Welcome IRAQ!

Bradley Manning is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed restricted material to the website WikiLeaks. He was charged in July that year with transferring classified data onto his personal computer, and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source. An additional 22 charges were preferred in March 2011, including "aiding the enemy," a capital offense, though prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. He was found fit to face court martial in April 2011 and currently awaits the first hearing.

Prevention of Injury (POI) from kyle broom on Vimeo.

The Events of The Syrian Revolution in English

http://syrianrevolution2011.wordpress.com/

Nearly daily updated with videoblogs from:

al-Baida, Banyas, Latakia, Homs, Hama, towns near Dara, al-Moudamiya (Damascus suburb), etc.

The current intervention of an alliance of foreign military forces in Libya (GB, USA, FR and CA, IT and NO) is taking place on behalf of two recent UN resolutions: 1970 and 1972 (these are document numbers, not years).

As reported in Cecile's previous post, it now seems that the text of resolution 1970 is available online.

With hick-ups and hick-offs, livestream with chat from Bengazi, here:

http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb

Update: Mo, the guy who started the Livestream from Bengazi, was killed just before the intervention was initiated, making footage in Bengazi for the livestream.

His wife made a statement about his death. You can hear her, clicking here.

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[Egypt]

Uninstalling Dictator ... 100% complete
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Different media are reporting that Internet and other forms of electronic communications (including telephone providers) are being disrupted in Egypt, presumably after a government order in response to the protests.

In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet.

Read more details on Renesys and BGPmon.

"We'll get u Assange, and your little site too!"

"But a thousand other sites will creep up behind you."

Wikileaks started publishing leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

The release has generated reactions all across the world, where diplomats have been warned by the dangers international covert actions face as such information is disclosed. WLCentral quotes the reaction of various newspapers about this scoop, while the Wikileaks twitter feed laments DoS attacks to the site hosting the information, which is also served by the Guardian UK.

Jadaliyya

by Sinan Antoon

[US] -- The attack on the Sayyidat al-Najat (Our Lady of Salvation) Church in the al-Karradah district in Baghdad on October 31st was not the first on churches in Iraq in recent years. However, it’s certainly the most lethal in terms of casualties, let alone its deleterious effects on Iraq’s already damaged social space. The Islamic State of Iraq, some of whose members stormed the church and took the congregation hostage and killed some of them before being attacked in turn by government troops, is now threatening more attacks on Christians unless the Coptic Church in Egypt releases two captive women who've converted to Islam they are supposedly holding. The attack left 58 corpses. This event will probably come to epitomize the tragedy of Iraq's Christians and the fragility of their situation. Since 2004, more than sixty churches have been attacked all over Iraq. About 2,000 Christians have been murdered and almost half a million have fled the country. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians have been forced to leave their homes and are internally displaced inside Iraq.

While Iraqi Christians are not the only targets of this sectarian violence (Sabaeans and Yazidis amongst the non-Muslims, for example) and of course hundreds of thousands of Sunnis and Shi`is have also been the victims of violence and have had their mosques and shrines attacked, the plight of Christians and other non-Muslims always receives disproportionate attention in the west. Genuine concern for the plight of others notwithstanding, the tradition of official “concern” for minorities in the Middle East, especially Christians, has been used as a pretext for intervention and a tool to gain geopolitical influence and power. On the popular level it reinforces orientalist stereotypes of the Islamic world and its societies as ultimately inhospitable and naturally intolerant of others, and consequently the colonial fantasy of the west as an automatic guardian of threatened minorities over “there.” /snap/ [link]

... in Light of Democracy and Resistance

By Bassam Haddad

-- The only thing more sickening than the United States cracking down on groups/human beings it does not like in the name of fighting terrorism is when Arab regimes do it. The same goes for Israel except that one should be increasingly prepared to expect literally anything, no matter how morally or politically reprehensible, from its governments. In any case, for those interested in the struggle for any number, or kind, of rights in the Arab world, that phony specter has come to reek of hypocrisy and imbecility. For at least three decades now, from Jordan to Egypt, and from Morocco to Bahrain, government crackdowns on dissent have run out of any semblance of excuse and are increasingly confined to the silly and invariably empty accusation of terrorism which enjoys salience in patron countries like the United States or Britain--and certainly Russia. That label/ticket is becoming increasingly absurd to observers while it is becoming a consistent last resort for unsavory motives—everywhere. Its excessive use speaks more of bankruptcy than leadership.

This fall (2010), three significant Parliamentary elections will have taken place in Bahrain, Jordan, and Egypt. /../ [link]

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At 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history, providing details on events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.

The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 'civilians'; 23,984 'enemy' (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 'host nation' (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 'friendly' (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period.