The head of the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has called for the disarmament of Lebanon’s Hizbullah, according to an audio message posted on the Internet.

…In Thursday’s message, Zarqawi called on fellow Sunnis to reject any reconciliation with “infidel” Shiites, saying: “O Sunnis! Prepare to get rid of the infidel snakes and their poison … and don’t listen to those advocating an end to sectarianism and calling for national unity. This is a weapon to get you to surrender,” he said.
dailystar.com

‘Zarqawi’ has apparently been promoted to Iran policy spokesman for the US. And for the record, some of us remember that when the formation of ‘al Qaida in Iraq’ was announced, it was said by the mainstream press that it bore no relation with the other ‘al Qaida’ besides the unfortunate choice of name. If ‘Zarqawi’ is pushing a Sunni jihad against Shiites, how could he be a pal of Osama? Of course, both exist in the same twilight zone of possible but unlikely reality…

…”I don’t like Americans. They are arrogant, they are selfish and they act in a manner quite opposite to our traditions,” said Matin Rahimi, an employee of the national airline Ariana.

“Whoever says they are here to help us, I don’t believe them,” he said.
news.yahoo.com

The day that changed Afghanistan
…”I’ve been in Kabul for nine months and there has never been anything like this before. There is a real feeling in the air that today Kabul changed. There has been a lot of fighting in the south but this has been mainly between the militias and the American forces … I’ve spoken to friends who work in Iraq and they say that there was one day when it all changed. That could be the case here … They [Afghans] have realized that they can take on the police and take on the Americans – they could easily do it again.”

…Normally, American camps in Iraq are almost suburban, with their coffee shops and polite soldiers who idle away their rest hours playing computer games and discussing girls back home.

Haditha was shockingly different – a feral place where the marines hardly washed; a number had abandoned the official living quarters to set up separate encampments with signs ordering outsiders to keep out; and a daily routine punctured by the emergency alarm of the dam itself with its antiquated and crumbling machinery.
telegraph.co.uk

Probe Clears U.S. Troops
A military investigation into allegations that American troops intentionally killed civilians in Ishaqi, a village north of Baghdad, has cleared them of misconduct, the US said, even though it acknowledged the deaths of up to 13 Iraqis in the March raid.

Gen. Caldwell also acknowledged there were “possibly up to nine collateral deaths” in addition to the four Iraqi deaths that the military announced at the time of the raid. The results of the investigation were released after questions were raised about the original US report as television stations aired AP Television News footage of a row of dead children in the aftermath of the raid. The probe was part of US investigations into possible misconduct by American troops in at least three separate areas of Iraq. Besides Haditha and Ishaqi, seven Marines and a Navy Corpsman could face murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges in the April shootings of an Iraqi man, west of Baghdad.

reuters.com”>Iraq rejects US probe clearing troops of killings
…Police in Ishaqi say five children, four women and two men were shot in the head, and that the bodies, with hands bound, were dumped in one room before the house was blown up.

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) – Bolivia’s President Evo Morales calls him “my brother” but elsewhere in Latin America, political leaders are finding out that being seen as a close ally of Hugo Chavez can be harmful for their careers.

As a tripartite alliance between Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba began taking shape after Morales took office in January, there have been signs of irritation in the rest of the continent with the way the Venezuelan leader is trying to convert Latin America to his populist, anti-U.S. agenda.
news.yahoo.com

Well I would say is that in the long-term the US is the master of the toxic embrace.

ABUJA, Nigeria — The U.S. presence in the Gulf of Guinea is said to be a result of the U.S. Navy protecting Nigerian oil plants from terrorists, Nigeria’s The Guardian reported.

A report published in the Nigerian newspaper Wednesday said that the U.S. Navy was patrolling the Gulf of Guinea, home to Nigeria’s biggest oil field, Bonga Project, to prevent the field from being targeted “by terrorists and other maritime criminals.”
wpherald.com

The great grandson of the Apache leader Geronimo has appealed to the big chief in the White House to help recover the remains of his famous relative – purportedly stolen more than 90 years ago by a group of students – including the President’s grandfather.

