"http://www.roshangari.net/as/ds.cgi?art=20101221232914.html"
۱۳۸۹ دی ۸, چهارشنبه
۱۳۸۷ اردیبهشت ۱۶, دوشنبه
Iran,Top of the News!
Iran says new talks with U.S. on Iraq meaningless:
Iran on Monday dismissed any prospect of new talks with the United States on Iraq, accusing U.S.-led forces on Monday of a "massacre" of the Iraqi people.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080505/pl_nm/iran_iraq_dc
===
Iran will not hold talks with U.S. on Iraq:
Iran does not intend to hold talks with the United States on Iraq while American forces are fighting Shiite militias in Sadr City, the Iranian Foreign Ministry reported on its Web site on Monday.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/05/africa/iraq.php
===
Iraq: No Evidence Iran Is Arming Shiites:
A top Iraqi official said Sunday there was no "conclusive" evidence that Shiite extremists have been directly supplied with some Iranian arms as alleged by the United States.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/04/iraq/main4069224.shtml
===
Manufacturing Consent For An Attack On Iran:
US: Hezbollah training Iraqi Shiite extremists in Iran:
Iraqi Shiite extremists are being trained by members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in camps near Tehran, a U.S. military spokesman said Monday.
http://tinyurl.com/4c595d
===
Selling war:
Breakthrough reached in intel on Iran :
Mossad chief Meir Dagan is expected to brief Britain's MI6 head Sir John Scarlett, who is slated to visit Israel later this month, on an intelligence breakthrough regarding the Iranian nuclear program, London's Sunday Times reported.
http://tinyurl.com/5whqxw
===
Nir Rosen : Selling the War with Iran:
When the American media, which, in the build up to the American attack on Iraq abdicated its duty to challenge those in power and inform the public, continues to demonstrate the same lack of skepticism, it is very distressing.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/05/selling_the_war/
===
Former UN weapons inspector says attack on Iran 'virtual guarantee':
I would say that it's a virtual guarantee that there will be a limited aerial strike against Iran in the not-so-near future-or not-so-distant future, that focuses on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command,"
http://tinyurl.com/3mwx2l
===
Iran Set To Reject Nuclear Incentives Offer By World Powers :
Iran was quick to pour cold water on the offer, which reportedly outlined possibilities of technical assistance if Iran gave up its uranium enrichment program.
http://www.payvand.com/news/08/may/1042.html
===
Iran offers major breakthrough for ending world crises Tehran:
Hosseini added that Tehran's proposed package "can help international peace, stability and security" and are based on "respecting rights of all nations and their territorial integrity."
http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0805053250145306.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Information Clearing House Newsletter
News You Won't Find On CNN
05/05/08
Iran on Monday dismissed any prospect of new talks with the United States on Iraq, accusing U.S.-led forces on Monday of a "massacre" of the Iraqi people.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080505/pl_nm/iran_iraq_dc
===
Iran will not hold talks with U.S. on Iraq:
Iran does not intend to hold talks with the United States on Iraq while American forces are fighting Shiite militias in Sadr City, the Iranian Foreign Ministry reported on its Web site on Monday.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/05/africa/iraq.php
===
Iraq: No Evidence Iran Is Arming Shiites:
A top Iraqi official said Sunday there was no "conclusive" evidence that Shiite extremists have been directly supplied with some Iranian arms as alleged by the United States.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/04/iraq/main4069224.shtml
===
Manufacturing Consent For An Attack On Iran:
US: Hezbollah training Iraqi Shiite extremists in Iran:
Iraqi Shiite extremists are being trained by members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in camps near Tehran, a U.S. military spokesman said Monday.
http://tinyurl.com/4c595d
===
Selling war:
Breakthrough reached in intel on Iran :
Mossad chief Meir Dagan is expected to brief Britain's MI6 head Sir John Scarlett, who is slated to visit Israel later this month, on an intelligence breakthrough regarding the Iranian nuclear program, London's Sunday Times reported.
http://tinyurl.com/5whqxw
===
Nir Rosen : Selling the War with Iran:
When the American media, which, in the build up to the American attack on Iraq abdicated its duty to challenge those in power and inform the public, continues to demonstrate the same lack of skepticism, it is very distressing.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/05/selling_the_war/
===
Former UN weapons inspector says attack on Iran 'virtual guarantee':
I would say that it's a virtual guarantee that there will be a limited aerial strike against Iran in the not-so-near future-or not-so-distant future, that focuses on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command,"
http://tinyurl.com/3mwx2l
===
Iran Set To Reject Nuclear Incentives Offer By World Powers :
Iran was quick to pour cold water on the offer, which reportedly outlined possibilities of technical assistance if Iran gave up its uranium enrichment program.
http://www.payvand.com/news/08/may/1042.html
===
Iran offers major breakthrough for ending world crises Tehran:
Hosseini added that Tehran's proposed package "can help international peace, stability and security" and are based on "respecting rights of all nations and their territorial integrity."
http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0805053250145306.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Information Clearing House Newsletter
News You Won't Find On CNN
05/05/08
۱۳۸۷ فروردین ۶, سهشنبه
In Solidarity with Mahmoud Salehi
Solidarity committee with Iranian Workers-Australia
--- On Tue, 25/3/08, yadullh wrote:
From: yadullh
Subject: Important Updates as of March 24th- Two days of Protests!- Under mounting pressures, government authorities say they will release Salehi on Wednesday!
To: info@workers-iran.org
Received: Tuesday, 25 March, 2008, 9:24 AM
Important Updates as of March 24, 2008
Two days of rally outside Sanandaj Prison and Court to protest Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention!
Mahmoud Salehi ended his dry hunger strike today after meeting with his family! He has just started his wet hunger strike after 7 days of dry hunger strike in Sanandaj Prison!
Under mounting pressures, government authorities say they will release Salehi on Wednesday!
On March 23, 2008 (Farvardin 4, 1387), in response to a call by the Committee in Defence of Mahmoud Salehi, about 200 workers and labour activists, who had come from cities of Sanandaj, Karaj, Kamyaran, Rasht, Tehran, Oshnovieh, Saqez, Boukan..., gathered outside the central prison in Sanandaj to protest Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention beyond his scheduled 23 March 2008. This rally took place from 8:00 AM to 12 PM and protesters vowed to continue their protests until Mahmoud Salehi is freed. The prison authorities who felt the pressure from the protesters explained that Mahmoud had not yet been released because the judicial offices have been closed due to the Iranian New Year holidays.
Mahmoud’s family went to the Sanandaj Justice Department on Monday March 24th to make inquiries about the excuses to keep Mahmoud behind bars and to demand his immediate freedom. They were again supported by about 200 labour activists and family members. This protest that lasted about three hours was surrounded by security forces. One participant, named Behrooz Sohrabi, was arrested and harassed and reportedly beaten. After protesters demanded his release they freed him a couple hours later.
The judiciary authorities promised to allow Najibeh Salehzadeh, Mahmoud’s wife, to visit him today at 4 PM and that they would issue a release order for Mahmoud to be freed from prison on Wednesday, March 26th. Najibeh along with Mahmoud’s brother and sister went to the court and protesters at the same time submitted a petition in which they demanded Mahmoud’s immediate freedom. Since these kinds of promises have been made before, protesters will continue their actions until Mahmoud Salehi is freed. According to the latest report by the Committee in Defense of Mahmoud Salehi, Mahmoud ended his dry hunger strike on Monday, March 24th after meeting with his wife and family members at 4:00 PM. Mahmoud’s family, on behalf of the protesters as well as all concerned friends asked him to stop his hunger strike. Mahmoud appreciated all efforts by protesters and everyone else and agreed to stop his dry hunger strike, but he said he will immediately start a wet hunger strike as of March 24th until he is freed from prison( wet hunger strike usually means only drinking water or Tea but no food at all ). Mahmoud’s dry hunger strike lasted seven days.
The Committee in Defense of Mahmoud Salehi reports that there are new charges against Salehi in addition to ‘communicating with those outside prison for the purposes of issuing messages of solidarity ...’ They are also charging Salehi in relaton to two incidents during which there were protests in prison agianst the quality and quantity of food and the prisoners’ refusal to eat as well a protest action by the prison’s inmate cleaners for a better weekly pay.
Mahmoud Salehi was on a total (dry) hunger strike since March 17, 2008. There has been mounting concerns for his life. Many labour organizations and activists have urged Salehi to end his dry hunger strike, but he has expressed his determination that either he has to be rightfully freed from prison or he would continue with his hunger strike. Salehi’s lawyer, his family and many labour and progressive organizations in Iran and abroad have strongly condemned the refusal by the government authorities to free Salehi on March 23rd, 2008. His lawyer has told in an interview that judicial authorities must be hold accountable for any harm done to Salehi. Protest actions in support of Salehi, such as the one mentioned above, need to continue urgently until government authorities withdraw their new charges against Salehi and release him from prison. Other actions are being organized in different countries by the activists of Iran ’s labor movement abroad, and numerous labour, progressive and human rights organization internationally have issued statements.
More updates to follow shortly. Please read the documents below.
******************************************************
To: General Secretary of International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
Dear Guy Ryder,
Last year was a year full of misery, unemployment, dismissal and temporary and blank-signed contracts for Iranian workers. As a result of the difficult economic situation resulting from the miseries of the global capitalist system, last year came to an end while Iranian workers and wage earners were struggling with the extreme hardship. The livelihood of workers has been constantly diminishing. And finally, the Iranian year 1386 (March 21, 2007 to March 20, 2008) ended while the Iranian workers are still facing prosecution for struggling to create their independent organizations. Some examples are the oppression of members of Sherkate Vahed syndicate and the imprisonment of the president of this syndicate while the syndicate’s secretary is pending for the court order to be carried out in the upcoming days. The workers of Haft Tapeh Sugar Company were under pressure during past year and some of them have been interrogated and detained. So far, not a single indication of decrease of oppression has been seen.
During the past years, Iran ’s workers have consistently been facing numerous difficulties and arrests for organizing free May Day events. As you know, one example was the May Day celebration in the city of Saqez in 2004, which ended with the arrest of numerous worker activists. As we speak, Mahmoud Salehi is paying the high price of organizing that event with his poor health condition in prison since last year. Mahmoud Salehi is under intensive pressure for his solidarity messages from prison in support of workers’ rights and other social movements and there is no hope for his release at the end of his prison sentence.
While organizing May Day events has been recognized as a basic right in many countries, the worker activists in Iran are still under hardest pressure for these same reasons. The recent humiliating and offensive whipping sentences against worker activists is another sign of rising pressures to prevent workers from organizing international workers’ day freely.
The two international days of action in support of Iranian workers launched by your organization on August 9, 2007 and March 6, 2008, despite their positive effects, have not yet been successful in stopping the repression of worker activists. Therefore, putting pressure on Iran ’s government should continue in a way that results in suspension of suppression and persecution of labour activists. We, labour activists in Iran, expect that you, as an organization that has the creation of free and independent labour organizations on its agenda – to take necessary measures to compel the Iranian government to stop pressures and repression of the workers and labour activists. Workers in Iran demand, and they should be able to freely strive towards the achievement of these demands, to end sacking and dismissals, to stop the practice of temporary and blank-signed contracts, timely payment of their wages, wage increase according to real inflation rates, equal rights between women and men, prohibition of child labour, and more importantly to create free and independent worker organizations.
*The Collaborative Council of Labour Organizations and Activists
2008-03-19
*This council of labour activists was formed and is active in Iran
Appeal to Mahmoud Salehi from organizations of labour movement abroad
Dear Mahmoud,
We are writing this as some of your friends and allies to share our concerns with you. Today that we are writing this letter three days has gone since you began your hunger strike. This was a bitter reminder of the huge challenges facing our labour movement. We hope that you would accept from us that we support your protest against all the unjust and cruel actions that have been taking place against you and other prisoners. We too are outrageous about their efforts to prevent your freedom. Their objective is clear. They want to deprive our movement of its leaders…. We are so proud of you that, despite the most difficult conditions and illness, you’ve never stopped fighting against oppression and violation of our rights. You have no illusion about this system and establishment. In order to move forward and succeed, our labour movement needs many more activists like you….
Dear Mahmoud,
The defenders of the capitalist order cannot stand you and activists like you. But, we need you and all activists of labour movement….Workers in Iran need to keep their activists, those who have been taking risks and been facing jails and other difficulties, healthy and safe. That’s why your immediate and unconditional freedom is our most urgent demand. We vow that we will continue our struggles even more resolutely than before to free you and all other jailed workers. Your freedom and the freedom of all jailed workers and political prisoners will be realized. Our expectation and hope is that you will be freed from prison hale and hearty. As your colleagues and fellow workers we urge you to end your hunger strike. The continuation of your hunger strike will deteriorate your health significantly. Your family as well as the labour movement in Iran needs you while the protectors of capital want you to disappear. Let’s disappoint them…. We urge you to end your hunger strike.
Long live Mahmud Salehi!
- Committee of Solidarity with the Iranian Workers – Australia
- Committee in Support of Workers in Iran – Toronto , Canada
- Association of Solidarity with the Iranian Workers – Norway
- A Group of Progressive Workers in Exile – Switzerland
- Committee of Socialist Solidarity with Iranian Workers – France
- Association of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Köln , Germany
- Association of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Frankfurt and Suburb,
Germany
- Association of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Hanover , Germany
- Committee of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Hamburg , Germany
- Solidarity Group with the Labour Movement-Berlin-Germany
- Iranian and Swedish Workers' Solidarity Committee
- International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran (IASWI)
- The solidarity center with Iranian workers, Guttenberg , Sweden
- Jamal Cheragh-Weisi Labour Association
To: Mahmoud Salehi
Date: 20/03/2008
WE URGE YOU TO END YOUR HUNGER STRIKE
Mahmoud salehi was due to be released from prison on March 23rd after serving his one year prison sentences. However, we have been informed that on Monday march 17 Mahmoud had been summoned from prison to court (branch 4) in the city of Sanandaj , Kurdistan province. The court has charged him for communicating with those outside prison on political issues and sending messages of solidarity. He has since been remanded in custody.
Mahmoud Salehi Immediately decided to go on dry hunger strike after being summoned to court. This was in protest against the courts illegal decision; a clear determination by the Iranian rulers to keep him in prison.
