Zarqawi killed in Iraq air raid
“We have eliminated Zarqawi,” Mr Maliki said at a news conference in Baghdad, sparking sustained applause.

Zarqawi was considered the figurehead of the Sunni insurgency. He was leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, blamed for killing thousands of Shias and US forces.

The US said he was killed in an air strike “approximately 8km (five miles) north of Baquba”.

The head of US-led forces in Iraq, General George Casey, said the strike against an “isolated safe house” took place at 1815 (1415 GMT) on Wednesday.

It says he was id’d by ‘fingerprints, facial features, and known scars.’ All those missing body parts of his would have made it easy.

Zarqawi Scheduled for Martyrdom
une 7, 2006: The relationship between terrorist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi and and the mainline al Qaeda leadership continues to deteriorate. Zarqawi’s recent audio messages have not only attacked the U.S. and the Shia-dominated government in Iraq, but also Iran. He’s even claiming that the U.S., Iran, and Shia in general, are in cahoots to destroy Islam. He has also called for continued attacks against Shia.

Except for his verbal attacks on the U.S. and the Iraqi government, he is almost totally distanced himself from the central leadership. Other al Qaeda leaders have been trying to down play anti-Iranian and anti-Shia rhetoric, and have been strongly discouraging attacks on civilians.

Given that Zarqawi has become a loose cannon and that his actions are handicapping Al Qaeda’s efforts, it seems reasonable to expect that an accident may befall him at some point in the near future. If handled right it can be made to look like he went out in a blaze of glory fighting American troops or that he was foully murdered. Either way, al Qaeda gets rid of a problem and gains another “martyr.”

This comes from a US pro-war website, strategypage.com. So the US ‘airstrike’ nicely dovetails with the desires of ‘Al Qaeda’.

I’m feeling a little misty. I’m going to miss the guy who came to be a symbol for all the wicked shenanigans…his miraculous regeneration of limbs, the way he died and returned to life as purposes served… There are 822,000 Google hits for ‘does zarqawi exist.’ As a memorial, here are a couple of good ones…

October 2004 Arab News: Zarqawi the Terror Monster: But Does He Really Exist?
…The US has justified its daily attacks against Fallujah, west of Baghdad, with the claim that it is targeting Zarqawi and his gang. On Saturday, however, Zarqawi was supposed to be near Kirkush, some 200 kilometers east of Fallujah, killing Iraqi army recruits.

The people of Fallujah, however, insist that they have never seen the man or heard about him except through the media.

July 2004 truthseeker (UK):Zarqawi Does Not Exist
…The horrible things being done in Iraq under the name of Zarqawi are no laughing matter. The Iraq Intelligence Service is after him, the followers of al Sadr are after him, the residents of Fallujah are after him, the ShiÍite majority in Iraq are after him, ten million Iraqis who could use the big US reward money are after him, and two Iraqi resistance groups have pronounced a death sentence on him. But nobody can find him. Why not? There are three possibilities:

1) The one-legged Jordanian thug who is semi-literate, threatens ShiÍites, and is a squat fellow with tattoos on his arms, is the most elusive super-villain ever — an inspiration to the next generation of thugs.

2) The real Zarqawi is long dead, but a composite Zarqawi who is literate, urbane, has been created by Iraqi resistance groups who seek to terrorize the United States and the puppet government they have set up in Iraq — an inspiration to the next generation of Iraq avengers.

3) The real Zarqawi is long dead, but a literate, tall fellow with two legs and no tattoos on his arms has been created by US military intelligence as a straw man to justify everything about the Iraq war. However, a rogue group has hijacked the US Zarqawi identity and is responsible for the beheadings — an inspiration to copycats and future groups to do the same.

With an ethnically and religiously combustible population of 130 million, Nigeria is lurching toward disaster, and the stakes are highÑfor both Nigeria and the United States. An OPEC member since 1971, Nigeria has 35.9 billion barrels of proven petroleum reservesÑthe largest of any African country and the eighth largest on earth. It exports some 2.5 million barrels of oil a day, and the government plans to nearly double that amount by 2010. Nigeria is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the United States; U.S. energy officials predict that within ten years it and the Gulf of Guinea region will provide a quarter of America’s crude.

It is hardly surprising, then, that since 9/11 the Bush administration has courted Nigeria as an alternative to volatile petro-states in the Middle East and Latin America. In 2002, the White House declared the oil of Africa (five other countries on the continent are also key producers) a “strategic national interest”Ñmeaning that the United States would use military force, if necessary, to protect it. In short, Nigeria’s troubles could become America’s and, like those of the Persian Gulf, cost us dearly in blood and money.
theatlantic.com

Iran? Venezuela? Nigeria? Where will the hammer of democracy fall next?

