Sonja Karkar

The Massacre

It happened twenty-eight years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from it all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.

Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children – more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses – doctors, nurses, journalists – who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.

Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]

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Stephen Lendman

Dealing with Washington and Israel is like swimming with sharks. Get out of the water or be eaten. Achieving an equitable Israeli/Palestinian peace settlement is no more likely now than ever. Both sides know it but pretend otherwise, suggesting perhaps a finessed or arranged resolution - a sham one or capitulation if anything is agreed.

On September 15, the latest Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt round ended with no progress,

Haaretz saying both "sides seem no closer to a compromise on West Bank settlements."
Al Jazeera headlined "Slow progress in Egypt peace talks," saying "Latest round of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians make little headway....The only agreement the two sides arrived (at) was to meet for the scheduled talks in Jerusalem on" September 15.
Al Jazeera's Marwan Bishara said "Because of a lack of optimism, the negotiations are being conducted in secrecy. We don't know what precisely is going on in these two rounds," or what will follow.
Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin called settlements "the main issue" and that any sort of agreement "does not look promising."
Al Jazeera's Nour Odeh added: "Americans came pretty much empty handed." Further, "Thousands of new (settlements) are approved and ready for construction come the end of September."

More about them below. Even New York Times writers Mark Landler and Isabel Kershner struck a sour note headlining, "Amid Shelling, Mideast Peace Talks Drag," saying:

Shifting "to home turf" on September 15, neither side "had broken an impasse over Israel's (settlement construction) moratorium."

More on it below. First some spin.

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Wayne Madsen
Online Journal

Illustration for "Islamabad Hotel Bombing: A CIA/MI6/MOSSAD false flag
like Bali and Jakarta(update3)" with the caption: "Have a look at the crater;
it is enormous: 40 meters deep."

(WMR) -- WMR has learned from a deep background source that Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, has been conducting false flag terrorist attacks in Pakistan that are later blamed on the entity called “Pakistani Taliban.”

Only recently did the US State Department designate the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban, a terrorist group. The group is said by the State Department to be an off-shoot of the Afghan Taliban, which had links to “Al Qaeda” before the 9/11 attacks on the United States. TTP’s leader is Hakimullah Mehsud, said to be 30-years old and operating from Pakistan’s remote tribal region with an accomplice named Wali Ur Rehman. In essence, this new team of Mehsud and Rehman appears to be the designated replacement for Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri as the new leaders of the so-called “Global Jihad” against the West.

However, it is Xe cells operating in Karachi, Peshawar, Islamabad and other cities and towns that have, according to our source who witnessed the U.S.-led false flag terrorist operations in Pakistan. Bombings of civilians is the favored false flag event for the Xe team and are being carried out under the orders of the CIA.

However, the source is now under threat from the FBI and CIA for revealing the nature of the false flag operations in Pakistan. If the source does not agree to cooperate with the CIA and FBI, with an offer of a salary, the threat of false criminal charges being brought for aiding and abetting terrorism looms over the source.

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Paul Woodward
War In Context

[Photo: Retired U.S. Air Force Captain Vaughn Oliver saluting a fallen soldier: U.S. Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson, at the funeral for Peterson Sept. 27, 2003 in Flagstaff, Arizona. Alyssa died September 15 in Tel Afar, Iraq, as result of a self inflicted gun shot wound to the head after having been ordered to take part in interrogations employing torture as authorized, we are learning, at the highest government levels by July 2002. (Street Prophets)]

Greg Mitchell reports (parts one and two) on the suicide of Spc. Alyssa Peterson, one of the first women soldiers to die in Iraq. She took her own life exactly seven years ago after being reprimanded for showing empathy for Iraqi prisoners who were undergoing interrogation. All records of the techniques being used have been destroyed but there seems little doubt that the Iraqis were being tortured.

The 27-year-old’s parents didn’t even know their daughter was in Iraq until they were informed of her death. The fact that she committed suicide was concealed by the military for several more years — the most likely reason for the cover-up being that it was Peterson’s unwillingness to participate in torture that drove her to take her own life.

Kayla Williams, a US Army sergeant who served with Peterson, described the impact of participating in interrogations which she could see clearly contravened the Geneva Conventions.

Fellow soldiers, echoing then vice-president Dick Cheney, told the young sergeant that “the old rules no longer applied because this was a different world. This was a new kind of war.” But Williams said: “it really made me feel like we were losing that crucial moral higher ground, and we weren’t behaving in the way that Americans are supposed to behave.”

“It also made me think,” Williams says, “what are we as humans, that we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the humanity of all Americans. It was difficult, and to this day I can no longer think I am a really good person and will do the right thing in the right situation.”

As the famous Milgram experiment demonstrated, individuals who choose to do the right thing — especially when that demands defying authority — are usually in a minority. The much more prevalent tendency is a willingness to follow orders and suspend ones own moral judgment — even when that involves participating in torture.

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Marat Kunaev

"American-German freelance journalist F. William Engdahl analyzed the much-talked-about "100 Orders" of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and concluded that Iraq actually had been looted. The only prominent characteristic of today’s state of Iraqi democracy is the "freedom" to sell pornography on the streets of Baghdad."

The many images of American troops leaving Iraq remind one of the ones of the Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan. The latter, however, did not leave in the dead of night. But still the difference between the consequences of the Soviet military "presence" in Afghanistan and the American one in Iraq are much more relevant than some fleeting impressions.

Soviet Union entered Afghanistan as an ally of a certain native power group — the one having rather significant public support. Perhaps Soviet leadership could have influenced the concept of socialism and Marxism of their Afghan colleagues but it did not predefine the political system in the country — it was established before the entry of the Soviet troops and managed to exist for a few years after their leave. Mujahidin, however, failed, to secure their power, having lost their position to Talibs, whom numerous Pashto military specialists (and former servicemen of pro-Soviet Afghan army) have joined prior to that. Talibs — as well as the monarchic Daoud regime, overthrown by the left officers, and the Afghan communists from the PDPA themselves — were the unitary power, unifying the country. It was the ideology that was different and the victory of one project other another was defined by the whole set of internal and external factors of Afghan contemporary history. Today Afghanistan is buried in chaos. The situation in Iraq is by no means better — in the long term it might as well turn out to be worse.

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