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General Strike Shuts Port of Oakland and Downtown Banks
http://www.occupyoakland.org/2011/11/downtown-banks-shut-down-in-face-of-protests/
The Occupy Wall Street /everywhere protests are transforming and politicizing the scene in the U.S. in a whole new way. People are taking on and learning about this capitalist /imperialist system on many levels... VVAWAI ed.
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Depleted Uranium: A Strange Way To Protect Libyan Civilians
By David Wilson
March 24, 2011 - In the first 24 hours of the Libyan attack, US B-2s dropped forty-five 2,000-pound bombs. These massive bombs, along with the Cruise missiles launched from British and French planes and ships, all contained depleted uranium (DU) warheads. DU is the waste product from the process of enriching uranium ore. It is used in nuclear weapons and reactors. Because it is a very heavy substance, 1.7 times denser than lead, it is high ly valued by the military for its ability to punch through armored vehicles and buildings. When a weapon made with a DU tip strikes a solid object like the side of a tank, it goes straight through it, then erupts in a burning cloud of vapor. The vapor settles as dust, which is not only poisonous, but also radioactive....
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=76182
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We Are Public Employees Too!
posted at www.ivaw.org
Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) calls on all U.S. military service members to refuse and resist any mobilization against workers organizing to protect their basic rights. IVAW stands in solidarity with the multitude gathered in Madison, Wisconsin and many other cities to defend their unions...
http://www.ivaw.org/blog/we-are-public-employees-too
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Washington's Plan B: Why Obama Fears Democracy in Egypt
by Shamus Cooke
January 31, 2011 -Raising Lazarus from the dead would be easier than reviving the Egyptian President. So Obama is on to plan B. And as it turns out, plan B looks a lot like the status-quo, minus a change of face. The new face is a man handpicked by the U.S., Mohamed ElBaradei, a UN bureaucrat who hasn't lived in Egypt in decades and is virtually unknown by the Egyptian people. Placing ElBaradei in power will take behind the scenes political maneuvering combined with military repression, a plan that will collide with the revolutionary demands of the people. The U.S. has already succeeded in gaining support for its plan from the Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest opposition group in Egypt...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=74470
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Military steps up retaliation against Bradley Manning
Following a rally by supporters Monday at Quantico, the military retaliated with an arbitrary "suicide watch" against Bradley Manning. Retaliation continued today with the detainment of an approved regular visitor, increasing Bradley's isolation.
By the Bradley Manning Support Network
QUANTICO, VA, 23 January 2011 -- Military officials at Marine Corps Base Quantico today increased the isolation of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning by detaining Manning's friend and regular visitor David House at the base entrance until visiting hours were over. House was accompanied by Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com, a website that has collected 42,000 signatures on a petition calling for improvements to the conditions of Manning's detention, which constitute extreme and illegal pre-trial punishment.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/881/1/
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U.S. Raids: High Tech Terror in Afghanistan
by Larry Everest
posted at revcom.us
February 6, 2009: U.S.-led NATO forces strike two houses in a "night raid" in a village near Shar-e-Safa in Zabul province, Afghanistan. Six are killed and two arrested. The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) issues a press statement reporting that those killed had been "militants" while "24 women and 45 children were protected from harm." (centcom.mil/press-releases/ansf-coalition-forces-further-disable-ied-cells-in-khowst-and-zabul)
Local officials protested that those killed were innocent civilians. "Six people in the two houses were killed and two more were arrested, all civilians," Mohammad Khasin Graned, chief of the Provincial Council, told China's Xinhua News Agency on the same day CENTCOM issued its statement. He also said villagers were planning to launch a protest against the killings. ("Raid of international troops kills 6 civilians in S Afghanistan," People's Daily Online, February 6, 2009)
This U.S.-led attack received, at most, scant—if any—coverage in the U.S. media. But now, secret State Department cables published by WikiLeaks paint a picture of the kinds of attacks and escalating carnage the U.S. continues to carry out across Afghanistan under President Obama, and the rage generated among the Afghan people. And a deeper look into the pattern of such massacres provides an insight into the nature of U.S. imperialism's bloody war in Afghanistan...
http://revcom.us/a/221/afghanistan-en.html
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BREAKING: WikiLeaks Releases Diplomatic Bombshell
David Leigh, Guardian UK
A small glimpse of the more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables released
by WikiLeaks discloses that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike
on Iran, and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN's
leadership.
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/368-wikileaks/4075-breaking-wikileaks-...