In spite of all protest from inside and outside of Iran , the Islamic regime, regardless of Mahmoud’s critical medical condition kept him in prison for one year. His “crime” was attempting to organise celebration of May Day. However this cruel act by the Iranian regime did not prevent Mahmoud’s fight for workers rights and equality.
We some fellow workers concerned about Mahmoud, strongly condemn this illegal charge against him and demand his immediate and unconditional release from prison.
Medical practitioners who have examined Mahmoud have unanimously stated that the hunger strike would put his life profoundly in danger. Therefore we urge Mahmoud from the bottom of our hearts to end his hunger strike, for the sake of his life which is very precious to us all.
Yadullah Khosroshahi, former secretary of Syndicate of Tehran oil refinery workers and former member of Workers Central council in oil industry.
Farhad Shabani, repressive of workers Club, Food Industry Workers Union, Uppsala , Sweden .
Mozafar Falahi, member of Metal Workers Union, Sweden.
Majid Tamjidi, member of Municipal Workers’ Union, S.K.T.F Union, Sweden .
Sedigh Jahani, member of Industrial Workers Union, Sweden.
Farkhondeh Ashna, Unemployed Worker.
Abas Govili, member of executive board of Workers Club 34, Bus Drivers Union, Stockholm , Sweden
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PUBLIC STATEMENT
AI Index: MDE 13/052/2008 (Public)
Date: 19 March 2008
Iran: Amnesty International and international trade union bodies condemn repressive measures meted out against trade union leader Mahmoud Salehi
Amnesty International, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) are calling on the Iranian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Mahmoud Salehi, the former leader of the Saqez Bakers’ Union, who was imprisoned in 2007 for the pursuit of legitimate trade union activities.
Mahmoud Salehi, who has serious long term medical concerns, is now on a total hunger strike and there are serious fears for his safety. He went on hunger strike after he was summoned to appear for questioning by Branch 4 of the Sanandaj Courts on 17 March 2008 when, after a prolonged wait, new charges were issued against him.
He has reportedly been accused of ‘communicating with those outside prison for the purposes of issuing messages of solidarity’ for other individual prisoners on hunger strike and students facing arrest. The new charges appear intended to justify Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention beyond his scheduled 23 March 2008 release date, when he will have completed a one year prison sentence.
Amnesty International, the ITUC and the ITF are concerned that the new charge may have been brought against Mahmoud Salehi in response to the international mobilisation on 6 March 2008 by trade unions and Amnesty International members around the world to demand his release and that of his fellow trade unionist, Mansour Ossanlu (or Osanloo).
Mahmoud Salehi, former President of the Bakery Workers' Association of the city of Saqez, was arrested after a peaceful demonstration to celebrate May Day 2004. He was imprisoned on charges of ‘acting against national security’ after his final appeal hearing on 11 March 2007, and he began a one year sentence, with another three years’ suspended, on 9 April 2007.
Mahmoud Salehi is a prisoner of conscience and has long-term medical needs. A May 2007 request by his doctor that he be accorded specialist treatment outside the prison has been ignored. He suffers from chronic kidney disease, as a result of which he requires dialysis. He is also said to suffer from a heart disorder. In December 2007 it was reported that he had grave intestinal edema or swelling that may be connected with his renal disease. His health continues to be at serious risk, and he is reported to regularly experience fainting episodes in prison as a result of blood pressure problems.
Guy Ryder, General Secretary of the ITUC said ”It is deplorable that Mahmoud Salehi should have been imprisoned for participating in a May Day rally – a show of worker solidarity that should be a cause of celebration rather than repression.”
Amnesty International, the ITUC and the ITF are calling on the Iranian authorities to release both Mahmoud Salehi and Mansour Osanlu immediately and unconditionally and to ensure that Mahmoud Salehi has immediate access to specialist medical treatment that he needs.
David Cockroft, ITF concluded “It seems that the Iranian authorities want to silence Salehi ahead of this year’s May Day rallies. Though they may be able to keep him in jail, they will not silence the voices of hundreds of thousands of human rights activists and trade unionists who are demanding respect for fundamental labour rights in Iran. The three organisations will continue to work tirelessly alongside the independent Iranian trade union movement to seek respect for human rights for working people in Iran,” David Cockroft, ITF added.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
In November 2005 Mahmoud Salehi was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and three years' internal exile in the city of Ghorveh, Kordestan. At his trial, the prosecutor reportedly cited his trade union activities as evidence against him, and referred to a meeting he had held with officials from the then-International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) – a predecessor organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) - in April 2004, shortly before the May Day demonstrations. His conviction was overturned on appeal, but after a retrial he was sentenced on 11 November 2006 to four years’ imprisonment for "conspiring to commit crimes against national security". He was free until the appeal hearing on 11 March 2007, when his sentence was reduced to a three-year suspended prison sentence and one year’s imprisonment, which commenced with his imprisonment on 9 April 2007.
Amnesty International is working together with the ITUC and the ITF to seek the release of Mahmoud Salehi and fellow jailed trade unionist Mansour Osanlu, leader of the Tehran bus workers’ union, and to promote labour rights in Iran.
ENDS
Public Document
International Secretariat, Amnesty International, 1 Easton St., London WC1X 0DW, UK
Transport House
128 Theobald’s Road
London WC1X 8TN
Tel: 020 7611 2500
Fax: 020 7611 2555
CENTRAL OFFICE
T&G SECTION
Friday, 21 March 2008
Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
The Presidency,
Palestine Avenue,
Azerbaijan Intersection,
Tehran,
Islamic Republic of Iran
Dear President
Mahmoud Salehi
I am writing this letter to express my outrage over new charges against Mahmoud Salehi, who has been in Sanadaj’s central prison since April 9, 2007. Mr. Salehi, a founding member and the former President of the Bakery Workers’ Association of the city of Saqez and a well-known labour activist in Iran, has been sentenced unjustly to one year imprisonment and a three year suspended prison sentence for his labour activities.
On Monday, March 17, 2008 , the judiciary authorities in Sanadaj charged Mahmoud with connecting with outside prison and sending solidarity messages to progressive students and other prisoners. They put Mahmoud under temporary arrest while he was supposed to be released from prison on March 23, 2008 . In response to this unjust order, Mahmoud Salehi has declared dry hunger strike effective immediately. It’s very important to emphasize that Mr. Salehi is currently suffering from a life-threatening kidney disease. He only has one kidney, and that kidney is functioning at about only 10 percent of capacity.
I am writing this to condemn this outrageous action on the part of your government and calling on you to release Mahmoud Salehi immediately and unconditionally as he is a prisoner of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful exercise of organizing the 2004 May Day demonstration and his right to freedom of expression and association in connection with his labour rights activities.
I also demand that Mansour Osanloo as well as all other labour and student activists, is released immediately and unconditionally.
Yours sincerely
Jennie Formby
National Secretary
Act NOW!
Iran : Release jailed workers, respect rights
http://www.labourstart.org/iran
*************************************
You can also use the following sample letter:
Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
The Presidency,
Palestine Avenue, Azerbaijan Intersection,
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Fax: + 98 21 649 58 80
Email: dr-ahmadinejad@president.ir
I am writing this letter to express my outrage over new charges against Mahmoud Salehi, who has been in Sanadaj’s central prison since April 9, 2007. Mr. Salehi, a founding member and the former President of the Bakery Workers’ Association of the city of Saqez and a well-known labour activist in Iran, has been sentenced unjustly to one year imprisonment and a three year suspended prison sentence for his labour activities.
On Monday, March 17, 2008, the judiciary authorities in Sanadaj charged Mahmoud with connecting with outside prison and sending solidarity messages to progressive students and other prisoners. They put Mahmoud under temporary arrest while he was supposed to be released from prison on March 23, 2008. In response to this unjust order, Mahmoud Salehi has declared hunger strike effective immediately. It’s very important to emphasize that Mr. Salehi is currently suffering from a life-threatening kidney disease. He only has one kidney, and that kidney is functioning at about only 10 percent of capacity.
I am writing this to condemn this outrageous action on the part of your government and calling on you to release Mahmoud Salehi immediately and unconditionally as he is a prisoner of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful exercise of organizing the 2004 May Day demonstration and his right to freedom of expression and association in connection with his labour rights activities. I also demand that Mansour Osanloo as well as all other labour and student activists are released immediately and unconditionally.
Name
Organization
position
Send Copy of your Protest Letters to:
Leader of the Islamic Republic:
Ayatollah Sayed *Ali Khamenei
The Office of the Supreme Leader
Shoahada Street
Qom, Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: info@leader.ir OR istiftaa@wilayah.org
Fax: 011 98 251 7774 2228
Head of the Judiciary:
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Justice Building
Panzdah-Khordad Square
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Fax: 011 98 21 3390 4986 (may be difficult to reach)
Email: info@dadgostary-tehran.ir
Ambassador, Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Institutions in Geneva, Chemin du Petit-Saconnex 28, 1209 Geneva, Switzerland, Fax: +41 22 733 02 03, E-mail: mission.iran@ties.itu.int
cc: info@workers-iran.org
********************************************************************
For more information, contact info@workers-iran.org or alliance@workers-iran.org.
International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran
Background Information: www.workers-iran.org
http://www.etehadbinalmelali.com/INDEXI.htm
--- On Tue, 25/3/08, yadullh
From: yadullh
Subject: Important Updates as of March 24th- Two days of Protests!- Under mounting pressures, government authorities say they will release Salehi on Wednesday!
To: info@workers-iran.org
Received: Tuesday, 25 March, 2008, 9:24 AM
Important Updates as of March 24, 2008
Two days of rally outside Sanandaj Prison and Court to protest Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention!
Mahmoud Salehi ended his dry hunger strike today after meeting with his family! He has just started his wet hunger strike after 7 days of dry hunger strike in Sanandaj Prison!
Under mounting pressures, government authorities say they will release Salehi on Wednesday!
On March 23, 2008 (Farvardin 4, 1387), in response to a call by the Committee in Defence of Mahmoud Salehi, about 200 workers and labour activists, who had come from cities of Sanandaj, Karaj, Kamyaran, Rasht, Tehran, Oshnovieh, Saqez, Boukan..., gathered outside the central prison in Sanandaj to protest Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention beyond his scheduled 23 March 2008. This rally took place from 8:00 AM to 12 PM and protesters vowed to continue their protests until Mahmoud Salehi is freed. The prison authorities who felt the pressure from the protesters explained that Mahmoud had not yet been released because the judicial offices have been closed due to the Iranian New Year holidays.
Mahmoud’s family went to the Sanandaj Justice Department on Monday March 24th to make inquiries about the excuses to keep Mahmoud behind bars and to demand his immediate freedom. They were again supported by about 200 labour activists and family members. This protest that lasted about three hours was surrounded by security forces. One participant, named Behrooz Sohrabi, was arrested and harassed and reportedly beaten. After protesters demanded his release they freed him a couple hours later.
The judiciary authorities promised to allow Najibeh Salehzadeh, Mahmoud’s wife, to visit him today at 4 PM and that they would issue a release order for Mahmoud to be freed from prison on Wednesday, March 26th. Najibeh along with Mahmoud’s brother and sister went to the court and protesters at the same time submitted a petition in which they demanded Mahmoud’s immediate freedom. Since these kinds of promises have been made before, protesters will continue their actions until Mahmoud Salehi is freed. According to the latest report by the Committee in Defense of Mahmoud Salehi, Mahmoud ended his dry hunger strike on Monday, March 24th after meeting with his wife and family members at 4:00 PM. Mahmoud’s family, on behalf of the protesters as well as all concerned friends asked him to stop his hunger strike. Mahmoud appreciated all efforts by protesters and everyone else and agreed to stop his dry hunger strike, but he said he will immediately start a wet hunger strike as of March 24th until he is freed from prison( wet hunger strike usually means only drinking water or Tea but no food at all ). Mahmoud’s dry hunger strike lasted seven days.
The Committee in Defense of Mahmoud Salehi reports that there are new charges against Salehi in addition to ‘communicating with those outside prison for the purposes of issuing messages of solidarity ...’ They are also charging Salehi in relaton to two incidents during which there were protests in prison agianst the quality and quantity of food and the prisoners’ refusal to eat as well a protest action by the prison’s inmate cleaners for a better weekly pay.
Mahmoud Salehi was on a total (dry) hunger strike since March 17, 2008. There has been mounting concerns for his life. Many labour organizations and activists have urged Salehi to end his dry hunger strike, but he has expressed his determination that either he has to be rightfully freed from prison or he would continue with his hunger strike. Salehi’s lawyer, his family and many labour and progressive organizations in Iran and abroad have strongly condemned the refusal by the government authorities to free Salehi on March 23rd, 2008. His lawyer has told in an interview that judicial authorities must be hold accountable for any harm done to Salehi. Protest actions in support of Salehi, such as the one mentioned above, need to continue urgently until government authorities withdraw their new charges against Salehi and release him from prison. Other actions are being organized in different countries by the activists of Iran ’s labor movement abroad, and numerous labour, progressive and human rights organization internationally have issued statements.
More updates to follow shortly. Please read the documents below.
******************************************************
To: General Secretary of International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
Dear Guy Ryder,
Last year was a year full of misery, unemployment, dismissal and temporary and blank-signed contracts for Iranian workers. As a result of the difficult economic situation resulting from the miseries of the global capitalist system, last year came to an end while Iranian workers and wage earners were struggling with the extreme hardship. The livelihood of workers has been constantly diminishing. And finally, the Iranian year 1386 (March 21, 2007 to March 20, 2008) ended while the Iranian workers are still facing prosecution for struggling to create their independent organizations. Some examples are the oppression of members of Sherkate Vahed syndicate and the imprisonment of the president of this syndicate while the syndicate’s secretary is pending for the court order to be carried out in the upcoming days. The workers of Haft Tapeh Sugar Company were under pressure during past year and some of them have been interrogated and detained. So far, not a single indication of decrease of oppression has been seen.
During the past years, Iran ’s workers have consistently been facing numerous difficulties and arrests for organizing free May Day events. As you know, one example was the May Day celebration in the city of Saqez in 2004, which ended with the arrest of numerous worker activists. As we speak, Mahmoud Salehi is paying the high price of organizing that event with his poor health condition in prison since last year. Mahmoud Salehi is under intensive pressure for his solidarity messages from prison in support of workers’ rights and other social movements and there is no hope for his release at the end of his prison sentence.
While organizing May Day events has been recognized as a basic right in many countries, the worker activists in Iran are still under hardest pressure for these same reasons. The recent humiliating and offensive whipping sentences against worker activists is another sign of rising pressures to prevent workers from organizing international workers’ day freely.
