Sun. 24 Oct. 2010

INDEPENDENT Robert Fisk: The shaming of America ………………………1 Torture, killing, children shot – and how the US tried to keep

it all quiet………………………………………………….…7 Leading article: The 'unknowns' were knowable …….…….14

GUARDIAN Iraq war logs: British legal threat as UN calls on Obama to

look at torture claims………………………………….……16

YEDIOTH AHRONOTH Israeli artist: IDF an army of evil ………….………………19

HAARETZ What led to IDF bombing house full of civilians during Gaza

war?.......................................................................................21

WIKED LOCAL HINGHAM Pointing out the policies of Syria’s regime …………..…….26

NYTIMES In the Mideast, No Politics but God’s ………………..…….28

OBSERVER Editorial: The final reasons for going to war are being swept

away…………………….………………………………….33

RADIO NETHERLANDS Prize for imprisoned Syrian lawyer …………………….…..34

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HOME PAGERobert Fisk: The shaming of America Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the USIndependent,24 Oct. 2010,

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.

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It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The "old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The "evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.

But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the "81" bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?

The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the

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Israeli army told when he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre.

The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report – heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon.

Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.

But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret

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military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?

We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation – "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."

The significance of this remark – cryptically sadistic in its way – was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.

So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. And so General David Petraeus – widely loved by the US press corps – was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating that WikiLeaks may have blood on its

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hands. The Pentagon has been covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? – to claim that WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.

The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told.

US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 2004-2009. Here are the main points:

Prisoners abused, raped and murderedHundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.

Civilian death toll cover-upCoalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.

The shooting of men trying to surrender

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In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."

Private security firm abusesBritain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.

Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombingA teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.

Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpointsOut of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.

Iranian influenceReports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

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HOME PAGETorture, killing, children shot – and how the US tried to keep it all quietThe largest leak in history reveals the true extent of the bloodshed unleashed by the decision to go to war in Iraq – and adds at least 15,000 to its death tollReports by Emily Dugan, Nina Lakhani, David Randall, Victoria Richards and Rachel ShieldsIndependent,23 Oct. 2010,

So now we begin to know the full extent of what Tony Blair called the blood price. A detainee tortured with live electrical wires here, children shot by US troops at a checkpoint there, insurgents using children to carry out suicide bombings somewhere else; on and on, through 391,832 documents. At the Pentagon, these messages were the day-to-day commonplaces of staff inboxes; for Iraqis, they detail, in the emotionless jargon of the US military, nothing less than the hacking open of a nation's veins.

Today, seven and a half years on from the order to invade, the largest leak in history has shown, far more than has been hitherto known, just what was unleashed by that declaration of war. The Iraqi security services tortured hundreds, and the US military watched, noted and emailed, but rarely intervened. A US helicopter gunship crew were ordered to shoot insurgents trying to surrender. A doctor sold al-Qa'ida a list of female patients with learning difficulties so they could be duped into being suicide bombers. A private US company, which made millions of dollars from the outsourcing of security duties, killed civilians. And the Americans, who have always claimed never to count civilian deaths, were in fact secretly logging them. At a conservative estimate, the new documents add at least 15,000 to the war's death toll.

It was yesterday morning when WikiLeaks, the crowd-funded website which achieved worldwide fame for releasing Afghanistan material earlier this year, uploaded nearly 400,000 US military documents. Covering the 2004-09 period, they consist of messages passed from low-level or medium-level operational troops to their

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superiors and ultimate bosses in the Pentagon. They are marked "Secret", by no means the highest of security classifications.

The Pentagon's response was to say that the leak put the lives of US troops and their military partners in jeopardy, and other official sources dismissed the documents as revealing little that was new. An answer to this came from Iraq Body Count, the British organisation that has monitored civilian deaths since 2003: "These Iraq logs... contain information on civilian and other casualties that has been kept from public view by the US government for more than six years.... The data on casualties is information about the public (mainly the Iraqi public) that was unjustifiably withheld from both the Iraqi and world public by the US military, apparently with the intent to do so indefinitely."