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WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates
posted at guardian.co.uk
Reaction and updates following the release of more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks. Tomorrow, revelations about North Korea and the UK....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/nov/28/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-blog
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How real is the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq?
posted at www.uruknet.de
Atul Aneja
September 4, 2010 - Under cover of darkness, hundreds of armoured vehicles rumbled across the Iraqi border into Kuwait, marking the much-touted withdrawal of American combat forces. Dominant sections of the international media interpreted the August 19 pullout as a political statement — the fulfilment of a commitment by President Barack Obama to bring home troops entrapped by the Bush administration in the Iraqi military quagmire. In short, the American public was made to believe that the pullout by the fourth Stryker Brigade was leading to the end of the U.S. occupation. On August 31, Mr. Obama formally declared in a televised address that all American combat operations in Iraq had ceased. The spin-doctors in the American establishment and their willing accomplices in the media have indeed done a marvellous job. An extraordinary task — of dressing up a new phase of Iraqi occupation as the beginning of its end — has been accomplished...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=69485
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Invisible Holocaust: Mountains of Dead Children and “the World’s Greatest Democracy”
posted at www.urknet.de
Chris Floyd
July 22, 2010 - In the last decade of the 20th century, a nation often hailed (not least by itself) as the "world's greatest democracy" directed a program of savage economic warfare against a broken, defenseless country. This blockade, carried out with an exacting bureaucratic coldness, killed, by very conservative estimate, at least one million innocent people. More than half of these victims were young children. Dead children. Thousands of dead children. Tens of thousands of dead children, Hundreds of thousands of dead children. Mountains of dead children. Vast pestiferous slagheaps of dead children. This is what the world's greatest democracy created, deliberately, coldly, as a matter of carefully considered national policy...
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m68179&hd=&size=1&l=e
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From A World To Win News Service
Israel and the U.S.: who is whose tool?
28 June 2010. A World to Win News Service. The American international policy professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who are critical of U.S. support for Israeli settlement expansion and its attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, argue that "the unmatched power of the Israel lobby" distorts U.S. foreign policy. Many people outraged by these crimes have been influenced by their still widely circulated article "The Israel Lobby" that first appeared in The London Review of Books in 2006 (available at lrb.co.uk) and was later expanded into a book published in 21 countries.
(at VVAWAI we've been grappling with the relationship between U.S. imperialism and Israel for a long time. This article is very helpful-- Anton, VVAWAI)
Read on… http://revcom.us/a/207/AWTWNS-Israel-en.html
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A Personal Plea from a Vietnam Vet:
Donate to the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund
The understanding people get from revolutionary literature is precious--VVAWAI ed.
DONATE to PRLF
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Read more...
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Western powers grab for Libya
21 March 2010. A World to Win News Service. The Western powers now bombarding Libya like to pretend that their so-called humanitarian intervention is something new in the world. It would be something new and amazing if the US and Europe were fighting to liberate an oppressed people, but that's not what's happening.
What has now been rebranded as ''humanitarian intervention'' is just as old as what apologists for nineteenth-century colonialism called the ''white man's burden''. And it is no more new than the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, similarly touted as acts taken to rid the people of tyrants, which in fact just brought those peoples even more misery and on top of that foreign occupation.
Our indictment of the Western powers rests on two main arguments based on evidence whose truth would be difficult to deny: what these powers have done in the past, from the late nineteenth century through now, and why they have decided to respond to the Arab spring by singling out Libya for attack. Taken together, an examination of these two questions demonstrates that the West's current actions represent not a break with their colonial past but a continuity...
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Who is calling for American intervention in Libya?
posted at www.uruknet.de
Max Ajl
February 27, 2011 - History is being re-written in front of our eyes, but not by the usual suspects. I remember the debates over the Balkan Wars and whether America should have a "right" to "humanitarian intervention" there as classic moments when the touchstone of leftist ethics – do not intervene – was the most reliable guide to political thinking. Liberals like David Reiff, the pathetic Samantha Power, and Thomas Friedman, the NYT court jester, supporte d "humanitarian intervention" in the Balkans, sometimes in a tacit alliance with "conservatives," although it was the latter more than the former who opposed the war and especially the intervention in Kosovo...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75403
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Police ban Egypt solidarity rally in Ramallah
Ma'an news
January 31, 2011 - Security forces shut down a demonstration Sunday in front of the Egyptian embassy in Ramallah, after calling in one of the organizers for questioning multiple times a day earlier, organizers of the rally said. Forces pushed demonstrators and a man who identified himself as a police commander said the demonstrators were in a "security area" and would have to disperse, they said. Twenty armed police, who quickly tried to confiscate cameras, ordered a journalist to turn off her microphone and recorder, Human Rights Watch said. An Agence France-Presse reporter confirmed the report...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=74468
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Introducing The Palestine Papers
posted at english.aljazeera.net
Al Jazeera has obtained more than 1,600 internal documents from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Gregg Carlstrom
Last Modified: 23 Jan 2011 15:32 GMT
Over the last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are nearly 1,700 files, thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. These documents – memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations – date from 1999 to 2010.
The material is voluminous and detailed; it provides an unprecedented look inside the continuing negotiations involving high-level American, Israeli, and Palestinian Authority officials.