The two international days of action in support of Iranian workers launched by your organization on August 9, 2007 and March 6, 2008, despite their positive effects, have not yet been successful in stopping the repression of worker activists. Therefore, putting pressure on Iran ’s government should continue in a way that results in suspension of suppression and persecution of labour activists. We, labour activists in Iran, expect that you, as an organization that has the creation of free and independent labour organizations on its agenda – to take necessary measures to compel the Iranian government to stop pressures and repression of the workers and labour activists. Workers in Iran demand, and they should be able to freely strive towards the achievement of these demands, to end sacking and dismissals, to stop the practice of temporary and blank-signed contracts, timely payment of their wages, wage increase according to real inflation rates, equal rights between women and men, prohibition of child labour, and more importantly to create free and independent worker organizations.
*The Collaborative Council of Labour Organizations and Activists
2008-03-19
*This council of labour activists was formed and is active in Iran
Appeal to Mahmoud Salehi from organizations of labour movement abroad
Dear Mahmoud,
We are writing this as some of your friends and allies to share our concerns with you. Today that we are writing this letter three days has gone since you began your hunger strike. This was a bitter reminder of the huge challenges facing our labour movement. We hope that you would accept from us that we support your protest against all the unjust and cruel actions that have been taking place against you and other prisoners. We too are outrageous about their efforts to prevent your freedom. Their objective is clear. They want to deprive our movement of its leaders…. We are so proud of you that, despite the most difficult conditions and illness, you’ve never stopped fighting against oppression and violation of our rights. You have no illusion about this system and establishment. In order to move forward and succeed, our labour movement needs many more activists like you….
Dear Mahmoud,
The defenders of the capitalist order cannot stand you and activists like you. But, we need you and all activists of labour movement….Workers in Iran need to keep their activists, those who have been taking risks and been facing jails and other difficulties, healthy and safe. That’s why your immediate and unconditional freedom is our most urgent demand. We vow that we will continue our struggles even more resolutely than before to free you and all other jailed workers. Your freedom and the freedom of all jailed workers and political prisoners will be realized. Our expectation and hope is that you will be freed from prison hale and hearty. As your colleagues and fellow workers we urge you to end your hunger strike. The continuation of your hunger strike will deteriorate your health significantly. Your family as well as the labour movement in Iran needs you while the protectors of capital want you to disappear. Let’s disappoint them…. We urge you to end your hunger strike.
Long live Mahmud Salehi!
- Committee of Solidarity with the Iranian Workers – Australia
- Committee in Support of Workers in Iran – Toronto , Canada
- Association of Solidarity with the Iranian Workers – Norway
- A Group of Progressive Workers in Exile – Switzerland
- Committee of Socialist Solidarity with Iranian Workers – France
- Association of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Köln , Germany
- Association of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Frankfurt and Suburb,
Germany
- Association of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Hanover , Germany
- Committee of Solidarity with Iranian Workers – Hamburg , Germany
- Solidarity Group with the Labour Movement-Berlin-Germany
- Iranian and Swedish Workers' Solidarity Committee
- International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran (IASWI)
- The solidarity center with Iranian workers, Guttenberg , Sweden
- Jamal Cheragh-Weisi Labour Association
To: Mahmoud Salehi
Date: 20/03/2008
WE URGE YOU TO END YOUR HUNGER STRIKE
Mahmoud salehi was due to be released from prison on March 23rd after serving his one year prison sentences. However, we have been informed that on Monday march 17 Mahmoud had been summoned from prison to court (branch 4) in the city of Sanandaj , Kurdistan province. The court has charged him for communicating with those outside prison on political issues and sending messages of solidarity. He has since been remanded in custody.
Mahmoud Salehi Immediately decided to go on dry hunger strike after being summoned to court. This was in protest against the courts illegal decision; a clear determination by the Iranian rulers to keep him in prison.
In spite of all protest from inside and outside of Iran , the Islamic regime, regardless of Mahmoud’s critical medical condition kept him in prison for one year. His “crime” was attempting to organise celebration of May Day. However this cruel act by the Iranian regime did not prevent Mahmoud’s fight for workers rights and equality.
We some fellow workers concerned about Mahmoud, strongly condemn this illegal charge against him and demand his immediate and unconditional release from prison.
Medical practitioners who have examined Mahmoud have unanimously stated that the hunger strike would put his life profoundly in danger. Therefore we urge Mahmoud from the bottom of our hearts to end his hunger strike, for the sake of his life which is very precious to us all.
Yadullah Khosroshahi, former secretary of Syndicate of Tehran oil refinery workers and former member of Workers Central council in oil industry.
Farhad Shabani, repressive of workers Club, Food Industry Workers Union, Uppsala , Sweden .
Mozafar Falahi, member of Metal Workers Union, Sweden.
Majid Tamjidi, member of Municipal Workers’ Union, S.K.T.F Union, Sweden .
Sedigh Jahani, member of Industrial Workers Union, Sweden.
Farkhondeh Ashna, Unemployed Worker.
Abas Govili, member of executive board of Workers Club 34, Bus Drivers Union, Stockholm , Sweden
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PUBLIC STATEMENT
AI Index: MDE 13/052/2008 (Public)
Date: 19 March 2008
Iran: Amnesty International and international trade union bodies condemn repressive measures meted out against trade union leader Mahmoud Salehi
Amnesty International, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) are calling on the Iranian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Mahmoud Salehi, the former leader of the Saqez Bakers’ Union, who was imprisoned in 2007 for the pursuit of legitimate trade union activities.
Mahmoud Salehi, who has serious long term medical concerns, is now on a total hunger strike and there are serious fears for his safety. He went on hunger strike after he was summoned to appear for questioning by Branch 4 of the Sanandaj Courts on 17 March 2008 when, after a prolonged wait, new charges were issued against him.
He has reportedly been accused of ‘communicating with those outside prison for the purposes of issuing messages of solidarity’ for other individual prisoners on hunger strike and students facing arrest. The new charges appear intended to justify Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention beyond his scheduled 23 March 2008 release date, when he will have completed a one year prison sentence.
Amnesty International, the ITUC and the ITF are concerned that the new charge may have been brought against Mahmoud Salehi in response to the international mobilisation on 6 March 2008 by trade unions and Amnesty International members around the world to demand his release and that of his fellow trade unionist, Mansour Ossanlu (or Osanloo).
Mahmoud Salehi, former President of the Bakery Workers' Association of the city of Saqez, was arrested after a peaceful demonstration to celebrate May Day 2004. He was imprisoned on charges of ‘acting against national security’ after his final appeal hearing on 11 March 2007, and he began a one year sentence, with another three years’ suspended, on 9 April 2007.
Mahmoud Salehi is a prisoner of conscience and has long-term medical needs. A May 2007 request by his doctor that he be accorded specialist treatment outside the prison has been ignored. He suffers from chronic kidney disease, as a result of which he requires dialysis. He is also said to suffer from a heart disorder. In December 2007 it was reported that he had grave intestinal edema or swelling that may be connected with his renal disease. His health continues to be at serious risk, and he is reported to regularly experience fainting episodes in prison as a result of blood pressure problems.
Guy Ryder, General Secretary of the ITUC said ”It is deplorable that Mahmoud Salehi should have been imprisoned for participating in a May Day rally – a show of worker solidarity that should be a cause of celebration rather than repression.”
Amnesty International, the ITUC and the ITF are calling on the Iranian authorities to release both Mahmoud Salehi and Mansour Osanlu immediately and unconditionally and to ensure that Mahmoud Salehi has immediate access to specialist medical treatment that he needs.
David Cockroft, ITF concluded “It seems that the Iranian authorities want to silence Salehi ahead of this year’s May Day rallies. Though they may be able to keep him in jail, they will not silence the voices of hundreds of thousands of human rights activists and trade unionists who are demanding respect for fundamental labour rights in Iran. The three organisations will continue to work tirelessly alongside the independent Iranian trade union movement to seek respect for human rights for working people in Iran,” David Cockroft, ITF added.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
In November 2005 Mahmoud Salehi was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and three years' internal exile in the city of Ghorveh, Kordestan. At his trial, the prosecutor reportedly cited his trade union activities as evidence against him, and referred to a meeting he had held with officials from the then-International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) – a predecessor organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) - in April 2004, shortly before the May Day demonstrations. His conviction was overturned on appeal, but after a retrial he was sentenced on 11 November 2006 to four years’ imprisonment for "conspiring to commit crimes against national security". He was free until the appeal hearing on 11 March 2007, when his sentence was reduced to a three-year suspended prison sentence and one year’s imprisonment, which commenced with his imprisonment on 9 April 2007.
Amnesty International is working together with the ITUC and the ITF to seek the release of Mahmoud Salehi and fellow jailed trade unionist Mansour Osanlu, leader of the Tehran bus workers’ union, and to promote labour rights in Iran.
ENDS
Public Document
International Secretariat, Amnesty International, 1 Easton St., London WC1X 0DW, UK
Transport House
128 Theobald’s Road
London WC1X 8TN
Tel: 020 7611 2500
Fax: 020 7611 2555
CENTRAL OFFICE
T&G SECTION
Friday, 21 March 2008
Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
The Presidency,
Palestine Avenue,
Azerbaijan Intersection,
Tehran,
Islamic Republic of Iran
Dear President
Mahmoud Salehi
I am writing this letter to express my outrage over new charges against Mahmoud Salehi, who has been in Sanadaj’s central prison since April 9, 2007. Mr. Salehi, a founding member and the former President of the Bakery Workers’ Association of the city of Saqez and a well-known labour activist in Iran, has been sentenced unjustly to one year imprisonment and a three year suspended prison sentence for his labour activities.
On Monday, March 17, 2008 , the judiciary authorities in Sanadaj charged Mahmoud with connecting with outside prison and sending solidarity messages to progressive students and other prisoners. They put Mahmoud under temporary arrest while he was supposed to be released from prison on March 23, 2008 . In response to this unjust order, Mahmoud Salehi has declared dry hunger strike effective immediately. It’s very important to emphasize that Mr. Salehi is currently suffering from a life-threatening kidney disease. He only has one kidney, and that kidney is functioning at about only 10 percent of capacity.
I am writing this to condemn this outrageous action on the part of your government and calling on you to release Mahmoud Salehi immediately and unconditionally as he is a prisoner of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful exercise of organizing the 2004 May Day demonstration and his right to freedom of expression and association in connection with his labour rights activities.
I also demand that Mansour Osanloo as well as all other labour and student activists, is released immediately and unconditionally.
Yours sincerely
Jennie Formby
National Secretary
Act NOW!
Iran : Release jailed workers, respect rights
http://www.labourstart.org/iran
*************************************
You can also use the following sample letter:
Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
The Presidency,
Palestine Avenue, Azerbaijan Intersection,
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Fax: + 98 21 649 58 80
Email: dr-ahmadinejad@president.ir
I am writing this letter to express my outrage over new charges against Mahmoud Salehi, who has been in Sanadaj’s central prison since April 9, 2007. Mr. Salehi, a founding member and the former President of the Bakery Workers’ Association of the city of Saqez and a well-known labour activist in Iran, has been sentenced unjustly to one year imprisonment and a three year suspended prison sentence for his labour activities.
On Monday, March 17, 2008, the judiciary authorities in Sanadaj charged Mahmoud with connecting with outside prison and sending solidarity messages to progressive students and other prisoners. They put Mahmoud under temporary arrest while he was supposed to be released from prison on March 23, 2008. In response to this unjust order, Mahmoud Salehi has declared hunger strike effective immediately. It’s very important to emphasize that Mr. Salehi is currently suffering from a life-threatening kidney disease. He only has one kidney, and that kidney is functioning at about only 10 percent of capacity.
I am writing this to condemn this outrageous action on the part of your government and calling on you to release Mahmoud Salehi immediately and unconditionally as he is a prisoner of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful exercise of organizing the 2004 May Day demonstration and his right to freedom of expression and association in connection with his labour rights activities. I also demand that Mansour Osanloo as well as all other labour and student activists are released immediately and unconditionally.
Name
Organization
position
Send Copy of your Protest Letters to:
Leader of the Islamic Republic:
Ayatollah Sayed *Ali Khamenei
The Office of the Supreme Leader
Shoahada Street
Qom, Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: info@leader.ir OR istiftaa@wilayah.org
Fax: 011 98 251 7774 2228
Head of the Judiciary:
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Justice Building
Panzdah-Khordad Square
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Fax: 011 98 21 3390 4986 (may be difficult to reach)
Email: info@dadgostary-tehran.ir
Ambassador, Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Institutions in Geneva, Chemin du Petit-Saconnex 28, 1209 Geneva, Switzerland, Fax: +41 22 733 02 03, E-mail: mission.iran@ties.itu.int
cc: info@workers-iran.org
********************************************************************
For more information, contact info@workers-iran.org or alliance@workers-iran.org.
International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran
Background Information: www.workers-iran.org
http://www.etehadbinalmelali.com/INDEXI.htm
Bush's War: Frontline. PBS Video:
Bush's War: Frontline. PBS Video:
How the war began and how ist has been fought, both on the ground and deep within the government
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/
click on to watch video!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/cron/
===
How the war began and how ist has been fought, both on the ground and deep within the government
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/
click on to watch video!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/cron/
===
۱۳۸۷ فروردین ۲, جمعه
Gaza's Reality
Gaza's Reality
Would you be able to live like this?
"We live in constant fear"
Video Runtime 5 minutes
click the link below to watch the video!
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15693.htm
www.informationclearinghouse.info
Would you be able to live like this?
"We live in constant fear"
Video Runtime 5 minutes
click the link below to watch the video!
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15693.htm
www.informationclearinghouse.info
۱۳۸۷ فروردین ۱, پنجشنبه
U.S."Enhancing Terror"
U.S. "Enhancing Terror"
Interview with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky explains the reality of Israel's actions to Canadian interviewer Evan Solomon.
The show is Hot Type on CBC
Part 1:
Part 2:
Hot Type edited down some of what Chomsky said, below is a transcript with more of what Chomsky said:
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comments (33) Comment (0)
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and relevant to the story. We encourage engaging, diverse and meaningful commentary. Do not include personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers and emails. Comments falling outside our guidelines – those including personal attacks and profanity – are not permitted.
