Under the post-1967 plan designed by Israeli military commanders, heavily populated Palestinian areas were not included, but land belonging to several Palestinian villages was incorporated into Jerusalem

The Wall consolidates the objectives of the 'centre of life' policy. It not only isolates East Jerusalem from the West Bank and effectively incorporates it to Israel but also divides Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem

On 26 August 2006, soldiers detained Tha'ir Muhsen, 18, from a-Neqora, a village near Nablus , while he was on his way home after registering at a-Najah University , in Nablus .

The soldiers sat him down next to another Palestinian who had been detained. The other fellow told Muhsen that the soldiers had beaten him. When one of the soldiers threw a stick to another soldier present, the other detainee fled. The soldiers chased him but returned empty- handed. They then began to abuse Muhsen.

The maltreatment lasted for about two hours, during which time the soldiers beat him over his whole body with their hands, sticks, and stones, kicked him, pulled his hair, and threw him to the ground. Muhsen lost consciousness. When he regained consciousness, the abuse continued. Among other kinds of abuse, one of soldiers practiced karate kicks to Muhsen's head while the other soldier held Muhsen in place.

At some time during the events, one of the soldier's took Muhsen's cell phone and photographed two of the soldiers who beat Muhsen.

Photo of two of the soldiers suspected of the abuse, taken by a third soldier, using Tha'ir Muhsen's cell phone camera.

In his testimony to B'Tselem, Muhsen described how, toward the end of the abusive treatment, the soldiers made a circle on the ground and ordered him to crouch inside it.

"I tried to sit down, but I was really dizzy... I barely managed to sit down inside the circle, as he demanded. I felt as if I were rocking back and forth and was about to fall.... another soldier gave him a rifle, and he aimed it at me. He put the barrel of the rifle to my head a few times and cocked the trigger. He laughed and said, "I am going to come to your house tonight and arrest you." He spoke in Hebrew, and the soldier who took the cell phone translated and said to me, "Do everything that the officer says." He was referring to the soldier who beat me with the stick and aimed the rifle at me. Afterwards, the officer gave the rifle to the soldier who translated, moved back a few meters, ran toward me and kicked me in the head. He did this a few times, as if my head were a ball in a game. Then the officer grabbed my head and slammed it into the armored vehicle and went away."

Two days later, after he gained some strength, Tha'ir filed a complaint at the army liaison office and gave the soldiers there a copy of the photo that the soldiers took with his cell phone.



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These repulsive and revolting images are too much for any news channel to show and the facts of the killing are merely stated, without any analysis of who is behind these killings and why. Anyone with any familiarity with American tactics of counter-insurgency will not be remotely surprised or puzzled by the grisly news coming out of Iraq every day.

During the 1980's the U.S. trained, armed and directed 'death squads' throughout Central and South America. El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua and Colombia were amongst the countries who suffered the most. The Latin American experience was also following on from the U.S. first known death squads; those in Vietnam. The Vietnamese death squads were given monthly targets by the CIA to kill. The CIA later admitted that the figure was 1,800 per month to be killed by their trained and directed death squads.

Guatemala was the one of the worst to suffer, with 200,000 dead and 40,000 missing till today. The suffering in Guatemala was so great and the U.S. link is so well documented that in 1999, the then President Clinton apologised for the U.S. role. The experience of the so-called "death squads" in Central America remains raw for many even now and helped to sully the image of the United States in the region till this day.

From the time of invasion of Iraq in March 2003 till June 2004, the phenomenon of death squads was unknown to Iraq and the U.S. soldiers were being killed and injured daily by the Iraqi resistance, something the Americans were unprepared for and had not expected. The U.S. response was to send John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 - during the worst of death squads operations there, to Baghdad as 'ambassador'.

Negroponte was notorious during his tenure in Honduras for not only failing to admit to existence of death squads there, he was almost universally believed to be directing death squads in both Honduras and Nicaragua.

His appointment as ambassador to Iraq by Bush in June 2004 until April 2005 marked the development and the formation of the now notorious Iraqi death squads. The fact that death squads were to be formed by the U.S. and let loose on the long suffering Iraqi population was so widely known and discussed that the US Newsweek magazine even ran an article speculating about the fact that the U.S. government was seriously considering the option of following the Latin American model of simply killing anyone remotely suspected of being against the U.S. interest.

A U.S. military source was quoted by the American media as saying, "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving the terrorists. ... From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

The traumatized populations of Central America could have told the Iraqis of the death squad's methods. People would be kidnapped and tortured by soldiers who wore uniforms by day but used unmarked cars by night to kidnap and kill those hostile to the regime or their suspected sympathizers. Witnesses in Iraq almost always recount that the victims were abducted by people who "came in white police Toyota Land Cruisers, wore police commando uniforms, flak vests and helmets" and were armed with 9mm Glock pistols. Glock side arms are used by many U.S. law enforcement agencies and have been supplied to Iraqi security forces by the U.S. military.