Al Jazeera will release the documents between January 23-26th, 2011. They will reveal new details about:
- the Palestinian Authority’s willingness to concede illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, and to be “creative” about the status of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount;
- the compromises the Palestinian Authority was prepared to make on refugees and the right of return;
- details of the PA’s security cooperation with Israel;
- and private exchanges between Palestinian and American negotiators in late 2009, when the Goldstone Report was being discussed at the United Nations.
Because of the sensitive nature of these documents, Al Jazeera will not reveal the source(s) or detail how they came into our possession. We have taken great care over an extended period of time to assure ourselves of their authenticity.
We believe this material will prove to be of inestimable value to journalists, scholars, historians, policymakers and the general public...
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112214310263628.html
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WAR CRIMES & WIKILEAKS
{col. writ. 1/2/11] (c) '11 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Among the maniac right, calls have come for the assassination of Julian Assange, of Wikileaks fame. Some have called for his quick arrest, prosecution and conviction for alleged violations of U.S. anti spying laws (despite the fact that he's not a U.S. citizen.)
Although the din may've died down somewhat, U.S. government officials are livid with the Australian, with some issuing dark and foreboding threats.
if Wikileaks is guilty of anything, it's failing to abide by the unwritten rules of the corporate press, that of keeping state secrets secret.
The catcalls for Assange's prosecution are startling given the seas of silence on the prosecution of U.S. government officials for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. ..
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WikiLeaks continues exposure of predatory US foreign policy
posted at www.uruknet.de
By Patrick Martin
December 6, 2010 - In the face of an unprecedented campaign of US harassment and intimidation, the Internet-based WikiLeaks group is continuing its efforts to expose the predatory role of American foreign policy around the world, releasing secret diplomatic documents every day. WikiLeaks has acquired over 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables, most of them generated over the past five years, and it has posted about 700 of them so far on it s web site, as well as turning over the entire cache to four news organizations in Europe. One of the four, the British daily Guardian, in turn gave access to the New York Times...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=72550
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Robert Parry | On Korea, Here We Go Again!
Robert Parry, Consortium News
Intro: "If American journalism should have learned one thing over the years, it is to be cautious and skeptical during the first days of a foreign confrontation like the one now playing out on the Korean Peninsula. Often the initial accounts from the 'US side' don't turn out to be entirely accurate."
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/56-56/4070-on-korea-here-we-go-again
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The West's war in Afghanistan is failing: Crisis Group
posted at www.uruknet.de
By Claire Truscott , AFP
November 27, 2010 — A leading international think tank Sunday issued a damning review of the US-led war in Afghanistan and said NATO plans to end its combat mission by 2014 would lead to the Kabul government's collapse. The Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said the coalition's strategy to break the Taliban, build popular support among civilians, woo disenchanted rebels and boost Afghan security forces was failing...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=72266
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Afganistan War Logs:
following stories posted at www.uruknet.de
Afghanistan war logs: How US marines sanitised record of bloodbath
Declan Walsh
July 26, 2010 - Brevity is the hallmark of military reporting, but even by those standards the description of one disastrous event is remarkably short: "The patrol returned to base." It started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the city of Jalalabad. The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=68313
Wikileaks files 'may reveal thousands of war crimes'
By Paula Fentiman and Sam Marsden, Press Association
Monday, 26 July 2010 - The Afghanistan files released by WikiLeaks could contain details of "thousands" of potential war crimes, the founder of the whistleblowers' website said today. Julian Assange told reporters at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London: "It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime. "That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be e vidence of war crimes in this material."..
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=68315
What the Wikileaks files TRULY reveal
ANSWER Coalition interview on breaking Wikileaks story
ANSWER
Juky 26, 2010 - The documents present a powerful indictment against the Pentagon, the Obama administration and the Bush administration for their failure to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan. They provide documentary evidence of the killing of hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians by U.S. and NATO troops. The files reveal that the Pentagon set up a secret commando unit called Task Force 373 that is nothing other than a death squad. Task Force 373, made up of Army and Navy Special Operatives, is seeking to assassinate individuals from an assembled list of 2,000 targets. And despite rosy-sounding publicity missives coming from the Pentagon, the information released on Wikileaks shows an obvious pattern of intensifying bomb attacks against U.S. and NATO forces. The decision by the Obama administration to send 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 is exposed as nothing other than a decision to send more human beings to their death in an ongoing war that cannot be won, so as to avoid taking the political responsibility for a military setback...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=68312
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Defend Bradley Manning! Facing 52 years for sharing video
posted at www.couragetoresist.org
By Courage to Resist. July 14, 2010
“From what I’ve heard of (Pfc. Bradley) Manning, he is a new hero of mine.” —Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
In April, the Wikileaks website released a video depicting a US helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed eleven unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters employees, and seriously wounded two children. Titled “Collateral Murder”, the video was widely posted and reported on.
Last week, the Army charged 22-year-old intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning with providing the video after he allegedly took credit for doing so online. For the past month, he has been held in isolation from supporters and civilian legal assistance in a US military confinement facility in Kuwait....
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/846/27/
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