Six Children Killed In US Terrorist Attacks In Pakistan

Toll rises in Pakistan drone attack

Al Jazeera, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/08/200982271735800769.html

UPDATED ON:Saturday, August 22, 2009 13:48 Mecca time, 10:48 GMT

The death toll from a suspected US air raid in Pakistan has risen after nine more bodies were pulled from the rubble, officials have said.

Three Pakistani intelligence officers said on Saturday that 21 people had been killed in the attack in the village of Dande Darpa Khel in North Waziristan a day earlier.

A local tribal elder said six children were among the dead.

The attack on a housing compound in the village was thought to have been aimed at Siraj Haqqani, a Taliban commander with suspected ties to al-Qaeda. It was unclear whether he was among the dead.

None of the dead were identified, but the officials said local informants told them all those in the compound were Afghans. Continued

US Supported Israeli Government Set To Destroy Palestinian Homes In East Jerusalem

Palestinians ask Obama to press Israel to halt demolitions

Monday, February 23, 2009 - AFP

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) — The Palestinian Authority urged the US president on Monday to press Israel to scrap a plan to raze almost 90 homes in annexed Arab east Jerusalem.

"We call on President Barack Obama to intervene personally to have this project stopped," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, one of the main aides of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

The Palestinian owners of 88 houses in the Silwan neighbourhood have received eviction notices saying that the structures will be destroyed because they were built or expanded without the necessary permits. The move would affect about 1,500 people.

"It is a massacre that Israel will commit in this Holy City," Abed Rabbo told a news conference, calling for "urgent Arab and international action to halt this dangerous project."

He said some of the houses affected by the orders had been built before Israel captured east Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War.

He called for a day-long strike in east Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank to protest against the plan.

The Gulf Cooperation Council, which groups the six Gulf Arab states, backed the call for US intervention to stop what it called these "racist acts that defy human rights and international law." Read On

Profit Motive Leads to Slavery, Torture in Miami

Farm bosses in Immokalee plead guilty in slavery scheme

Posted on Fri, Sep. 05, 2008
Miami Herald
BY JAY WEAVER
jweaver@MiamiHerald.com

Five farm bosses have pleaded guilty to a scheme to enslave Mexican and Guatemalan nationals as agricultural workers in southwest Florida, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

Cesar Navarrete, Geovanni Navarrete, Villhina Navarrete, Ismael Michael Navarrete and Antonio Zuniga Vargas were convicted of harboring undocumented immigrants for profit and identify theft in the farming community of Immokalee, authorities said.

Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete also pleaded guilty to beating, threatening, restraining and locking workers in trucks to force them to work.

They face up to 35 and 25 years in prison, respectively. The other defendants face 10 to 25 years in prison.

Previously, codefendant Jose Navarrete had pleaded guilty to harboring undocumented foreigners for profit. He faces up to 37 years in prison.

According to prosecutors, the defendants were accused of paying the workers minimal wages and driving them into debt, threatening physical harm if they left before their debts were repaid to the Navarrete family.

''In this case, we are given yet another example of how human trafficking of all kinds victimizes vulnerable human beings,'' said Grace Chung Becker, acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.

This case was investigated by agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI, assisted by the Collier County Sheriff's Department. Victim assistance was provided by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. It was prosecuted by the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida.

Iraq War Realities Suppressed

Military censorship of the war in Iraq
By Naomi Spencer31 July 2008
World Socialist Website

Five years of bloody US occupation have seen numerous crimes against humanity unfold in Iraq. Millions of Iraqi civilians have been killed and wounded, with millions more made into refugees. Ancient, once-vibrant cities have been destroyed by air raids and chemical weapons. Thousands of Iraqis have been imprisoned by the US military in barbaric conditions, and in many cases tortured. In carrying out the occupation, more than 4,400 military personnel—most of them American—have died and tens of thousands have been wounded.

Little reflection of these realities is to be found, however, in the US media, particularly in visual form. Censorship by the military—and self-censorship by media outlets—is part of an effort by the ruling elite to sanitize the war and keep the American public in the dark about its real nature.

As highlighted in a July 26 piece in the New York Times, titled “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images,” very few photographs of the occupation have trickled out from the military-embedded journalists and been released by the American media. The military and Bush administration have imposed rules barring photos of flag-draped caskets, as well as documentation of battlefield casualties in which faces, ranks, or other identifiers are visible.
Read On

More About The Iraqi Refugee Crisis...

Humanitarian crisis: Displaced in Diyala

DIYALA, Iraq (UWIRE) – “The militias are not allowing us to return to our homes,” said Karima Abas Kuydayer. She is one of an estimated 4.2 million Iraqis displaced around the world. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, this figure includes 2.4 million persons displaced inside Iraq. The center tracks conflict-induced internal displacement worldwide.

During the last 24 months, sectarian and generalized violence have replaced military operations as the primary causes of recent population displacement within postwar Iraq.