See our complete Comment Policy and use this link to notify us if you have concerns about a comment. We’ll promptly review and remove any inappropriate postings.
Transcript:
Chomsky: ... Let's take a look at the Middle East, let's take a look at facts. The facts are, for 35 years, there has been a harsh, brutal, military operation. There has not been a political settlement. The reason that there has not been a political settlement is because the United States, unilaterally, has blocked it for 25 years. Just recently, Saudi Arabia produced a highly praised plan for political settlement. The majority of the American population supports it. The majority of the population also thinks the United States ought to be more active in the Middle East. They don't know that that's a contradiction in terms. The reason that's a contradiction in terms is the following: In the Saudi Arabia plan is a repetition of a series of proposals, which go back to 1976 when the UN Security Council debated a resolution calling for a settlement, in accord with the Saudi plan, to state settlement on the internationally recognized borders. With arrangements to guarantee the rights of every state in the nation to exist in peace and security within secure and recognized borders.
That was January 1976. OK, that was actually in accord with official U.S. policy. Except for one thing. It called for a Palestinian State in the territories; Israel wouldn't leave the occupied territories. That was vetoed by the US. It was supported by the Arab states, it was supported by the PLO, supported by Europe.
Solomon: Before they even recognized Israel as a state, though.
Chomsky: This was to exist as a state within secure and recognized borders. Nobody talked about recognizing the new Palestinian state, nobody talked about recognizing Israel. Look, is there a possible political settlement today? Has there been one for the last 25 years?
Is it supported by the entire world, including the majority of the American people? The answer to that question is yes. There is a political settlement that has been supported by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states, the PLO, Europe, Eastern Europe, Canada…
Solomon: Didn't Barak put that on the table?
Chomsky: No, he did not!
Solomon: He did not?
Chomsky: What was also supported by the majority of the American people, has just been reiterated by Saudi Arabia. The U.S. has unilaterally blocked it for 25 years. What Barak put on the table, the population doesn't know this, because people like the Western media in Canada in the United States don't tell them. Like, you can check and see how often, you for example, and others, have reported what I just said. Don't bother checking. The answer is zero.
The Barak proposal in Camp David, the Barak-Clinton proposal, in the United States, I didn't check the Canadian media, in the United States you cannot find a map, which is the most important thing of course, check in Canada, see if you can find a map. You go to Israel, you can find a map, you go to scholarly sources, you can find a map. Here's what you find when you look at a map: You find that this generous, magnanimous proposal provided Israel with a salient east of Jerusalem, which was established primarily by the Labor government, in order to bisect the West Bank. That salient goes almost to Jericho, breaks the West Bank into two cantons, then there's a second salient to the North, going to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which bisects the Northern part into two cantons.
So, we've got three cantons in the West Bank, virtually separated. All three of them are separated from a small area of East Jerusalem which is the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural life and of communications. So you have four cantons, all separated from the West, from Gaza, so that's five cantons, all surrounded by Israeli settlements, infrastructure, development and so on, which also incidentally guarantee Israel control of the water resources.
This does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when South Africa established the Bantustans. That's the generous, magnanimous offer. And there's a good reason why maps weren't shown. Because as soon as you look at a map, you see it.
Solomon: All right, but let me just say, Arafat didn't even bother putting a counter-proposal on the table.
Chomsky: Oh, that's not true.
Solomon: They negotiated that afterwards.
Chomsky: That's not true.
Solomon: I guess my question is, if they don't continue to negotiate -
Chomsky: They did. That's false.
Solomon: That's false?
Chomsky: Not only is it false, but not a single participant in the meetings says it. That's a media fabrication . . .
Solomon: That Arafat didn't put a counter-proposal . . .
Chomsky: Yeah, they had a proposal. They proposed the international consensus, which has been accepted by the entire world, the Arab states, the PLO. They proposed a settlement which is in accordance with an overwhelming international consensus, and is blocked by the United States.
Solomon: If you don't talk -
Chomsky: Yeah, they did talk. They talked. They proposed that.
Solomon: Once they walked out of Camp David,
Chomsky: They didn't walk out of Camp David . . .
Solomon: Both camps . . .
Chomsky: No, no, both sides walked out of Camp David.
Solomon: All right, once Camp David disbands, the radicals take over the process, my question is, how do . . .
Chomsky: No, no, the radicals didn't take over the process.
Solomon: You don't think that the Sharon, the right-wing Israeli . . .
Chomsky: No, Barak stayed in power for months. Barak cancelled it. That's how it ended.
Solomon: OK. The problem that people look at now in the Middle East is they say it's spun out of control because the radicals are on both sides now.
Chomsky: No, there's three sides. You're forgetting the United States. The radicals in the United States who have blocked this proposal for 25 years, continue to block it.
Solomon: How do we get back, now, there's so much distrust?
Chomsky: The first way we get back is by trying the experiment of minimal honesty. If we try that experiment of minimal honesty, we look at our own position and we discover what I just described. That for 25 years, the United States has blocked the political settlement, which is supported by the majority of the American population and by the entire world, except for Israel.
The first thing we do is accept the honesty and look at it. We take a look at Camp David and we see how it's the same. The United States was still demanding a Bantustans style settlement and rejecting the overwhelming international consensus and the position of the American people.
We then discovered the United States immediately moved to enhance terror in the region. So, let's continue. On September 29th, Ehud Barak put a massive military presence outside the Al Aqsa Mosque, very provocative, when people came out of the Mosque, young people started throwing stones, the Israeli army started shooting, half a dozen people were killed, and it escalated.
The next couple of days -- there was no Palestinian fire at this time -- Israel used U.S. helicopters (Israel produces no helicopters) to attack civilian complexes, killing about a dozen people and wounding several dozen.
Clinton reacted to that on October 3, 2000 by making the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel new military helicopters which had just been used for the purpose I described and of course would continue to be.
The U.S. press co-operated with that by refusing to publish the story. To this day, they have not published the fact.
It continued when Bush came in. One of his first acts was to send Israel a new shipment of one of the most advanced military helicopters in the arsenal. That continues right up to a couple of weeks ago with new shipments. You take a look at the reports, from say Jenin, by British correspondents like Peter Beaumont for the London Observer. He says the worst atrocity was the Apache helicopters buzzing around, destroying and demolishing everything.
Now, this is enhancing terror, and we may easily continue. On December 14th, the Security Council tried to pass a resolution calling for what everyone recognized to be the obvious means for reducing terror, namely sending international monitors. That's a way of reducing terror.
This happened to be in the middle of a quiet period, which lasted for about three weeks. The U.S. vetoed it. 10 days before that, there was a meeting at Geneva of the high-contracting parties of the 4th-Geneva convention, which has unanimously held for 35 years that it applies to Israel. The meeting condemned the Israeli settlements as illegal, condemned the list of atrocities -- willful destruction of property, murder, trials, torture.
What happened in that meeting? I'll tell you what happened in that meeting. The U.S. boycotted it. Therefore, the media refused to publish it.
Therefore, no one here knows that the United States once again enhanced terror by refusing to recognize the applicability of conventions which make virtually everything the United States and Israel are doing there a grave breech of the Geneva convention, which is a war crime.
These conventions were established in 1949 in order to criminalize the atrocities of the Nazis in occupied territory. They are customary international law. The United States is obligated, as a high-contracting party, to prosecute violations of those conventions. That means to prosecute its own leadership for the last 25 years. They won't do it unless the population forces them to. And the population won't force them to as long as they don't know it's a fact. And they won't know it's a fact as long as the media and loyal intellectuals keep it secret.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14120.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14120.htm
please click the above link to watch the video!
Interview with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky explains the reality of Israel's actions to Canadian interviewer Evan Solomon.
The show is Hot Type on CBC
Part 1:
Part 2:
Hot Type edited down some of what Chomsky said, below is a transcript with more of what Chomsky said:
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comments (33) Comment (0)
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and relevant to the story. We encourage engaging, diverse and meaningful commentary. Do not include personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers and emails. Comments falling outside our guidelines – those including personal attacks and profanity – are not permitted.
See our complete Comment Policy and use this link to notify us if you have concerns about a comment. We’ll promptly review and remove any inappropriate postings.
Transcript:
Chomsky: ... Let's take a look at the Middle East, let's take a look at facts. The facts are, for 35 years, there has been a harsh, brutal, military operation. There has not been a political settlement. The reason that there has not been a political settlement is because the United States, unilaterally, has blocked it for 25 years. Just recently, Saudi Arabia produced a highly praised plan for political settlement. The majority of the American population supports it. The majority of the population also thinks the United States ought to be more active in the Middle East. They don't know that that's a contradiction in terms. The reason that's a contradiction in terms is the following: In the Saudi Arabia plan is a repetition of a series of proposals, which go back to 1976 when the UN Security Council debated a resolution calling for a settlement, in accord with the Saudi plan, to state settlement on the internationally recognized borders. With arrangements to guarantee the rights of every state in the nation to exist in peace and security within secure and recognized borders.
That was January 1976. OK, that was actually in accord with official U.S. policy. Except for one thing. It called for a Palestinian State in the territories; Israel wouldn't leave the occupied territories. That was vetoed by the US. It was supported by the Arab states, it was supported by the PLO, supported by Europe.
Solomon: Before they even recognized Israel as a state, though.
Chomsky: This was to exist as a state within secure and recognized borders. Nobody talked about recognizing the new Palestinian state, nobody talked about recognizing Israel. Look, is there a possible political settlement today? Has there been one for the last 25 years?
Is it supported by the entire world, including the majority of the American people? The answer to that question is yes. There is a political settlement that has been supported by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states, the PLO, Europe, Eastern Europe, Canada…
Solomon: Didn't Barak put that on the table?
Chomsky: No, he did not!
Solomon: He did not?
Chomsky: What was also supported by the majority of the American people, has just been reiterated by Saudi Arabia. The U.S. has unilaterally blocked it for 25 years. What Barak put on the table, the population doesn't know this, because people like the Western media in Canada in the United States don't tell them. Like, you can check and see how often, you for example, and others, have reported what I just said. Don't bother checking. The answer is zero.
The Barak proposal in Camp David, the Barak-Clinton proposal, in the United States, I didn't check the Canadian media, in the United States you cannot find a map, which is the most important thing of course, check in Canada, see if you can find a map. You go to Israel, you can find a map, you go to scholarly sources, you can find a map. Here's what you find when you look at a map: You find that this generous, magnanimous proposal provided Israel with a salient east of Jerusalem, which was established primarily by the Labor government, in order to bisect the West Bank. That salient goes almost to Jericho, breaks the West Bank into two cantons, then there's a second salient to the North, going to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which bisects the Northern part into two cantons.
So, we've got three cantons in the West Bank, virtually separated. All three of them are separated from a small area of East Jerusalem which is the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural life and of communications. So you have four cantons, all separated from the West, from Gaza, so that's five cantons, all surrounded by Israeli settlements, infrastructure, development and so on, which also incidentally guarantee Israel control of the water resources.
This does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when South Africa established the Bantustans. That's the generous, magnanimous offer. And there's a good reason why maps weren't shown. Because as soon as you look at a map, you see it.
Solomon: All right, but let me just say, Arafat didn't even bother putting a counter-proposal on the table.
Chomsky: Oh, that's not true.
Solomon: They negotiated that afterwards.
Chomsky: That's not true.
Solomon: I guess my question is, if they don't continue to negotiate -
Chomsky: They did. That's false.
Solomon: That's false?
Chomsky: Not only is it false, but not a single participant in the meetings says it. That's a media fabrication . . .
Solomon: That Arafat didn't put a counter-proposal . . .
Chomsky: Yeah, they had a proposal. They proposed the international consensus, which has been accepted by the entire world, the Arab states, the PLO. They proposed a settlement which is in accordance with an overwhelming international consensus, and is blocked by the United States.
Solomon: If you don't talk -
Chomsky: Yeah, they did talk. They talked. They proposed that.
Solomon: Once they walked out of Camp David,
Chomsky: They didn't walk out of Camp David . . .
Solomon: Both camps . . .
Chomsky: No, no, both sides walked out of Camp David.
Solomon: All right, once Camp David disbands, the radicals take over the process, my question is, how do . . .
Chomsky: No, no, the radicals didn't take over the process.
Solomon: You don't think that the Sharon, the right-wing Israeli . . .
Chomsky: No, Barak stayed in power for months. Barak cancelled it. That's how it ended.
Solomon: OK. The problem that people look at now in the Middle East is they say it's spun out of control because the radicals are on both sides now.
Chomsky: No, there's three sides. You're forgetting the United States. The radicals in the United States who have blocked this proposal for 25 years, continue to block it.
Solomon: How do we get back, now, there's so much distrust?
Chomsky: The first way we get back is by trying the experiment of minimal honesty. If we try that experiment of minimal honesty, we look at our own position and we discover what I just described. That for 25 years, the United States has blocked the political settlement, which is supported by the majority of the American population and by the entire world, except for Israel.
The first thing we do is accept the honesty and look at it. We take a look at Camp David and we see how it's the same. The United States was still demanding a Bantustans style settlement and rejecting the overwhelming international consensus and the position of the American people.
We then discovered the United States immediately moved to enhance terror in the region. So, let's continue. On September 29th, Ehud Barak put a massive military presence outside the Al Aqsa Mosque, very provocative, when people came out of the Mosque, young people started throwing stones, the Israeli army started shooting, half a dozen people were killed, and it escalated.
The next couple of days -- there was no Palestinian fire at this time -- Israel used U.S. helicopters (Israel produces no helicopters) to attack civilian complexes, killing about a dozen people and wounding several dozen.
Clinton reacted to that on October 3, 2000 by making the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel new military helicopters which had just been used for the purpose I described and of course would continue to be.
The U.S. press co-operated with that by refusing to publish the story. To this day, they have not published the fact.
It continued when Bush came in. One of his first acts was to send Israel a new shipment of one of the most advanced military helicopters in the arsenal. That continues right up to a couple of weeks ago with new shipments. You take a look at the reports, from say Jenin, by British correspondents like Peter Beaumont for the London Observer. He says the worst atrocity was the Apache helicopters buzzing around, destroying and demolishing everything.
Now, this is enhancing terror, and we may easily continue. On December 14th, the Security Council tried to pass a resolution calling for what everyone recognized to be the obvious means for reducing terror, namely sending international monitors. That's a way of reducing terror.
