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POPS"War On Terror": Iraqi Civilian Fatalities 151,000 as reported by the World Health Organization, January 2008 An October 2006 study by John Hopkins University estimated the number of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the war at 654,965 and Iraq Body Count, as of December 3, 2008, puts the civilian fatality count somewhere between 89,544 – 97,762. No matter the number, every one of these civilian deaths is the result of a Bush Administration lie. infoshout.com
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POPSUS General: Bush committed war crimes, must be prosecuted Maj. Gen. Taguba led the US Army's official investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and testified before Congress on his findings in May 2004. Taguba retired in January 2007, later alleging that Pentagon officials had ordered him to retire for being "overzealous" in his criticisms of the military. He writes here, in the Preface to the report "Broken Laws, Broken Lives."
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POPSUri Avnery: 1948 At the time, the Jews constituted only a third of the population. The hundreds of Arab villages throughout the country dominated the main arteries that were crucial to our survival. We suffered heavy casualties in our efforts to open them, especially the road to Jerusalem. We honestly felt that we were "the few against the many". Our side was preparing for the massive attack of the Arab armies and we could not possibly leave a large hostile population at our rear. This military necessity was, of course, intertwined with the more or less conscious desire to create a homogeneous Jewish territory. ccording to the UN resolution, the "Jewish state" was to include more than half of Palestine (as it existed in 1947 under the British Mandate). In this territory, more than 40% of the population was Arab. In the second half of the war, after the advance of the Arab armies was halted, a deliberate policy of expelling the Arabs became a war aim on its own.
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POPSSlavery By Another Name I saw Douglas Blackmon, Wall Street Journal reporter and author of "Slavery by Another Name", on the Tavis Smiley Show tonight. I had never before heard about neo-slavery. According to Blackmon, the South was culpable; the North was complicit. Modern companies, including US Steel, profited. The system didn't come to an end until the 1940s, "partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II." 13th Amendment be damned, this sale of "convicts" to private enterprises to pay of "debts" was perfectly legal until 1951.
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POPSKhaled Abou El Fadl: Jihad Gone Wrong Khaled Abou el Fadl is a professor at the School of Law at the University of California. He is a prominent Islamic scholar and intellectual. In this interview, El Fadl talks about suicide bombings, misinterpretations of 'jihad' and the humanist tradition of Islam. Deutsche Fassung: Interview Khaled Abou El Fadl - Der missverstandene Dschihad Der Begriff des Dschihad geistert seit Jahren durch die Presse. Dass seine wahre Bedeutung weder etwas mit Selbstmordattentaten noch mit "heiligem Krieg" zu tun hat, erklärt Khaled Abou El Fadl im Gespräch. Das, was Selbstmordattentäter als Dschihad verkaufen, ist nichts anderes als eine Strategie offensiver Bombenanschläge, die von der revolutionären Ideologie der 60er Jahre beeinflusst ist, meint Khaled Abou El Fadl. Prof. Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl ist Professor für islamisches Recht an der Universität von Los Angeles (UCLA)
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POPSAmerica Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the world of evil." is National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents." Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.
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POPSAfghanistan: Women's lives worse than ever International Women's Day is March 8 this year, and it is an occasion which the president will certainly use, once again, to claim success on behalf of the women in Afghanistan and Iraq. This will be a lie. It is a lie every year. AlterNet: Blogs: PEEK: Women's Lives Are Worse Than Ever, Thanks George W.
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POPSAppeasement In this sense is seen as a policy of making one-sided concessions, often at the expense of third parties and with nothing offered in return except promises of better behaviour in the future, in a vain attempt to satisfy the aspirations of the aggressor states. The most famous of the appeasers was inevitably Neville Chamberlain. It was during his premiership (1937–40) that appeasement reached its climax with the Munich settlement of September 1938, by which Britain sought to avoid war over Czechoslovakia by agreeing to Nazi demands for the annexation of the German-speaking parts of that state . Among anti-appeasers the name of Winston Churchill inevitably takes first place. Churchill stands as the isolated prophet who consistently warned the government of the dangers posed by Nazi Germany and of the disaster to which the policy of appeasement would inevitably lead.
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POPSWW1 Kid Soldiers: B&W pics "After the WW2 very young boys were still able to enlist in the American services. This went on until the early fifties. Nowadays the USA is the only country where an association called Veterans of Underage Military Service (VUMS) exists. It was formed in 1991." "Buckles enlisted in the American army at age 16 in 1917. During his summer vacation from school he went to the Marine Corps recruiting office to enlist, told them he was 21, but he was turned down: too small. He tried the Navy: too flatfooted. He then went to the Army and they accepted him. "The old sergeant advised me that the Ambulance Service was the quickest way to get to France because the French were begging for ambulance services". In France he served at several locations. After Armistice Day he was assigned to a POW escort company to return prisoners back to Germany. In WW2 while working in the Philippines, the Japanese army seized him and he stayed in a POW camp for more than 3 years.