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Congo’s president and current African Union head Denis Sassou Nguesso hit out at US support for Somali warlords and expressed hope Washington would work to establish a government in Mogadishu.

“We think, and what we told president (George W.) Bush, that most important is to establish a government that must help the Somali people to have a real government,” Sassou Nguesso told journalists after meeting Bush and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“We think that if this effort is needed, we have to move in this direction, in order that the Somali government can truly be established in Mogadishu,” he said, referring to the exiled government in Kenya.

“The presence of various groups, the warlords, is not a permanent solution.”
news.yahoo.com

There is an estimated 5,000- plus South Africans working in Iraq “doing Lord knows what,” a South African official said on Tuesday.

South African defense department official Siviwe Njikela said in Cape Town that South Africa had a duty to oversee and regulate the activities of thousands of militarily trained citizens selling their skills abroad.

According to earlier report, South Africans are doing military and security jobs and providing vip protection in Iraq.

“If you keep dangerous animals in your yard, you have responsibility to ensure they don’t get out and harm people,” the official told the parliament’s defense portfolio committee.

“If we have that kind of a population in Iraq, isn’t it rather curious that we have no idea what they are doing there? The South African government should know — that is the principle — without infringing on their right to earn a living and practicing their profession,” he added.

Committee acting chairman Oupa Monareng said a previous submission on the topic had put the number of South Africans providing security or military-type services in Iraq and other countries at about 20,000.
english.people.com.cn

…In the latest in a string of allegations against US forces, Juburi said 29 Iraqis were killed in May in separate incidents in the towns of Latifiyah and Yusifiyah, south of Baghdad, and in the capital itself.

“On May 13, US forces launched an air assault on a civilian car in Latifiyah and killed six people,” Juburi told reporters.

“On the same day US aircraft attacked the house of a civilian, Saadun Mohsen Hassan, and killed seven members of his family,” he added.

Juburi said US forces carried out another air strike the next day on the house of Sheikh Yassin Saleh Shallal in Yusifiyah, “killing 13 people — including women and children.”

Three other Iraqis were killed in US raids in Baghdad, he said.
news.yahoo.com

‘U.S. Military Hides Many More Hadithas’
“There are many, many, many cases like Haditha that are still undercover and need to be highlighted in Iraq,” Dr. Salam Ishmael, projects manager with the organisation Doctors for Iraq, and former chief of the junior doctors in Baghdad’s Medical City Hospital told IPS.

In Haditha itself, he said, the U.S. military cut electricity and water to the entire city, attacked the hospital and burned the pharmacy.

“The hospital has been attacked three times. In November 2005 the hospital was occupied by the American and Iraqi Army for seven days, which is a severe breach of the Geneva Conventions,” he said.

“In one of these attacks, the U.S. soldiers used live ammunition inside the hospital. They handcuffed all the doctors and destroyed the entire contents of the medical storage. It ended with the killing of one of the patients in his bed.”

US/UK BASES IN IRAQ
The CIA Õ03 oil map (above) explains the location of US/UK bases in Iraq. There is also a CIA map of oil fields, circa 1992. If one then looks at the Centcom map, one sees that there are nine visibly marked bases, not including the Baghdad complex, along the oil axis. These are: Al Sahra, Kirkuk, Balad and Qayyara West in the North; Tallil and Salman North in the South; Al Taquaddam, H2 and H3 in the West. Some southern UK-controlled areas, including Basra where the UK base is located, cannot be seen.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – The U.S. Air Force increased its bombing of Taliban and other insurgent targets in Afghanistan this spring, making about 750 airstrikes in May alone, Air Force officials said.

The intensified bombing in Afghanistan has overshadowed the smaller number of U.S. airstrikes on Iraq, said Air Force Lt. Gen. Gary L. North, who commands U.S. and coalition air operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We have seen more direct support in Afghanistan that is of a kinetic effect than in Iraq of late,” North told The Associated Press during a visit Monday to the United Arab Emirates, where he met with defense officials.
news.yahoo.com

‘More direct support of a kinetic effect than in Iraq of late’…we got a poet here.

The Israeli women of Machsom Watch keep a close eye on soldier behavior at the roughly 600 Israeli-controlled checkpoints in the West Bank.

