be just

Held Hostage For Six Years In Guantanamo  : Information Clearing House - ICH Silvia Cattori : What kind of torture did they subject you to? Sami El Haj : All kinds of physical and psychological torture. As all the detainees were Muslim, the camp administration subjected them to many forms of harassment and humiliation linked to religion. With my own eyes I saw soldiers tearing up the Qur’an and throwing it in the toilet. I saw them, during interrogation sessions, sitting on the Qur’an until their questions were answered. They insulted our families and our religion. They made fun of us by pretending to ring our God, asking him to come and save us. The only Imam at the camp was accused of complicity with the detainees and was sent away, in 2005, for refusing to tell visitors that the camp respected religious freedom. They beat us up. They taunted us with racist insults. They locked us in cold rooms, below zero, with one cold meal a day. They hung us up by our hands. They deprived us of s...

Held Hostage For Six Years In Guantanamo  : Information Clearing House - ICH Standing straight and tall, an impressive and deeply introspective man, Sami El Haj walks with a limp and the help of a walking stick. Neither laughter nor smiles light up the refined face of this man, old before his time. A deep sadness pervades him. He was 32 years old when, in December 2001, his life, like that of tens of thousands of other Muslims, became a horrific nightmare. He endured horrendous suffering. Weakened by a hunger strike which lasted 438 days, set free on the 1st May 2008, he greets you attentively and with a gentle manner. He calmly tells you of a world whose paralyzing, suffocating horror is beyond your comprehension. He is the first of the released detainees from the camps built by the Bush administration at the Guantánamo Bay naval base to be authorised to travel. “I came to Geneva, the city of the United Nations and freedom, [1] to ask for the law to be respected, to demand the closure...

Bomb kills Ugandan peacekeeper in Somalia : "A roadside bomb killed a Ugandan peacekeeper in the Somali capital Friday, witnesses and an official said, breaking a brief period of relative quiet following a peace agreement between some of the fighting factions. The explosion occurred near the Ugandan base at Mogadishu's international airport, said Ugandan commander Col. Godfrey Golooba. Keyse Ali, a witness, said the bomb was hidden in a pile of garbage and exploded as the soldiers were making routine checks on the road. The blast knocked Ali back several yards. Muhyadin Nor, another witness, said the area was covered in blood. A spokesman for the African Union said the peacekeepers would continue their efforts. 'Unfortunately, this is not the first attack against our troops in Mogadishu,' said El-Ghassim Wane at the AU's headquarters in Ethiopia. 'But we are as determined as ever to carry out the mandate of the mission. ... This is an attack by elements bent on...

Sadr movement: U.S. should agree to go - UPI.com The Sadr Movement supports any agreement that would lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, the group's foreign relations spokesman said Friday. Sheik Hassan al-Zarqani, in an interview with Alalam News Network, said Iraqi sovereignty is a key issue for the followers of Moqtada Sadr. Sadr in a public statement Thursday urged Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki not to sign an agreement that does not include the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of next year. Zarqani suggested the government should wait until President George W. Bush leaves office, signing an agreement with the next administration. He criticized the Bush administration for sending mixed messages about a U.S. pullout and ignoring Iraqi opposition to any agreement that would allow U.S. forces to remain in the country.

When Extremists Attack - Swampland - TIME : "I have now been called antisemitic and intellectually unstable and a whole bunch of other silly things by the folks over at the Commentary blog. They want Time Magazine to fire or silence me. This is happening because I said something that is palpably true, but unspoken in polite society: There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003. Their motivations involve a confused conflation of what they think are Israel's best interests with those of the United States. They are now leading the charge for war with Iran. Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country. Unhappily, their views have had an impact in the highest reaches of the Bush Administration--and seem to have an influence on John McCain's c...

On Joe Klein and the Jewish Neoconservatives (Prospects for Peace) : "There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003… Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country…I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel…But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek…I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them."

Living Through the Age of Denial in America - by Tom Engelhardt : "I set foot, so to speak, on this planet on July 20, 1944, not perhaps the best day of the century. It was, in fact, the day of the failed German officers' plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. My mother was a cartoonist. She was known in those years as 'New York's girl caricaturist,' or so she's called in a newspaper ad I still have, part of a war-bond drive in which your sizeable bond purchase was to buy her sketch of you. She had, sometime in the months before my birth, traveled by train, alone, the breadth of a mobilized but still peaceable American continent to visit Hollywood on assignment for some magazine to sketch the stars. I still have, on my wall, a photo of her in that year on the 'deck' of a 'pirate ship' on a Hollywood lot drawing one of those gloriously handsome matinee idols. Since I was then inside her, this is not exactly part of my memory bank. But that photo does ...