In Iraq, western news services like the BBC and Reuters would only report that people were 'kidnapped by men wearing police uniforms'. Journalists who try and investigate and expose the U.S. direction are themselves then targeted. The killing of journalists seeking to document or expose allegations of state-organised murder has accompanied every dirty war against a civilian population. Since the U.S. occupation of Iraq began, dozens of reporters, cameramen and other media workers have been killed by American-led forces in suspicious circumstances that were never independently investigated.

A typical early example was on June 24 2005, when Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi special correspondent for the news agency Knight Ridder, was killed by a single bullet to the head as he approached a checkpoint that had been thrown up near his home in western Baghdad by U.S. and Iraqi troops. It is believed that the shot was fired by an American sniper.

According to eyewitnesses, no warning shots were fired. Over the past month, Salihee had been gathering evidence that U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have been carrying out extra-judicial killings of alleged members and supporters of the anti-occupation resistance. His investigation followed a feature in the New York Times magazine in May 2005, detailing how the U.S. military had modeled the Iraqi interior ministry police commandos, known as the Wolf Brigade, on the death squads unleashed in the 1980s to crush the left-wing insurgency in El Salvador.

The Wolf Brigade, the most notorious and best known death squad created, was funded and directed by the U.S. A majority of its officers and personnel served in Saddam Hussein's special forces and Republican Guard-veterans of killings, torture and repression. The unit has been used against the resistance in rebellious cities such as Mosul and Samarra, and, over the past year, has played a vital role in allowing U.S. forces a slight distance from having to go and do the killing themselves- although as the most well documented events of Haditha show, the U.S. forces are still massacring Iraqis of all ages themselves. The main U.S. advisor to the Wolf Brigade from the time of its formation until April 2005 was James Steele.

Steele's own biography, states that "he commanded the U.S. military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerilla war" and "was credited with training and equipping what was acknowledged to be the best counter-terrorist force in the region". In a 12-year campaign of murder and repression, the Salvadoran units, trained and advised by people like Steele, killed over 70,000 people.

The daily appearance of men's bodies in the main central Baghdad morgue had "been killed in a methodical fashion" according to the morgue director, Faqir Baqir. "Their hands had been tied or handcuffed behind their backs, their eyes were blindfolded and they appeared to have been tortured. In most cases, the dead men looked as if they'd been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with single bullets to their heads."

In March this year, Mr Baqir was forced to leave Iraq for revealing that over 7,000 victims of the death squads had arrived in his morgue in Baghdad in the previous few months.

The death squads are particularly busy in the last few months with the rise in U.S. military casualties. In Mosul, for example, dozens of men were detained by the commandos in November 2005, as part of a U.S.-led operation to bring the city back under the occupation control. Over the following weeks, more than 150 tortured and executed bodies were found there. In Samarra, dozens of bodies appeared in nearby Lake Thartar in the wake of operations by police commandos in that city. From February till late April 2006, more than 100 bodies were recovered from the Tigris River south of Baghdad-one of the most rebellious areas of the country.

The Iraqi government initially claimed they were villagers who had been kidnapped by "insurgents" in the village of Maidan. This has since been discredited. The victims are from a range of towns and villages, including Kut in the north and Basra in the south. Police in the area told journalists that many of the dead had been "motorists passing through the area when stopped by masked men bearing Kalashnikov rifles at impromptu checkpoints".

Other killings have been discovered in Baquba and the Syrian border town of Qaim in the aftermath of counter-insurgency operations by U.S. forces and their death squads. The death squads have also been busy as in Latin America in the assassination of well over 200 university academics, most of whom were opponents of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Dozens of bodies have been found over the past two months in Baghdad. The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS)-the main public Sunni organisation opposed to the occupation-directly accused the Wolf Brigade of having "arrested Imams and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, and then got rid of their bodies in a garbage dump in Shaab district" of Baghdad.

George Bush has declared his administration was working with the Iraqi interior and defence ministries to "improve their capabilities to coordinate anti-terrorist operations" and "develop their command and control structures". The evidence points clearly that the U.S. is paying and equipping killers to terrorize, torture and murder Iraqis who are believed to have links to the popular resistance, which an unnamed U.S. analyst estimated for Newsweek had "as many as 400,000 auxiliaries and support personnel". The war in Iraq has already seriously undermined U.S. standing in the Middle East and around the world.

Images of U.S. soldiers sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners, putting bags over the heads of captives and shooting a wounded "insurgent" have blackened America's image everywhere and made cooperation with the United States increasingly difficult even in countries long considered American allies.

A dirty war conducted by the U.S which pits against one ethnic group will make civil war more likely, which was always a medium-term U.S. goal as it allows it to follow the classic imperial tactic of 'divide and rule'. The very existence of the Wolf Brigade and other death squads underscores the criminality of the U.S. occupation and the utter fraud of the Bush administration claims of bringing "liberation" and "democracy" to Iraq.

Amongst the current U.S. officials who played key roles in Central America, Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Central American policies at the State Department and who is now a Middle East adviser on Bush's National Security Council staff, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a powerful defender of the Central American policies whilst a member of the House of Representatives.