…Some simply observe and report; others attempt to talk with soldiers or intervene on the part of Palestinians. Each “patrol” produces a report of their shift’s events, which is then put up on their website (www.machsomwatch.org). Most checkpoints the women monitor are inside the West Bank, rather than on border points between Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The purpose of such interior checkpoints is solely “to prevent free passage of Palestinian residents between their villages and towns,” says group spokeswoman Adi Dagan. This violates international law, she says. The checkpoints’ hours of operation and procedures are “arbitrary” and often changed, she says, making access to jobs, schools, and hospitals for many Palestinians at best, time- consuming and at worst, impossible.
csmonitor.com

The Israeli Boycott of Palestinian Education
…Under Israeli occupation, all eleven Palestinian universities have been closed, the longest being Birzeit between 1988 and 1992, and the most recent Hebron Polytechnic which was closed by military order for 8 months in 2003. During these periods community-based classes were criminalized and its teachers and students arrested. Since 2000, 185 schools have been shelled and scores of teachers and students have been shot at and arrested. Then there are the less extreme but just as effective obstacles like the 700 restrictions of movement by checkpoints, road-blocks and earth mounds. Through creating and controlling a system of internal borders in the occupied territories, the Israeli military prevents students from accessing Palestinian universities far from their homes. University campuses are then increasingly ghettoised; Birzeit now attracts the vast majority of its new students from the Ramallah and Jerusalem areas, and its intake of people from Jenin has dropped by 100%. This also means students are limited in their course choices; 12 students from Gaza have been denied permission to go to Bethlehem and study Occupational Therapy (a course not available in Gaza) despite them not representing a security threat to Israel–a point the military admitted at the Israeli High Court where the decision is currently being challenged.

However, the latest round of Israeli attacks on Palestinian education has been through the control of its external borders. As an occupying power, Israel is legally responsible for guaranteeing all human necessities and rights in the occupied territories, including the right to education, and is in de facto control of all that goes in and out of the territories, including foreign academics, researchers and students.

Those wishing to study or work in Palestinian universities have to go through farcical procedures that are bad at the best of times. Students are often denied entry if they reveal they will be based inside the occupied territories. This is so common that Palestinian universities even advise students to claim they will be tourists in Tel Aviv instead. While other countries’ foreign students are given visas for the duration of their courses, in the occupied territories they suffer the stress of insecurity and the burden of having to lie–itself in breach of their universal right of access to education. The overall message here is clear: if you want to study, you cannot do it in Palestine.

Why the Boycott of Israel is Justified
The recent boycott resolutions of CUPE and NATFHE against IsraelÕs Apartheid predictably awakened IsraelÕs willing apologists, initiating a high pitched chorus of condemnation and self pity across the Western media, not to mention the blogosphere.
Their arguments, however, are flimsy, not to say rotten.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The prescription of antipsychotic medications for children and adolescents in the US increased nearly 6-fold between 1993 and 2002, according to survey results.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved only three antipsychotic drugs – haloperidol, thioridazine hydrochloride and pimozide — for use in patients younger than 18 years, but most of the prescriptions written were for newer medications.

“What was most striking is that nearly one in five — 18 percent — of visits to psychiatrists by young people resulted in their being prescribed an antipsychotic medication,” lead investigator Dr. Mark Olfson told Reuters Health.

Interest in this issue followed “earlier studies that reported significant increases in the use of antipsychotics by young people within the Medicaid population,” the researcher added. “We wanted to find out if this was a general trend that more broadly affects the mental health care of youths in the US.”
news.yahoo.com

…In bone-baking heat under a cloudless sky, evacuees traveling from Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Houston and elsewhere fumed at the city and federal housing officials who have opened fewer than 1,000 of more than 8,000 public housing units in a city suffering from a housing crisis and a shortage of workers.

The residents promised on Sunday to gut and rebuild their own units, and they said they planned to be back permanently Ñ with or without the city’s permission Ñ as soon as their work was done.

“They’re not giving us any help, and we’re tired of waiting,” a resident, Nickole Banks, said of the Housing Authority. “People want to come home.”

Damage to the projects ranged from very little to severe. The Housing Authority says that as many as 90 percent of the apartments are unsafe and uninhabitable and that time-consuming environmental evaluations remain unfinished. To the residents, these are excuses. They fear that city officials are really trying to redevelop the projects to bring in other residents with more money.
nytimes.com

…The Louisville case was taken to the Supreme Court by Crystal D. Meredith, a white parent whose son, Joshua McDonald, did not receive a requested transfer to attend kindergarten in a school that was trying to maintain a sufficient number of black students.

The plan in Seattle, which has struggled for decades to deal with the effects on its school system of segregated housing patterns, applies only to the city’s 10 high schools. The policy is one of “open choice,” subject to various “tiebreakers,” one of which is race. Other factors include geographic proximity and whether a student has a sibling at the desired school, both of which count in favor of an application.

Under the “integration tiebreaker,” high schools that deviate by more than 15 percent from the systemwide balance, which is 60 percent nonwhite, must take account of an applicant’s race in order not to deviate further.
nytimes.com

This is what the idea of school desgregation has come to: white parents getting a hearing in the Supreme Court because their little Johnny doesn’t get to go where he wants.