This happened to be in the middle of a quiet period, which lasted for about three weeks. The U.S. vetoed it. 10 days before that, there was a meeting at Geneva of the high-contracting parties of the 4th-Geneva convention, which has unanimously held for 35 years that it applies to Israel. The meeting condemned the Israeli settlements as illegal, condemned the list of atrocities -- willful destruction of property, murder, trials, torture.
What happened in that meeting? I'll tell you what happened in that meeting. The U.S. boycotted it. Therefore, the media refused to publish it.
Therefore, no one here knows that the United States once again enhanced terror by refusing to recognize the applicability of conventions which make virtually everything the United States and Israel are doing there a grave breech of the Geneva convention, which is a war crime.
These conventions were established in 1949 in order to criminalize the atrocities of the Nazis in occupied territory. They are customary international law. The United States is obligated, as a high-contracting party, to prosecute violations of those conventions. That means to prosecute its own leadership for the last 25 years. They won't do it unless the population forces them to. And the population won't force them to as long as they don't know it's a fact. And they won't know it's a fact as long as the media and loyal intellectuals keep it secret.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14120.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14120.htm
please click the above link to watch the video!
۱۳۸۶ اسفند ۲۹, چهارشنبه
: Iran Nuke Laptop Data Came from Terror Group
POLITICS: Iran Nuke Laptop Data Came from Terror Group
By Gareth Porter
ipsnews: WASHINGTON, Feb 29 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" -- 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop -- as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.
But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by U.S. and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation.
There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel's Mossad.
In its latest report on Iran, circulated Feb. 22, the IAEA, under strong pressure from the Bush administration, included descriptions of plans for a facility to produce "green salt", technical specifications for high explosives testing and the schematic layout of a missile reentry vehicle that appears capable of holding a nuclear weapon. Iran has been asked to provide full explanations for these alleged activities.
Tehran has denounced the documents on which the charges are based as fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded copies of the documents to analyse, but the United States had refused to do so.
The Iranian assertion is supported by statements by German officials. A few days after then Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the laptop documents, Karsten Voight, the coordinator for German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry, was reported by the Wall Street Journal Nov. 22, 2004 as saying that the information had been provided by "an Iranian dissident group".
A German official familiar with the issue confirmed to this writer that the NCRI had been the source of the laptop documents. "I can assure you that the documents came from the Iranian resistance organisation," the source said.
The Germans have been deeply involved in intelligence collection and analysis regarding the Iranian nuclear programme. According to a story by Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer soon after the laptop documents were first mentioned publicly by Powell in late 2004, U.S. officials said they had been stolen from an Iranian whom German intelligence had been trying to recruit, and had been given to intelligence officials of an unnamed country in Turkey.
The German account of the origins of the laptop documents contradicts the insistence by unnamed U.S. intelligence officials who insisted to journalists William J. Broad and David Sanger in November 2005 that the laptop documents did not come from any Iranian resistance groups.
Despite the fact that it was listed as a terrorist organisation, the MEK was a favourite of neoconservatives in the Pentagon, who were proposing in 2003-2004 to use it as part of a policy to destabilise Iran. The United States is known to have used intelligence from the MEK on Iranian military questions for years. It was considered a credible source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear programme after 2002, mainly because of its identification of the facility in Natanz as a nuclear site.
The German source said he did not know whether the documents were authentic or not. However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very sceptical about their authenticity.
The Guardian's Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is "doubt over the provenance of the computer".
A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, "I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt."
Scott Ritter, the former U.S. military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.
The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.
Despite its having been credited with the Natanz intelligence coup in 2002, the overall record of the MEK on the Iranian nuclear programme has been very poor. The CIA continued to submit intelligence from the Iranian group about alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related work to the IAEA over the next five years, without identifying the source.
But that intelligence turned out to be unreliable. A senior IAEA official told the Los Angeles Times in February 2007 that, since 2002, "pretty much all the intelligence that has come to us has proved to be wrong."
Former State Department deputy intelligence director for the Near East and South Asia Wayne White doubts that the MEK has actually had the contacts within the Iranian bureaucracy and scientific community necessary to come up with intelligence such as Natanz and the laptop documents. "I find it very hard to believe that supporters of the MEK haven't been thoroughly rooted out of the Iranian bureaucracy," says White. "I think they are without key sources in the Iranian government."
In her February 2006 report on the laptop documents, the Post's Linzer said CIA analysts had originally speculated that a "third country, such as Israel, had fabricated the evidence". They eventually "discounted that theory", she wrote, without explaining why.
Since 2002, new information has emerged indicating that the MEK did not obtain the 2002 data on Natanz itself but received it from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Yossi Melman and Meier Javadanfar, who co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear programme last year, write that they were told by "very senior Israeli Intelligence officials" in late 2006 that Israeli intelligence had known about Natanz for a full year before the Iranian group's press conference. They explained that they had chosen not to reveal it to the public "because of safety concerns for the sources that provided the information".
Shahriar Ahy, an adviser to monarchist leader Reza Pahlavi, told journalist Connie Bruck that the detailed information on Natanz had not come from MEK but from "a friendly government, and it had come to more than one opposition group, not only the mujahideen."
Bruck wrote in the New Yorker on Mar, 16, 2006 that when he was asked if the "friendly government" was Israel, Ahy smiled and said, "The friendly government did not want to be the source of it, publicly. If the friendly government gives it to the U.S. publicly, then it would be received differently. Better to come from an opposition group."
Israel has maintained a relationship with the MEK since the late 1990s, according to Bruck, including assistance to the organisation in beaming broadcasts by the NCRI from Paris into Iran. An Israeli diplomat confirmed that Israel had found the MEK "useful", Bruck reported, but the official declined to elaborate.
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
(END/2008)
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41416
http://www.donyayema.info/album.php?a_id=2880
By Gareth Porter
ipsnews: WASHINGTON, Feb 29 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" -- 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop -- as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.
But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by U.S. and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation.
There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel's Mossad.
In its latest report on Iran, circulated Feb. 22, the IAEA, under strong pressure from the Bush administration, included descriptions of plans for a facility to produce "green salt", technical specifications for high explosives testing and the schematic layout of a missile reentry vehicle that appears capable of holding a nuclear weapon. Iran has been asked to provide full explanations for these alleged activities.
Tehran has denounced the documents on which the charges are based as fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded copies of the documents to analyse, but the United States had refused to do so.
The Iranian assertion is supported by statements by German officials. A few days after then Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the laptop documents, Karsten Voight, the coordinator for German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry, was reported by the Wall Street Journal Nov. 22, 2004 as saying that the information had been provided by "an Iranian dissident group".
A German official familiar with the issue confirmed to this writer that the NCRI had been the source of the laptop documents. "I can assure you that the documents came from the Iranian resistance organisation," the source said.
The Germans have been deeply involved in intelligence collection and analysis regarding the Iranian nuclear programme. According to a story by Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer soon after the laptop documents were first mentioned publicly by Powell in late 2004, U.S. officials said they had been stolen from an Iranian whom German intelligence had been trying to recruit, and had been given to intelligence officials of an unnamed country in Turkey.
The German account of the origins of the laptop documents contradicts the insistence by unnamed U.S. intelligence officials who insisted to journalists William J. Broad and David Sanger in November 2005 that the laptop documents did not come from any Iranian resistance groups.
Despite the fact that it was listed as a terrorist organisation, the MEK was a favourite of neoconservatives in the Pentagon, who were proposing in 2003-2004 to use it as part of a policy to destabilise Iran. The United States is known to have used intelligence from the MEK on Iranian military questions for years. It was considered a credible source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear programme after 2002, mainly because of its identification of the facility in Natanz as a nuclear site.
The German source said he did not know whether the documents were authentic or not. However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very sceptical about their authenticity.
The Guardian's Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is "doubt over the provenance of the computer".
A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, "I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt."
Scott Ritter, the former U.S. military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.
The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.
Despite its having been credited with the Natanz intelligence coup in 2002, the overall record of the MEK on the Iranian nuclear programme has been very poor. The CIA continued to submit intelligence from the Iranian group about alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related work to the IAEA over the next five years, without identifying the source.
But that intelligence turned out to be unreliable. A senior IAEA official told the Los Angeles Times in February 2007 that, since 2002, "pretty much all the intelligence that has come to us has proved to be wrong."
Former State Department deputy intelligence director for the Near East and South Asia Wayne White doubts that the MEK has actually had the contacts within the Iranian bureaucracy and scientific community necessary to come up with intelligence such as Natanz and the laptop documents. "I find it very hard to believe that supporters of the MEK haven't been thoroughly rooted out of the Iranian bureaucracy," says White. "I think they are without key sources in the Iranian government."
In her February 2006 report on the laptop documents, the Post's Linzer said CIA analysts had originally speculated that a "third country, such as Israel, had fabricated the evidence". They eventually "discounted that theory", she wrote, without explaining why.
Since 2002, new information has emerged indicating that the MEK did not obtain the 2002 data on Natanz itself but received it from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Yossi Melman and Meier Javadanfar, who co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear programme last year, write that they were told by "very senior Israeli Intelligence officials" in late 2006 that Israeli intelligence had known about Natanz for a full year before the Iranian group's press conference. They explained that they had chosen not to reveal it to the public "because of safety concerns for the sources that provided the information".
Shahriar Ahy, an adviser to monarchist leader Reza Pahlavi, told journalist Connie Bruck that the detailed information on Natanz had not come from MEK but from "a friendly government, and it had come to more than one opposition group, not only the mujahideen."
Bruck wrote in the New Yorker on Mar, 16, 2006 that when he was asked if the "friendly government" was Israel, Ahy smiled and said, "The friendly government did not want to be the source of it, publicly. If the friendly government gives it to the U.S. publicly, then it would be received differently. Better to come from an opposition group."
Israel has maintained a relationship with the MEK since the late 1990s, according to Bruck, including assistance to the organisation in beaming broadcasts by the NCRI from Paris into Iran. An Israeli diplomat confirmed that Israel had found the MEK "useful", Bruck reported, but the official declined to elaborate.
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
(END/2008)
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41416
http://www.donyayema.info/album.php?a_id=2880
۱۳۸۶ اسفند ۲۳, پنجشنبه
IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM
IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM
Farzad Kamangar is a 33 year old teacher, journalist and a member of Human Rights Activists in Iran.
Mr. Kamangar is of the Kurdish Ethnicity and was teaching in the city of Kamyaran before his arrest in August of 2006.
In the past 19 months Mr. Kamangar has been subjected to the most brutal tortures imaginable. On February 25th 2008 was found guilty of “risking national security and being a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party” and sentenced to death.
Mr. Kamangar has at all times maintained his innocence, and denied all charges against him. An International Campaign has been launched by Human Rights Activists in Iran in support of Mr. Kamangar
Please put this log
on your websiteIN THE NAME OF FREEDOM
http://f-kamangar.hra-iran.org/
Farzad Kamangar is a 33 year old teacher, journalist and a member of Human Rights Activists in Iran.
Mr. Kamangar is of the Kurdish Ethnicity and was teaching in the city of Kamyaran before his arrest in August of 2006.
In the past 19 months Mr. Kamangar has been subjected to the most brutal tortures imaginable. On February 25th 2008 was found guilty of “risking national security and being a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party” and sentenced to death.
Mr. Kamangar has at all times maintained his innocence, and denied all charges against him. An International Campaign has been launched by Human Rights Activists in Iran in support of Mr. Kamangar
Please put this log on your websiteIN THE NAME OF FREEDOM
http://f-kamangar.hra-iran.org/
۱۳۸۶ اسفند ۲۲, چهارشنبه
political news & views,video clips!
Ex-DEA Head Admits CIA Imported Cocaine : Video clip:
"American Drug War: The Last White Hope"http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0011uebG_ZziY3SB-o3GVvWgV94vrj5oSMPy_jdp7BuW1xaAYDbM6E0q44i7XSO7Fve24Hxe0AZWQ5Ei-urvl5N2guOF6Z8-BDd2NcR_u6vkwD4xTVCLFGieg==
"American Drug War: The Last White Hope"http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0011uebG_ZziY3SB-o3GVvWgV94vrj5oSMPy_jdp7BuW1xaAYDbM6E0q44i7XSO7Fve24Hxe0AZWQ5Ei-urvl5N2guOF6Z8-BDd2NcR_u6vkwD4xTVCLFGieg==
Iran's President Thanks Indonesia for Not Supporting UN Resolution :
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has thanked Indonesia for abstaining from a vote last week on a U.N. resolution that imposes new sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program.http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0011uebG_ZziY3DoB_Go0vepphYbK78TS8fWINFb2kY_lW9M-a-PAJ3AYL_S5OArYpc89QZ23JKrXpDwu1d6aWkQUadiPbZuvXRfBVV5NuLHoVs681QFzfkL7FUoX9JHl9dAuOsVCJVg-TpIJ66Jd3y0kzr-qT7KvCl
===
Poll: Support for tough moves against Iran falls:
Support for military strikes or sanctions to stop Iran's nuclear program has fallen in more than half the countries surveyed in an international poll, pollsters said on Tuesday. http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0011uebG_ZziY3fXpi6grQMCZqaQmIlXnfcsxUYODJqanmBoZciI2HwpYmSnoMfLvSnkfqoqzohSX2xc_Yj5NVl63NGZR8_Pf90rbQv2ZvYWQjI9vXF-o2JXU5QPDm6GccgLCpFUz8j9tsPVs_f--zEmdG_jnFXgXAZoIovhrp7m6c=
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has thanked Indonesia for abstaining from a vote last week on a U.N. resolution that imposes new sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program.http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0011uebG_ZziY3DoB_Go0vepphYbK78TS8fWINFb2kY_lW9M-a-PAJ3AYL_S5OArYpc89QZ23JKrXpDwu1d6aWkQUadiPbZuvXRfBVV5NuLHoVs681QFzfkL7FUoX9JHl9dAuOsVCJVg-TpIJ66Jd3y0kzr-qT7KvCl
===
Poll: Support for tough moves against Iran falls:
Support for military strikes or sanctions to stop Iran's nuclear program has fallen in more than half the countries surveyed in an international poll, pollsters said on Tuesday. http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0011uebG_ZziY3fXpi6grQMCZqaQmIlXnfcsxUYODJqanmBoZciI2HwpYmSnoMfLvSnkfqoqzohSX2xc_Yj5NVl63NGZR8_Pf90rbQv2ZvYWQjI9vXF-o2JXU5QPDm6GccgLCpFUz8j9tsPVs_f--zEmdG_jnFXgXAZoIovhrp7m6c=
'The War on Democracy'
'The War on Democracy' is John Pilger's first major film for the cinema - in a career that has produced more than 55 television documentaries. Set in Latin America and the US, it explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. "The film tells a universal story," says Pilger, "analysing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called war on terror".
