Makeheadline.com

New deadline for Yahoo Groups data request

2020-01-10T12:13:00.001-06:00

Hi Yahoo Member,

In recent weeks, we communicated the latest changes to Yahoo Groups and explained how to request a download of any content you've previously posted to the platform. Some Groups users asked us for more time, and in response to these requests, we have decided to extend the deadline. Groups users now have until Friday, January 31, 2020 at 11:59pm PST to submit a request for their data.

We have now taken down all user content from the Yahoo Groups website. However, we will continue to accept users' requests for their data until January 31, 2020, and will ensure these have been fulfilled prior to deleting the data.

For additional support, users can email YahooGroupsEscalations@verizonmedia.com and our team will troubleshoot any issues.

Best,
The Yahoo Groups team

Next Steps: The Evolution of Yahoo Groups (Final Notification)

2019-12-09T19:51:00.001-06:00

Dear Group Moderators and Members,

Last month we notified you of the changes coming to Yahoo Groups that better align with user habits, and today we are providing an update to guide you through the next steps of the transition. Yahoo Groups is not going away - but we are making adjustments to ultimately serve you better. We are amazed at the vibrant community you've created through Yahoo Groups and we want to make sure you feel supported as we introduce these changes.

The following changes were made since our last communication:

   •   Users can now only join a Yahoo Group through an invite or group request approval by the Group Moderator.
   •   New Groups can't be public. They can only be private (not listed in Groups directory, membership by invitation only) or restricted (listed in Groups directory, membership requests must be approved by a Group Moderator).
   •   Members must share all content via email, and can no longer upload or host new content on the Yahoo Groups website itself.

The following changes will be made on December 14, 2019:

   •   Public groups will no longer exist. All existing public Groups will become restricted Groups that require Group Moderator approval to join.
   •   Any content that was previously uploaded via the website will be removed.

If you would like to keep any of the content you've posted or stored within your Yahoo Group, please download it by December 14 by accessing the Groups Download Manager at this link. Once you provide your preferred email address, we will send you a confirmation of your download request and notify you once the download is complete.

You will receive a link to a downloadable zip file via email for each of your Groups organized into a separate folder. Download time varies depending on the amount of information and file size.

If your download request is made by 11:59pm PST on Saturday, December 14, 2019, your content will not be deleted until your download is complete. We are unable to accommodate any download requests made after this deadline.

This is the final reminder to download your content. You can find additional information about the upcoming changes here.

We have worked extensively with our customer support team to develop recommendations for tools that can help you with any download issues. See help article here.

We have watched the evolution of Yahoo Groups with awe, as we grew to a community of millions with over 10 million Groups. Every day, we witness the power of community and shared passions, and our mission is to provide a platform for the strong connections people make with each other around their interests.

We thank you for being part of the Yahoo Groups community and look forward to continuing to provide ways for you to connect with one another about your shared interests and passions.

Sincerely,
The Groups Team

Yahoo Groups - Upcoming Product Changes to Yahoo Groups

2019-10-17T13:09:00.001-05:00

Dear Group Moderators and Members,

We are notifying you about upcoming changes to Yahoo Groups, which affect how content is shared and group membership is managed. We know that our users are deeply passionate about connecting around shared interests, and we want to continue offering the best experience possible.

We extensively researched the Yahoo Groups usage and user experience. In doing so, we determined that the majority of our members use the Yahoo Groups email functionality to share content, rather than posting directly to website message boards.

To align our features with user preferences, effective October 28, the following changes will be made to Yahoo Groups:

Uploading of new content will be disabled on the Yahoo Groups website. All users can continue to communicate and share content via email using any email client.
All users will only be able to join Groups either through an invite from the Group Moderator or by submitting a request to join a Group, which requires approval by the Group Moderator.

Starting December 14, all previously uploaded content stored on the website will be removed and all existing public Groups will be made private. If you would like to keep any of the content you've posted or stored within your Yahoo Group, you have until December 14 to download it by accessing this link. More information about the upcoming changes can be found here.

Since most content sharing among Yahoo Group members now occurs over email, we believe it is the right time to make this change. Please be assured that while posted content will be removed, Yahoo Groups is not going away, and new Groups can still be formed, allowing users to join and connect with their communities and passions.

Yahoo Groups is an online extension of your real-life group of friends, interests, and communities, so we hope this change will streamline and improve your experience.

Sincerely,
The Groups Team

[wvns] Palestinian Soccer Player Nears Death

2012-06-22T20:16:00.001-05:00

Palestinian Soccer Player Nears Death
Karin Friedemann
The Muslim Observer

While President Obama awarded Israeli president Shimon Perez with a
medal last week, world outrage about Israel's treatment of
Palestinians has escalated exponentially as professional footballer
Mahmoud al Sarkar nears death from his hunger strike of over 90 days
in protest of his illegal incarceration. Thousands of other
Palestinian prisoners, including 20 children, have joined his hunger
strike. Despite a media blackout, the word has been spreading globally
through Facebook and Twitter.

With Sarkar, Akram Al-Rikhawi, a prisoner for 8 years on his 57th day
of hunger strike, wrote in a letter to the world: "This is an urgent
and final distress call from captivity, slow and programmed death
inside the cells of so-called Ramle Prison hospital, that you know
that your sons and brothers are still struggling against death and you
pay no attention to them and do not remember their cause...You are the
ones able to support us for victory in our battle."

Sarsak, a 25 year old from Rafah, in Gaza, was arrested at a
checkpoint while on his way to the West Bank to play with the
Palestinian national team in 2009. Since then, he has been detained
without charge or trial, and has not been allowed to see his family.
He is being held under the Unlawful Combatant Law, which allows Israel
to detain Palestinians from Gaza indefinitely without charge or
criminal proceedings being brought to court. As with every other
Palestinian prisoner held by Israel, Mahmoud was transferred to a
prison outside of the Occupied Territories. This is illegal under
Articles 49 and 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits
the transfer of prisoners from an occupied territory to that of the
occupying state. 2,000 prisoners, according to Palestinian prisoners'
rights group Addameer, are held as administrative detainees without a
chance of trial.

UN Special Envoy to the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, has called
for the 25 year old's release, saying that 'he has suffered
immensely.' Sarkar has lost 33 percent of his body weight. After three
months without food, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel issued a
warning that he could die at any moment.

There are huge demonstrations expected in Scotland on Saturday, where
Israel's women's soccer team is to play against Scotland. Mick Napier,
chairman of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC),
explains: "There should be no business as usual for Israel's national
teams while Israel denies Palestinians the same privileges."

Meanwhile, dozens of professional athletes have been rallying to
Sarkar's cause, sending out twitters to fans. "In the name of sporting
solidarity, justice and human rights, we declare our support for
Palestinian footballer Mahmoud Sarsak. As European sportsmen, we
believe that every person has the right to a fair and independent
trial," wrote Marcelo del Pozo, an Argentinian player for Spain.

Seville striker Frédéric Kanouté posted on his website: "In the name
of civil liberties, justice, and basic human rights, we call for the
release of Mahmoud Sarsak." Kanouté gained international fame when he
lifted his team jersey to reveal a shirt with the word
"Palestine"after scoring a goal during a league match at the height of
Israel's January 2009 attack on Gaza, an action for which he was fined
$4,000.

Other supporters include Nicolas Anelka, former player for Arsenal,
Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Real Madrid, and French sailor Jo Le
Guen. Prominent figures such as former France and Manchester United
midfielder Eric Cantona, film director Ken Loach and American
philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky have urged Israeli authorities
to release Sarsak. Protests under the banner "Let Sarsak Live" took
place in London's Trafalgar Square last week to raise awareness of his
ordeal. In a letter to The Guardian, former UK Member of Parliament
John Austin called on the Union of European Football Associations
(UEFA) to "reconsider its decision to hold its under-21 championship
in Israel in 2013."

Amnesty International also proclaimed that Sarsak, "who is at risk of
death after more than 90 days on hunger strike in protest against his
detention by Israel should immediately be admitted to a civilian
hospital or released so that he can receive life-saving medical care."

Philippe Piat, vice-president of FIFPro, the global organization which
represents professional footballers said, "freedom of movement is a
fundamental right of every citizen. It is also written down in the
FIFA Regulations that players must be allowed to play for the national
team of their country. But actually for some footballers it is
impossible to defend the colors of their country. They cannot cross
the border. They cannot visit their family. They are locked up. This
is an injustice.'

As the Israeli Asaf Harofe Hospital announced that Sarkar's death
could come within hours, the Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA) became heavily involved in pressing the Israelis
for Sarkar's release. On June 20, Mahmoud Sarsak rejected an offer
from negotiators and lawyers to be released to Norway or Sweden.
Mahmoud wants to be free to go to his home in the Gaza Strip only.

Gaza TV News reported on June 21: "After 91 days on Hunger Strike,
Mahmoud Sarsak is to be released on July 17th. We will post further
news as it reaches us." This report has not yet been confirmed, so it
is vital that the public continue writing letters and making phone
calls of support.

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[wvns] Should We Boycott Israeli Art?

2012-06-08T16:32:00.000-05:00

Should We Boycott Israeli Art?
June 7, 2012
By Karin Friedemann
The Muslim Observer
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=11255

Sarah Gillespie started an interesting debate on deliberation.info with her article, "The BDS Cultural Boycott and Integrity." BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. She opposes the call by the BDS to sabotage or ban any mode of expression delivered by state-enforced Israeli artists, musicians and thinkers because "art has the capacity to transcend the binary world of `placard politics' (`for' this or `against' that) and deliver the transforming might of pathos, spirit, sadness and beauty… We should boycott Israeli products, not art, spirit and ideas."

While I share her reservations about why only Israeli-born Zionists are being boycotted, the inevitable ethical inconsistencies that arise in trying to avoid supporting any type of organized violence, especially when that would include boycotting one's own country, and the funding by George Soros of the BDS movement, I disagree with her that "Art" is something that should never be boycotted.
Art is a luxury product. Jewish gift stores give a lot of legitimacy to Israel's folk narrative by selling Israeli made handicrafts and clothes. People who shop there are usually buying those products in order to help support the financial existence of illegal settlers in Occupied Palestine.

Likewise, the Israeli government purposely promotes Israeli artists and musicians, considering them ambassadors for the legitimization of the Zionist State of Israel. The Shakespeare play shown in London, which Gillespie opposed boycotting, was not only funded by the State of Israel but was rewritten in order to generate more sympathy for the Jewish character, transforming it into a standard work of propaganda.

Boycotters make exceptions for those Jewish Israelis who are openly opposing Zionism, yet it would be ridiculous not to assume that all Israelis who are selling us products whether art or plastic storage boxes are participating in Zionism. In any case, they are paying taxes to the Israeli government and are at the very least in that way participating in genocide.

If we apply the same morals to Jews as we do to others, all Jews as a group, if they do not consciously defect from the Zionist racist movement, are guilty of participating in Zionist aggression, preventing public comment, or letting racist violence happen without comment.

It is quite standard to revile an artist or academic if he has ever been a member of any other racist organization.

For example, mainstream media consistently refers to former Congressman David Duke without his Doctor title as a way of belittling him, even though he has claimed that the KKK in his town was nothing more than a neighborhood organization. Nobody starts jumping up and down fuming at the mouth when someone condemns or boycotts a former member of the KKK, insisting, "But not all KKK members are violent!" Most people simply accept that the KKK is a purveyor of racist violence and try to avoid supporting it, even indirectly.

Yet we are asked to distinguish carefully between a non-violent Zionist and Zionism as a movement, even though all Israelis are required to serve in the Israeli military and are thus guilty of participating in organized crime.

The question of whether or not boycotting a theater production would ever end the Israeli state needs to be looked at in context of the American Jewish lobby. Any Palestinian poet who tried to book a show in New Jersey would automatically find himself canceled and playing outside the cafe in the street due to a deluge of angry phone calls from Zionist Jews, even if his poster had a picture of a dove on it.

It would probably be wise for more Americans to become similarly aggressive about getting Zionist performances cancelled. That way, the theater will learn to either avoid all controversial performances OR they will be forced to adopt a more balanced approach (for example showing both Palestinian and Israeli art productions). What happens when only Jews protest, the Jews get what they want while others just stew.

It is impossible to boycott entirely a country in which you live, but you can still make wisest choices about how to spend your money. I would only encourage a foreigner to spend money on American artists if I knew for sure that this artist's world view supported something that person could morally accept. Paintings are a dime a dozen. If all you want is a pretty picture, frame a calendar photo. You should buy a painting because you are supporting a revolutionary movement – you want to give money to a particular artist because you want them to continue in their struggle for truth and beauty.

There are Israeli musicians and writers I support because they are outspoken anti-Zionists. But if some random Israeli musician was playing at my children's elementary school I would oppose it, because that would be giving a public message that Israelis are cute and cuddly, that we should bond with them emotionally and give them our tax dollars and feel sorry for them because they are such good musicians.

The main idea behind a boycott is to delegitimize the fake Zionist narrative. There were a couple kids in my elementary school whose parents forbade them to participate in Israeli folk dances and it made long lasting impressions on their fellow students. At first we did not understand why these students opposed Israel, but eventually we figured it out.

One can only imagine with trepidation a world where no one ever spoke truth in the face of power and privilege.

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[wvns] People’s Lawyer Goes to Jail

2012-05-18T18:30:00.000-05:00

People's Lawyer Goes to Jail
May 17, 2012 by TMO <http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?author=8>

By Karin Friedemann, TMO

http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=11074
<http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=11074>
[0920_barry-wilson-624x464]
<http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/windows-live-pictures/Peoples-Lawyer-\
Goes-to-Jail_E0D6/0920_barry-wilson-624x464.jpg> File: Attorney Barry
Wilson.
Boston–"The fiery attorney who represented former Boston city
councilor Chuck Turner in his bribery trial is now headed to jail
himself," the Boston Globe reports.

Superior Court Judge Patrick Brady sentenced famed "people's
lawyer" Barry Wilson to 90 days in the South Bay House of Correction
in Boston for contempt of court for being "loud, abusive, insulting
and disruptive."

On May 15, 2012, Wilson was escorted off to jail in front of a
courthouse crowded with his supporters.

Attorney Wilson was attempting to ensure that his client, a 22-year-old
African-American man on trial for his life, had a jury of his peers in a
first degree murder trial. Wilson protested when the prosecutor struck
off all young people and people of African-American descent from serving
on the jury. Wilson then "went ballistic" after the judge then
empaneled a white man who had worked many years for Homeland Security.
David Boeri of WBUR reports that Wilson's "pyrotechnics"
went on for six minutes.

"You're going to sit him. Lock me up now. Just lock me up, lock
me up and declare a mistrial," Wilson ranted. "That's
ridiculous. Fifteen years a federal agent and he's going to be
unbiased — are you kidding me?"

As Wilson strongly objected, the judge found him in contempt. The Judge
then stayed the sentence until completion of the trial and ordered
Attorney Wilson to proceed. As a result, Wilson said he was under the
sword during the whole trial and therefore distracted from defending his
client fully.

Two days after the jury found the defendant guilty of first degree
murder, Judge Brady sentenced Attorney Wilson to ninety days in jail.

Barry Wilson has a 36 year long history of defending political
activists, labor organizers, immigrants and minorities. He was lead
counsel in the Plymouth 25, Marcus Jean and Amer Jubran cases, the first
lawyer for the Boston School Bus Drivers, Steelworkers Local 8751 in the
1970s, and counsel for framed African-American City Councilor Chuck
Turner. Wilson served six months in federal prison in 1985 for refusing
to violate attorney-client privilege.

According to Wilson's lawyer, Judge Brady had dropped "a nuclear
bomb" without warning, "chilling the advocacy" of defense
attorneys.

Associate Appeals Court Justice David Mills, in reviewing Wilson's
alleged misconduct, considered it a clear breach of decorum. "He
screamed at the judge and made a scene," Mills said.