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POPSDefending Israel to the 'End Times' Rosenberg appears to believe that if a peace deal is concluded, it will not contradict Biblical prophesy: "While . . . Matthew 24 and Luke 21 indicate that there will be wars, rumors of wars and revolutions in the Middle East in the last days, Ezekiel 38 also indicates that for a season at least the Jews will be living 'securely' in the land prior to the apocalyptic War of Gog & Magog (the Russian-Iranian alliance to destroy Israel)." Netanyahu said that 'In a war of attrition the enemy strikes and you react, the enemy strikes harder and you retaliate harder. This gradual increase in violence is the antithesis of deterrence. . . . Deterrence always means using disproportionate force. We need to move from a concept of attrition to one of tough deterrence that will eventually lead to the removal of the Hamas regime, because as long as it exists it will continue arming itself and continue its attacks.'
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POPSlostplaces.de - Investigating military historical traces in Northern Germany Autobahn-Flugplätze (NLP-Str) U-Boot-Bunker Valentin, Bremen-Farge Vorbereitete Sperren Geo-Datenbank DDR-Geschichte (für TTQV) Ehemaliges Olympisches Dorf Elstal Der alte Hamburger Elbtunnel Tankstellengeschichte in Deutschland Die V-2 und V-3 Anlagen am Pas-de-Calais Die Geschichte des U-Bootbunkers "Kilian" in Kiel Die vergessene Autobahn bei Hannover Server temp. not available.
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POPSWill there be a Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth) on the Iraq war?
Warnings about a new stab-in-the-back myth may seem premature or overheated at this moment in the Iraq War. Yet, if the history of the original version of this myth is any guide, the opposite is true. They are timely precisely because the Dolchstoßlegende was not a post-war concoction, but an explanation cunningly, even cynically, hatched by Rightists in Germany before the failure of the desperate, final "victory offensive" of 1918 became fully apparent. Although Hindenburg's dramatic testimony in November 1919 popularized the myth in Germany, it caught fire precisely because the tinder had been laid to dry two years earlier. It may seem farfetched to compare a Prussian military dictatorship and its self-serving lies to the current Bush administration. Yet I'm not the first person to express concern about the emergence of our very own Iraqi Dolchstoßlegende. Is an American version of this myth really emerging then?
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POPSJust East of Eden: Iran, images and reflections Continuation: Washington had total confidence in the Shah’s American-armed military forces that had made Iran the gendarme of the region. The Iranian Revolution was a severe blow to US power in the Middle East from which the world power has never recovered. The miscalculations, misjudgments and blindness to reality concerning Iran of 29 years ago have led the USA down erroneous paths ever since. In 1980 American-armed Iraq conveniently attacked Iran in chaos, while Washington turned up the heat and upped its own confusion by secretly selling more arms to Iran in order to pay for the dirty war against the new leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contras scandal. America arms both sides. Until Iraq launched its US-provided chemical warfare, killing thousands of Iranians.
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POPSUri Avnery über Yitzhak Rabin (zum 12. Jahrestag von dessen Ermordung)
Forts.: WARUM LANDETE Rabins Oslo-Schiff auf einer Sandbank? Ich glaube, dass Rabin an vielem selbst schuld war. Er wollte wirklich einen Frieden mit den Palästinensern erreichen. Aber er sah keinen Weg zu diesem Ziel, und er hatte kein klares Bild von diesem Ziel. Die Wende war zu schroff. Wie die israelische Gesellschaft im allgemeinen war er nicht in der Lage, sich selbst vom einen zum andern Tag von den Ängsten, dem Misstrauen, dem Aberglauben und den Vorurteilen zu befreien, die sich im Laufe von 120 Jahren des Konfliktes angesammelt hatten. Deshalb vollbrachte er das eine Manöver nicht, das das Oslo-Schiff sicher im Hafen hätte landen lassen: den Schwung der Ereignisse auszunützen und Frieden mit einer kühnen und schnellen Maßnahme zu erlangen. Er kannte das berühmte Wort von David Lloyd-George nicht, das dieser äußerte, als es um den Frieden mit Irland ging: „Man kann einen Abgrund nicht mit zwei Sprüngen überqueren.“
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POPSBush's Response to 9/11 Was Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves * Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11? * Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence ? * How was the war lost ? * How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmare? * What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration ? * Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War, as argued by an old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996)? * What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror ? * How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war ? * Why is the contemporary American antiwar movement so anemic ?