The Iraq War Logs are US documents, and so detail only a few incidents involving British troops. Two, dated 23 June 2008, record a pair of Shia men who say they were punched and kicked by unidentified British troops. Both men had injuries that were consistent with their stories. There is no record of any formal investigation. Another log, dated 2 September 2008, records that a civilian interrogator working with the Americans claimed British soldiers had dragged him through his house and repeatedly dunked his head into a bowl of water and threatened him with a pistol. The log says his story was undermined by inconsistencies and an absence of injuries.

Here are the main areas where there is fresh, and significant, information:Civilian death tollsThe Pentagon and the Iraqi health ministry consistently refused to publish a death toll of civilians, even denying such a record existed. "We don't do body counts," said US General Tommy Franks, who directed the Iraq invasion. The Iraq War Logs reveal just how hollow his words were.

Since the beginning of the war, The Independent on Sunday has asserted that the true death toll of civilians in the war was far

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higher than military officials were suggesting. As early as 2004 the IoS reported that the Pentagon was in fact collecting classified casualty figures and that academics believed the death toll might be as much as 100,000 – or more.

The logs detail 109,032 deaths, some 66,081 of which are civilians. Iraq Body Count said yesterday that an analysis of a sample of 860 of the Iraq War Logs led it to estimate the information in all the logs would add 15,000 extra civilian deaths to its previous total of 107,000. To these should be added military deaths, and IBC's revised total deaths in Iraq would now be around 150,000, 80 per cent of them civilians.

However, some care needs to be taken in using this data. The information in the logs is by no means a comprehensive tally of all deaths.

The death toll of civilians is in stark contrast to President Bush's words in 2003, when he said that new technology meant troops could go out of their way to protect Iraqi civilians. "With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," he said.

TortureThe leaked documents provide a ground's-eye view of abuses as reported by US military personnel to their superiors, and appear to corroborate much of the past reporting on such incidents. Beatings, burnings and lashings surface in hundreds of the documents, giving the impression that the use of cables, metal rods, wooden poles and live electrical wires to torture detainees was far from rare. Although some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans, most in the archive seem to have been ignored.

Early on, space for detainees was limited, and Iraqis would pack them into makeshift jails. In November 2005, American soldiers found 173 detainees with cigarette burns, sores and broken bones crammed into a police internment centre near Baghdad. The log states: "Many detainees are coughing.... Approx 95 were being

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held in one room and were sitting cross-legged with blindfolds, all facing the same direction. According to one of the detainees questioned on-site, 12 detainees have died of disease in recent weeks."

In August 2006, a US sergeant in Ramadi heard whipping noises in a military police station and walked in on an Iraqi lieutenant using an electrical cable to slash the bottom of a detainee's feet. He later found the same Iraqi officer whipping a detainee's back. The American provided sworn statements and photographs of "circular whip marks [and] bleeding on back." No investigation was initiated.

But some of the worst examples came later in the war. In one case last December, 12 Iraqi soldiers, including an intelligence officer, were caught on video in Tal Afar shooting to death a prisoner whose hands were tied. In another, US forces found a detainee with two black eyes, a bruised neck and "scabbing on his left ankle". The detainee said he was electrocuted by Iraqi soldiers in Mosul in order to obtain a confession. Iraqi officials stated he was injured after attempting to escape.

Amnesty International condemned the revelations in the documents and questioned whether US authorities had broken international law by handing detainees to Iraqi forces known to be committing abuses "on a truly shocking scale". The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, said there was a duty on the US administration to investigate whether its officials were involved in or complicit in torture.

Al-Qa'ida's use of special needs patients as suicide bombersA doctor allegedly "sold lists" of patients with special needs to al-Qa'ida so they could be strapped with remote-control explosives and detonated in busy markets in Baghdad. According to the Iraq War Logs, in October 2008 a GP was arrested by US forces on suspicion of passing on the names of 11 female patients to insurgents.

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A file stated that the women were "likely used in the 01 February 2008 dual suicide attack on local markets", referring to two women with Down's syndrome who were fooled into wearing explosive vests and blown up in co-ordinated attacks on pet bazaars in central Baghdad. The explosions, which Iraqi officials said were detonated by mobile phone, killed at least 73 people and wounded more than 160.