"All I'm trying to do is stand up for my clients'
rights," Wilson said. "You got to be in those pits to understand
what you have to do.

You're standing between your client and a jail cell. And you have an
ethical, professional obligation to be a zealous advocate."

On Thursday May 3, 2012, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied
Attorney Wilson's motion for further appellate review, thus
upholding the Court of Appeal's March 20, 2012 decision denying
Attorney Wilson's appeal. The Appeals Court called Wilson's
conduct "without parallel" in a 21-page rebuke.

During the contempt hearing, Wilson was defiant.

"Mr. Wilson, your behavior before me two weeks ago was
atrocious," said Suffolk Superior Court Judge Patrick Brady, calling
Wilson's conduct "the worst I've seen in 20 years on the
bench."

"I don't think my conduct was egregious or out of line in terms
of what occurred in court," the criminal defense attorney replied to
the judge in his well-known booming voice. "In 2011 an
African-American man cannot get a fair trial."

"Wilson has a right to his own opinions but he has no right to
interrupt the proceedings and turn the courtroom into a platform from
which to hurl disrespectful words at the judge and the criminal justice
system because he did not agree with the judge's ruling," the
Appeals Court concluded.

"This flagrantly reactionary repression — which comes from the
same poisoned well that jailed people's lawyer Lynne Stewart (who
represented the blind Shaykh Omar Rahman) — is designed to send a
threatening message to the progressive movement and to all defense
lawyers who stand with it," comments Kirshbaum in Workers World.

Larry Pinkney writes on BlackCommentator.com, "On February 10th,
2005, attorney Lynne Portia Stewart, after having been targeted for many
years by the US Government for her vigorous defense of the rights of
Black and other people of color, found herself convicted of a despicably
and conspicuously bogus `conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism'
charge."

This was "an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence
dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers, and install fear in those who
would fight against the U.S. government's racism," state her
supporters.

Prior to sentencing, Stewart wrote a letter to the judge pleading for
mercy: "What might have been legitimately tolerated in 2000-2001,
was after 9/11, interpreted differently and considered criminal… The
government disparages the idea of zealous advocacy because it has never
practiced criminal defense law as I did, with heartfelt concern for my
clients. I tested the limits of what the courts and law would allow for
my clients because I believed I was, as criminal defense lawyers often
say, "liberty's last champion."

Unfortunately the rules of ethics have moved away from excusing zealous
or intemperate behavior and language. 90 days in the county jail for
Wilson still seems quite extraordinary, when the customary penalty for
an attorney's contempt of court is normally a fine, but jail time
for zealous attorneys seems to be occurring more frequently, especially
in political cases.

Michigan criminal defense attorney Scott Milliard found himself in jail
for four days after being held in contempt by District Court Judge
Kenneth Post because he told a client at arraignment not to answer the
judge's questions about personal drug use because the client might
incriminate himself.

Kentucky attorney Amelia Adams got 6 months in jail after she refused to
disclose to District Judge Karem the name of her 17 year old client who
had sought permission from the court to have an abortion without her
parent's consent.

Wilson told his supporters, "I'll go do my 90 days, I'll
smile through the whole 90 days. I'll go out the way I came in…
No I don't regret anything. I did what I was supposed to do."
Wilson plans to retire after he does his time. "I'm gone,"
Wilson says. "I don't want any more part of this. Why would I
want to do this job any more and be surrounded by judges who are idiots?
I legitimized a bankrupt system, and I was very good at it. I achieved
everything I ever wanted."

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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[wvns] 2012 Olympics the Year of Muslim Women

2012-05-18T18:29:00.001-05:00

2012 Olympics the Year of Muslim Women
May 17, 2012
By Karin Friedemann, TMO
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=11072

The 2012 Olympics promises to be an exciting year for Muslim women athletes as well as anyone and everyone who enjoys debating women's rights issues. There is controversy, there are lovely ladies, and an observant public. We will probably be hearing a lot more from the media in the coming weeks.

Muslim women athletes are in many ways stuck between a rock and a hard place: between a religious orthodoxy that generally frowns upon young women being seen in the public eye and the West, which frowns upon the covering of women.

The pressure is on, as Human Rights Watch has suggested that if Saudi Arabia will not support the participation of women in the Olympics, the Olympics should not support the participation of Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabian newscaster Reema Abdullah has been chosen as one of the torch-bearers at the 2012 London Games.

The big fuss over Muslim women's participation in the Olympics invites the question of why more Muslim women do not participate in sports.

Farah Jassat reports in the Guardian, UK: Cultural barriers to participation were recently highlighted in Saudi Arabia, when the country refused to allow Saudi women to compete in the Olympics. The institutional barrier, by contrast, can be seen in International Federation of Association Football ban on women wearing hijab. The Iranian women's football team could not complete their 2012 Olympic second-round qualifying match against Jordan because they refused to remove their headscarves.

Muslim Women's Sport Foundation, based in the UK, strongly believes that faith and sport for both genders are entirely compatible and that the culture of sport is an essential part of Islamic history. Since its establishment in 2001 MWSF has been at the forefront of encouraging physical activity amongst women from British ethnic-minority communities. Offering female only athletic sessions has helped to address cultural sensitivities and provide opportunities where more Muslim women feel comfortable in enjoying sport. MWSF even allows mothers to bring their kids along to training sessions.

This leads us to an important point: Participation of women of any age in physical fitness, regardless of religion, is often curtailed by childcare responsibilities. This is most unfortunate, since the only way for women to "reclaim" their bodies after childbirth is through regular physical exercise. American researchers report that the main obstacle to female exercise is sheer exhaustion from raising children and keeping house, in addition to earning income. There is no way for a mother to attend an aerobics class, run a few blocks, or even go into a private room to do some stretches unless at least one family member is willing to step up to take care of the children for some time to support the desire of the mother to get some exercise. Even those families who cite their total dependence on the mother as their reason for her lack of privacy should be aware that she is likely to be around a lot longer if she has access to some free time to work out.

Salma Bi, a cricketer and umpire believes "the main challenge is the support of the family."

"It is much harder to excel in anything if your loved ones don't understand why it's important to you," notes Jassat.

MWSF's International Sportswoman of the Year, Ibtihaj Muhammad is an American sabre fencer who has made the last two US World Championship teams and ranked second in the US. She hopes to be the first Muslim woman representing the US in the Olympics in any sport whilst wearing hijab. Although she has said it is "extremely difficult being different in the sports world – be it for religion or race…" she also concludes, "I would never fence if it compromised who I am and my religion – I love that the two work together."

Another bright shining star hopeful is the Malaysian rifle shooter Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi, who will be well into her pregnancy at the time of her Olympic competition. She will be the fourth woman to compete in the Olympics while pregnant. The first was Swedish figure skater Magda Julin in 1920, the second was German skeleton racer Diane Sartor in 2006 and the third was Kristie Moore, a Canadian curler in 2010.

Suryani told Reuters, "I feel I am strong and my husband says `as long as you feel like that, energized to do that, it seems like that is your baby talking to you so you go.'" Malaysia's best shooter will however not be competing in the 50m competition, even though she achieved the qualifying marks. "Yeah, I cannot do a prone position with this big stomach," she said.

The accomplishments of Muslim women athletes are guaranteed to be a source of inspiration for the wider community, states David Bernstein, President of Level Playing Field and Chair of the Centre for Access to Football in Europe.

The world is watching, regardless of anyone's opinion on the matter.

The best we can hope for is that our sisters will make us proud with their excellent performances at the 2012 Olympics, because no matter how they rank in their sport, they are showing us what is possible in this decade of history.

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[wvns] US Knows Captive is Innocent

2012-05-04T23:45:00.000-05:00

How US Investigators Established that Obaidullah, an Afghan Still Held in Guantánamo, Is Innocent
Andy Worthington
29.4.12
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2012/04/29/how-us-investigators-established-that-obaidullah-an-afghan-still-held-in-guantanamo-is-innocent/

According to the US Justice Department, Obaidullah (also referred to as Obaydullah), one of 17 Afghan prisoners still held in Guantánamo, "was plainly a member of an Al-Qaeda bomb cell," even though Obaidullah himself, and his lawyers, have always contended that, like so many of the 200 or so Afghans who have been repatriated from Guantánamo over the last ten years, he was actually seized by mistake.

In February, when discussions between the US government and the Taliban were underway, regarding the possibility that five of the 17 — all apparently significant figures in the Taliban — would be transferred to Qatar as part of the peace process in Afghanistan, the New York Times picked up on Obaidullah's case, and reporter Charlie Savage recognized that, unlike the five senior Taliban figures, no one was pushing for his release, because he was "not an important enough figure to be a bargaining chip."

As Charlie Savage also reported:

It is an accident of timing that Mr. Obaidullah is at Guantánamo. One American official who was formerly involved in decisions about Afghanistan detainees said that such a "run of the mill" suspect would not have been moved to Cuba had he been captured a few years later; he probably would have been turned over to the Afghan justice system, or released if village elders took responsibility for him.

As it is, however, Obaidullah, who was just 21 or 22 years old at the time of his capture, is stuck at Guantánamo, where the supposed evidence against him — though insubstantial — saw him put forward for a trial by military commission under George W. Bush in September 2008, and led to him having his habeas corpus petition denied in September 2010. Describing the background to the case, Savage explained:

On the night of July 20, 2002, about two dozen American Special Forces soldiers raided a house in a village near Khost, Afghanistan. The unit was acting on a tip from an informant who said someone living there was hiding anti-tank mines for an insurgents' cell. They found a cache of mines buried in a field. They also found a young man named Obaidullah, who was carrying a notebook with several pages of diagrams for wiring improvised explosive devices.

However, on February 8 this year, Obaidullah's military defense lawyers filed a declaration in court, seeking to revive his habeas petition, after an investigation in Afghanistan, involving discussions with village elders, neighbors and family members, "corroborated crucial aspects of the benign explanations offered by Mr. Obaidullah." Maj. Derek A. Poteet of the Marines, one of his military lawyers, said, "With new evidence that brings into question the allegations against him, we hope we will be able to obtain a fair hearing, or that he will be sent home."

As Charlie Savage noted, when Obaidullah's habeas petition was denied, Judge Richard Leon stated that the evidence "unmistakably supports the conclusion that it is more likely than not" that he was with Al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. Savage added, "During and after his arrest, Mr. Obaidullah's accounts about the notebook and the land mines changed, and he is said to have confessed at a prison in Afghanistan that he had been part of a cell."

In Guantánamo, however, he recanted those statements, explaining that he had made false confessions, incriminating himself and another man, Karim Bostan, also still held, because he had been abused by US soldiers. He also insisted that the mines "were left behind by a Communist commander who lived in his family's house during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s," and said that "he had copied the diagrams [in the notebook] in August 2001 when the Taliban conscripted him to attend a military school, but that he ran away after a few days and was using the blank pages for other purposes."

Although Charlie Savage noted that intelligence analysts and Judge Leon had "concluded that Mr. Obaidullah had made up that explanation" after arriving in Guantánamo, the witnesses in Afghanistan — members of his family, and others who knew him — "corroborated his explanation," as the defense team explained, pointing out that "an American witness backed up his account of rough treatment in custody, including that he was struck in the head with a rifle," and providing a crucial explanation for a report that Judge Leon had highlighted. That involved a soldier who took part in the raid saying that "the Americans had also found a car with Taliban propaganda and dried blood in the back seat," and also reporting that "Mr. Obaidullah and a business partner [Karim Bostan] had been seen taking insurgents to the hospital after an accidental explosion."

As the witnesses explained, however, "two nights before the raid, Mr. Obaidullah's wife had given birth in the car while on the way to the hospital." The defense team added that he "had not volunteered that explanation about the blood" because of "a cultural taboo about discussing childbirth."

Despite this new evidence, Justice Department lawyers informed Obaidullah's legal team that the government would oppose their request that Judge Leon reverse his ruling against Obaidullah.

This is a depressing state of affairs, and in the hope of establishing Obaidullah's innocence to a wider audience, I have included below a version of the declaration submitted to the court by the investigator for Obaidullah's defense team, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Pandis, who was assigned for a year to the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel, Military Commissions, to assist on the case.

How investigations in Afghanistan established Obaidullah's innocence

In the declaration, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis explained how his assignment began on February 27, 2011, working with Obaidullah's military defense team — Lt. Col. Michael L. Acuff, Maj. Derek A. Poteet, and Capt. Jason D. Wright — and how he was "disclosing newly discovered evidence that may assist in the habeas action, resulting from witness interviews in Afghanistan and in other countries."

After stating that he is an Intelligence Officer, currently assigned to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), who has "supported operations in El Salvador, Korea, Kuwait, Bahrain, North Arabian Gulf and Afghanistan," and that, in civilian life, he is a Special Agent with the Office of Personnel Management in the Office of the Inspector General, whose investigative duties include working complex fraud investigations with the Department of Justice and United States Attorney's Office, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis explained the background to his investigation: how, in September 2008, charges were filed against Obaidullah, but, in June 2011, "the Convening Authority for military commissions dismissed Obaidullah's charges without prejudice." He added, however, that, "Despite the dismissal, our office has been told by the prosecution that this remains an active case, so the defense has continued to investigate and prepare."

As a result, in spring and summer 2011, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis "interviewed most of the US military personnel involved in 2002 in taking Obaidullah into custody," and, in November and December 2011, "traveled to Afghanistan and other countries to conduct a defense investigation," along with Maj. Poteet, and support including a translator who spoke Dari, Pashto and English. The team "conducted interviews of family-member and non-family-member witnesses with personal knowledge of matters related to this case," overcoming a number of significant obstacles to discover important new information.

As Lt. Cmdr. Pandis explained, although he was "familiar with the prior defense investigative efforts in the military commissions case" — even though "the prosecution has provided no discovery information to the defense" — this was the first time that information was "obtained from witnesses with personal knowledge about the source of the dried blood in the car, the reason the car was in the compound, and the existence of a non-family-member eyewitness to landmines present on the compound during the Soviet war of the same type as some of those found in 2002 when Obaidullah was taken into custody." As he also explained, "Previously this information and evidence was not reasonably available due to the extraordinary difficulties in conducting investigations in an overseas combat area," as well as cultural difficulties, which will be discussed in further detail below.

In examining why there was a car in the compound, and why there was dried blood in the car, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis referred to the habeas ruling in October 2010, in which there was mention of an intelligence report indicating that Obaidullah "was seen taking injured individuals from the scene of an allegedly premature IED explosion." Investigating this claim, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis stated that he was "familiar with an intelligence report relevant to this allegation," which he believed to be "the primary report about this incident," and that he had also "interviewed key US personnel who would have been involved in making statements related to this allegation." He also noted that he had "read a redacted, unclassified and publicly-released version of a Report of Investigative Activity from the Karim Bostan habeas case," which indicated that the second document was written by one US person "taking a statement from another US person."

In investigating whether Obaidullah and Karim were "seen," or "visually identified at the time by the person who made the original report of persons ferrying wounded individuals," Lt. Cmdr. Pandis explained that a key US witness "with personal knowledge" told him that "he made the inference that Obaidullah may have been one of the people described in the earlier report after seeing the blood in the vehicle found at the compound."

This "inference" is extremely important, as there is no other actual evidence. Lt. Cmdr. Pandis noted that the document from Karim Bostan's case only "refers to a previous incident," and, moreover, does not even "purport to be the original report of that incident," and, without disclosing classified information, he explained, "I have reviewed what I believe to be the original report of the allegation that persons were seen ferrying wounded individuals from an accidental IED explosion," and added, "my investigation has given me no reason to believe that Obaidullah or any other particular person was actually visually identified at the time of the report about injured persons being ferried in a vehicle. Instead, my investigation leads me to believe that the intelligence was unintentionally mischaracterized by individuals and documents describing it to the District Court."

Whether unintentional or not, this mistake has played a major part in losing Obaidullah the last ten years of his life, as has a misunderstanding about why there was a car in his compound, and what the source of the dried blood was.

As Lt. Cmdr. Pandis explained, "Publicly-released unclassified government documents discuss the alleged presence of dried blood residue in one of the two automobiles that was parked in the courtyard of Obaidullah's family compound on the night Obaidullah and two of his cousins were taken into custody." Seeking to "learn the source of the alleged blood residue and whether this could have been some substance other than blood, or other than human blood," and to "learn more about the ownership and lineage of the vehicles," Lt. Cmdr. Pandis discovered, from "Afghan witnesses with personal knowledge," that "the car containing blood stains was a Toyota Corolla hatchback borrowed, only days before Obaidullah's arrest, for the express purpose of taking Obaidullah's wife to the hospital for the birth of their first child, a daughter."

This was difficult to discover, primarily because, as Lt. Cmdr. Pandis explained, "there is a strong cultural taboo against speaking about a woman being in labor and the process of childbirth, in Afghanistan and particularly in Pashtun tribal culture." He added, "I was told that Pashtun women may speak about such things among themselves, but that they would not speak about such things to males, and never to males outside the family. I came to understand that it is considered shameful for someone outside of one's family to have knowledge of such things." As a result, "It was difficult to get any witnesses to discuss the subject of childbirth, even generally. Witnesses outside the family expressed embarrassment at questions about another man's child being born."

Having managed to secure witnesses, however, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis discovered a whole other narrative about Obaidullah, which was not previously known, and which not only seems to exonerate Obaidullah, but also to add a depressing angle to his ongoing detention, as he was seized just after his wife gave birth to a daughter he has not seen since the first few days of her life, who is now nearly ten years old.

As Lt. Cmdr. Pandis explained:

According to family-member witnesses with personal knowledge, it is normal custom for an expectant father to move out of the home as his wife nears term in her pregnancy, and other females in the family move in to take care of the expectant mother … Obaidullah had done so although he still lived in the family compound, and Obaidullah's wife began to experience labor on a night about two days before the US military raid which resulted in Obaidullah's capture. Family members took Obaidullah's wife in the Toyota Corolla which had been borrowed for that purpose, and began the drive toward the hospital in the city of Khost, about six kilometers east. Obaidullah was not in the vehicle …

[A]t this time in July 2002, militia checkpoints were prevalent on roads in this area. The family was required to stop at each checkpoint, wait for the cars in front of them to go through, and then explain their situation. Their progress driving Obaidullah's wife to the hospital was significantly impeded by the many militia checkpoints along the road. Eventually, their trip was taking so long that they had to pull off to the side of the road because the infant was being born … Obaidullah's wife gave birth in the back of the Toyota Corolla hatchback, with the seat folded down, off the side of the road near the city of Khost, Afghanistan in July 2002. Family members stated that the blood stains and residue resulted from the child's birth inside the Toyota Corolla … [A]fter the daughter was born, the family members continued on to the hospital for an examination but the hospital did not keep birth or examination records at this time in 2002.

To discover more, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis "interviewed the owner of the other vehicle that was parked in the compound on the night Obaidullah was taken into custody, who stated that he never allowed others to drive his car, and that he would not have allowed Obaidullah's family to borrow his car." He said that he "stated that Obaidullah's family allowed him to park his car in their courtyard because he had no access to the road from his own house."

Furthermore, other witnesses "with personal knowledge" of the events explained that, "on the same night that Obaidullah was taken into custody, the US forces seized the Toyota Corolla with blood stains from the courtyard," and that, although "family members tried to recover the Toyota Corolla which had been borrowed to transport Obaidullah's wife," they "were unable even to learn the ultimate outcome or disposition of the car." As a result, "the owner of the car contacted the family seeking reimbursement for the value of the car," and although the family "tried to earn enough money to pay for the seized car for several years," they "eventually had to sell off part of their farm in order to pay for the seized car."

Filling in blanks in the story, US personnel told Lt. Cmdr. Pandis that "the car containing blood stains was kept for several weeks at a nearby base," but "was eventually given by the US forces to the local Afghan militia forces which had been working with them." Lt. Cmdr. Pandis added that he had "found no indication that samples of the blood residue were preserved," and that, because the current location of the car is unknown," he had "not been able to find a way to obtain any sample of the blood stains for scientific testing."

In addition, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis noted that cars remarkably similar to the one used for Obaidullah's wife's — white Toyota Corollas and white-and-yellow Toyota Corollas — were "by far the most common type of car in Khost," comprising "fifty percent or greater of the vehicles in Khost province." As a result, it was "not surprising that the vehicle seized from the compound with this color scheme would match a general description of a vehicle involved in another incident or report."

Ironically, witnesses told Lt. Cmdr. Pandis that "Obaidullah had never owned a car, and that they had never seen a Toyota Corolla parked in the compound before the birth of Obaidullah's daughter." They also explained that "Obaidullah had very limited driving experience," and family members "stated that Obaidullah's main driving experience was operating a tractor while farming," all of which made it even less likely that he "would have been involved in any other incident involving him driving a car."

Reporting about other difficulties in getting villagers to talk, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis noted that people were "extremely reluctant to talk about who may have provided information leading to the raid on the Obaidullah compound because of concerns over potential feuds that could erupt between relatives of the people involved if accusations were made." Nevertheless, he eventually ascertained, from "individuals who had lived in Obaidullah's village," that two men who were not from the village but "had lived there for a period," were "rumored to have sold false information to Americans." He was also told that these two men later disappeared and their whereabouts were unknown.

Investigating other allegations, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis noted that publicly-released unclassified government documents alleged that there was "an association between Obaidullah and Al-Qaeda and/or Taliban forces," although family members and other witnesses insisted that Obaidullah had not associated with Al- Qaeda, and had only had anything to do with Taliban members "for the few days he was forcibly conscripted to attend a Taliban training school."

Some witnesses "described the process by which the Taliban conscripted young men to train to fight Massood's forces [the Northern Alliance forces of Ahmad Shah Mahsood, assassinated two days before the 9/11 attacks]." According to these witnesses, "the Taliban leadership in the province stated how many men were needed, and then tribal leaders designated which villages were responsible for providing how many conscripts. Village elders would then designate which young men were to be conscripted." The witnesses added, "A wealthy family could pay another person to attend instead," but "Obaidullah's family was not wealthy, so Obaidullah was forced to go to training at the location of the Khost Mechanical School." However, family members "stated that Obaidullah fled from that school and hid from the Taliban after attending only a few days."

Further refuting claims of an association with Al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, witnesses stated that "no such fighters were present" in the compound, and that, anyway, "given the size, layout and number of occupants of the family compound and adjoining compounds, the presence of Al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters could not have gone unnoticed."

Witnesses also explained the origin of the landmines that played a major part in the allegations against Obaidullah. As Lt. Cmdr. Pandis stated:

[D]uring the 1980s Soviet war a communist official named Ali Jan used the Obaidullah family compound as his residence and used the nearby high school as his garrison headquarters. Obaidullah and most of his family were refugees in Pakistan during this time. [One witness] stated that he continued to live in the area during the Soviet war and stated that he was in the Obaidullah family compound on occasion when it was used by Ali Jan. This witness stated that he personally witnessed landmines and other munitions present in the compound during this time. I showed him a photograph, obtained during our independent defense investigation, which US personnel had previously told us showed the landmines seized on the night Obaidullah was taken into custody. Without describing the photograph to him I asked if he recognized any of the items present. The witness positively identified one of the types of landmines from the photograph as being a type of landmine he recalls seeing in the compound when Ali Jan lived there. This statement is consistent with statements that the landmines were left over from the Soviet war and had been buried by the family when they returned to their home after that war.

In conclusion, backing up Obaidullah's claims that he had made false statements after being abused by US forces, Lt. Cmdr. Pandis stated that he had interviewed US and Afghan witnesses, who had confirmed that "Obaidullah was subjected to sleep deprivation and was physically abused while at FOB Chapman." According to US witnesses, "one service member was punished for having another service member photograph him as he struck Obaidullah in the head with a rifle, and the camera was destroyed by US personnel."

Lt. Cmdr. Pandis added that he had learned from Afghan witnesses, and through other investigative efforts, that "detainees at Bagram during this period in 2002, including Obaidullah, were subjected to extraordinarily coercive measures which cause me to question the reliability of resulting statements."

This is certainly true, and it only sets the seal on a terribly sad story — involving mistaken inferences, cultural taboos and false confessions extracted through abusive means — that has unjustly deprived Obaidullah of his freedom for the last ten years, and that ought to be brought to an end through his immediate release to Afghanistan.

Note: On April 24, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Obaidullah's case, as reported here by Lawfare.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, "The Complete Guantánamo Files," a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo" (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new "Close Guantánamo campaign," and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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[wvns] Arabs Debate the War on Women

2012-05-04T23:43:00.000-05:00

Far from constituting a solution, this type of one-dimensional reductionism and stereotyping is one of the problems facing Arab women.

Ikhwanweb's Response to Mona ElTahawy's 'Why Do They Hate Us' Article
Thursday, April 26,2012 08:27
by Sondos Asem IkhwanWeb
http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=29926

*This article was originally published on Foreign Policy magazine's roundtable "Debating the War on Women"

When I marched to Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, I was driven by the indignities and suffering endured by all Egyptians, men and women, from decades of corrupt and oppressive rule. Despite the oppression, I believed in my power to effect change. I believed then and I believe now that to bring about that change, we need lots of determination and hard work.

Although I share many of her concerns, I respectfully disagree with Mona Eltahawy's simplistic assertion that the plight of women in the Arab world is the result of being hated by the rest of society -- more specifically, by men, and even more so by newly elected Islamists. In taking issue with Islamists' view of women, Eltahawy uses a combination of hyperbole and perhaps benign neglect to highlight offensive stances and bury more women-centered ones. Far from constituting a solution, this type of one-dimensional reductionism and stereotyping is one of the problems facing Arab women. Let's be clear: There is misogyny in the Arab world. But if we want progress for Arab women, we must hack at the roots of evil, not at its branches.

Indeed, the status of women is a serious challenge in post-revolutionary Egypt. Many Egyptian women suffer from discrimination both in society and in their homes. Some 5 million Egyptian women are the sole breadwinners for their families. Female genital mutilation (FGM) remains a widespread practice in rural areas and Upper Egypt. Sexual harassment abounds on Egyptian streets, and the list goes on. To address these issues, however, we ought to look at the bigger picture: More than 20 percent of young people remain jobless, and almost half of them are women. Illiteracy and poverty -- the twin drivers of discrimination -- are widespread: 20 percent of Egyptians are illiterate, and more than 40 percent live on less than $2 per day.

But how do we move forward? Based on these alarming figures, the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), has devised a holistic plan to advance women's standing in Egyptian society. First, we acknowledge that Egypt needs a cultural revolution alongside the political one. There are many practices -- not just FGM -- that must be eradicated outright, but railing against such practices will not make them disappear. Instead, what we need are sustained, nationwide campaigns to raise awareness and dissociate religion from repression of women. We also recognize that, in some cases, we cannot wait for educational efforts to take root. Both the legislative and executive branches of the state must play an immediate role. Legislation criminalizing harassment of and assaults against women must be passed, while ensuring that these measures are implemented by strict rule of law.

As a party that adopts Islam as its reference, we believe that our civil-society outreach can be as effective as legislative and executive avenues. Contrary to the underlying argument in Eltahawy's article, we believe that religion can be the main driver for renouncing violence and the repression of women. Islam empowers women both in their households and in society. Men and women are both entitled to the same level of respect, social status, and protection under the law.

Beyond the political and cultural realms, there is one other important plank in the struggle to advance the status of women. The FJP's platform and our flagship Nahda (Renaissance) Project both encourage and support female entrepreneurship while offering adequate health insurance to female breadwinners. Economic security for women is as essential as political and cultural change. Moreover, we are seeking to change the negative perception of women's political participation by promoting the active participation of women in politics and introducing successful female role models that will help counter stereotypes.

While ensuring that women have a vibrant role in society, the FJP is also concerned with making sure that families are supported and nurtured. However much people wish to be different, women remain the primary driver of family life. In many cases, they have to put in a great deal of effort both at home and at work. FJP will adopt a set of family-centered policies that enable women to support their family lives. We will not shy away from the value we place on family life nor will we accept that women who choose to focus on their families are somehow making an inferior choice.

A democratic Egypt in which the citizenry are informed and in which the rule of law is supreme will ensure the success of these programs and others, leading to the welfare of all society, with women as its backbone. Attributing women's suffering in our region to misogyny and hatred of women is overly simplistic and does nothing to help women in their struggle for dignity and justice.

Sondos Asem is senior editor of the Muslim Brotherhood's official English-language website Ikhwanweb.com and its Twitter account @Ikhwanweb. She is also a member of the Freedom and Justice Party's foreign relations committee. Follow her on Twitter @SondosAsem.

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[wvns] A Different Kind of Prom

2012-05-04T23:40:00.000-05:00

This Prom Has Everything, Except for Boys
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
May 1, 2012
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/us/hamtramck-high-holds-all-girl-prom.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

A Different Kind of Prom: When religious beliefs keep some of the girls at Hamtramck High School from an important senior function, they throw a sparkly and very pink alternative.

[photo]

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — The prom countdown was nearly complete, the do-it-yourself Greek columns, pink and white tulle bows and plastic flutes with the "Once Upon a Dream" logo awaiting the evening of evenings.

But as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, her one-shoulder lavender gown matching the elaborate hijab that framed her face in a cascade of flowers — a style learned on YouTube — Tharima Ahmed knew that what lay ahead was more than simply a prom.

As organizer of Hamtramck High School's first all-girl prom, which conforms to religious beliefs forbidding dating, dancing with boys or appearing without a head scarf in front of males, Tharima, 17, was forging a new rite of passage for every teenage Muslim girl who had ever spent prom night at home, wistfully watching the limousines roll by.

"Hi, guys — I mean girls!" Tharima, a Bangladeshi-American, exuded into the microphone as 100 girls — Yemeni-American, Polish-American, Palestinian-American, Bosnian-American and African-American — began pouring into the hall on Bangladesh Avenue.

This was prom, Hamtramck-style: the dense scrappy working-class city of 22,500 encircled by Detroit, once predominantly German and Polish, has become one of the most diverse small cities in America. Its new soul lay in the music playlist embedded in Rukeih Malik's iPhone: Lady Gaga, Cobra Starship, the Belgrade-born singer Ana Kokic and The Bilz, a Canadian-South Asian band, singing "2 Step Bhangra."

In this season of wobbly heels and cleavage, the bittersweet transformation of teenagers in jeans and T-shirts into elegant adults barely recognizable to their friends is an anticipated tradition.

But at the all-girl prom, there were double double-takes, as some of Tharima's classmates, normally concealed in a chrysalis of hijab and abaya, the traditional Muslim cloak, literally let their hair down in public for the first time.

Eman Ashabi, a Yemeni-American who helped organize the event, arrived in a ruffled pink gown, her black hair falling in perfect waves, thanks to a curling iron. Like many here, she stunned her friends.

"It's `Oh my god!' " said Simone Alhagri, a Yemeni-American junior who was wearing a tight shirred dress. "This is how you look underneath!"

The dance was the denouement of seven months of feverish planning in which a committee raised $2,500, mostly through bake sales. Ignoring the naysayers who could not imagine anyone coming to a prom without boys, Tharima and her friends approached their task systematically, taking a survey of all the girls at Hamtramck High. They found that 65 percent were not able to attend the coed prom because of cultural and religious beliefs. After discussion, the school supported the student-driven alternative.

In addition to Muslim girls (and alumnae who never got the opportunity), non-Muslim students wanted to go, too. "I want to support all my girls," said Sylwia Stanko, who was born in Poland and whose friends are mostly Bengali-American or Arab-American. "I know how important it is to them."

The prom promised "music all night, except during dinner and five minutes for prayer." A former Knights of Columbus hall was transformed into princess-pink perfection.

Tharima placed a huge order for decorations with PromNite.com, including a light-up fountain to which the girls added pink food coloring.

Tharima had dreamed of prom night since her freshman year, squirreling away photographs of ballrooms and ads for tiaras.

As Tharima prepared for her big night, her mother, Roushanara Ahmed, recalled the fancy pink sari she wore to an all-girls party in what is now Bangladesh. "I was in high school," she said, her voice low, eyes softening. "I know her feelings."

Like the prom, the city of Hamtramck is a mixer of a different kind. Along Joseph Campau Street, a monumental statue of Pope John Paul II presides over Pope Park, with its festive mural of Krakow. A poster for the television program "Bosnian Idol" is displayed in the Albanian Euro Mini Mart, known for homemade yogurt and burek, traditional spinach and meat pies. During her English class, Tharima can hear the call to prayer over loudspeakers from the Islah Islamic Center a few blocks from school.

Diversity was hard-won: The mosque, one of five in the city, was the subject of controversy in 2004, when some people strenuously objected to the city's decision to allow it to broadcast prayers five times a day; the city ultimately prevailed, regulating the hours when the call may be sounded.

In sharp contrast to earlier immigrants, drawn by the once-thriving auto industry, a quarter of the residents now live below the federal poverty level.

"People here have to work out their difficulties," said Mayor Karen Majewski, an ethnic historian and Hungarian folk dancer. "There's no opportunity to hide in your cul-de-sac."

At Hamtramck High, which has 900 students, many non-Muslims respectfully tuck away their food and water bottles during Ramadan. The prom reflects a broad cultural shift. "Twenty years ago, parents used to pull fifth-grade girls out of school for arranged marriages," said Chris Bindas, a library aide who brought chocolate-dipped cream puffs to the prom. "Now these same girls are going to college" — albeit a college close to home, where the girls will continue to live with their parents.

Tharima, who plans to work while attending Wayne State University in Detroit, has applied for 27 scholarships, saving all the rejection letters.

"These are my weaknesses," she said of her financial struggles. "But they are also my strengths."

On Saturday night, when the strobe lights started, throwing jewels of light around the room, the shy comments of "Oh, you look gorgeous!" and "Ooh, I love your shoes!" gave way to the sheer joy of music, the girls fist-pumping in unison, some discarding their heels and some hugging one another in disbelief.

Shortly before 8, it was time for prayer, the spaghetti straps and empire waists disappearing under hijabs and abayas, a prayer rug taking its place on the dance floor.

Afterward, when the prom royalty was announced, it was no surprise — except to her — that Tharima was pronounced the senior queen, a tiara ceremoniously placed atop her hijab. Amid whoops and shrieks, she struggled to maintain her composure. Her mascara was not so lucky.

Then the hall erupted with a song by the band 3alawah, and the girls performed a debka, a Middle Eastern circle dance. Everyone held hands, snaking around the dessert buffet and columns decorated with artificial wisteria.

The jubilant energy of 100 young women feeling victorious and beautiful filled the room.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 1, 2012

An earlier version of this article misidentified a student who wore a ruffled pink gown to the prom. She is Eman Ashabi, not Maha al-Shauweyh.

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[wvns] US resumes drone killings in Pakistan

2012-05-04T23:37:00.000-05:00

US resumes drone killings in Pakistan
By Bill Van Auken
May 1, 2012
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m87709&fb=1

Washington ended a month-long pause in its campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas Sunday, killing four "suspected militants" in North Waziristan and provoking a formal protest from the government in Islamabad.

The strike by the remotely piloted aircraft on Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, part of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, expressed Washington's unconcealed contempt for the Pakistani government, which had publicly conditioned a resumption of its full collaboration in the so-called AfPak war on a halt to the drone attacks.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry issued a formal statement saying that it "strongly condemns the US drone attack that occurred in North Waziristan today." The statement continued: "Such attacks are in total contravention of international law and established norms of interstate relations. The Government of Pakistan has consistently maintained that drone attacks are violative of its territorial integrity and sovereignty. The matter will be taken up through diplomatic channels both in Islamabad and Washington."

The drone strike comes on the heels of last week's negotiations in Islamabad between the Pakistani government and a US team led by US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman.

Pakistani officials had indicated Sunday that a deal was in the works in which Pakistan would agree to reopen its borders to the transport of materiel for the US-led occupation troops in Afghanistan in return for the payment of some $1.1 billion in withheld coalition support funds, money which Washington and its allies had agreed to pay Islamabad for expenses incurred in counterinsurgency operations in the border region. No payments have been made since mid-2010.

The deal is of decisive importance for Washington, given that the route from Pakistani seaports to Afghanistan is far less costly than the alternative it has pursued through Central Asia to the north. Moreover, given the carrying through of a scheduled drawdown of large numbers of US and NATO troops, it will be next to impossible to ship out the huge quantities of vehicles, heavy weapons and other equipment that have been amassed in Afghanistan over more than a decade of war without access to the Pakistani supply routes.

One stumbling block in the negotiations was reportedly Islamabad's demand that Washington issue an unconditional apology for the slaying last November of 24 Pakistani troops in strikes by US attack helicopters and fighter jets against a border post inside Pakistan.

The Pentagon's story is that the incident was a result of "friendly fire," a mistaken clash in which both sides bore blame. Pakistan's military has categorically rejected this account. In any case, the US military is strongly opposed to issuing any apology, holding Pakistan responsible for harboring forces fighting the US occupation of Afghanistan, in particular the so-called Haqqani network, which was blamed for the coordinated attacks in the center of Kabul and other areas on April 15.

The Obama White House is not about to cross the Pentagon on such an issue in an election year. Moreover, an apology would cut across the right-wing re-election campaign being waged by the Democratic Party, which is extolling the US Seal assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan a year ago and suggesting that Obama is more militarily aggressive than his presumptive Republican rival Mitt Romney.

According to some reports, the US and Pakistan were prepared to work out some sort of face-saving statement that would fall considerably short of the apology, which had been set as part of the "terms of engagement" in a resolution approved by the Pakistani parliament last month.

The same resolution demanded an immediate halt to the drone strikes. Sunday's attack was the first on a target inside Pakistan since March 30. While Grossman left Pakistan Friday night with no agreement, Pakistani officials reported that a team of 10 US officials from the State and Treasury departments, the Pentagon and other agencies had remained in Islamabad to iron out an deal.

The latest drone strike, however, has made it more difficult to reach a bargain with Washington. The brazen attacks on Pakistani soil and the resulting loss of civilian lives has provoked widespread anger in Pakistan, which the country's ruling elite has had to take into account, even as the government has in the past collaborated with the drone campaign, going so far as to provide the CIA with a base inside Pakistan for the pilotless aircraft.

The Washington Post quoted an unnamed Pakistani government official as saying, "When a duly elected democratic Parliament says three times not to do this, and the US keeps doing it, it undermines democracy." In reality, what it undermines is the credibility of the government and its attempt to mask its continued dependence upon US imperialism, which treats it as a neocolonial subject.

The Associated Press quoted unnamed American officials as stating that Washington has "no intention of stopping the covert drone program in Pakistan."

The US intransigence on both the drone attacks and the apology for the November massacre of Pakistani troops appears likely to lead at least to a delay in any reopening of Pakistani supply routes to Afghanistan. It may also result in Pakistan boycotting a NATO summit meeting to be held later this month in Chicago, centering on future operations in Afghanistan.

The strike on Pakistan came on the same day that White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan issued an unusual public defense of the CIA's drone missile attacks in various parts of the globe. While the drone campaigns have been widely reported in the media and are no secret in the countries where Hellfire missiles are claiming their victims, the official US position has been that it is a covert program, not to be officially acknowledged.

Appearing in Sunday television news interviews, followed by a Monday speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Brennan claimed that the extra-territorial and extra-judicial assassinations by drone attacks were both legal and effective.

"The constitution empowers the president to protect the nation from any imminent threat of attack," Brennan said in the Monday speech. "It is hard to imagine a tool that can better minimize the risk to civilians than remotely piloted aircraft."

The claim that these drone strikes are aimed at protecting the US from "imminent threat of attack" is a lie. As US officials acknowledged, Sunday's attack in Pakistan was directed at elements who were allegedly preparing not to attack the US, but rather to resist the US military occupation of Afghanistan.

In Yemen, they are aimed against armed opponents of the US-backed regime. The White House last month approved a CIA request for permission to stage so-called "signature strikes" in which targets may be selected on the basis of "suspicious activity" with no knowledge of who is being killed.

While extolling the "laser-like" precision of drone strikes, Brennan said that, "Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population." While acknowledging that "innocent civilians have been killed in these strikes," he claimed that such deaths are "exceedingly rare, but it has happened. When it does, it pains us and we regret it deeply, as we do any time innocents are killed in war."

He added, "Sometimes you have to take a life to save lives."

There have been some 3,000 Pakistanis killed in drone attacks, of whom only 170 have been identified as known "militants".

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[wvns] Iraq’s Radiation: Not Going Away

2012-05-04T23:35:00.000-05:00

Iraq's Radiation: Not Going Away
May 3, 2012
By Karin Friedemann, TMO
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=10977

A depleted Uranium shell

According to Al Jazeera, the Pentagon used more than 300 tons of depleted uranium in Iraq in 1991. In 2003, the US military used more than 1,000 tons. In 2010, depleted uranium contamination was reported to be the highest on record, yet by 2012 continuing documentation has still not resulted in any action by the US or any other responsible party towards environmental clean-up.

An April 13, 2012 article by Karlos Zurutuza published by Global Research quotes hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi saying:
"At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don't want to talk. Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone. It's all too shameful for them."

Relief organizations such as LIFE for Relief and Development escorted several US Congressmen on a tour of Iraqi hospitals in 2002, which often had no electricity nor sterile equipment, where women too weak from hunger to give birth had to receive C-sections by candlelight without anesthetic on beds without sheets. The horror show often reached its climax when the baby was born looking grotesque. When the sympathetic Congresspeople spoke up, the US government arrested relief workers and peace activists from several organizations for the crime of breaking US sanctions.

Back then, there was already documentation of Iraqi babies being born with bizarre deformations such as hands growing out of shoulders without arms, which were also found to occur in the offspring of US veterans who had served in Iraq. None of this came as a surprise to the US Army.
In a report published in 1990, before Operation Desert Storm, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) reported that:
"Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer," and
"Aerosol DU exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects."

None of this is new information, but a recent photo circulated on Facebook shows infant deformations in Iraq that are so horrific that I was asked to stop "traumatizing" my friends after I posted the photo.
Many babies born dead in Iraq today do not even resemble a human being. My Facebook friend told me she doesn't want to see it and doesn't want to think about it ever again. This was the first time she had ever heard of this problem.

My outrage, if fully expressed, would be a howling scream filling every corner of the earth. How dare anyone do this to women? Or refuse to care? How come, after over 20 years, no one is working to fix this problem? I have lost so many friends over the years, trying to educate them, and yet our popular culture continues to condemn Nazi Germans as the worst people who ever lived, because they went about their normal lives, oblivious to the atrocities of their government. The Nazis are accused of having performed scientific experiments on humans. Yet when I spoke up in college German history class, saying, "You ask, `How could they?' How could you?" I just received a roomful of blank stares.

After WWII, the victorious party (America) took responsibility for rebuilding the defeated party (Germany). This was considered vital for preserving the world economy. Projected temperature for Wednesday in Baghdad is 103 degrees. Before we discuss universal health care for Americans, we need to discuss the clean-up of Iraq.

The radioactivity situation in Iraq is much worse than in Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each atomic bomb created a huge blast that killed over 100,000 people within eight weeks, one third of them dying within one day. Infants conceived within that eight week period were found with birth defects but no genetic damage was discovered after the blasts.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, an exhaustive Japanese study, published in English in 1981 claims that most of the radioactive debris was carried off in the mushroom cloud and not embedded in the earth. By contrast, the relatively low-level radiation caused by the use of depleted uranium artillery and tanks has become part of the air, rain and dust, sickening the Iraqi people without killing them immediately. Because the victims die one at a time, there are no headline news stories. Yet even in the early 1990's there were reports of farmers' fields strewn with bullets where nothing would grow, and children dying after playing with bullet casings. Relief organizations' concerns were casually dismissed by Hillary Clinton at a meeting during her husband's presidency. Like Madeleine Albright, she felt that the deaths of Iraqi children were "worth it."

The way the US treats Iraqi people is worse than they treated the Black slaves, who at least were considered useful. The US has intentionally destroyed the future of more than one country. This is why getting our government to make the reparations necessary for a true peace will be difficult. The good news is that we now have Facebook, Twitter, and alternative news websites to bring the horrible news to people's bedrooms and living rooms. In the 1990's, political activists had to rely on subscription-only email lists and photocopied flyers. We now have the technology to go beyond preaching to the choir.
Many of us are exhausted from the relentlessness of international news reports of evil in the world. After subjecting ourselves to twenty or more years of sleepless nights, some of us are ready to say, "I tried," and hand the heavy responsibility of knowledge to the next generation. Yet, our children cannot save the world without our guidance.

The problem of radioactive contamination is not going to go away by itself. Those who are interested in scientific experiments should embrace the very real challenge of cleaning up Iraq's depleted uranium. It's something no human generation has ever had to do before, and will require some very smart thinking individuals to come up with a plan.

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[wvns] Americans Need the Truth About 9/11

2011-09-13T22:48:00.000-05:00

Americans Need the Truth About 9/11
by Eric Margolis
September 13, 2011
http://lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis258.html

We Americans become like the moribund Hapsburg Empire which was said to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

Watching 9/11 commemorations, which have by now become an annual religious-political event, reminds us of this old adage.

One of the biggest tragedies within the tragedy of 9/11 is that the nation has not learned the real lesson of 9/11 – the reason why the 19 suicide hijackers attacked New York and Washington.

Before this attack, the hijacker's ringleaders made clear their goal was to punish the United States for occupying the holy land of Saudi Arabia and for supporting Israel's repression of the Palestinians.

A subtext of the deadly operation was to make America experience some of the suffering and damage it had long inflicted on the Mideast.

In short, the motive for the assault was entirely political. But the Bush administration and then Congress were unable or unwilling to accept the fact that America's Mideast policies were the cause of the attacks. The US media cowered from discussing the true reasons for the attack as a third-rail that had to be avoided.

Instead, 9/11 was spun by the White House and a remarkably tame media into an assault on America by crazed Muslim fanatics who hated, as President Bush said, our freedoms, values, religion and way of life. Islam was to blame.

This message reverberated through the US media and government. Christian and some Jewish fundamentalist groups amplified the theme that Islam is a menace. Pundits opined that Islam was inherently and dangerously flawed, a religion that preached violence and sought world domination.

The lurid proclamations of Osama bin Laden served as a convenient, perfectly timed proof of the wickedness and danger of Islam. His tiny organization of no more than 300 men, as this writer saw firsthand, had been devoted to fighting the Afghan Communists, suddenly morphed into a mortal danger for the United States.

Al-Qaida was vastly exaggerated into a worldwide menace. Housewives in Peoria, Illinois, voted for George Bush because they feared Osama bin Laden was about to come and snatch away their children. Paranoia gripped the United States and made it do terrible things that violated its own laws, ethics and values.

Muslims under our mattress replaced the old bogeyman of the 1950's, reds under our beds.

When Bush declared a "crusade" against terrorism, he really meant it. Like all crusades, this ostensibly religious mission quickly became a scramble for plunder – in this case, Iraq's vast troves of oil and gas.

Thanks to Washington's anti-Islamic spin over 9/11, Americans were able to steep themselves in righteous indignation and victimhood, free of any inconvenient questions that their policies in the Muslim world may have contributed to the 9/11 attacks.

The British used to call such attacks, "the cost of empire." But Americans were simply not aware their nation had an empire. This writer calls it the "American Raj."

Blaming fanatical Muslims for 9/11 may have been a tactical success for the Bush White House. But in the longer run, laying off the blame on Islam has proved strategically disastrous for the US and just as dishonest as blaming World War II on Christianity.

Poll after poll is now showing that a majority in Muslim nations, even so-called "moderate" ones like Egypt, Indonesia and Morocco, mistakenly believe the US is out to destroy Islam.

The fire and brimstone anti-Muslim hate fulminations of mountebanks like Rev. Hagee, Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh are amplified at full volume across the Muslim world.

Pakistanis now regard the United States as their nation's leading enemy. Old foe India has fallen into second place. Anti-Americanism is now raging across the Muslim world. The next explosion will come in long-repressed Egypt.

Washington has fallen into Osama bin Laden's last and deepest trap. First, two wars that have so far cost up to $4 trillion and thousands of US military casualties. Next, the undermining of the US economy by reckless deficit spending on the military and intelligence. Under Bush, and now Obama, the runaway deficit has reached an astounding $1.4 trillion.

Finally, the so-called "war on terror," that has earned America the searing hatred of much of the Muslim world.

Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

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[wvns] Israeli High Court to reverse Nakba Law

2011-09-13T22:40:00.000-05:00

Palestinian rights group submits petition to Israeli High Court to reverse "Nakba Law"
http://electronicintifada.net/node/9911

Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel has submitted a petition to the Israeli High Court demanding that the government overturn its recent decision to criminalize commemoration of the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians before, during and after Israel declared itself a state in 1948.

Every 15 May, Palestinians all over the world — inside the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, those who hold Israeli citizenship, those in refugee camps outside Palestine, and millions more in the global diaspora — hold commemorative events and protests to remember and reflect on their collective history since the purging began more than six decades ago.

In an article in The Electronic Intifada in March, Jillian Kestler-D'Amours reported — just after the so-called "Nakba bill" was passed in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) — that the Israeli government would "deny funding to any organization, institution or municipality that commemorates the founding of the Israeli state as a day of mourning." The Israeli Finance Minister would be the one charged with investigating and slapping fines on Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and civil society organizations taking part in Nakba day commemorations.

Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported this morning that:

Adalah and the Union for Human rights submitted the petition along with the parents of students from a mixed Arab and Jewish school, a non profit alumni organization for former students at an Arab high school in Haifa and Professor Oren Yiftahel from Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva.

The petition claims that the Nakba Law will unjustly permit Israeli authorities to fine individuals for holding events commemorating the Nakba not only on Israel Independence Day, but throughout the year as well.

The drafters of the petition claim that the law is an infringement upon citizens' legal rights, compromising individuals' political, academic and artistic freedoms. They added that the law detracts from basic human entitlement to equality, education, and employment as well.

The petitioners' major allegation is that the law will harm the basic rights of Israel's Arab minority, and may detract from the budgets of many public institutions including cultural and education facilities, as well as Arab municipalities throughout Israel.

Those who submitted the petition have demanded that the Knesset, and the Finance Minister, suspend implementation of the bill until it rules on the petition. Members of the Knesset who are opposed to the Nakba Law have denounced it as a racist attack on Palestinian identity and heritage.

Haaretz continued:

MK Afu Aghbaria (Hadash) said … "We will continue activities marking Nakba Day with the aim of presenting the historical facts, which are not subject to interpretation when it comes to a people uprooted from its land, many of whose members were made refugees."

CONTINUED: http://electronicintifada.net/node/9911

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[wvns] Vanunu: "Revoke my Israeli citizenship"

2011-09-13T22:37:00.000-05:00

Vanunu: "Revoke my citizenship"
http://www.youtube.com/user/vanunuvmjc?feature=mhum
http://www.vanunu.com/

Morderchai Vanunu demands to apply a recently passed law and revoke his Israeli citizenship. "I have no interest in Israeli citienship, I don't want to go on living here".

To Mr. Eli Yishai, Minister of the Interior, 2 Kaplan Street, Hakirya, Jerusalem

Re: Revocation of Citizenship

I am Mordechai Vanunu, who was kidnapped in Rome on September 30, 1986, by the security services of Israel.

I was tried by the Jerusalem District Court, convicted of espionage, treason and assistance to the enemy and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment, following a newspaper interview to the London "Sunday Times" where I told of the production of materials for nuclear arms in Israel.

I have enacted the democratic principle of the public's right to know.

I have spent 18 years at the Ashkelon Prison, mostly under conditions of complete isolation. On April 21, 2004 I was released, under severe restrictions.

Seven years have passed and the restrictions are renewed again and again, every year, on the basis of the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations. Now these restrictions are about to be renewed for yet another year.

Since my release I lived for six years in East Jerusalem. Since September 2010 I have lived in Tel Aviv.

On June 1986 I have converted to Anglican Christianity.　
Recently, the Knesset passed a law authorizing the revocation of Israeli citizenship for those convicted of espionage and treason.

For 25 years I am waiting and demanding the restoration of my complete freedom.

I am asking the State of Israel to revoke my citizenship.

This wish for revocation of citizenship is neither new nor recent.

Now, however, it is supported by the new Citizenship Revocation Law, passed on March 28, 2011.

I am asking and expecting that this law be enforced to the letter, and that my citizenship be revoked here and now, under the spirit of the law.

I have no other citizenship, but I can easily get one, even during my enforced sojourn in Israel, and certainly if I leave the country.

After the treatment and "care" which I got from this country and its citizens, I cannot feel myself a wanted citizen here.

In the Israeli media and on the Israeli streets I am called "The Atomic Spy" and "A traitor", harassed and persecuted as an Enemy of the State for 25 years.

I feel myself still imprisoned, still a prisoner of war and a hostage, held by the state and the government.

After 25 years of getting various harsh penalties from the state, I would like to see an end to punishments and the realization of my basic human right to freedom.

I wish to exercise my right to the Freedom of Conscience and the Freedom of Choice, by choosing not to be a citizen of Israel.

I have no interest in Israeli citizenship, I do not want to live here.

I ask that you revoke my citizenship here and now.

I request that you set me free of Israel, since Israel does not want me nor do I want Israel.

All that I knew I told, already in 1986, to the English newspaper. I have no further confidential information.

The time has come to let me leave Israel, after 25 years of imprisonment, a full quarter of a century!

Mordechai Vanunu
(c/o Att. Avigdor Feldman, 10 Huberman Street, Tel Aviv)

Copies: The President, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, Foreign Minister and Justice Minister

http://www.youtube.com/user/vanunuvmjc?feature=mhum
http://www.vanunu.com/

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[wvns] The Libyans' Threat

2011-09-13T22:21:00.000-05:00

"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"
by Mike Whitney
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/mike-whitney/36009/the-greatest-purveyor-of-violence-in-the-world-today

The greatest threat to Libyan sovereignty and independence is the United States of America. Nothing else comes close.

Gaddafi hasn't been targeted because he's a tyrant, but because he sits on an ocean of petroleum. That's what this is all about, right? If Libya's main source of wealth was car parts or coconuts, there never would have been a war.

The notion that a leader does not have the right to put down an armed rebellion against the state is too absurd to dispute. If we apply the same standard to the demonstrations in Wisconsin, then the teachers and other union members would be entirely justified in grabbing their hunting rifles and handguns and storming the capital in Madison. Can you see how stupid this is? And yet this is pretext that's being used to wage war on Libya.

""The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government." That was true when Martin Luther King uttered those words more than 40 years ago, and it's true today. Just ask anyone who lives in Baghdad.

Sure, no one wants to talk about Iraq anymore. It's more fun to watch while some dissolute sitcom star, like Charlie Sheen, has an emotional breakdown on national TV. Or listen to the endless blabbering of some clownish real estate mogul as he claws a path to the 2012 elections. But Iraq is still front-and-center on every Arabs mind. And, it should be. It's the prime example of US foreign policy at work.

Don't worry, I won't bore you with all the stats about the 1 million killed, the 4 million displaced, the lack of electricity, clean water, hospitals, schools etc., etc., etc. You've heard it all before. But there is one clip from an article in the New York Times that I will share with you because it perfectly summarizes how life has changed for many Iraqis since the invasion. The article is titled "City Upon a Hill of Scraps: Surviving on Scavenging in Iraq". Here's an excerpt:

"At the bottom of the economy here, life revolves around that humblest of commodities, garbage.....

On a recent morning, Hamad Tarish dropped down a bag of cans and scrap metal, showing off blackened hands that rarely touched running water. For Mr. Tarish, 22, garbage is his capital. Every night around 3 a.m. he leaves his home to scavenge in a neighborhood to the south before the sanitation trucks come, hustling to avoid the police and to compete with other collectors.

In front of a stretch of makeshift cinder-block houses he threw his haul onto a scale. Seventeen pounds of aluminum cans, worth $6. A hunk of scrap metal and a pound of wire from which he had burned the rubber insulation, each good for $2. In all, $10 to buy food for himself, his wife and their two children.

For Mr. Tarish, who said he usually earned about $4 a day, it was a good harvest. Tomorrow might not be as good, he said. You could never tell. His eyes were bloodshot, his limbs hung heavy with exhaustion.
"A kilogram of meat is $15," he said. "It's impossible. I don't buy sugar for tea."

As Iraq's economy languishes, Mr. Tarish has found his livelihood in an underground economy that sustains and organizes whole neighborhoods. Around him were his fellow foot soldiers in this new marketplace — the nocturnal scavengers, the middlemen who bought the scrap for cents on the pound, the dirty horse-drawn carts bringing in more debris from more remote parts of the city. And around these were piles and piles of garbage, sorted by type and swarmed over by flies.
"People here are living on garbage and animals," said Ali Hasun, 27, a middleman, gesturing around him at a horizon of improvised houses pressed one against another as far as the eye could see — a midsize city subsisting on refuge....

Mr. Hasun and Mr. Tarish live in a vast slum named Naser City, or Victory City, one of dozens of squatter settlements that have sprung up around Baghdad since the American invasion of 2003. Naser City, one of the largest, grew exponentially through the waves of sectarian violence that displaced people from other areas, and more recently because unemployment has forced others to leave their homes. With Baghdad experiencing a housing shortage, the squats — where land is free but illegal, and housing is whatever a family can erect — are in a construction boom.

Residents of Naser City believe that as many as 500,000 people live here, but that is just guesswork. The governor of Baghdad estimates that 600,000 people live in 42 squatter encampments around the city — roughly the population of Boston. But in a country without a census, where few government agencies venture into the squats, this, too, is more belief than fact.

"Those people need to pick up garbage because there are no chances to work," said the governor, Salah Abdul-Razzaq.

Because the communities were not legal, he said, the province did not provide services like education, medical care, security, electricity, sewage and clean water. "The neighborhoods become places for criminals, thieves, terrorists, kidnappers. But we can't move them out because there are no alternatives."......(""City Upon a Hill of Scraps: Surviving on Scavenging in Iraq", John Leland, New York Times)
This is what US "liberation" looks like up-close-and-personal, a half a million people foraging through garbage dumps to feed their kids and stay alive. Isn't that worth thinking about the next time Obama beats the war drum and tries to rally the masses to action?

The United States will never atone for what it did to Iraq. There's no making up for the lives that were lost or ruined. There's no making up for the blood that was spilled.

Here's a poem by the insightful Iraqi author, Layla Anwar, who asks Americans to consider what's been done in their names and to take a fresh look at the death and destruction we've left behind. The poem is called "Flying Kites":

"Come and see our overflowing morgues and find our little ones for us...

You may find them in this corner or the other, a little hand poking out, pointing out at you...

Come and search for them in the rubble of your "surgical" air raids, you may find a little leg or a little head...pleading for your attention.

Come and see them amassed in the garbage dumps, scavenging morsels of food...

Half of them are under-nourished or dying from disease. Cholera, dysentery, infections of all sorts....

Come and see, come...." ("Flying Kites" Layla Anwar)

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[wvns] Ode to an Unfortunate Mass Murder

2011-09-13T22:03:00.000-05:00

Ode to an Unfortunate Mass Murder
Karin Friedemann
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
http://karinfriedemann.blogspot.com/2011/09/ode-to-mass-murder.html

Originally, I was not planning on writing a 9/11 article. Why not treat 9/11 the way Americans treat Hiroshima Day? Nobody cares that the US incinerated an entire city in Japan, it was not just one building. Let's be fair. On 9/11, between 2,000 and 3,000 people perished according to varying reports. Only God knows if they were innocent or not. Some of them probably beat their wives or bought lottery tickets. Anyway they were non-combatants, who are protected in war by moral standards. I knew someone who was working in the banking industry in the World Trade Center. He was a Muslim. But I never understood why he would work at a bank, let alone at America's Ribaa Center. I feel horribly for his family. No matter who bombed the World Trade Center in New York, Allah willed it though. He willed all of those people killed, the same way He willed you to lose your wallet one day. Maybe you underestimated your Zakat. Maybe your reaction of alhamdulillah will protect your future losses and gains.

Nobody who ever met Osama bin Laden ever said a bad word about him. Therefore I am inclined to disbelieve ongoing news reports that he was connected to 9/11. Just before the Americans started bombing Afghanistan, the US told the Taliban to hand over bin Laden. The Taliban said if he had committed such a crime, they would be happy to hand him over since according to Islam, the targeting of non-combatants is illegal. What was the evidence that bin Laden had committed the crime, they asked? The US refused to answer. We just mass murdered thousands of starving people for no apparent reason. Same as Iraq. The US just decided that certain people shouldn't have food.

I'm sorry my fellow travelers, but that's just Satanic. An illiterate could see this. The Salafis held the American flag high totally clueless while Shias blamed the Salafis for 9/11, also waving the American flag. Hello? Can we just get something straight? Muslims don't fight like 9/11. The WTC attack was a made-for-TV event. It was seized by all the networks to promote an agenda. They said they knew who did it within 30 seconds of the first report and yet ten years later, they have not produced a shred of evidence. Muslims don't do one-time, glamorous, perfectly photographed at every angle events!

9/11 cannot be considered as part of any jihad right or wrong, for the simple reason that it was clearly a symbolic show of smoke and flames and not an act of an ongoing war. When Muslims fight a war, they don't mess around with one-time events. If there was an Islamic Jihad in America, people would be dying every day. If there was such thing as al-Qaeda declaring war on the US the way the Taliban declared war on the Soviet Union, five to six policemen would die a day. Civilians would rarely be targeted. But the death toll would be steady, small, and relentless. Not a week would go by when the Muslims didn't hurt you so deep by targeting your men in uniform on your own soil. Muslims fight to win.

If Muslims had declared war on the US and they had truly committed 9/11, don't you think they would have capitalized on that event? They would have followed that explosion with another explosion and another one after that, if they had that much money and power. Not. The Muslims' main claim to fame is the car bomb. How come there are no car bombs going off every few days in America like in most Muslim countries? How come I got some pizza at Sbarro's no problem? Why is Boston's World Trade Center still standing?

9/11 was not committed by any extremist Muslims on an anti-American Crusade. If they were, we'd have heard about follow up explosions on 9/12, 9/13, and every week including this week just like Palestine or Pakistan just between political parties. Look at every war involving Muslims. It just goes on and on and on with agonizing detail. One person at a time is targeted and the person who shot him may or may not get away unharmed. To say that 9/11 bears any characteristics of Islamic warfare is a JOKE. At no time in history have Muslims ever created one single successful attack staged for television that ruined a nation. They never ever got all TV stations to agree who did it within 30 seconds of their grandiose measure. This is absurdity! If the Muslims could do this, why are they not doing it every week? They would have their own station just for terrorizing skittish Americans with 9/11 footage around the clock. They don't.

9/11 was a mass murder for which no perpetrator has ever been convicted. No one has ever had a fair trial and answered our questions. It has never happened. There are people on Wall Street who know why.

Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based freelance writer.

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[wvns] Police attacked Muslims at amusement park in Westchester, New York

2011-09-02T12:08:00.001-05:00

Articles from mainstream & rightwing newspapers.

'Muslims, police scuffle at Rye Playland over amusement park's head scarf ban; 15 arrests made'

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2011/08/31/2011-08-31_muslims_cops_scuffle_at_rye_playland_over_amusement_parks_head_scarf_ban.html

by Corrinne Lestch and Bill Hutchinson, New York Daily News

Rye Playland was shut down Tuesday after cops scuffled with Muslims upset that women wearing head scarves were barred from the rides, witnesses said.

Fifteen people, including three women, were charged with disorderly conduct and assault in the chaos, authorities said.

The Westchester County park was packed with Muslims celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr - the holiday marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

One woman, Entisai Ali, began arguing with cops over the amusement park's head scarf, or hijab, rule, said Dena Meawad, 18, of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The ban, which is not Muslim specific, was imposed about 3 years ago mostly to prevent hats from falling onto the tracks of roller coasters and other rides, park officials said.

"The cops started getting loud with her and she started getting loud, too. They pushed her on the ground and arrested her," Meawad said.

Her cousin, Kareem Meawad, 17, went to try to protect the woman and was beaten by cops and also arrested, she added. Her brother, Issam Meawad, 20, was pushed to the ground and taken into custody when he tried to help his cousin, she said.

"She just wanted to get on a ride. That was it," Dena Meawad said of the initial confrontation. "It's clear, this all happened because we're Muslim."

John Hodges, chief inspector of Westchester County Public Safety, insisted that police did not use excessive force.

He said up to 100 cops from surrounding departments converged on the park.

Two park rangers were injured in the melee, prompting felony assault charges against two people arrested, officials said.

The ugly incident happened just after 1 p.m. The event was organized by the Muslim American Society of New York, and attracted 3,000 Muslims from Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Westchester County.

Ali's sister, Ayman Alrabah, 24, of Brooklyn said her husband, brother and father were all tackled by cops and put into handcuffs when they tried to help her sister.

Alrabah said she was unaware of the head-scarf rule until she and her sister tried to get on the park's Dragon Coasters.

"We requested a refund and all of a sudden an argument became a riot," Alrabah said. "Cops came. They were hitting my brother, my dad. My husband was on the floor and they were handcuffing him.

She said her 4-year-old son was "traumatized" by seeing his father arrested.

"They treated us like animals, like we were nothing," Alrabah said. "They came with their dogs and sticks. We came to have fun."

'It's clear, this all happened because we're Muslim,' says Dena Meawad.

The park was closed for about two hours because of the fracas. It reopened at about 6 p.m.

Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of Westchester County Parks, said the Muslim American Society of New York was warned in advance of the rule barring head scarves on rides for safety reasons.

"Part of our rules and regulations, which we painstakingly told them over and over again, is that certain rides you cannot wear any sort of headgear," Tartaglia said. "It's a safety issue for us on rides, it could become a projectile."

Many Muslims were given refunds as they left the park disappointed.

"In this heightened state of Islamaphobia, a woman wearing a hajib is an easy target these days," said Zead Ramadan, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations - New York. "Unfortunately, this turned ugly due to a lot of miscommunication."

---------------------------------------

'Teen talks of role in Playland melee over head scarves'

http://www.lohud.com/article/20110901/NEWS02/109010375/Teen-talks-role-Playland-melee-over-head-scarves

Written by Ned P. Rauch and Rebecca Baker, The [Westchester] Journal News

[Longer video interview with Ola Salem at above website]

RYE, N.Y. — Ola Salem says it was her refusal to take off her head scarf to go on a ride that sparked Tuesday's fracas at Playland Amusement Park.

"I started the whole thing," the 17-year-old Brooklyn resident said Wednesday.

Salem and her family were among 3,000 Muslims who were participating in a promotional day at Playland to celebrate the end of Ramadan when a melee broke out among 30 to 40 people upset at enforcement of a longstanding rule.

Salem's father and 14 other people were arrested after tempers flared when Salem was told by a ride attendant she would have to remove her "headgear" — her hijab — if she wanted to get on a fast-moving ride.

"This has nothing to do with headgear," Salem recalled saying to the ride attendant. "This is my religion."

Salem took her complaint to a manager, who supported the attendant's position, telling her that the scarf could get caught in a wheel.

"Muslims wouldn't allow it to get caught," Salem said Wednesday. "It's worn low and tight."

Salem began telling other Muslim women what had happened, and, as word spread, anger built. Attendees said they had not known beforehand about the park's rules — ultimately leading to the melee, a massive police response and the arrests of 15 park-goers, two were charged with felony assault and most others with disorderly conduct.

Email correspondence shows Playland officials were clear about the ban on hijabs and other "headgear" to leaders of the Muslim American Society of New York, which organized the outing.

The string of emails obtained by The Journal News between Playland event coordinator Adam Harvey and MAS New York president Hatem Gawaly included questions about the head scarves women wear.

"I need to get more details please about whether a burka/hijab constitutes as a head gear," Gawaly wrote to Harvey on July 19. "There will be a lot of commotion about this."

Harvey responded on July 23: "The head gear RULES are there for safety and they will not change them even for a big group. I am sorry about this."

-------------------------------------------------------------

Wed, Aug. 31 2011
'Muslim Veil Controversy: Islamic Women Rejected From NY Theme Park Ride'

http://m.christianpost.com/news/ramadan-brawl-as-muslim-women-rejected-from-ny-theme-park-ride-for-wearing-hijabs-54837/

By Fionna Agomuoh
Christian Post

A brawl between police and a group of Muslims at a theme park has left two park rangers injured and 15 people arrested, including three women.

Approximately 3,000 members of the Muslim American Society were visiting New York's Rye Playland theme park on Tuesday for the end of Ramadan.

A number of women within the group were denied entry to certain rides in the park unless they removed their hijab headscarves. The grounds given were for security reasons.

After several men and women in the group became upset and began to argue among themselves, police were called and a scuffle between police and the guests ensued.

One woman, Entisai Ali was pushed to the ground and arrested after arguing with police.

The altercation escalated as the woman's brother and male cousin attempted to intervene. The men were also beaten and arrested, a friend has claimed.

Ayman Alrabah told the Daily News that her male family members were also arrested for attempting to diffuse the situation, adding that witnessing his father getting arrested has traumatized her four-year-old son.

"We requested a refund and all of a sudden an argument became a riot," Alrabah said. "Cops came. They were hitting my brother, my dad. My husband was on the floor and they were handcuffing him."

According to Rye Playland policy, guests are not permitted to wear headgear on certain rides because of various safety risks.

"If somebody wears some kind of a scarf, it could be a strangling situation. On a track of a roller coaster, it could cause that ride to stop and cause injury," said a Rye Playland official.

Rye Playland insists that the Muslim American Society was properly briefed on the regulations of the park and were offered refunds.

Guests however say they were treated unfairly because they are Muslim.

"They said no because my of my 'headgear'," Ola Salem told the New York Times. "I said: `It's not my headgear, it's my religion'."

The two, first responding park rangers were injured in the scuffle and hospitalized. Afterwards, back up was called and in what some are saying was an over-reaction, approximately 60 patrol cars and 100 police arrived on the scene.

The park entrance was closed for two hours.

------------------------------------------------------------

'Muslim Leaders Criticize Police Response to Scuffle'

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/nyregion/muslims-criticize-police-over-playland-fight-about-hajibs.html

By Dan Bilefsky. New York Times, August 31, 2011

Muslim civil rights leaders on Wednesday accused the authorities of using excessive force after a Westchester County amusement park's restrictions on head coverings provoked a scuffle a day earlier that led to the arrest of 15 people.

About 3,000 visitors from a Muslim tour group were at Playland park in Rye on Tuesday afternoon celebrating the end of Ramadan when a dispute erupted after women wearing traditional hijabs, or head scarves, were told they could not wear them on certain rides, for safety reasons.

Among the rides that headwear is prohibited on is the Dragon Coaster, on which riders plunge 128 feet before being hurled into the mouth of a smoke-emitting dragon. However, headwear, including the hijab, is allowed on the Double Shot, in which passengers, harnessed in cars, are rocketed up an 85-foot tower in less than two seconds before being shot back down at a nausea-inducing force of what the park says is "negative-one G."

Park officials said Wednesday that the women were offered admission refunds, but that an altercation ensued when clutches of displeased visitors became agitated and began to argue among themselves and then with park officials, including two rangers who were hospitalized with injuries.

Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of the County Parks Department, said that two people were charged with assault and that 13 were charged with disorderly conduct. All had been released by Tuesday night.

Mr. Tartaglia said the Muslim American Society of New York, which organized the outing, had been warned of the headwear rule, which he said was a safety precaution to ensure that items like caps and head scarves did not get entangled in mechanical parts. On Playland's Web site, he noted, rides that allow what the park calls headgear are clearly indicated with the letter H.

"This is all about safety, not about religion," he said.

Mr. Tartaglia recalled an April 2010 episode in Sydney, Australia, in which a 26-year-old mother wearing a hijab was strangled after her head scarf became tangled in the wheel axle of a go-kart. In another incident, in Buena Park, Calif., in 2000, two dozen people were stranded on a roller coaster for about three hours after a rider's jacket flew onto the track and became wedged under the train.

Cyrus McGoldrick, civil rights manager at the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Wednesday that the authorities had overreacted. He said 60 patrol cars and 100 police officers from nine departments had responded to the disturbance, which he said had involved 40 people at most. He said video taken during the episode showed the police pushing at least one Muslim woman to the ground.

"There seems to have been a disproportionate response in which police used excessive strength and force to subdue female protesters," Mr. McGoldrick said. "That had a snowball effect on the antagonism and aggression that ensued."

Sharif Aly, vice president of the Muslim American Society of New York, said it was investigating the episode to determine whether the group had been singled out for being Muslim.

Mr. Tartaglia said that nearly 6,000 people were at the amusement park at the time, and that police intervention had been necessary to ensure public safety. "The incident was very quickly escalating," he said, "and the police had no choice to interfere, or it could have turned into a riot."

David Mandt, spokesman for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, whose members include Disney World and the company that operates the attractions at Coney Island, said it was not unusual for amusement parks to require guests to remove or secure loose articles, including head scarves or hats of any kind.

Kristin Siebeneicher, a spokeswoman for Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J., said that for safety reasons, no loose articles were allowed on rides. But hijabs, which are typically securely wrapped around the head, are allowed, she said.

Ms. Siebeneicher said that those wearing the hijab were advised to exercise caution on Six Flags' most "extreme" ride, the Kingda Ka, a 45-story roller coaster that she said was the tallest in the world and the fastest in North America, going from zero to 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds.

"Because that roller coaster is so extreme, we require that head scarves are tightly fastened," she said. "But we are more than happy to have them along on the ride."

----------------------------------------------------------
'HIJAB WELL DONE. Many parks allow Muslim scarves, unlike Rye

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/hijab_well_done_FY1qRw4lfNx763qDHCcdnL

By Kate Sheehy, Jennifer Bain and Colin Mixson, New York Post

Six Flags Great Adventure has the biggest, fastest roller coasters in the world, and even that park doesn't have the religious head-scarf ban that sparked a massive brawl at Rye Playland between Muslim guests and local cops.

"We don't allow hats like baseball caps, but we do allow headdresses," said Kristen Siebeneicher, spokeswoman for the massive amusement park in Jackson, NJ.

They even allow them on the monster ride Kingda Ka -- which is 456 feet high and goes 128 mph -- but "we tell our guests . . . that they must have their headdresses very tightly fastened," Siebeneicher said.

Fifteen people were busted during a wild fistfight at Rye Playland in Westchester County on Tuesday afternoon after some hijab-wearing women -- part of a group of 3,000 Muslim parkgoers, mainly from Brooklyn -- were denied access to more than half the adult rides.

County Parks Deputy Commissioner Peter Tartaglia, whose agency runs the park, said the brawl began when frustrated Muslim families lining up for refunds got into a shoving match with each other.

A security guard trying to break things up touched one of the garbed women and her husband got furious.

"All of a sudden, everyone started running to the entrance . . . I just saw flailing arms and punching," said one parkgoer from Teaneck, NJ.

The woman said her three sons wear yarmulkes and that they had been asked to take them off for certain rides as well.

"What's the issue?" she shrugged. "They did not ask in a negative or offensive way."

Tartaglia insisted that the head-scarf ban was "a black-and-white safety issue."

"We look at every individual ride," he said.

"It's just common sense," he said, noting that some of the rides go up to 40 mph.

A rep for Coney Island's amusement rides said he wasn't clear on his park's policy, although a hijab-wearing woman was spotted riding a roller coaster there yesterday. Water parks such as Splish Splash in Long Island don't ban the headgear, a representative said.

New York personal-injury lawyer Jim Reed said Playland is within its rights to ban the scarves as long as "it would promote greater safety and . . . as long as consistency is applied" so as not to discriminate.

Ali Shibah of Yonkers, who was part of the Muslim group, said, "I understand the point that this could be a safety issue."

"But they have to learn how to deal with certain groups," he said of the park. "You can't tell a woman who's been wearing this their whole life to take it off suddenly. This is a sensitivity issue.

"What would they say if the Virgin Mary wanted to go a ride -- to take off her hijab?"

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[wvns] Pakistan-Iran Gas Pipeline Under Way

2011-07-18T17:33:00.000-05:00

Zardari meets Khamenei, Ahmadinejad: Gas pipeline to reach border next year: Iran

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/17/zardari-meets-khamenei-ahmadinejad-gas-pipeline-to-reach-border-next-year-iran.html

TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that Tehran was hopeful of completing its section of the Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline by the end of next year.

"Construction of the pipeline to export Iranian gas to Pakistan is under way, and we hope it will reach the frontier by the end of 2012," he said of the multi-billion-dollar project after a meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari.

President Zardari, who arrived in Tehran on a day-long visit, held two rounds of talks with President Ahmadinejad — first delegation-level talks and then a one-on-one meeting.

The two leaders also reviewed progress on a proposal for the transmission of electricity from Iran to Balochistan.

They expressed confidence that joint efforts would prove helpful in countering terrorism, terming the menace a common enemy for the region and the world.

Mr Ahmadinejad said his country looked forward to a new era in relations with Pakistan.

"Iran is ready to reinforce its cooperation with Pakistan in every field," the Iranian president said.

Mr Zardari said relations between the neighbours should be strengthened, and proposed that "trade between the two countries be conducted in local currency, and not the dollar, to curb smuggling". He also proposed a bilateral free trade agreement.

The President said Pakistan was already in negotiations with Turkey, Sri Lanka and China for the currency swap arrangement.

He denounced "efforts by our enemies who seek to show that the Pakistan government is unstable by provoking trouble," saying that those responsible would face justice.

President Zardari praised Iran's constructive engagement in the trilateral process, recalling last month's Pakistan-Iran-Afghanistan summit hosted by Tehran.

He urged the Iranian government to consider the creation of an integrated border management regime for tackling militancy and extremism. He said Pakistan and Iran had vital interests in stability and peace of the region.

Mr Zardari called for developing coordination between governments to curb narcotics and human trafficking in the region. He said Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan faced a common menace of drug trafficking and expressed the hope that a trilateral initiative would help counter the curse.

The President said Pakistan and Iran had the potential to undertake joint economic projects in Afghanistan to enhance connectivity, build infrastructure, rail and road links.

Mr Zardari said there was a need to raise bilateral trade to four billion dollars from one billion dollars. He called for working together to identify impediments to implementation of the Pakistan-Iran Preferential Trade Agreement, signed in 2006.

The Iranian president agreed to take full advantage of geo-strategic locations for "ushering in a new era of progress".

About the Afghanistan issue, President Zardari said Pakistan supported the process initiated by President Hamid Karzai for reconciliation and peace. He said Pakistan supported a reconciliation process which must be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned, adding that Islamabad was ready to provide all possible assistance to Kabul in reconstruction efforts.

It was Mr Zardari's second visit to Iran in less than a month. He visited Tehran last month to attend the counter-terrorism summit, on the sidelines of which the two countries and Afghanistan reached an agreement to augment cooperation in the fight against militancy.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Water and Power Minister Syed Naveed Qamar, Petroleum Minister Dr Asim Hussain and presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar accompanied Mr Zardari.

KHAMENEI LAMBASTS US: Later Mr Zardari called on Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Fars news agency quoted Ayatollah Khamenei as telling the President: "The principal enemy of the Pakistani people and the unity of the country is the West, headed by the United States."

Iranian officials have been vocal in their criticism of the prolonged US troop deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which are now set to be drawn down.—Agencies

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[wvns] Africa to Gaza convoy

2011-07-18T17:27:00.001-05:00

An interview with Sheik Walid el-Saadi, the head of the Africa to Gaza Aid Convoy, from Zambia

'Gaza or bust for Africa to Gaza convoy'
Mon Jul 4, 2011
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/187582.html

The Africa to Gaza Aid convoy is continuing on its way to the besieged Palestinian territory, despite all the difficulties, the head of the convoy says.

Sheik Walid el-Saadi made the remarks in an interview with Press TV.

Africa's first overland aid convoy to the Gaza Strip started its journey in Durban, South Africa in late June and is expected to reach the Palestinian territory by the end of July.

The 21 activists of the convoy are riding a dozen vehicles carrying essentials such as medical supplies, milk powder, generators, and construction materials.

Following is the text of the interview with Sheik Walid el-Saadi:

Press TV: Mr. el-Saadi, if you could kindly first tell us the stages that the first Africa aid convoy to Gaza has been through and is set to go through now before reaching Gaza.

El-Saadi: Thank you very much for having me on your program. As you all know, we left the city of Durban last Sunday [June 26] and we moved to Botswana.

We had two programs in Botswana, one in Gaborone and the other one in Francistown, where we had a rally and we approached the people and spoke to them about the difficulties of the Palestinian people and the atrocities that are happening to them.

After that we proceeded to Zambia. We started in Zambia, we went to Lusaka. We spent two nights in Lusaka, and we had two awareness programs on Palestine and what is happening in Palestine.

We also delivered some food aid for the people in the villages because our path is not only to reach the people of Gaza but to pass by the people of Africa. We are also giving to the people in Africa on our way. We put them in our program also. We distributed some books, some holy Qurans to the people.

And after Lusaka, we went to Serenje last night. We spent one night there, and we had one Palestinian awareness program, and we also met the community, where we delivered some groceries, some aid, and we also distributed some books, Islamic books, Islamic literature, and the Holy Quran translation.

We left Serenje for Mpika this afternoon. And from Mpika we are on our way to Mbeya, which is at the border of Tanzania.

Press TV: Mr. el-Saadi, we are hearing that the main concern now for the Africa aid convoy is the announcement from the Egyptian authorities that they will not allow this convoy onto Egyptian thoroughfares. Is there any plan being made by this aid convoy and how will things develop if Egypt does not allow them to move forward?

Of course, you have heard and may suspect of the threats that are being made by Israel, as well, against the Freedom Flotilla II. So what are you planning if you are not allowed into Gaza?

El-Saadi: It is a possibility because, you know, we cannot predict [whether] the Israelis will put pressure on the Egyptians to allow us [in] or not. But we have done all that we can.

We have informed the Egyptian government. For six months I've been preparing for this convoy. I've been to the Egyptian Embassy, we've sent them letters, and we've explained to them exactly what we're doing.

I myself went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo and I explained to them exactly what we are doing, how many trucks, how many people are coming… and hopefully, they will give us the go ahead.

It's possible to stop us. We are talking about a journey of 10,000 kilometers with the most difficult roads in the world. This morning we are traveling about 20 to 30 kilometers an hour because of narrow roads and huge potholes in the road, which the whole tire would go in and won't come out.

It is a very difficult journey and I [hope] that the Egyptian government won't stop us because it is going to be a disaster if they do that. A lot of people and organizations are involved with us in this.

We have got the support of our government. The South African government supported our mission.

Let's pray that from now and until we reach them, the Egyptian government will change their mind and will understand that they should allow us [in]. They gave visas to all the 21 members and they know that these members are going on this convoy in that mission.

So that is annoying for me and for all the people to understand that this is trouble for our convoy to go to Gaza.

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[wvns] Hungary destroys all GMO maize fields

2011-07-18T17:26:00.001-05:00

Hungary destroys all GMO maize fields
13 Jul 2011
http://www.allaboutfeed.net/news/hungary-destroys-all-gmo-maize-fields-11994.html

Some 400 hectares of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said.
The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added. Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary.

Authorities have been checking for GMO crops since the beginning of this year as a new regulation came in force this March which stipulates GMO checks before seeds are introduced to the market.

The checks will continue despite the fact that seed traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.

Compensation unlikely
Controllers have found Pioneer and Monsanto products among the seeds planted. The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary but they will check where the goods can be found, Bognar said.

Regional public radio reported that the two biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and GMO seeds could have been sown on up to thousands of hectares in the country.

Local farmers complain that the use of GMO seeds has only been revealed now when it is too late to sow again and the entire year's harvest has been lost.

Another problem is that the company that distributed the seeds in Baranya county is under liquidation, therefore if any compensation is paid by the international seed producers, the money will be paid primarily to that company's creditors, rather than the farmers.

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[wvns] 'Little Gitmo'

2011-07-18T17:25:00.000-05:00

When an upstate imam named Yassin Aref was convicted on a suspect terrorism charge, he was sent to a secretive prison denounced by civil libertarians as a Muslim quarantine.

'Little Gitmo'
By Christopher S. Stewart
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28539.htm

[Photos on above website.]

July 11, 2011 "New York Magazine" -- - On August 4, 2004, Yassin Aref was walking along West Street in a run-down part of downtown Albany. It was about 11 p.m., and he had just finished delivering evening prayer at the storefront mosque around the corner, where he had been the imam for nearly four years. Caught up in his thoughts, he might not have noticed the car parked across from his two-story building if a man hadn't called out his name.

Aref instantly recognized the FBI agents inside the darkened vehicle. They had been monitoring him for years now, maybe longer. Sometimes they stopped and asked questions about his views on Saddam Hussein or the mosque. As part of Bush's war on terror, the FBI had been talking to other Muslims in Albany, too. When Aref climbed into the back seat, he figured that the agents simply wanted to talk some more. Instead, they told him he was under arrest.

It took a long time for this to settle in. Aref was silent as they drove to FBI headquarters, a fortlike concrete-and-glass building on the south side of town. The agency has spoken only vaguely about what happened when they questioned him, and there are no recordings, though Aref would later describe the time as the "hardest, darkest, and longest night of my life"—scarier, he said recently, than the hardships he and his wife suffered as Kurds in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

His hands and feet were chained. One of the agents spoke some Kurdish. Aref heard questions about terrorism, money laundering, a missile launcher. He refused a lawyer, believing that he had nothing to hide. "It is against my religion to lie," he told them. The interrogation lasted much of the night. He says he never heard specific charges. At some point they told him his house and mosque were being raided, and all he could think about was his wife and three children, who had arrived in Albany with him as U.N. refugees in 1999.

When morning broke, he was loaded into another car, bleary-eyed and weakened, and taken to the federal courthouse. As the vehicle moved through the streets, Aref was astonished by the sudden commotion. Helicopters swarmed overhead. There were scores of local and national news reporters, cameras angling to get his picture. He saw snipers.

During his three-week trial in 2006, he learned that he was the target of a controversial FBI sting, which involved a Pakistani informant with a history of crime. In the end, he was convicted of, among other things, conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He spent weeks in solitary confinement, days shackled in different vehicles, which shuffled him from prison to prison. Time coalesced, became unrecognizable, until, in the spring of 2007, Aref landed at a newly created prison unit in Terre Haute, Indiana, that would change his life again. It already had a nickname: Little Gitmo.

Aref didn't know anything about Little Gitmo, or a Communication Management Unit (CMU), as it's formally called. Once a death-row facility where Timothy McVeigh was executed, the Terre Haute CMU was quietly opened by the Bush administration in December 2006 to contain inmates with links, in particular, to "terrorist-related activity." A year later, another unit opened in Marion, Illinois.

Although inmates and guards refer to CMUs as Little Gitmos, the comparison to Guantánamo is imprecise: The units are not detention centers, and the inmates inside have already been convicted of crimes in the U.S. legal system. But what differentiates CMUs from all other facilities in the U.S. are the prisoners. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) estimates that 66 to 72 percent of them are Muslims, a staggering number considering that Muslims represent only 6 percent of the entire federal-prison population.

As of June, there are 82 men in the two CMUs, according to federal-prison officials, including a man convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the American Taliban John Walker Lindh, and the lone survivor of an EgyptAir hijacking in 1985. All inmates are kept under 24-hour surveillance in near-complete isolation. "If the government has intelligence that links you to terrorist activity, then that's something that the prison authority should be able to take into account," says Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, in defense of the measures. "We give them an array of privileges that most other places in the world are shocked by."

Legal activists agree that restrictive rules can be applied to high-security prisoners, but many in the CMUs, they say, are low-security inmates. One Muslim man was placed in a CMU for perjury, while another was locked up, in part, for violating U.S. sanctions by donating to a charity abroad without a license. According to CCR, many don't fully know why they ended up in the segregated units or how they might appeal their placement. In the words of Kathy Manley, one of Aref's defense attorneys, the CMUs are a "quarantine," and Alexis Agathocleous, a lawyer at CCR, calls them "an experiment in social isolation." "There is this story being told in this country now about the threat of homegrown terror and of radicalization related to Muslim prisoners, and the CMU is a story about law enforcement controlling that dangerous threat," says Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer at CCR. "An allegation that someone is somehow connected to terrorism, without evidence and without an actual conviction [for terrorism], allows them to be treated in this whole different system of justice."

The federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where a Communication Management Unit is located.
(Photo: AFP/Newscom)

To gather intelligence from CMU inmates, correspondence is combed through by a counterterrorism unit in West Virginia. Regular group prayer is prohibited, and communications must be in English unless there's a live translator. Phone calls are limited to two fifteen-minute conversations a week (most maximum-security prisoners get 300 minutes a month). Immediate families of CMU inmates can visit only twice a month for a total of eight hours (general-population prisoners at Terre Haute get up to 49 hours of visits a month), and those conversations are monitored, recorded, and conducted through Plexiglas. Physical contact is forbidden, a permanent ban not imposed on most violent felons in maximum-security prisons.

As a result, critics say, those familiar markers—family, language, and religious identity—are being stripped away. "This is more than just being cut off from the world," says Nina Thomas, a psychologist-psychoanalyst at NYU who has studied the CMUs. "Inmates are being shut into a very narrow universe."

While the stated purpose of the CMUs, according to prisons spokesperson Traci Billingsley, is to "protect the public," Meeropol thinks that they "spread fear." Shamshad Ahmad, a physics lecturer at the University of Albany and president of Aref's mosque, says that CMUs "send a message that the whole justice system [is] geared to take revenge of the events of 9/11 on anyone belonging to the Muslim community"—a message that, essentially, any Muslim could become Aref.

And especially because Aref's conviction is itself a matter of controversy, CCR has chosen the imam to become its lead plaintiff in a case against the CMUs, one of the major lawsuits, including the ACLU's in Indiana, meant to challenge the units and change the way they operate. Along with five other plaintiffs, Aref now sits at the center of a civil-liberties battle against the prison system. To a growing number of supporters in Albany—who have rallied to get him out; have published his pre-CMU memoir, Son of Mountains; have raised money for his family—he is a symbol of the inequities Muslims still endure as collateral damage in the war on terror.

Aref was born in a mountain village in northern Iraq, where he lived through Saddam's genocide on the Kurds and met his wife, Zuhur. They fled to Syria, where he finished his religious studies, worked at the office of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), and had three kids. Under a U.N. asylum program, the family learned in 1999 that they were going to Albany, a place the 29-year-old Aref had never heard of.

Although he couldn't speak or understand much English, he managed to support his family as a hospital janitor for more than a year before he became the imam of Masjid As-Salam, the city's only mosque. During his four years as imam, Aref regularly discussed his anti–Iraq War sentiments and grew to represent the spiritual voice of many Albany Muslims. "People hesitated to criticize the government publicly," says Ahmad. "But he didn't."

It is believed that the FBI decided to target Aref in the summer of 2003, after the American military stormed an armed camp in Iraq and discovered a notebook with his name and number in it, along with the word kak, which the FBI translated as "commander" (the prosecution would later admit that the term actually translates to "mister"). The camp was alleged to be affiliated with Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist organization founded by Mullah Krekar, who was once a member of the IMK, where he had met Aref. Aref's backers argue that the camp was filled with refugees and that the notebook could have belonged to anyone. Aref claims that he met Krekar only in passing and that he left for Albany long before the mullah founded Ansar al-Islam.

That Aref had a past connection to Krekar was perhaps enough to attract the FBI's attention, though likely not enough to mount a legal case against him. So, working with expanded surveillance powers, the FBI went about setting up an operation.

Since 9/11, the FBI had begun relying more heavily on informants, under a controversial policy of preemptive prosecution—taking down those thought to possibly become terrorists in the future. It has resulted in the conviction of more than 200 individuals, including four Muslims in Newburgh convicted of plotting to bomb two Bronx synagogues; a 19-year-old Somali charged with attempting to blow up a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon; and a man caught plotting an attack on Herald Square. "These types of operations have proven to be an essential law-enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing potential terror attacks," Attorney General Eric Holder said at a dinner this winter in defense of the tactics.

Critics, however, point out that in many operations, it's difficult to determine whether anyone is truly culpable—or inherently dangerous. And intentionally or not, it's very easy to round up Muslims. "There is a massive ideological, military, and intelligence infrastructure committed to the domestic and international wars on terror. These wars depend on maintaining Muslims as the primary threat to national security," says Amna Akbar, a senior research scholar at NYU's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. "The U.S. government seems to rely on widespread use of informants … sending them into mosques and other community spaces without any concrete suspicion of criminal activity."

Yassin Aref's wife with an Albany police officer the day after her husband's arrest.
(Photo: Ron Antonelli/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images)

In order to pursue Aref, the FBI employed a Pakistani informant named Shahed Hussain, known as Malik, the same informant later used in the Newburgh trial and a man once described by the defense in that case as "an agent provocateur who earned his keep by scouring mosques for easy targets." Malik had made a deal to avoid years in jail and deportation for helping people cheat on driver's-license exams. He was also arrested in Pakistan on a murder charge. The operation, scripted by the FBI, started with Mohammed Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who owned a local pizzeria and helped found Aref's mosque.

Over several months, Malik moved into Hossain's life, bringing his kids toys and expressing interest in religion. Malik, who claimed to be working for the Islamic terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, or JeM, eventually said he was buying a shoulder-firing missile launcher to kill then–Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf during a visit in New York City. To complete the purchase, he needed Hossain to launder $50,000 for him. In return, Hossain, whose business was on the skids, would earn $5,000.

Hossain then asked Aref to be the witness to the loan, a tradition in Islamic culture (as the only imam in Albany, Aref had notarized many loans). There were additional months of transactions where Aref documented Hossain's loan payments to Malik. During those months, Malik would occasionally mention the missile, using the code word chaudry. The government argued that this was evidence that Aref knew about Malik's terrorist connection, and the jury agreed. Aref was charged with ten of the 30 total counts, and the jury found him guilty of money laundering and supporting a known terrorist organization. "Did [Aref] actually engage in terrorist acts?" William Pericek, assistant U.S. Attorney, asked during a post-sentencing press conference. "Well, we didn't have the evidence of that. But he had the ideology."

"Family, language, and religious identity are being stripped away."

o outside observers of the case, the details that emerged during the trial were troubling. The FBI testified that Aref knew the code word, linking him to the conspiracy, but according to recorded conversations, there was no evidence that either Malik or Hossain informed him of the term. And though Malik had shown a fake missile to Hossain, the FBI decided against showing it to Aref because they worried that he would be "spooked."

The case, observers noted, ultimately lacked definitive evidence that Aref knew the true nature of the transaction, and the jury was directed to ignore the motives of the FBI's investigation. As Judge Thomas J. McAvoy instructed them, "The FBI had certain suspicions, good and valid suspicions for looking into Mr. Aref, but why they did that is not to be any concern of yours."

"I'm not only surprised that the jury convicted him, but I'm sure the judge was surprised too," says Stephen Gottlieb, a professor at Albany Law School and author of Morality Imposed: The Rehnquist Court and Liberty in America. "They basically turned two decent men into criminals."

Manley believes he lost on emotional grounds. "I think the fear got to [the jury]. They ended up convicting him out of fear that he might be some kind of shadowy bad guy." Steve Downs, another member of Aref's legal team, attributes it to what he calls "the Muslim exception." The emotion and politics of 9/11 had, they argue, altered the threshold for what constituted reasonable doubt.

In the years since Aref's trial, critics have identified a pattern. "A whole range of policing, prosecution, and incarceration policies seem to take as a starting point that Muslims pose a particularly uncontainable threat meriting extreme and exceptional treatment by the government," says Akbar. "Because national security has become an area in which the government is granted an extraordinary amount of deference, these policies are often allowed to stand without much scrutiny."

After the jury reached a verdict, two local papers published editorials asking for leniency. The editors at the Albany Times Union called the case "unsettling," with no clear answer to why the men were targeted, and wondered what lives Hossain and Aref would have "continued to lead if they had never been lured into a sting operation."

The judge sentenced Aref to fifteen years and recommended a local federal prison. Instead, he was sent to the CMU, with little explanation, no hearing, and no obvious way to appeal.

The first time Aref wrote to me, in a heavily monitored e-mail exchange, he said, "I am not spending my time, time is spending me. My family's situation is driving me insane and eating my patience." His world was falling apart at the CMU. "It's really hard for me to talk about what happened," he wrote.

When Aref was sent to the Terre Haute CMU in May 2007, he was 37 years old. "I arrived to find a small Middle Eastern community," he said. There were about twenty others inside. The idea of being called a terrorist sickened Aref. Every day he wondered why he was there, and he hoped someone would eventually realize that a mistake had been made. "I don't understand how the jury found me guilty," he wrote at one point.

His cell unlocked at 6 a.m., and he could circulate through the small unit comprising a few dozen cells and a common room. At 9 p.m., he'd be locked in for the night. On occasion, he heard screaming, and one day he saw a grown man drop to the floor and begin uncontrollably shaking and sobbing. When Aref asked a nurse later what had happened, she told him, "It's all fear and stress."

A peculiar loneliness consumed him. As an imam, Aref was naturally social. He helped solve people's problems and guide them through their tangled lives. But at Terre Haute, he became reticent, curled inside himself. It was hard to know whom to trust. The FBI was sending agents to the unit to ask questions, and new inmates came every few weeks or so.

All along, he felt his family drifting away. That one fifteen-minute phone call a week (a second call per week was added in January 2010) was never enough. What could you really say in fifteen minutes divided up among at least four people? He tried to be upbeat, avoiding talk of the CMU. With the kids, he spoke about school, a kind of dinner talk. When his wife got on, the reality of their separation was oppressive.

Zuhur "almost lost her mind," as Aref put it. The case had turned her upside down. Worried about wiretaps, she had disconnected the Internet, TV, and phone. She didn't have a job and relied on friends and the mosque to pay her rent and buy food. She rarely interacted with strangers, afraid that they might be informants setting her up.

Talking to Aref was a project that required a friend to lend a cell phone to the family on the days he called. And when he spoke to Zuhur, she mostly cried. In the four years that he has been at the CMU, she has cried during every single call.

One of the hardest things was thinking about his young daughter, Dilnia. She was born while Aref was in jail. All he was to her was an abstract concept. "Whenever anyone asks her, `Where is your daddy?' she will point or run to the phone and say, `That is my daddy,' " Aref said.

His two boys visited that first summer. With surveillance cameras zeroing in on them, it was difficult to be intimate. Salah was 10, Azzam 7. As Aref spoke through the Plexiglas, every word, every gesture was being mined for information.

His demeanor changed dramatically when his boys stepped away and Downs stepped in. Downs had made the two-day car trip with the kids from Albany. "They abuse me," Aref said. When Downs asked him to explain, Aref wouldn't. Then suddenly the meeting was terminated. According to Downs, a guard falsely claimed that he was using a pen "as a secret recording device."

"I'm convinced that they understood I was trying to get info about the CMU," Downs says. "And they did what [the CMU] was set up to do—prevent information [about the CMU] from getting out."

The entire family arrived in a minivan the next summer, in 2008. It had been roughly four years since they'd all been together. But seeing his 2-year-old girl on the other side of the glass gave Aref tremendous pain. She didn't recognize him.

The family spent a total of four hours together, and all seemed well until Zuhur suddenly snapped. In front of the kids, she made an announcement: She wanted to go back to Kurdistan. She felt her safety was at risk in America, even more than in the region from which she had fled.

Aref didn't want to argue. A part of him understood. "I am not dead in order for them to forget me," he said to me, "and not really alive to benefit them." That was the last time he saw his family. They didn't visit again. Zuhur wouldn't let them.

On March 27, 2009, at about 4 a.m., a guard entered Aref's cell and told him to pack. He was being transferred to the second CMU, at the state penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, which had opened a year before. Until recently, Marion had been one of the nation's only supermax facilities, replacing Alcatraz in 1963.
The move came at a particularly fraught moment for the CMUs. When President Obama came into office in 2009, many hoped the units would be shut down. The Bureau of Prisons wouldn't say if the new administration had reviewed the units, but they remained open, and their expansion soon inspired a fierce legal battle. In the summer of 2009, the ACLU's National Prison project filed a lawsuit on behalf of an inmate that disputed the legality of the creation of the units, among other things. Soon after, the ACLU of Indiana filed another lawsuit, about the restrictions on Muslim prayer.

In the meantime, "balancers," as CMU guards call them, were reportedly blended into the population—environmental activists, sexual predators, bank robbers, people who, prison officials claimed, "recruit and radicalize"—in order to address the criticism that CMUs were housing only Muslims. The Bureau of Prisons says it doesn't use race or religion to decide placement, and it rejects claims of adding balancers, though Muslim inmates continue to be in the majority.

In April 2010, CCR, with Aref, filed its suit, challenging the constitutionality of the place: the harsh restrictions on phone calls and visits, the ban on physical contact, the alleged absence of due process, and cited growing evidence suggesting that prisoners were being targeted for their religious and political beliefs.

To CCR, Aref's case was especially poignant. "Aref came to the United States as a refugee and was then subject to a dubious conviction," says Agathocleous. "Despite the fact that he engaged in no violence, that the prosecution acknowledged at trial that it was not seeking to prove he was a terrorist, and that his conduct in prison was spotless, he has been subject to these incredibly restrictive conditions at the CMU … It just doesn't make any sense."

In Marion, Aref's single cell was just as small as the former one, and his family was just as far away. But something had changed. He began to dread the phone calls with his family. "For many prisoners, the phone call is a big relief, and they get strength from it," he said. "But each time I call and hear my wife crying and I learn what my children are going through, it stresses my mind."

"I am not spending my time, time is spending me."

After a motion for a new trial was dismissed and the appeal to his original case was rejected, a part of him became resigned to the situation, friends say.

Then on April 13, I received a surprise e-mail from Aref. "How are you doing?" he asked. And then he told me the news. "For real, I am no longer in CMU!"

"My father is a very religious man," Aref's 15-year old daughter, Alaa, says one recent summer night. "He has a beard and wears Arab clothes and has an accent. But when you talk to him"—she pauses as if conjuring her father—"you know he's not a terrorist." She has trouble saying this word. Terrorist. It doesn't sound right in her mouth. And she tries it another way. "Baba didn't hate anyone."

On this June night, Aref's four kids sit barefooted on the carpet of a classroom on the second floor of the Central Avenue mosque in Albany, where their father was once the imam. Some of the doors are still broken from the FBI raid almost eight years ago.

The two boys, Salah, 14, and Azzam, 11, sit on either side of Alaa. Dilnia, who is now 5, sits off to the side, reading a book with a family friend. Zuhur stayed home. "She sometimes is depressed and doesn't go out," Alaa says.

Friends of the family say that Zuhur still talks about returning to Iraq, though she doesn't have the money for a plane ticket or travel documents. Her crying hasn't abated. When she does leave the house, she occasionally visits Aref's lawyers and asks, "What did Yassin do wrong?" or "When is he coming home?"

Since being placed in a general-population prison, Aref remains cautious. Without much explanation, he was moved out of the CMU, where he had been separated from the world for four years, and he could just as easily be moved back, like officials had done recently to an environmental activist named Daniel McGowan. Aref's lawyer speculates that my requests to visit Aref in a CMU and the CCR lawsuit had placed pressure on prison officials, which might have had something to do with his sudden transfer out. (It's a tactic that's worked for CMUs in the past. With one of the ACLU lawsuits, a plaintiff was moved from a unit to a general-population prison and the case was dismissed.)

Last April, four years after the first CMU opened and days following CCR's suit, the Bureau of Prisons began a public discussion of the units, a move, advocacy groups say, the prison system was legally obligated to make before the CMUs ever opened. Many of the comments that flooded in focused on the lack of meaningful appeal—that inmates are stuck in the units—and in particular, how the units were ruining the men and their families.

Once Aref entered the general-population prison, he assumed that things would get better—that he would be able to embrace his wife and hug his kids, and that he might even be transferred again to a prison closer to home.

But so far, none of that has changed.

The FBI investigation and the CMUs have so alienated his family, especially Zuhur, who has still not visited her husband since his transfer. She hasn't allowed the kids to go, either—though supporters are working to set up a trip for this summer.

None of Aref's kids know exactly why their father is in jail.

Azzam, playing with the yellow gum in his mouth, says, "Money laundering or something, right?"

"It was an FBI sting," Alaa says. "They kind of set him up for missiles or something."

Salah, who looks most like his father in his long white shirt, nods.

"I miss him," Alaa says. Turning to Steve Downs, who has been sitting quietly against the wall, she asks, "When my father gets out, they can deport him right away?"

Downs nods. Aref will be deported the day he is released from prison. Among them, Dilnia is the only American citizen, which means that all the others could be deported on that day too, or shortly after. Zuhur was recently denied citizenship.

Alaa will turn 18 before her father is released, and she could apply for citizenship. If it's granted, she could become the guardian of the others.

I ask whether what's been done to their father makes them angry. The boys are silent. "I'm upset," Alaa says. "But my dad taught us never to hate."

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[wvns] Precious Cargo

2011-07-18T17:21:00.000-05:00

Precious Cargo
By Sumayyah Meehan
The Muslim Observer
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=8309

You can see them popping their heads through an open car sunroof as it speeds down the highway or bouncing up and down in the back of a car in motion. No, they're not animals such as a cat or dog traveling with its master. They are unrestrained children living in some of the world's richest nations. It's a startling phenomena given that America's legal system has gone to great lengths to protect American children traveling in motor vehicles in the United States by making seat belts and car seats for young children a part of the law. However, the utter disregard for the safety of children traveling in motor vehicles in the Middle East is alarming. In fact, it is an epidemic that threatens entire generations of children.

This past winter a father in Kuwait paid dearly for his lesson in passenger safety. A family trip to the desert turned tragic as the SUV the father was driving jostled under the bumpy desert terrain. His son was standing upright inside the car as his upper body was outside. All it took was a single bump to throw the son from the car and into the path of his father's vehicle. With no time to regain control of the vehicle, the father ran over his son and crushed him to death. Stories like this are common all across the Middle East as many parents take the road less traveled by not securing all passengers before turning that ignition key.

The problem is widespread and, while most countries in the Middle East pay lip service to restraining children inside of motor vehicles and do have laws requiring car seats and seat belts on the books, there is no enforcement of vehicular laws meant to protect children. It is up to parents to decide whether or not to restrain their children inside the vehicle. Unfortunately, most parents pay little attention to the safety of their children inside the car.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), for example, has one of the worst records for unrestrained children in the Middle East. According to recent research, car accidents are the number one killer of children in the sheikhdom with 63% of child deaths last year alone being linked to car or roadway accidents. Further, UAE authorities have determined that an estimated 98% of children in the country are not restrained when traveling by motor vehicle.

There is little data regarding children and road safety in other regions of the Middle East as research over the issue in scarce. However the problem will most likely continue to deteriorate, as countless children will undoubtedly pay for the negligence of adults with their very lives.

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[wvns] Giving frozen assets to rebels is piracy--Libya

2011-07-11T22:22:00.000-05:00

Giving frozen assets to rebels is piracy--Libya
http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFLDE7442GP20110506

* Legal obstacles prevent release to rebels of frozen funds
* Anti-Gaddafi nations set up fund for rebel administration

TRIPOLI, May 5 (Reuters) - The Libyan government rejected on Thursday U.S. plans to unblock its frozen assets and give them to rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi, saying such a move was piracy and would undermine the global financial system.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told anti-Gaddafi countries meeting in Rome that Washington would try to pass legislation to unblock frozen Libyan assets and hand them to the rebels who have seized eastern Libya.

Washington has frozen about $30 billion in such assets since the Libyan revolt began in February, but there are legal obstacles to enabling the money to be used.

"Any use of the frozen assets is like piracy on the high seas," said Libya Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim.

"They (the rebels) are not a legal entity. They are not a country.

The country is not divided according to a referendum or to a United Nations resolution," he told journalists. "This is illegal ... If we stay silent about it, I think we will be living in a jungle."
Kaim said handing Libyan assets to the rebels would discourage wealthy countries from investing abroad, for fear their cash would be seized and handed to rebel groups at the first sign of domestic unrest.

He said that Libya had more than $140 billion invested abroad and that the Libyan central bank had transferred 700 million Libyan dinars ($571 million) to its Benghazi branch in February to pay for six months of salaries and other expenses. He condemned pledges by Western and Arab countries opposed to Libyan leader Gaddafi to set up a fund to help the rebels, who are desperately short of cash, saying the mechanism was illegal and there was no way to monitor the way the money was spent.

"Where was the 700 million spent?" he said. "On arming rebels or dividing among the nine people on the self-appointed council?" (Reporting by Lin Noueihed, editing by Tim Pearce) ($1=1.226 Libyan Dinar)

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[wvns] Violence in Karachi, Pakistan

2011-07-11T22:21:00.000-05:00

19 killed on second day of violence
----------------------------------------------------------------
By S. Raza Hassan

KARACHI, July 6: After the loss of ten lives on Tuesday in a new upsurge in violence in the city, another 19 people, including five passengers of a minibus, were killed and dozens others injured on Wednesday, taking the death toll to 29 in two days.

The violence which broke out in Orangi Town spread to Lyari, Baldia Town, Site and Gulshan-i-Iqbal areas...

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/07/19-killed-on-second-day-of-violence.html

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