'The War on Democracy' is John Pilger's first major film for the cinema - in a career that has produced more than 55 television documentaries. Set in Latin America and the US, it explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. "The film tells a universal story," says Pilger, "analysing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called war on terror".
Paths Towards Fascism
Talk by Naomi Wolf author of "The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot" given October 11, 2007 at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings.
From the book's Preface:
I wrote this book because I could no longer ignore the echoes between events in the past and forces at work today.
When I discussed these issues informally with a good friend who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors -- and who teaches students about the American system of government as a kind of personal response to what happened to her family -- she insisted that I present this argument.
I also wrote it as I did because, in the midst of my research, I went to Christopher Le and Jennifer Gandin's wedding.
Chris -- the "young patriot" of the subtitle -- is a born activist, a natural grassroots leader and teacher. He helps run the Nation Suicide Prevention Lifeline and is active on a range of issues. Chris and Jennifer are characteristic of the kinds of the idealistic young people -- idealistic Americans -- who need to lead our nation out of this crisis.
I was there having emerged from my reading and could not ignore the terrible storm clouds gathering in the nation at large, and I felt that the young couple needed one more gift: the tools to fully realize and defend their freedom; the means to be sure that their own children would be born in liberty.
It is not just the young who are disconnected from democracy's tasks at just the moment that the nation's freedoms are being dismantled; in my travels across the country, I have heard from citizens of all backgrounds who feel alienated from the Founders' idea that they are the ones who must lead; they are the ones who must decide and confront and draw a line. They are the ones who matter. This book is written for them.
Such citizens need the keys to, the understanding of, the Founders' radical legacy. They need to understand how despots have gone about their work. They need a primer so they and those around them can be well-equipped for the fight that lies ahead.
So they can fight it well.
So that our children may continue to live in freedom.
So that we may all. What follows is the first of two parts of the introduction to The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Part II will be posted in this space on the Huffington Post on Wednesday, September 12. Chelsea Green Publishing has also generously made available a PDF version [PDF here] of the entire Introduction, with footnotes included.
Dear Chris:
I am writing because we have an emergency.
Here are U.S. news headlines from a two-week period in the late summer of 2006:
July 22: "CIA WORKER SAYS MESSAGE ON TORTURE GOT HER FIRED." Christine Axsmith, a computer security expert working for the C.I.A., said she had been fired for posting a message on a blog site on a top-secret computer network. Axsmith criticized waterboarding: "Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong." Ms. Axsmith lost her job as well as her top-secret clearance, which she had held since 1993. She fears her career in intelligence is over.
July 28: "DRAFT BILL WAIVES DUE PROCESS FOR ENEMY COMBATANTS." The Bush administration has been working in secret on a draft bill "detailing procedures [for] bringing to trial those it captures in the war on terrorism, including some stark diversions from regular trial procedures. . . . Speedy trials are not required. . . . Hearsay information is admissible . . . the [military] lawyer can close the proceedings [and] can also order 'exclusion of the defendant' and his civilian counsel." Those defined as "enemy combatants" and "persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence" can be held in prison until "the cessation of hostilities," no matter when that may be or what jail sentence they may get.
July 29: "THE COURT UNDER SIEGE." In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that denying prisoners at Guantánamo judicial safeguards violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. The Supreme Court also insisted that a prisoner be able to be present at his own trial. In response, the White House prepared a bill that "simply revokes that right." The New York Times editorial page warned, "It is especially frightening to see the administration use the debates over the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and domestic spying to mount a new offensive against the courts."
July 31: "A SLIP OF THE PEN." U.S. lawyers issued a statement expressing alarm at the way the president was overusing "signing statements." They argued that this was an exertion of executive power that undermined the Constitution. Said the head of the American Bar Association, "The threat to our Republic posed by presidential signing statements is both imminent and real unless immediate corrective action is taken."
August 2: "BLOGGER JAILED AFTER DEFYING COURT ORDERS." A freelance blogger, Josh Wolf, 24, was jailed after he refused to turn over to investigators a video he had taken of a protest in San Francisco. Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said that, although the jailing of American journalists was becoming more frequent, Mr. Wolf was the first American blogger she knew of to be imprisoned by federal authorities.
August 2: "GOVERNMENT WINS ACCESS TO REPORTER PHONE RECORDS." "A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources. . ." according to The New York Times. A dissenting judge speculated that in the future, reporters would have to meet their sources illicitly, like drug dealers meeting contacts "in darkened doorways."
August 3: "STRONG-ARMING THE VOTE." In Alabama, a federal judge took away powers over the election process from a Democratic official, Secretary of State Worley, and handed them over to a Republican governor: "[P]arty politics certainly appears to have been a driving force," argued the Times. "The Justice Department's request to shift Ms. Worley's powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary." When Worley sought redress in a court overseen by a federal judge aligned with the Bush administration, she wasn't allowed her chosen lawyer. It was "a one-sided proceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court. . ." cautioned the newspaper. She lost.
Why am I writing this warning to you right now, in 2007? After all, we have had a Congressional election giving control of the House and the Senate to Democrats. The new leaders are at work. Surely, Americans who have been worried about erosions of civil liberties, and the destruction of our system of checks and balances, can relax now: see, the system corrects itself. It is tempting to believe that the basic machinery of democracy still works fine and that any emergency threatening it has passed -- or, worst case, can be corrected in the upcoming presidential election.
But the dangers are not gone; they are regrouping. In some ways they are rapidly gaining force. The big picture reveals that 10 classic pressures -- pressures that have been used in various times and places in the past to close down pluralistic societies -- were set in motion by the Bush administration to close down our own open society. These pressures have never been put in place before in this way in this nation.
A breather is unearned; we can't simply relax now. The laws that drive these pressures are still on the books. The people who have a vested interest in a less open society may be in a moment of formal political regrouping; but their funds are just as massive as before, their strategic thinking unchanged, and their strategy now is to regroup so that next time their majority will be permanent.
All of us -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents, American citizens -- have little time to repeal the laws and roll back the forces that can bring about the end of the American system we have inherited from the Founders -- a system that has protected our freedom for over 200 years.
I have written this warning because our country -- the democracy our young patriots expect to inherit -- is in the process of being altered forever. History has a great deal to teach us about what is happening right now -- what has happened since 2001 and what could well unfold after the 2008 election. But fewer and fewer of us have read much about the history of the mid-twentieth century -- or about the ways the Founders set up our freedoms to save us from the kinds of tyranny they knew could emerge in the future. High school students, college students, recent graduates, activists from all walks of life, have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on. But they have lacked a primer to brief them on these themes and put the pieces together, so it is hard for them to know how urgent the situation is, let alone what they need to do.
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings. We take our American liberty for granted the way we take our natural resources for granted, seeing both, rather casually, as being magically self-replenishing. We have not noticed how vulnerable either resource is until very late in the game, when systems start to falter. We have been slow to learn that liberty, like nature, demands a relationship with us in order for it to continue to sustain us.
Most of us have only a faint understanding of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom or ruled by fear, because this is not the kind of history that we feel, or that our educational system believes, is important for us to know. Another reason for our vagueness about how liberty lives or dies is that we have tended lately to subcontract out the tasks of the patriot: to let the professionals -- lawyers, scholars, activists, politicians -- worry about understanding the Constitution and protecting our rights. We think that "they" should manage our rights, the way we hire a professional to do our taxes; "they" should run the government, create policy, worry about whether democracy is up and running. We're busy.
But the Founders did not mean for powerful men and women far away from the citizens -- for people with their own agendas, or for a class of professionals -- to perform the patriots' tasks, or to protect freedom. They meant for us to do it: you, me, the American who delivers your mail, the one who teaches your kids.
I am one of the citizens who needed to relearn these lessons. Though I studied civics, our system of government was taught to me, as it was to you, as a fairly boring explication of a three-part civil bureaucracy, not as the mechanism of a thrilling, radical, and totally unprecedented experiment in human self-determination. My teachers explained that our three-part system was set up with "checks and balances," so that no one branch of government could seize too much power. Not so exciting: this sounded like "checks and balances" in a bureaucratic turf war. Our teachers failed to explain to us that the power that the Founders restrained in each branch of government is not abstract: it is the power to strip you and me of personal liberty.
So I needed to go back and read, more deeply than I had the first time around, histories of how patriots gave us our America out of the crucible of tyrants, as well as histories of how dictators came to power in the last century. I had to reread the stories of the making and the unmaking of freedom. The more I read these histories, the more disturbed I became.
I give you the lessons we can learn from them in this pamphlet form because of the crisis we face. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18570.htm
Talk by Naomi Wolf author of "The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot" given October 11, 2007 at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings.
From the book's Preface:
I wrote this book because I could no longer ignore the echoes between events in the past and forces at work today.
When I discussed these issues informally with a good friend who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors -- and who teaches students about the American system of government as a kind of personal response to what happened to her family -- she insisted that I present this argument.
I also wrote it as I did because, in the midst of my research, I went to Christopher Le and Jennifer Gandin's wedding.
Chris -- the "young patriot" of the subtitle -- is a born activist, a natural grassroots leader and teacher. He helps run the Nation Suicide Prevention Lifeline and is active on a range of issues. Chris and Jennifer are characteristic of the kinds of the idealistic young people -- idealistic Americans -- who need to lead our nation out of this crisis.
I was there having emerged from my reading and could not ignore the terrible storm clouds gathering in the nation at large, and I felt that the young couple needed one more gift: the tools to fully realize and defend their freedom; the means to be sure that their own children would be born in liberty.
It is not just the young who are disconnected from democracy's tasks at just the moment that the nation's freedoms are being dismantled; in my travels across the country, I have heard from citizens of all backgrounds who feel alienated from the Founders' idea that they are the ones who must lead; they are the ones who must decide and confront and draw a line. They are the ones who matter. This book is written for them.
Such citizens need the keys to, the understanding of, the Founders' radical legacy. They need to understand how despots have gone about their work. They need a primer so they and those around them can be well-equipped for the fight that lies ahead.
So they can fight it well.
So that our children may continue to live in freedom.
So that we may all. What follows is the first of two parts of the introduction to The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Part II will be posted in this space on the Huffington Post on Wednesday, September 12. Chelsea Green Publishing has also generously made available a PDF version [PDF here] of the entire Introduction, with footnotes included.
Dear Chris:
I am writing because we have an emergency.
Here are U.S. news headlines from a two-week period in the late summer of 2006:
July 22: "CIA WORKER SAYS MESSAGE ON TORTURE GOT HER FIRED." Christine Axsmith, a computer security expert working for the C.I.A., said she had been fired for posting a message on a blog site on a top-secret computer network. Axsmith criticized waterboarding: "Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong." Ms. Axsmith lost her job as well as her top-secret clearance, which she had held since 1993. She fears her career in intelligence is over.
July 28: "DRAFT BILL WAIVES DUE PROCESS FOR ENEMY COMBATANTS." The Bush administration has been working in secret on a draft bill "detailing procedures [for] bringing to trial those it captures in the war on terrorism, including some stark diversions from regular trial procedures. . . . Speedy trials are not required. . . . Hearsay information is admissible . . . the [military] lawyer can close the proceedings [and] can also order 'exclusion of the defendant' and his civilian counsel." Those defined as "enemy combatants" and "persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence" can be held in prison until "the cessation of hostilities," no matter when that may be or what jail sentence they may get.
July 29: "THE COURT UNDER SIEGE." In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that denying prisoners at Guantánamo judicial safeguards violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. The Supreme Court also insisted that a prisoner be able to be present at his own trial. In response, the White House prepared a bill that "simply revokes that right." The New York Times editorial page warned, "It is especially frightening to see the administration use the debates over the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and domestic spying to mount a new offensive against the courts."
July 31: "A SLIP OF THE PEN." U.S. lawyers issued a statement expressing alarm at the way the president was overusing "signing statements." They argued that this was an exertion of executive power that undermined the Constitution. Said the head of the American Bar Association, "The threat to our Republic posed by presidential signing statements is both imminent and real unless immediate corrective action is taken."
August 2: "BLOGGER JAILED AFTER DEFYING COURT ORDERS." A freelance blogger, Josh Wolf, 24, was jailed after he refused to turn over to investigators a video he had taken of a protest in San Francisco. Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said that, although the jailing of American journalists was becoming more frequent, Mr. Wolf was the first American blogger she knew of to be imprisoned by federal authorities.
August 2: "GOVERNMENT WINS ACCESS TO REPORTER PHONE RECORDS." "A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources. . ." according to The New York Times. A dissenting judge speculated that in the future, reporters would have to meet their sources illicitly, like drug dealers meeting contacts "in darkened doorways."
August 3: "STRONG-ARMING THE VOTE." In Alabama, a federal judge took away powers over the election process from a Democratic official, Secretary of State Worley, and handed them over to a Republican governor: "[P]arty politics certainly appears to have been a driving force," argued the Times. "The Justice Department's request to shift Ms. Worley's powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary." When Worley sought redress in a court overseen by a federal judge aligned with the Bush administration, she wasn't allowed her chosen lawyer. It was "a one-sided proceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court. . ." cautioned the newspaper. She lost.
Why am I writing this warning to you right now, in 2007? After all, we have had a Congressional election giving control of the House and the Senate to Democrats. The new leaders are at work. Surely, Americans who have been worried about erosions of civil liberties, and the destruction of our system of checks and balances, can relax now: see, the system corrects itself. It is tempting to believe that the basic machinery of democracy still works fine and that any emergency threatening it has passed -- or, worst case, can be corrected in the upcoming presidential election.
But the dangers are not gone; they are regrouping. In some ways they are rapidly gaining force. The big picture reveals that 10 classic pressures -- pressures that have been used in various times and places in the past to close down pluralistic societies -- were set in motion by the Bush administration to close down our own open society. These pressures have never been put in place before in this way in this nation.
A breather is unearned; we can't simply relax now. The laws that drive these pressures are still on the books. The people who have a vested interest in a less open society may be in a moment of formal political regrouping; but their funds are just as massive as before, their strategic thinking unchanged, and their strategy now is to regroup so that next time their majority will be permanent.
