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In the Gaza Strip, there are a vast number of inspiring individuals prepared to put their personal reputation (and even their own physical well-being) on the line for matters of conviction. Dr. Eyad Sarraj is one of the more prominent of these figures and I was fortunate enough to speak with him on several occasions during my time in the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Sarraj, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, is the founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme—a groundbreaking NGO in Gaza catering to the masses of Palestinians suffering from emotional trauma, especially victims of torture. Sarraj is well known for his outspoken criticism of the Israeli occupation and of corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

In the excerpts that follow, I discuss the state of Palestinian democracy with Dr. Sarraj. (more…)

Control Room, directed by Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, provides unique insights into the media dynamics on the eve of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. It primarily portrays the interactions between Al Jazeera journalists on the one hand and US military spokespersons and Western journalists on the other hand. Al Jazeera is a TV station largely funded by the Arab Emirate of Qatar, which has the politically most open system in the Emirates. It was initially hailed by Western commentators and the US government as exceptionally critical of Arab governments and the region’s most prominent outlet for free speech. When it reported on atrocities by the Algerian military, for example, the Algerian government decided to disconnect the electricity in the capital city of Algier to avert that ordinary Algerians would observe the grim accounts. Al Jazeera fell into disfavor with many rulers, as a consequence of which its licenses to broadcast and report have been canceled or otherwise thwarted in dozen countries. Contrary to popular perception, Al Jazeera was not chiefly at odds with Western government before the Iraq invasion. (more…)

By now the private security firm, Blackwater USA, has become a household name. The firm has been the subject of multiple investigations, lawsuits, and congressional inquiries—all leading to an obvious conclusion: Blackwater in Iraq has either acted in a manner of extreme disregard for civilian lives, or they are outright contemptuous murderers. Yet, as Democracy Now! reports, Blackwater continues to reap millions in profits from the government and was recently awarded a new contract from the State Department.

In the aftermath of the now-infamous Nisour Square Massacre of September 2007 in which 17 Iraqi civilians were mercilessly gunned down by Blackwater operatives, the puppet Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, demanded that Blackwater be held accountable under Iraqi law. Al-Maliki had apparently forgotten the directive in place since Paul Bremer’s tenure providing immunity to all private contractors in Iraq. The order to expel Blackwater from Iraq was rescinded by the Bush junta and Blackwater was already operating in the region again by last April. (more…)

More than five years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, since President Bush stood under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on that aircraft carrier. While these fifth anniversaries got some notice, another did not: the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by a U.S. Army tank on April 8, 2003. The tank attack killed two unembedded journalists, Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco. Couso recorded his own death. He was filming from the balcony and caught on tape the distant tank as it rotated its turret and fired on the hotel. A Spanish court has charged three U.S. servicemen with murder, but the U.S. government refuses to hand over the accused soldiers. The story might have ended there, just another day of violence and death in Iraq, were it not for a young U.S. military intelligence veteran who has just decided to blow the whistle.

Adrienne Kinne is a former Army sergeant who worked in military intelligence for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004. Trained in Arabic, she worked in the Army translating intercepted communications. She told me in an interview this week that she saw a target list that included the Palestine Hotel. She knew that it housed journalists, since she had intercepted calls from the Palestine Hotel between journalists there and their families and friends back home (illegally and unconstitutionally, she thought). (more…)

When I reflect upon the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, I tend not to place so much faith in the rhetoric of change. Despite prevailing, popular attitudes here in Europe, I find it difficult to imagine anything but the most marginal change in domestic policy should Obama become President (and virtually zero change elsewhere).

We may count ourselves lucky, however, that whether it is McCain or Obama that takes the reins in November, our eight-year affair with Bush is almost at an end. No matter which “wing” from the corporatist cesspool of American government becomes President, at least we will be spared the inane remarks, the cheesy laughter, the genuine stupidity and brass arrogance of the Bush years. Perhaps I am alone, but I always felt the crimes prosecuted by the Bush junta were always compounded by the profound ignorance expressed by some of its more senior members. (more…)

There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history’s trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: “American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan).” It is the word “uninhabited” that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defence in London produced this epic lie: “There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation.” (more…)

When did the Lebanese civil war (the major one) start? Did it start in February of 1975 when Sidon-based leader, Ma`ruf Sa`d, was assassinated by a Lebanese Army intelligence sniper? Or was it the widely accepted “Sarajevo” (of the civil war) of 13th of April, 1975? I think that the civil war started in 1973, in April, when 3 Palestinian leaders (one of them a poet, Kamal Nasir) were shot in their sleep by an Israeli terrorist team headed by Ehud Barak (later prime minister of Israel). It brought the Lebanese internal divisions into the fore.

I was 15 years old, 30 years ago when the civil war started on April 13th, 1975. It was a Sunday that I still remember. My parents were out, and I was home in our middle class neighborhood in Beirut. We did not hear shots fired. We were not close to the scene of the crime. On that day, a bus carrying Palestinians who were earlier attending a rally for the PFLP-GC was ambushed by armed gunmen of the Lebanese fascistic Phalanges Party. My enmity to that party started earlier, much earlier. When I read about the civil war in Spain, I always felt that I could recognize the fascist side. When I read about the communist struggle against the Nazis in Germany, I recognized the Nazi side. I saw them in Lebanon. (more…)

AMY GOODMAN: [Five years ago] on March 19th, 2003, the US began bombing Baghdad. The invasion was on. Six weeks later, President Bush stood under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declared an end to major military combat operations in Iraq. Now, half a decade later, the war continues with no end in sight.

In a speech today to mark the fifth anniversary, the President, who leaves office in less than eleven months, will again give an upbeat assessment of the war. According to released excerpts of his address, Bush will insist the so-called troop surge in Iraq has opened the door to a “major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.”