And what about the man sent by Bush to set up the death squads, Negroponte? He is now Director of National Intelligence - a body set in 2004 as the senior most body to oversee all the different U.S. intelligence agencies; including the CIA.

Negroponte's deputy, General Hayden, has just been appointed to head the CIA. No-one in Iraq should expect any accountability or justice for Negroponte, the CIA or their death squads any time soon. As for Iraq, traumatized by wars and sanctions, death squads are merely the latest horrific trauma to be inflicted on them by the U.S.



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After five years of intensive international involvement in Afghanistan, the country remains ravaged by severe poverty and the spreading starvation of the rural and urban poor. Despite promises from the US-led international community guaranteeing to provide the resources and assistance necessary for its reconstruction and development needs, Afghanistan's people are starving to death. Afghanistan continues to rank at the bottom of most poverty indicators, and the situation of women and children is particularly grave. One in four children born in Afghanistan cannot expect to live beyond the age of five and certain provinces of the country lay claim to the worst maternal mortality rates ever recorded in the world. Yet, the local and international development community's abilities to respond to Afghanistan's many poverty-related challenges have been undermined by the United States' and United Kingdom's misguided focus on counter-narcotics eradication policies. As such, these two self-appointed lead nations on terrorism and counter-narcotics are jointly responsible for southern Afghanistan's current hunger crisis.

Afghans' anger at seeing no representatives from international organisations has only served in endearing the Taliban to the local people. The Taliban are often seen as doing their bit to help the Afghans, despite having much less money than the international community, while international troops are perceived as being in the country for their own purposes. Even those who do not want to turn to the Taliban are forced to do so in order to survive and support their families. After five years of no positive change, the overriding opinion is that this a war - originally supposed to "help" the poor people of Afghanistan - which only serves in making the rich richer, including all "foreigners". With children dying, people starving and family livelihoods being destroyed, there is an urgent need for a complete rethink on the part of the international community if Afghans are no longer to live in extreme poverty.

The ousting of the Taliban regime five years ago was widely believed to mark a new era for Afghanistan. Plagued by decades of violence and poverty, the arrival of the international community heralded a bright future for Afghanistan, confirmed by speeches assuring that the Afghan people would forever be freed from insecurity and oppression. The United States claimed the removal of the Taliban as a humanitarian duty, and promised to deliver enduring freedom to the Afghan people. (...)

With civilians being killed on a regular basis, Afghans are angry that the majority of international aid has been spent on the military purposes rather than poverty relief. Many believe that the military missions are misguided, having lost faith in the ability of the "foreigners" to bring stability to the country. A perceived lack of respect from international military troops has fuelled Afghans' resentment towards the international community. International troops' apparent unwillingness to study Afghan culture and co-operate with locals, has caused mass hatred of the "foreigners". Some believe that the ongoing fighting in Iraq and recent clashes in Lebanon are proof that the West is attempting to re-colonise the Muslim world. Many Afghans are now looking to the Taliban for leadership, declaring that they will "die fighting the foreigners".

A small sample of Afghan civilians have shown "astonishing" levels of uranium in their urine, an independent scientist says. (...) The scientist is Dr Asaf Durakovic, of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC), based in Canada. Dr Durakovic, a former US army adviser who is now a professor of medicine, said in 2000 he had found "significant" DU levels in two-thirds of the 17 Gulf veterans he had tested. In May 2002, he sent a team to Afghanistan to interview and examine civilians there. The UMRC says: "Independent monitoring of the weapon types and delivery systems indicate that radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads were being used by the coalition forces. (...) Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination. The results were astounding: the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999. If UMRC's Nangarhar findings are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster... Every subsequent generation is at risk."

A second UMRC visit to Afghanistan in September 2002 found "a potentially much broader area and larger population of contamination". It collected 25 more urine samples, which bore out the findings from the earlier group. Dr Durakovic said he was "stunned" by the results he had found, which are to be published shortly in several scientific journals. He told BBC News Online: "In Afghanistan there were no oil fires, no pesticides, nobody had been vaccinated - all explanations suggested for the Gulf veterans' condition. But people had exactly the same symptoms. I'm certainly not saying Afghanistan was a vast experiment with new uranium weapons. But use your common sense."

"We the undersigned are pained and devastated by the civilian casualties in Israel and Lebanon caused by terrorist actions initiated by terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas."

"If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die. We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs."

"The project was initiated by Ehud Danoch, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles, who has made the entertainment industry a special concern. Danoch and his early partners on the project assumed that the ad would carry no more than 50 or 60 signatures. But the names kept coming in, until the organizers had to close the list at 84 names. Israeli Danny Dimbort, co-chairman of the Nu Image production company, contacted 28 people. Most signed on, he said, though "some were scared to do so." His company also paid for the full-page ad in the national and international news section of the L.A. Times - at a cost of $117,132, according to the paper's advertising department. Gottlieb, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, said he received only positive feedback, with friends telling him they were moved by the ad. Some even chided him for not inviting them to sign the statement."