All of us -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents, American citizens -- have little time to repeal the laws and roll back the forces that can bring about the end of the American system we have inherited from the Founders -- a system that has protected our freedom for over 200 years.
I have written this warning because our country -- the democracy our young patriots expect to inherit -- is in the process of being altered forever. History has a great deal to teach us about what is happening right now -- what has happened since 2001 and what could well unfold after the 2008 election. But fewer and fewer of us have read much about the history of the mid-twentieth century -- or about the ways the Founders set up our freedoms to save us from the kinds of tyranny they knew could emerge in the future. High school students, college students, recent graduates, activists from all walks of life, have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on. But they have lacked a primer to brief them on these themes and put the pieces together, so it is hard for them to know how urgent the situation is, let alone what they need to do.
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings. We take our American liberty for granted the way we take our natural resources for granted, seeing both, rather casually, as being magically self-replenishing. We have not noticed how vulnerable either resource is until very late in the game, when systems start to falter. We have been slow to learn that liberty, like nature, demands a relationship with us in order for it to continue to sustain us.
Most of us have only a faint understanding of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom or ruled by fear, because this is not the kind of history that we feel, or that our educational system believes, is important for us to know. Another reason for our vagueness about how liberty lives or dies is that we have tended lately to subcontract out the tasks of the patriot: to let the professionals -- lawyers, scholars, activists, politicians -- worry about understanding the Constitution and protecting our rights. We think that "they" should manage our rights, the way we hire a professional to do our taxes; "they" should run the government, create policy, worry about whether democracy is up and running. We're busy.
But the Founders did not mean for powerful men and women far away from the citizens -- for people with their own agendas, or for a class of professionals -- to perform the patriots' tasks, or to protect freedom. They meant for us to do it: you, me, the American who delivers your mail, the one who teaches your kids.
I am one of the citizens who needed to relearn these lessons. Though I studied civics, our system of government was taught to me, as it was to you, as a fairly boring explication of a three-part civil bureaucracy, not as the mechanism of a thrilling, radical, and totally unprecedented experiment in human self-determination. My teachers explained that our three-part system was set up with "checks and balances," so that no one branch of government could seize too much power. Not so exciting: this sounded like "checks and balances" in a bureaucratic turf war. Our teachers failed to explain to us that the power that the Founders restrained in each branch of government is not abstract: it is the power to strip you and me of personal liberty.
So I needed to go back and read, more deeply than I had the first time around, histories of how patriots gave us our America out of the crucible of tyrants, as well as histories of how dictators came to power in the last century. I had to reread the stories of the making and the unmaking of freedom. The more I read these histories, the more disturbed I became.
I give you the lessons we can learn from them in this pamphlet form because of the crisis we face. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18570.htm
Taxi to the Dark SideMust Watch Award-Winning DocumentaryThe film documents how Rumsfeld, together with the White House legal team, were able to convince Congress to approve the use of torture against prisoners of war. Taxi to the Dark Side is the definitive exploration of the introduction of torture as an interrogation technique in U.S. facilities, and the role played by key figures of the Bush Administration in the process.
Over one hundred prisoners have died in suspicious circumstances in U.S. custody during the "war on terror". Taxi to the Dark Side takes an in-depth look at one case: an Afghan taxi driver called Dilawar who was considered an honest and kind man by the people of his rustic village. So when he was detained by the U.S military one afternoon, after picking up three passengers, denizens wondered why this man was randomly chosen to be held in prison, and, especially, without trial? Five days after his arrest Dilawar died in his Bagram prison cell. His death came within a week of another death of a detainee at Bagram. The conclusion, with autopsy evidence, was that the former taxi driver and the detainee who passed away before him, had died due to sustained injuries inflicted at the prison by U.S. soldiers. The documentary, by award-winning producer Alex Gibney, carefully develops the last weeks of Dilawar’s life and shows how decisions taken at the pinnacle of power in the Bush Administration led directly to Dilawar’s brutal death.
'Punish Israel for holocaust remarks'
Most people believe that Israel should be punished by the international community for its recent Gaza holocaust rhet
'Punish Israel for holocaust remarks' Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:45:10
Most people believe that Israel should be punished by the international community for its recent Gaza holocaust rhetoric, a poll indicates. More than 67 percent of 3587 respondents to a Press TV online poll said Israel's remarks that a bigger holocaust awaits Palestinians should prompt the international community to take punitive measures, including sanctions against the regime. Earlier the Israeli deputy war minister had threatened that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip should await a 'bigger holocaust'. About 19 percent of voters believed the international community should take measures to protect Palestinians against Israeli attacks while 13 percent said no action should be taken. Meanwhile, Israeli war minister Ehud Barak rejected on Wednesday a ceasefire with Hamas, saying Israel will continue its Gaza incursions. AKM/RE
Related News
Barak vows to continue Gaza holocaust
Olmert denies ceasefire, truce talks
UN slams Israel for Gaza bloodshed
Israel: Holocaust awaits Palestiniansoric, a
White House denies central command chief's resignation Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:25:58 Mike Kellerman, Press TV, Washington
mms://217.218.67.244/presstv/080313/OUTPUT_01-17-00-FTP-MIKE-WASHINGTON.wmv
Perino: No one in Washington wants war Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:08:51 The White House says "no one" in Washington seeks war with Iran rejecting reports that Fallon's resignation gives the go-ahead to war.
mms://217.218.67.244/presstv/080313/OUTPUT_01-17-00-FTP-MIKE-WASHINGTON.wmv
۱۳۸۶ اسفند ۱۹, یکشنبه
Rocket Men!
Rocket MenAl Jazeera Video ReportPaul Martin gains unique access to a Qassam rocket launching team in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli helicopter pilots charged with hunting them down.
Part 1
Part 2
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19500.htm
۱۳۸۶ اسفند ۱۷, جمعه
The 1953 CIA Coup in Iran and the Roots of Middle East Terror
The 1953 CIA Coup in Iran and the Roots of Middle East TerrorDemocracy Now Interview With New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.I think the National Intelligence Estimate might have perversely made the attack (On Iran) more likely. Text and audio
CLICK PLAY TO LISTEN
Real Video Stream - Real Audio Stream - MP3 Download
AMY GOODMAN: From Gaza, we turn now to Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iraq Sunday for a historic meeting with Iraqi leaders, first visit to Iraq by an Iranian president since the Iran-Iraq conflict of the ’80s. At a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad, Ahmadinejad said his visit would open a new era in Iraq-Iran ties. He also rejected US allegations his government is interfering in Iraq’s affairs.
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD: [translated] We want to tell Mr. Bush that accusing others will increase the problems of America in the region and will not solve them. The Americans have to accept the region as it is. The Iraqi people do not like America.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier, Ahmadinejad had made light of US allegations, saying, “Is it not funny that those with 160,000 forces in Iraq accuse us of interference?”
While Ahmadinejad’s visit could be a pivotal moment in improving Iran-Iraq ties, it’s also seen as a sign of the dwindling drumbeat for war coming from Washington. It’s been nearly three months since the release of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program years ago. The report was a major blow to Bush administration efforts to shore up support for a possible military strike on Iran.
Stephen Kinzer is the author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and The Roots of Middle East Terror. The book chronicles the CIA-backed 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government after Iran nationalized its oil industry. The aftershocks of the coup are still being felt. His book has just come out in paperback, and he’s traveling the country to warn against a US attack on Iran.
I sat down with him to talk about what is happening today in Iran.
STEPHEN KINZER: It’s more possible than you’d like to think. In a reality-based, fact-based policy environment in Washington, you’d think that the idea of attacking Iran would be off the agenda now. Not only is there no enthusiasm in the military for this, or even in the Defense Department civilian side, we’re very stretched in Iraq, obviously, and there doesn’t seem to be any public demand or urgency for it. In addition, we had this National Intelligence Estimate, which undercut what had been the principal argument for an attack, which was Iran is just about to develop a nuclear weapon and therefore we need a preemptive attack. Now, our sixteen intelligence agencies have issued this report saying, actually, no, they’re not developing a nuclear weapon nor have they been working on this project for at least five years. So, that also, you would think, would eliminate this possibility.
Unfortunately, though, I think the—first of all, the fact that the possibility is fading a little bit off the public agenda and public opinion is being kind of anaesthetized to this possibility increases the danger, because there doesn’t seem to be any public outcry or any outcry in Congress. Secondly, I think the National Intelligence Estimate might have perversely made the attack more likely in one sense. Before that estimate came out, the US’s policy was going to be: now we’re going to get the Security Council and the European Union to agree to really tight sanctions on Iran, because they’re about to develop a nuclear weapon. And we thought we were going to be able to do that because it was that urgent. But now, the reason why we said those sanctions were so urgent has been undercut by our own intelligence agency, so the sanctions option is more or less off the table. They’re not going to agree to sanctions now. And I think that might lead people in the White House to think, well, sanctions option isn’t there anymore; I guess bombing is the only option.
Here’s the nightmare argument that I could imagine being made inside the Oval Office. We had to suffer 9/11 because wimpy Clinton did not go over there and take care of that threat while it was gathering. There’s a threat gathering in Iran. It could be even more serious with millions killed in a nuclear bomb attack on the West. The next president won’t be able to carry out this drastic action for political reasons. But obeying the call of history, we’re going to realize we’ve got to take care of this threat before it grows out of hand.
I fear that some variation of this argument, particularly as the election approaches later this year, could lead us into a crazy adventure that’s not only going to set back the cause of democracy in Iran by a generation; strengthen the regime that we profess to detest; eliminate the entirely pro-American sentiment that now exists among the population of Iran; probably set off retaliation attacks by Iran on Israel and maybe states in the Persian Gulf; possibly result in the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran could do by just sinking a couple of tankers, and that’s 20 percent of the world’s oil right there; undoubtedly trigger a huge explosion of anti-American violence in Iraq, probably also in Afghanistan; and it would further destabilize Pakistan, which is already in upheaval. And I think throughout the Muslim world you’d see great upheaval.
So you can foresee all these negative effects, but based on what we now know about the long-term effects of the last time we intervened in 1953, I think I could predict one thing; despite all those negative effects, we could predict: history suggests that the worst long-term effects of this operation would be ones that nobody can now imagine. That’s the lesson we learned from the aftermath of 1953. And that’s why that story of 1953 is now so relevant again as we’re preparing possibly for another attack.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we talk about the effects now, like specifically why you think it would reinforce the hard-line conservatives in Iran, let’s go back to 1953, something that’s not very much done on television in the United States, taking a look at history or context. What did happen? Why is it that the people of Iran, this is indelibly written for every child who certainly wasn’t born then, but in the United States, they don’t know what you’re talking about?
STEPHEN KINZER: Well, I’ll tell you an interesting story to start off. I was recently on a panel in the National Cathedral in Washington, and one of the other panelists—we were talking about Iran—was Bruce Laingen, who had been the chief American diplomat in Iran and was the most prominent figure among the hostages that were held there for 444 days. And I knew that Laingen had become an advocate of reconciliation with Iran, which I consider quite remarkable, considering the ordeal that he suffered, so I wanted to talk to him. I hadn’t met him before. And we exchanged some emails after that.
He told me an amazing story. He said, “I had been sitting in my solitary cell as a hostage for about a year, when one day the cell door opens, and there is standing one of the hostage takers, one of my jailers. And all of my rage and my fury built up over one year sitting in that cell just burst out, and I started screaming at him, and I was telling him, ‘You have no right to do this! This is cruel, this is inhumane! These people have done nothing! This is a violation of every law of god and man! You cannot take innocent people hostage!’” He said, “I went on like this for several minutes. When I was finally out of breath, the hostage taker paused for a moment, and then he leaned into my cell and said, in very good English, ‘You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953.’”
That story really reinforced to me the connection and the fact that those hostage takers took those hostages not out of nihilistic rage, but for a very specific reason that seemed to make very good sense to them. In 1953, the Iranian people had chased the Shah out, but CIA agents working inside the American embassy in Tehran organized a coup and brought him back. So flash forward to 1979, people of Iran have chased the Shah out again. He has been admitted into the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Under Carter.
STEPHEN KINZER: Under President Carter. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Ostensibly for medical reasons.
STEPHEN KINZER: People in Iran are thinking, “It’s all happening again. CIA agents working in the basement of the American embassy are going to organize a coup, and they’re going to bring the Shah back. We have to prevent 1953 from happening again.” That was the motivation for the hostage taking, although I don’t think any of us really understood that at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: Stay there in 1953. It was Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit Roosevelt. Explain what happened.
STEPHEN KINZER: What happened was that the first half of the twentieth century, Americans had a super good image in Iran. The only Americans there were doctors and school teachers and people who really were selflessly devoting themselves to Iranians. Meanwhile, the British and the Russians and the French and other colonial powers were ripping Iran apart and stealing and looting everything of value there. So they, people in Iran, had a very high, exalted opinion of the United States, perfect country, the ideal country. And the words of Franklin Roosevelt in all his radio speeches during the Second World War also had a big impact on Iranians. And, of course, there was a big World War II conference in Tehran that just focused Iranians on the ideals of freedom that the Allied powers said they were fighting for.
So in the period after World War II, Iranian nationalism came to focus on one great cause. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as a result of a corrupt deal with the old dying monarchy, one British company, owned mainly by the British government, had taken control of the entire Iranian oil industry.
AMY GOODMAN: The company.
STEPHEN KINZER: This one company had the exclusive rights to extract, refine, ship and sell Iranian oil, and they paid Iran a very tiny amount. But essentially the entire Iranian oil resource was owned by a company based in England and owned mainly by the British government.
AMY GOODMAN: Called British Petroleum?
STEPHEN KINZER: That was Anglo-Iranian Petroleum, later to become British Petroleum and BP. I’m still on my like one-man boycott, like I go to the Shell station, as if Shell is somehow morally superior to BP. But still, in my own mind, I feel like I’m redeeming Mosaddeq whenever I pass by one of those BP stations.
Anyway, what happened was that Prime Minister Mosaddeq, who really was an extraordinary figure in his time, although he’s been somewhat forgotten by history, came to power in 1951 on a wave of nationalism aimed at this one great obsession: we’ve got to take back control of our oil and use the profits for the development of one of the most wretchedly impoverished nations on earth at that time. So the Iranian parliament voted unanimously for a bill to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company, and Mosaddeq signed it, and he devoted himself during his term of office to carrying out that plan, to nationalize what was then Britain’s largest and most profitable holding anywhere in the world.