But by most accounts, the war has been an unmitigated disaster. Up to one million Iraqis have been killed, with no estimates on the number of those wounded. Up to 2.5 million people are estimated to be displaced inside Iraq, and more than two million have fled to neighboring countries. Meanwhile, nearly 4,000 US soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands more wounded. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates the overall cost of this war will be $3 trillion. (more…)

AMY GOODMAN: [Tonight] the US invasion and occupation of Iraq will enter its sixth year. On Monday, at least seventy-two Iraqis were killed in violence around Iraq, including forty-two Shiite worshippers in a suicide bombing in Karbala. Two US troops were also killed, bringing the US death toll to 3,990, ten deaths away from the 4,000 mark.

If the Bush administration’s drive to invade Iraq was aided by corporate media cheerleading, the five-year mark today is being met with near-silence by the corporate media. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the US occupation of Iraq has accounted for just three percent of news stories in television, print and online media so far this year. On cable news networks, it’s accounted for just one percent.

That silence was on display this past weekend when the corporate media largely ignored a monumental gathering just outside the nation’s capital. For four days, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and active-duty soldiers convened at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland for Winter Soldier, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, the event was modeled after the historic 1971 Winter Soldier hearings that took place in Detroit held during the Vietnam War. (more…)

AMY GOODMAN: Iraq and Afghanistan veterans gathered in Maryland this past weekend to testify at Winter Soldier, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, the event was modeled after the historic 1971 Winter Soldier hearings held during the Vietnam War.

Over the weekend, war veterans spoke of free-fire zones, the shootings and beatings of innocent civilians, racism at the highest levels of the military, sexual harassment and assault within the military, and the torturing of prisoners.

Although Winter Soldier was held just outside the nation’s capital, it was almost entirely ignored by the American corporate media. A search on the Lexis database found that no major television network or cable news network even mentioned Winter Soldier over the weekend, neither did the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times or most other major newspapers in the country. The editors of the Washington Post chose to cover Winter Soldier but placed the article in the local section. (more…)

The U.S. Congress sent President Bush a bill that would have banned the CIA from using ‘harsh interrogation methods,’ which most of the world sees as torture and which even the military is forbidden to use. Said Mr. Bush: “The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror.”

It is not surprising that the irony of that statement is lost on Mr. Bush. Terrorist tools that he allows the Central Intelligence Agency to use are a ‘valuable tool’ in the war against terror.

The spineless Democratic Congressional leadership duly weighed in with meaningless rhetoric, proving once again that talk is cheap, and it can’t get much cheaper than the pronouncements of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In vowing to override the presidential veto, a near impossibility considering the numbers and therefore an easy target for taking the moral high ground, Ms. Pelosi said: “In the final analysis, our ability to lead the world will depend not only on our military might, but on our moral authority.” (more…)

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. “I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,” he says. “Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.” (more…)

It’s almost impossible to comprehend the hypocrisy behind American actions in the Middle-East. U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice—a woman whose grasp of Middle-Eastern issues was made acutely apparent during Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon in 2006 (birth pangs, remember?)—recently appealed to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on behalf of the Palestinian civilians currently being bombed into a powder by the IAF.

“I am concerned about the humanitarian condition there and innocent people in the Gaza who are being hurt. We have to remember that the Hamas activities there are responsible for what has happened in Gaza … But, of course, we are concerned about innocent people and we are concerned about the humanitarian situation,” she said after the one-hour breakfast meeting. <<< more

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In the chronology of the Bush administration’s record of manipulation and willful distortion of evidence, the apparent revelation – revealed in a recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate – that Iran ceased its nuclear program in 2003 promises to usher in a renewed phase of White House propaganda. While the cautious pundits and news anchors of the television media may predict this new information to initiate a sea-change in Washington’s antagonistic posturing, I am more skeptical. This administration will somehow find a way to interpret the development as “proof” of their wolf-crying.

Leaving aside the obvious outrage we should express at the government’s failure to rely on solid evidence and the colossally ignorant manner in which Bush threatened to launch WWIII based on shoddy intelligence, it would be prudent to review the case Washington has made against Iran thus far… (more…)

Writing about the serious flaws in American justice a la the “war on terror” is not especially easy. Where does one begin? From Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the secret CIA detention facilities scattered across Eastern Europe - there is surely an abundance of outraging cases of Orwellian malfeasance.

One case in particular has been on my mind recently… In Iraq, an Associated Press (AP) photographer name Bilal Hussein has been in U.S. custody for the last 19 months. During this time, no charges were issued and only now has the United States even raised the issue of his possible prosecution for alleged links to terrorism. The evidence for these links, of course, is secret… and even the possible charges have yet to be clearly defined. (more…)

Over 500,000 people have now fled Mogadishu and its seems safe to assume that the Bush doctrine is alive and well in Somalia.

With the Islamofascists overthrown and the bloodshed intensifying, America has added yet another success to its long list of accomplishments in spreading freedom and democracy. Somalis may yet throw candy to the U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops, but there’s just one hitch: the Islamist forces overthrown last year by the U.S.-backed Ethiopian army are regaining their strength and are likely to reassert their power if Ethiopia’s own domestic rebellion intensifies. (more…)

George W. Bush seems terribly confused these days (and not just because he can’t decide whether the U.S. supports the Kurds in Iraq, opposes the Kurds in Turkey, encourages Kurdish terrorism in Iran or does all three simultaneously). With Pervez Musharraf declaring emergency rule in Pakistan, the Bush Doctrine has come face to face with a genuine challenge: should the United States toss in its shameful support for Pakistan’s authoritarian Falstaff or… well, not?

The latter, it seems, has become the favored option in Washington. (more…)