The story that members of Yale University’s secret Skull and Bones society took the remains – including a skull and femur – from the burial site in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, has long been part of the university’s lore. But a university historian recently recovered a letter from 1918 that appears to support the story that members of the society did indeed take the remains while serving with a group of army volunteers from Yale, stationed at the fort during the First World War.

The students – among them, Mr Bush’s grandfather Prescott – apparently returned with the remains and kept them in their society’s headquarters at the university in New Haven, Connecticut. The society’s initiation rite reportedly involves kissing a skull, referred to as “Geronimo”, usually held in a glass case.
commondreams.org

…Over the past year Swiss officials have requested at least four times that the Bush administration share documents and evidence related to Khan’s nuclear black market. But the United States has never responded.

Swiss officials maintain it needs U.S. assistance in order to convict three Swiss men accused of helping AQ Khan set up a secret Malaysian factory to make components for gas centrifuges.

Last week U.S. weapons expert David Albright testified before Congress and said, “I find this lack of cooperation frankly embarrassing to the United States and to those of us who believe that the United States should take the lead in bringing members of the Khan network to justice for arming our enemies with nuclear weapons.”

Albright has floated one theory as to why the Bush administration won’t help the Swiss investigators. He says the three Swiss men accused of bring part of AQ Khan’s underground network may have been working for the CIA and being paid by the U.S. government.

The CIA has refused to comment on the allegation but former CIA Director George Tenet acknowledged the Agency had penetrated Khan’s network during a speech at Georgetown University in February 2004.
democracynow.org

MASKIOT, West Bank — Israel has begun laying the foundations for a new Jewish settlement deep in the West Bank – breaking a promise to Washington while strengthening its hold on a stretch of desert it wants to keep as it draws its final borders.
nwsource.com

It occurs to me there wouldn’t need to be an Israel lobby if Israeli interests just naturally meshed with those of the U.S., even the kooks.

The rabbi who pricks Israel’s conscience
Rabbi Arik Ascherman has spent years planting himself atop doomed Palestinian homes, reading extracts of international law to Israeli forces as they demolish the buildings beneath his feet.
More recently, the American-born rabbi, with a knitted blue skull cap pinned to his woolly black hair, has been at the forefront of resistance to the construction of what Israel calls its “security barrier” penning in and carving up West Bank villages.

Along the way he has been a persistent embarrassment to the Israeli government as a fervent Zionist who claims to reflect the true soul of the Jewish state by resisting its oppression of Palestinians. He has been arrested many times but this week, for the first time, the 45-year-old director of Rabbis for Human Rights was convicted for his form of resistance.

Russia has begun works in the Syrian port of Tartus seeking to built a full-scale naval base for the ships of the Black Sea Fleet, currently based in Ukraine’s Sevastopol, the Kommersant newspaper reported on Friday, quoting unnamed sources in the Defense Ministry and the General Staff of the Russian Navy.

The paper noted that this is the first time Russia is setting up a military base outside the CIS since the fall of the USSR and that the base will allow Moscow to pursue its own line in the Middle East.
mosnews.com

You never can be too early when it comes to an anniversary. It’s barely June, but a quick look down the road reminds us that the twentieth anniversary of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra Affair lies just ahead this November. As Greg Grandin reminds us, Irangate (as it came to be known in the wake of Nixon’s Watergate fiasco) was a kind of coming attractions, right down to its cast of characters, for our own era of right-wing domination, carnage, and now — finally — full-blown corruption scandals. From Vice President Cheney to the new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, so many of the Iran-Contra era scoundrels returned to the political stage these last years for a grim second bow and, perhaps not so strangely, similar results — though this time not on the relatively parochial stage of Central America, but in the oil heartlands of our planet.
tomdispatch.com