Bear in mind that the oil that fueled England all during the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s all came from Iran. The standard of living that people in England enjoyed all during that period was due exclusively to Iranian oil. Britain has no oil. Britain has no colonies that have oil. Every factory in England, every car, every truck, every taxi was running on oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which was projecting British power all over the world was fueled 100 percent by oil from Iran.
Suddenly, Iran arrives and says, “Oh, we’re taking back the oil now.” So this naturally set off a huge crisis. And that’s the crisis that made Mosaddeq really a big world figure around the early 1950s. At the end of 1951, Time magazine chose him as Man of the Year, and they chose him over Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. And they made the right choice, because at that moment Mosaddeq really was the most important person in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Former New York Times correspondent, Stephen Kinzer. His book is All the Shah’s Men. We’ll be back with him in a minute.
[break] AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men, as he goes back in time to the US-backed coup in Iran in 1953. Mohammed Mosaddeq, the prime minister, had roused Britain’s ire when he nationalized the oil industry. He argued Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves, which had been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The company later became known as British Petroleum. I asked Stephen Kinzer to talk about this period.
STEPHEN KINZER: Actually, it was at this time that Aramco, the Arab American Oil Company, came into Saudi Arabian, and their deal was a fifty-fifty split, so 50 percent for the country that has the oil and 50 percent for the company that comes in and builds the refinery. That had the air of fairness that ordinary people could understand, but the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company would not give in one inch. And that just made the Iranians more and more radical.
AMY GOODMAN: So how did the US get involved? You’re talking about this special relationship between Britain and Iran. Why the United States?
STEPHEN KINZER: The British tried all sorts of things to bring Mosaddeq down. They imposed a crushing economic embargo on Iran. They required all their oil technicians to leave. Many of them wanted to stay in Iran and work for the nationalized company. The British wouldn’t allow this. So, since they had been very careful not to train anyone how to run the oil refinery, any Iranians, that was the end of the possibility of oil refining. Just in case the Iranians could figure out how to extract any oil, the British imposed a naval embargo around the port, where oil is exported from in Iran. The British took Mosaddeq to the United Nations, they took him to the World Court, both unsuccessfully. The British were arguing that the Iranian oil industry was their private property and that Mosaddeq had stolen it from them. That was their complaint, but they failed to get any redress in international fora.
So then the British decided they would have to overthrow Mosaddeq, and they started a plot to do that. But Mosaddeq figured out what was happening, and he did the only thing he could have done to protect himself: he closed the British embassy. He sent home all the British diplomats. And among those diplomats were, of course, all the spies and the secret agents that were arranging the coup. So then, the only thing that Prime Minister Churchill could think of to do was to ask Harry Truman, the American president, to do this job for us: Can you please overthrow Mosaddeq, because we don’t have anyone in Iran now that can do it? And Truman said no. Truman believed that the CIA could be a covert action and intelligence-gathering agency, but he never wanted it to get involved in overthrowing governments. So that was the end of the line for Britain, until there was regime change in the United States.
We had the election of 1952. Dwight Eisenhower took office. John Foster Dulles became his secretary of state. And Dulles had spent his whole adult life working as a lawyer for giant international corporations. And the idea that a country should be able to get away with nationalizing such a big company, such a big corporate resource, was, as Dulles very well understood, a great threat to the system that he had been representing all his life, the system of multinational enterprise. And he realized that it was in the interest of the United States, as he saw them, to make sure that no such example could be set. So the new administration, the Eisenhower administration, reversed the policy of the Truman administration. They agreed to send a CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, to Iran in the summer of 1953. And that’s the story that I tell in my book.
It just took Kermit Roosevelt three weeks in August of 1953—
AMY GOODMAN: With a bag of money.
STEPHEN KINZER: Bag of money and a few other very interesting resources. He was a real-life James Bond. This guy was a real intrepid secret agent, and the story is just amazing how he did this. But it’s really an object lesson in how easy it is for a rich and powerful country to throw a poor and weak country into chaos. So at the end of August 1953, Mosaddeq was overthrown. At the moment, that seemed like a great success. So we got rid of a guy that we didn’t like, and we replaced him with someone else, the Shah, who would do anything we wanted. It seemed like the perfect ending.
AMY GOODMAN: And Mosaddeq is put into exile for the rest of his life.
STEPHEN KINZER: He was under house arrest for the rest of his life in his village in Iran. So that coup seemed like a success at first. But now, when you look back on it, it serves as a fascinating object lesson in unintended consequences.
Just very briefly, so we placed the Shah back on his peacock throne. The Shah ruled with increasing repression for twenty-five years. His repression set off the explosion of the late 1970s, what we call the Islamic Revolution. That revolution brought to power a clique of fanatically anti-American mullahs. That revolution also inspired radicals in other countries, like next-door Afghanistan, where the Taliban came to power and gave shelter to al-Qaeda with results we all know. That instability in Iran that followed that revolution also led Iran’s great enemy next door, Saddam Hussein, to invade Iran. That not only set off an eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, but it also brought the United States into its death embrace with Saddam. We were the military allies of Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, and we were supplying Saddam with military intelligence, with Bell helicopters that he used to spray gas on Iranian positions. President Reagan sent a special envoy twice to Baghdad to negotiate with Saddam and ask him how we could help him. And, of course, that envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. So that instability set off by that revolution also led the United States into the spiral in Iraq that brought us to the point where we are now.
That revolution in Iran also spooked the Soviets. They were terrified that there would be copycat fundamentalist revolutions all along their southern flank. And to prevent that, they invaded Afghanistan. That brought the United States into its position in Afghanistan, where we brought Osama bin Laden there, we trained all these tens of thousands of jihadis in how to kill infidels, which they later became the Taliban. We later became the infidels they wanted to kill. So why is this all so important for today?
AMY GOODMAN: And, in fact, it affected the Carter-Reagan elections, brought Reagan to power.
STEPHEN KINZER: Oh, and it devastated the presidency of Jimmy Carter forever, absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: Which had enormous effect then on Latin America, when you look at Reagan’s role in Latin America in the ’80s.
STEPHEN KINZER: You can—they call it in the CIA “walking back the cat.” You can walk back the cat endlessly on this one. And the reason the story is so relevant is that it tells us the main thing you need to know in assessing the current idea of an attack on Iran, which is the worst consequences are ones you can’t even imagine. Not even the wisest analysts, the most prescient specialists, in 1953 could ever have imagined all these consequences. Ah, the Shah’s going to fall; there’s going to be mullahs in power; the Soviets are going to invade Afghanistan; all these other things will happen. It shows you that when you violently interfere in the affairs of another country, you’re like setting off a wheel at the top of a hill. You let it go; you have no idea how it’s going to bounce.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Stephen Kinzer, the issue of torture that we are dealing with today, can you go back to Iran with the SAVAK and with the CIA? What was their relationship, and who was the SAVAK?
STEPHEN KINZER: SAVAK was, of course, the Shah’s notoriously repressive secret police. And one of the early commanders of the SAVAK was General Nasiri, who was a close participant in the coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and brought the Shah to power. In fact, he was the only guy promoted for his work during the coup. The Shah personally promoted from him from colonel to general as a result of his work in the coup. And then he went on to become the director of the SAVAK, which was, of course, the very brutal secret police that the Shah used to repress his people for years.
AMY GOODMAN: And when the Iranian Revolution took place in ’79, didn’t they find CIA offices in SAVAK headquarters?
STEPHEN KINZER: Yes, the CIA and the Mossad were actively involved in training—
AMY GOODMAN: Mossad, Israeli intelligence.
STEPHEN KINZER: Israeli intelligence—were intimately involved in the operations of the Mossad. And this is a classic thing you always see in—
AMY GOODMAN: Of the SAVAK.
STEPHEN KINZER: Yeah, of SAVAK. You see this in the aftermath of many American interventions, that after the intervention, the United States has to decide who’s going to be the new leader now. And you usually want a person with two qualities. First of all, it should be somebody who’s popular, who has the support of his people and can stay in power. Secondly, it needs to be somebody who will do what we want, since we didn’t overthrow someone we didn’t like just to put in someone that would not do what we wanted.
But we soon realized you can’t have both. You can’t have somebody who’s genuinely popular and who also is governing on behalf of the United States. People want their leaders to represent the interests of their own countries, not the interests of some outside country. So then the US has to choose. What do we want? Do we want a guy who’s going to be popular but won’t do what we say, or one who will do what we say but won’t be popular? Well, it’s just such an easy choice: you pick the guy that is going to do what you say.
Then, more and more opposition to him develops. He tries to put it down, but he can’t do it alone, because he’s so unpopular and isolated. Then he calls in the US for help. And then the people in that country begin turning their anger not just at their own leader, but also at the United States, which they see behind that leader. And that’s exactly what happened in Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Is US policy today shoring up Ahmadinejad?
STEPHEN KINZER: I think so, and I even think that, not just shoring him up, we helped bring him to power. In 2003, the Iranians sent a very comprehensive offer of negotiations to Washington. In that offer, they actually listed the points that they would be willing to negotiate, and they included the nuclear program in Iran; Iran’s support for Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic jihad, and even the Beirut Declaration, in which Arab states proposed that they all recognize Israel in exchange for the recognition of—the establishment of a Palestinian state. So all the agenda items that we claim to be interested in were in this offer, which was delivered by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran to Washington. Not only did we not reply to that offer, but we actually reprimanded the Swiss ambassador for having the temerity to bring it to us.
Now, that was the policy of the old government in Tehran, the government headed by President Khatami. The policy was, let’s extend a hand of friendship to the United States, let’s offer to negotiate. The other hard-liners then said, you tried that, and it didn’t work. We’ve got to try another policy, which is, you’ve got to make life as miserable as you can for the United States, because the policy of trying have a dialogue with them didn’t produce any results. So I think that actually helped create the climate in which a conservative, militantly anti-American figure like Ahmadinejad was able to rise. It’s because when we had a more moderate president who was talking about the dialogue of civilizations, we just pushed him aside and didn’t talk to him.
۱۳۸۶ اسفند ۱۶, پنجشنبه
The CIA Plot To Overthrow Hamas,video
The CIA Plot To Overthrow HamasVideoAl Jazeera interviews Hamas' head of the groups political bureaux, Khalid Mishaal
Broadcast 05/03/08
Part 1
Part 2
۱۳۸۶ اسفند ۱۱, شنبه
Abbas: Gaza Attacks 'A Holocaust'
Abbas: Gaza Attacks 'A Holocaust' By Al Jazeera01/03/08 "Al Jazeera" -- - The Palestinian president has accused Israel of "international terrorism", saying its assault on Gaza constitutes "more than a holocaust". Mahmoud Abbas's comments on Saturday came as more Israeli air raids brought the total death toll over four days to 86 people, at least a third of which have been children, according to medical sources. Fifty-two people were killed during Saturday's raids alone.
"It's very regrettable that what is happening is more than a holocaust," Abbas told reporters in Ramallah."Children who are barely five-months old are being bombed by the Israeli army." "We tell the world to see with its own eyes and judge for itself what is happening and who is carrying out international terrorism."Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas leader living in Syria, also denounced the Israeli attacks against Gaza's civilians as "the real holocaust".Abbas later requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip, a spokesman for the Palestinian leader said.Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said that "at best" Abbas could hope to get a Security Council resolution condemning the Israeli action."And as we know, Israel has ignored tens of UN Security Council resolutions over the last 40 years, and hundreds of UN assembly resolutions - so this is going to be more talk and probably not much will come out of it in the end," he said.Children killedRana el-Hindi from Save the Children, speaking from inside the Gaza Strip, told Al Jazeera children were suffering greatly from the Israeli bombardment."In the last three days at least 19 children have been killed ... it's a real concern for all organisations here," she said."Most of the time, when we go into the field and talk to the children about their fears and concerns, they are always afraid of a new [Israeli] invasion to the Gaza Strip - and obviously the current situation is just ... what they fear."She said the number of children being hospitalised was increasing "day after day".Eissam Younis, director of the Al Mizan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army was "intentionally and systematically targeting civilians" and criticised world powers for their muted response."Israel puts itself above the law because the international community is always silent," he said.Missile attacksThe latest attacks mark the fourth day of Israeli bombardment and follow the death of an Israel civilian in a Palestinian rocket attack.Those killed in Saturday's attacks included at least eight civilians, four of them women, said Dr Muawiya Hassanein, head of Gaza's emergency servicesAt least 15 of those killed were fighters, including 10 fighters from Hamas and two from the Islamic Jihad.An operation in the Jabaliya refugee camp on Saturday marked the deadliest day of fighting in the Hamas-ruled territory for more than a year.Witnesses said the Jabaliya deaths occurred as a result of gun battles between Palestinian fighters and Israeli soldiers.Tariq Dardouna, a Palestinian resident trapped in his house in east Jabaliya, told Al Jazeera that Israeli forces targeted civilians."The Israeli army opens fire at everything in our area, including children and houses. There are injured children bleeding inside their houses," Dardouna said."They are opening fire at everything."Witnesses also reported clashes in the nearby Tufah neighbourhood in northern Gaza City.The Israeli army confirmed its operations in northern Gaza, with the Israel Army Radio reporting that five Israeli soldiers were wounded in the fighting.Threat of invasionThere has been increasing domestic pressure in Israel to mount a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip.Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, said on Thursday that "a major ground operation was real and tangible" and that Israel was "not afraid of it".Senior Palestinian officials have told Al Jazeera that the peace negotiations begun in Annapolis last year, could be at risk if the Israeli military assault on Gaza continues.Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister who heads the Israeli negotiation team, reacted by saying that the Israeli military action would be unaffected by any suspension of the peace talks."Even if the Palestinians suspend talks, it won't influence in any way the decisions or operations Israel carries out to defend its citizens," she said.Gaza rocketsIn Israel, six people were wounded, one of them seriously, by long-range rockets fired from the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the Israeli army said.Fighters in Gaza fired over 40 rockets and mortars at southern Israel.Eight of the missiles were long-range rockets that travelled as far as the seaside Israeli town of Ashkelon, some 11km north of the Gaza Strip.Israel's political and military leadership has been considering a major ground offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory to prevent fighters from deploying more long-range rockets like those that hit Ashkelon.Palestinian fighters have launched frequent volleys of rockets and mortars at Israeli communities near the Gaza border, though the missile attacks rarely cause injuries. Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
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