Read On

The Plight Of Iraq's Refugees

Christopher Hayes
Thu Jul 24, 2:56 PM ET

The Nation -- Conservatives had a tendency to attribute the all of the reduction of violence in Iraq to the increase in US troops. But one of the most overlooked stories of Iraq is the massive outflow of refugees, 4 million by the latest estimates. Basically Iraq has gone through its own Big Sort, whereby Sunni and Shia simply don't live near each other, hence a diminishing amount of sectarian violence. Bobby Allyn attended a hearing on Iraq's refugees and sent this missive:

The Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held a hearing on the Iraq Refugee Crisis yesterday. Jonathan Finer, Washington Post correspondent, testified with former Washington Post interpreter Nasser Nouri about the plight of over two million Iraqi refugees who are struggling for permanent resettlement.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, over 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced since the 2003 US invasion, with more than two million living in Syria and Jordan. The US has committed to accept 12,000 refugees by September. So far the US has only accepted 6,463, allowing three months for another 5,537. "The question isn't will the US meet the 12,000 mark; it's why only 12,000?" said Finer. "We took in several hundred thousand Southeast Asians after the Vietnam war, more than a hundred thousand Bosnians in the mid '90s, 12,000 doesn't seem like a very ambitious target."

Nasser Nouri told the harrowing story of how Al Qeada tried to capture his youngest daughter after word got out that he worked for The Washington Post, highlighting the dangers faced by Iraqi journalists who work for US news outlets. "In Iraq you don't tell people you work for the United States because your life then could be in danger," Nouri said. Finer told of how Nouri acted more than just an interpreter, helping him avoid death in many circumstances. "No journalism would come out of Iraqi if it weren't for the Iraqi staff," he said. "Their importance is only gonna grow. We're gonna be more reliant on people like Nasser."

The numbers here, really are outrageous. We've taken a total of 5,537 refugees out of 4 million from a war that a war we started. Syria alone is now home to more than a million. With a population of 16 million, that's a 6% increase. The equivalent number in the US would be 18 million. Can you imagine the political turmoil that ensue here if 18 million foreign refugees were to flood into the country over a period of just a few years?

Lacking Basic Services, Iraqis' Lives Go From Bad To Worse

Years on, Iraq Rebuilding Still Failing

Sunday, July 6, 2008

By Afif Sarhan, IOL Correspondent

IslamOnline.Net

BAGHDAD — More than five years after the US-led invasion and despite billions of dollars dedicated to rebuild the country's war-torn infrastructure; Iraq reconstruction remains an unfinished job.

"Most of the infrastructure of Iraq today need urgent repair," Ali Azawi, a senior official at Iraq's Ministry of Reconstruction, told IslamOnline.net.

Years after the US invaded oil-rich Iraq in 2003, promising to turn it into a prosperous country with an improved standard of living, rebuilding remains largely a mirage.

According to US audits and international groups, there is little to show for the tens of billions of dollars spent over reconstruction in the past five years.

The US office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) said earlier this year that the Iraqi government was failing to take responsibility for rebuilding projects.

A recent report by Oxfam, a group of non-governmental organizations, and Iraqi NGOs concluded that at least eight million people in Iraq do not have access to basic essentials such as water, food, sanitation and shelter. Read On

UN envoy rips US violations in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan

Rapporteur condemns rights abuses at home, too

By Inter Press Service Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Thalif Deen Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS: After a two-week fact-finding tour of US prison and detention facilities, a UN human rights investigator has blasted the administration of President George W. Bush for a rash of shortcomings in the country's flawed justice system and continued violations of the rule of law.

Unleashing a stinging barrage of attacks, Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary and arbitrary executions, singles out the existence of racism in the application of the death penalty in the United States, and the lack of transparency in the deaths of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility housing suspected terrorists.

Alston, a professor at the New York University School of Law and an outspoken critic of human rights abuses worldwide, also complains about the non-availability of information on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the refusal of the US Justice Department to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings.

During his 14-day tour of the United States at the invitation of the administration, he met with federal and state officials, judges and civil society groups in New York, Washington DC, Alabama and Texas. Read On

Outsourcing Torture

CIA Likely Let Contractors Perform Waterboarding
By Siobhan Gorman The Wall Street Journal
Friday 08 February 2008
(as covered by truthout.org here)

Interrogation work outsourced heavily; legality uncertain.

Washington - The CIA's secret interrogation program has made extensive use of outside contractors, whose role likely included the waterboarding of terrorist suspects, according to testimony yesterday from the CIA director and two other people familiar with the program.

Many of the contractors involved aren't large corporate entities but rather individuals who are often former agency or military officers. However, large corporations also are involved, current and former officials said. Their identities couldn't be learned.

The broader involvement of contractors, and the likelihood they partook in waterboarding, raises new legal questions about the Central Intelligence Agency's use of the practice, which is designed to simulate drowning. It also will fuel the contentious debate over the administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques.