Dahouk – Turkish troops are massing close to the borders of northern Iraq where Kurds have set up a semi-independent enclave.
Informed sources told Iraq Press large-scale troop movements were spotted along the borders, with troop carriers and vehicles crossing into Iraqi territories.
Turkish troops have repeatedly made forays into Iraqi Kurdish areas in pursuit of Turkish Kurdish guerrillas but the sources said the latest redeployment was of a scale not seen before.
The outlawed Kurdish group, formerly known as the Kurdistan Democratic Party or PKK, has formally disbanded its armed struggle against Ankara and is currently working for reform under a different name.
The group is reported to be carrying out its peaceful activities through Kurdistan Freedom and Democratic Party, its new appellation.
It is not clear whether the Turks intend to attack the party's guerrilla bases inside Iraq or are readying themselves for a possible U.S. military move against the regime of President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
Early this year, the group announced that it suspended its military activities and was seeking a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue in Turkey.
For 15 years, the PKK fought with Turkey over the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish state in the southeast of the country.
Friday, May 17, 2002
Before me on my desk is a powerful document, a letter to American Jewish leaders calling on them to recognize the suffering that Israel has caused the Palestinians during its 35-year occupation of the West Bank. But the body of the letter is not as powerful as its second page, which is filled with the names of 108 rabbinical students. The letter represents a challenge to mainstream Jewish opinion on the Middle East from the very heart of the community, from the young people training to be rabbis. It is more of an act than a statement, and a brave act at that, which has gone unreported outside the Jewish press.
How did this happen?
In early April, leading Jewish organizations announced a rally to be held at the Capitol on Monday, April 15, to express solidarity with Israel. The many yeshivas and seminaries in New York City promptly canceled classes for that day, and told their students they were hiring buses to leave New York for Washington early Monday morning. At the Jewish Theological Seminary of America on Broadway at 122nd Street, an Israeli flag was hung in the airy entryway, and the Conservative academy’s chancellor sent out an e-mail saying it was important for students to support Israel’s war against terrorism.
For at least a handful of students, these announcements caused inner turmoil.
The rally’s message was obvious: America is with Israel, no matter what. But these students—most of them involved in social-justice issues—had more nuanced views. Love of Israel, yes; anger over suicide bombings, yes; but also sympathy for Palestinian suffering, and a belief that the Israeli occupation has damaged Israel’s morale and security.
The “Week in Review” section of the March 31 issue of the New York Times published an article containing a startling observation—that “today, America is no mere superpower or hegemon but a full-blown empire in the Roman and British sense.” The article, “All Roads Lead to D.C.,” by Emily Eakin, which included a picture of ancient Rome from a scene in the movie Gladiator, pointed out that many Americans, most notably conservatives, are now openly stating that the achievement of empire status is not something that Americans should bemoan but rather something we should be celebrating.
But is it?
First consider how differently our American ancestors viewed the concept of liberty and the legitimate functions of government. In 1890, for example, there was little or no income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, welfare, economic regulations, gun control, or immigration controls. People were free to enter into mutually beneficial transactions with people all over the world, accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, and decide what to do with it. That’s what it once meant to be an American. That’s what it once meant to be free.
Not anymore. Today, Americans define freedom by the power of government to take care of them with the taxes imposed on them. That’s why there are today thousands of government departments and agencies whose mission is to provide care and sustenance to the citizenry. It’s also why Washington, D.C., with all its magnificent buildings, reminds some people of Imperial Rome.
At least 10 persons were killed and many others were wounded when a US warplane bombed a village in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, the Afghan Islamic Press reported on Friday.
The bombing occurred overnight in Bal Khel village in Sabari district, 30 kilometers northeast of Khost, the Pakistan-based private news service said, quoting local sources.
A wedding was in progress in the village when people fired into the air in traditional celebration and US helicopters flying over the area could have mistaken it for hostile fire, AIP said.
An aircraft later bombed the area for several hours, the agency said.
It quoted sources as saying that terrified residents had been confined to their homes by fear and had not been able to remove dead bodies and evacuate the injured to hospitals for some time after the attack.
We should, of course, be thankful that the latest British casualties from Afghanistan appear to be suffering a form of gastroenteritis, although the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has declined to confirm the type of illness involved. The casualties join three others who have needed treatment, variously, for appendicitis, altitude sickness and scorpion bite.
The conditions in which they, and the accompanying journalists, lived in Bagram, were an unsanitary cocktail of heat, dirt, flies and rats. At least the casualties were not victims of the Taliban or al-Qa'ida.
PARIS (Reuters) - Washington got a blunt message from the rest of the world's wealthy nations over steel tariffs and farming subsidies on Thursday -- do not resort to protectionism.
Trade and finance ministers of the other 29 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development took the United States to task during a two-day meeting at OECD headquarters in Paris.
"Grave concerns were expressed about a return to protectionism in the last few months," Guy Verhofstadt, Belgian prime minister and chairman of the OECD talks, said.
He blamed the tariffs on foreign steel imports into the United States and recently announced plans for billions of dollars in subsidies to U.S. crop and dairy farmers.
"The messages during the talks were very clear and those who needed to hear certainly heard," he said.
Israeli troops in armoured vehicles entered the Jenin refugee camp before dawn on Friday.
The army says they are searching for militants who eluded capture during heavy fighting last month.
Exchanges of gunfire broke out shortly after the Israeli forces reached the camp around 3.30am local time, witnesses say.
But the army says its forces did not come under heavy fire and intend to withdraw as soon as it arrests the suspects it wants.
The military declined to say how many people it is seeking, and there is no immediate word on casualties.
The Israeli forces also surrounded the city of Jenin, in the northern West Bank, but the target of the operation is the adjacent refugee camp, a stronghold for militants, the army says.
At last the dam has broken. For eight months America has tiptoed around the most disturbing questions of all surrounding 11 September. Did the Bush administration fail to act on the evidence it had in hand, and prevent the worst terrorist attack in modern history?
From time to time the issue would crop up, only for it to be deflected by the feeling that the moment was still too close, and the argument that a post mortem which was bound to be painful for the country's security and intelligence services might interfere with the war against terrorism those agencies were helping to wage.
But all these considerations have been swept away by the disclosure that President George Bush was warned by the CIA in the first week of August that al-Qa'ida might be planning to hijack aircraft.
WASHINGTON: US House lawmakers on Wednesday unveiled a bipartisan bill calling for sanctions to be slapped on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization for their "recent acts of terrorism" against Israel.
"The legislation we've introduced condemns in no uncertain terms the violence that is supported and funded by Yasser Arafat and the PLO," bill sponsor Representative Bill Blunt said in a statement.
The Arafat Accountability Act, he said, "sends a strong message that the US will neither tolerate nor ignore Arafat's blatant refusal to work for the peace he says he seeks." "It's time to trade in our all-carrot and no-stick policy. It doesn't work," agreed Representative Gary Ackerman at a press conference held to introduce the bill.
Such scrutiny seemed over the line to retired phone company worker Barry Reingold, after the FBI got interested in remarks Reingold made at his health club. After loudly criticizing the war in Afghanistan, Reingold had some unexpected visitors a few days later.
"I said, you know, 'Who's there?' And they said, 'It's the FBI,'" said Reingold, 60.
Reingold says the two agents wanted to know more about his locker room outburst.
"Someone's reported to us that you've been talking about what happened on 9/11 and terrorism and oil and Afghanistan," Reingold said the agents told him.
HALHOUL, West Bank At 1 a.m. under a chilly spring rain, the streets of Halhoul lay silent and apparently deserted.
Hassan Abu Zalata recalled that he and a colleague in the Palestinian intelligence agency, Ahmed Zaerah Madhiah, left their car parked on a narrow lane alongside a mosque and walked a few meters to take a cell phone call. Their chief, Khalid Abu Khairan, remained behind in the car with another intelligence officer, watching and listening in the blackness.
The four were on late-night patrol in this West Bank city, 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Jerusalem. They had heard reports that the Israeli troops who tightly surround Halhoul were about to enter the city. But the reports had been checked and, headquarters radioed back, seemed doubtful. The four intelligence agents nevertheless remained on alert from their vantage point near the little stone mosque.
American airlines and airports say they weren't warned before September 11 of any specific hijacking threat.
The Federal Aviation Administration says it warned airlines and airports that terrorists might be planning hijackings at the end of July.
But pilots' and flight attendants' unions say their members were never told.
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, says the airlines were asked to "use caution".
The FAA declined to release copies of the classified warnings, which are sent to airline security directors or posted on a secure Web site.
In a written statement, American Airlines says it "received no specific information from the US government advising the carrier of potential terrorist hijacking in the United States in the months prior to September 11."
Thursday, May 16, 2002
Dan Rather, one of the most respected and well-known broadcasters in the United States said last night that the mood of extreme patriotism engulfing the country since 11 September had stopped the media asking difficult questions of America's leaders. He said he was personally guilty of self-censorship.
"It is an obscene comparison ... but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tyres around people's necks if they dissented," said Mr Rather. "And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck.
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Gen. Ariel Sharon's habit of sending hit squads to kill people he deems enemies has caught on in Washington. It's been revealed that last Monday the CIA tried to assassinate my old acquaintance, the Afghan leader, Gulbadin Hekmatyar.
U.S. forces and CIA agents have targeted senior members of al-Qaida and the Taliban since October.
But Hekmatyar belonged to neither group: he leads the well-established Hisbi-Islami Party, which played the leading role in the 1980s struggle to free Afghanistan from Soviet rule. He had nothing to do with al-Qaida or Sept. 11, and was an enemy of the Taliban.
But in Washington's eyes, Hekmatyar was marked for death because he opposed the U.S.-installed regime in Kabul of Hamid Karzai, and was thus a "terrorist."
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
The Republicans/Conservatives talk about the need to elect G.W. Bush in order to restore honor, dignity, ethics and morality to the White House. Hmmm, let's take a look at the so-called honor, dignity, ethics and morality of George W., his brothers, his father and those who served in the Reagan administration.:
George W. Bush
Reaped $14 million from selling his $600,000 stake in a deal that involved the building of a new stadium for the Texas Rangers. George profited handsomely while taxpayers were stiffed for the money to subsidize Bush and his investment partners.
A Big Slice of the Texas Rangers for a Little Money (and a Big Profit)
Jeb Bush
Defaulted on a $4,56 million loan from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida. After federal regulators closed the S&L, the office building that Jeb used the $4.56 million to finance was reappraised by the regulators to $500,000 which Bush and his partners paid. Taxpayers were socked the remaining $4 million tab.
Bush Family Value$
Neil Bush
Neil was director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan in Denver. After the S&L lent Bush and his partners over $200 million in loans for JNB Exploration, Neil's unsuccessful oil company, Neil's partners welshed on $132 million in loans, partly resulting in the failure of the S&L. Federal regulators determined that Neil was completely dependent on his partners for his income. The S&L's failure cost taxpayers $1 billion.
Bush Family Value$
The San Jose Mercury News April 18, 1994
Saudi Arabia and Egypt are stepping up their pressure on Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to take substantive action against terrorism.
Mohammed Dahlan, head of Preventive Security in Gaza, was invited yesterday to Cairo to meet with Omer Suleiman, head of Egypt's intelligence services. Dahlan, together with Nabil Sha'ath, the Palestinian liaison with the Saudis, took part in this past weekend's Egyptian-Saudi-Syrian summit in Sharm el-Sheikh.
According to intelligence reports in Jerusalem, Dahlan recently sent his family out of the territories due to power struggles inside the PA. The intelligence assessments say Arafat is under external and domestic pressure for reforms that would cut back on his authority.
There was always, in the past, a limit to this hatred. Letters would be signed with the writer's address. Or if not, they would be so-ill-written as to be illegible. Not any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.
How, I ask myself, did it come to this? Slowly but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of an angry crowd greeted with laughter and insults in the pages of an American newspaper, his life cheapened and made vulnerable by an actor who – without even saying why – says he wants to kill me.
The defense establishment was only letting go some of the thousands of reservists called up by emergency order for a putative operation against terror networks in the Gaza Strip, military officials told a subcommittee of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee yesterday.
The subcommittee on manpower, chaired by MK Naomi Chazan (Meretz), heard that despite the newspaper reports saying that the emergency orders were being canceled, the army had no intention of canceling the orders for several thousand reservists because it still planned to go ahead with an operation in Gaza and because many of those called up were due for reserve service anyway.
The "maneuver" pulled off by the Israel Defense Forces last week, when thousands of reservists received emergency (tzav 8) orders, infuriated a number of reserve officers. The emergency call-up was ordered to guarantee sufficient personnel for a planned wide-scale IDF operation in the Gaza Strip (the operation has since been canceled - at least, for the time being).
Unlike the mood that preceded Operation Defensive Shield, this time a number of reservists felt there was no justification for a major IDF operation that entailed serious risks. As battalion commanders in the regular forces made preparations for battle, their counterparts in the reserve forces were hesitant.
NABLUS, West Bank — The popularity of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which skyrocketed during the months he was besieged by Israel in Ramallah, is plummeting now as Palestinians reassess the results of his leadership of their long, bloody uprising.
Less than two weeks after the lifting of the siege, criticism of the 72-year-old father of the Palestinian national movement is everywhere — from the rubble-strewn streets of Nablus to the ruined Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah to the economically stricken shops of East Jerusalem.
Only 1.7 percent of the territory of the West Bank is built-up settlement area, while the territory "controlled by the settlements" amounts to 41.9 percent of the West Bank, according to a report published yesterday by B'Tselem, the Israeli information center for human rights in the territories.
The report - entitled "Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank" and compiled by researcher Yehezkel Lein - notes that 6.8 percent of the West Bank is area within the boundaries of the national outline plan for the Jewish settlement enterprise, while a further
35.1 percent is land that falls under the jurisdiction of the Jewish local and regional councils, beyond the borders of the outline plan.
The report divides the West Bank into four lengthwise strips.
The Eastern strip, which includes the Jordan Valley, the shores of the Dead Sea and eastern slopes of the West Bank ridge, is home to 5,400 Jewish settlers. The municipal boundaries of this strip encompass some 76,000 dunams, yet the areas under the jurisdiction of the regional
councils that are not included within the municipal boundaries total some 1.2 million dunams.
WASHINGTON - Among the photographs outside the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz is one where the veteran foreign policy official is flanked by Vice President Dick Cheney, his boss at the Pentagon of the first Bush administration, and his current boss, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Playfully signed by Cheney - "Paul, Who's the best Secretary of Defense you ever worked for? Dick" - it is more than just a picture of old friends who find themselves in the trenches together again.
In this Bush administration, it is a portrait of a powerful and disciplined team of like-minded hard-liners that is wielding extraordinary influence on foreign policy, edging into the domain of the State Department and shaping the debate on such issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the specter of a U.S.-led invasion to rid Iraq and the region of Saddam Hussein.
GAZA, May 12 — The head of the Palestinian Authority's intelligence service said today that a suicide bombing last week in Israel did not appear to be the work of Palestinian terrorists, but rather seemed to have been conducted by Israeli criminals against an illegal gambling club.
The bombing on Tuesday killed 15 Israeli civilians and wounded scores more, and the remarks today, by Amin al-Hendi, who is among those in the Palestinian Authority responsible for arresting terrorists, drew a strong reaction from Israel, which said the remarks were irresponsible and without foundation.
A bomb-sniffing dog first detected explosives on one of the men and inside the truck. High-tech equipment was used later to confirm the presence of TNT and RDX plastic explosive.
Documents read to Fox News indicate that both driver and passenger were Israeli nationals. Investigators say a roadside check of the national database of immigration records indicated that one of the men had not entered the country legally, and the other was in violation of his visa. Both men were taken into custody for immigration violations.