It wasn't an isolated incident – on 4 April 2008, a "mentally retarded" teenage boy blew himself up at a funeral in Diyala Province, north-east of Baghdad, killing six and injuring 34. He had, the log suggested, the "facial features of a person with Down's syndrome" and was part of an "ongoing strategy" to recruit individuals with learning difficulties. And, on 28 February 2008, a mentally ill teenage boy was shot and injured by a US patrol while attempting to flee his kidnappers who were intending to use him as a suicide bomber.

An analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that, on average, 30 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were detonated every day between 2004 and 2009 – with vulnerable children handpicked as pawns for slaughter. A US soldier wrote in March 2007: "A 12- to 14-year-old boy wearing a back pack and on a bicycle rode into the intersection. The patrol passed through the intersection and the boy detonated his explosives targeting the passing vehicles." A year later, in February 2008, the log stated: "S2 [military intelligence] assessment: recent reports indicated ... AQI [al-Qa'ida in Iraq] is recruiting young local nationals and also using mentally handicapped persons to target CF [Coalition Forces] within the dragoon OE [operational environment]."

Xe Services (formerly Blackwater)The Bureau of Investigative Journalism says the war logs detail 14 wrongful killings of civilians by the American security company formerly known as Blackwater. It is alleged that in one-third of the cases, Blackwater guards fired on civilians while guarding US officials. The company has earned more than $1.5bn (£950m) for escorting US diplomats in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. On 14

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May 2005 the logs allege that Blackwater shot a civilian car, reportedly killing the driver and injuring his wife and child. According to the logs, the guards drove on and left the injured woman and child. A year later, on 2 May 2006, logs state that Blackwater guards opened fire on an ambulance attending the scene of an IED, killing the civilian ambulance driver.

Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services in 2009 after an incident in 2007 in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in which its security guards were involved in a shooting that killed 14 civilians. After the Nisour massacre the Iraqi government demanded that Blackwater leave the country. Xe Services is still one of the US government's largest private security contractors, supplying many of the estimated 26,000 private security workers currently in Afghanistan.

Shooting of surrendering menA US Apache helicopter was ordered to kill two Iraqi insurgents who tried to surrender. The pilots of the helicopter were advised by a military lawyer that the men could not surrender to an aircraft, and thus were still targets. The aircraft – which has the call sign "Crazyhorse 18" – is thought to be the same helicopter behind the later killing of two Reuters journalists and 10 civilians in July 2007, which came to the world's attention when WikiLeaks released footage from the helicopter's gun camera on to the internet in April. The log of the earlier incident, which took place in February 2007, reveals the insurgents jumped out of their truck and attempted to surrender. The pilots reported: "Lawyer states they cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets," the log entry says. The gunship launched a Hellfire missile at the truck, but the men fled the vehicle and ran into a nearby shack. The crew received further instructions to kill the men, and succeeded by firing 300 rounds a minute from the Apache's 30mm cannon.

Up to 30 children killed by US soldiers at checkpointsAs many as 30 children died at the hands of US forces at military checkpoints, the Iraq war logs have revealed. Violent "escalation

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of force" (EOF) incidents as vehicles were slowed down and searched "often" resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, according to the classified documents.

One entry described how a six-year-old Iraqi was hit as troops fired several rounds with light machine guns. It read: "While crossing the street, patrol had an EOF where patrol fired 3 rounds of M249. One round ricocheted off the concrete hitting a 6yr old LN [local national] 250m down the road. Medical Facility reported that the 6yr old LN died of wounds upon arrival."

Another detailed an incident in June 2005, where US soldiers fired warning shots at the grill of a car from 150m away. When the car finally stopped, seven were dead – including two children – and two were injured, because their parents had told them to lie on the floor of the car for safety. The logs detail the deaths of "significant" numbers of Iraqi civilians, including an unborn child, at checkpoints between 2004 and 2009. Of 834 people killed, 80 per cent were civilians – bringing the total dead to 681.

A photographer embedded with the First Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division in January 2005, in Tal Afar, north-west Iraq, witnessed the deaths of Camille and Hussein Hassan, who were travelling with their six children. Rakan Hassan, 11, was shot in the spine and paralysed – and his family was offered just $7,500 (£4,782) in compensation by the US Army for the loss of the two parents at $2,500 (£1,594) each, and an extra $2,500 (£1,594) for damaging the car (pictured). And on 29 September 2004, a car approaching a checkpoint was fired on by US soldiers and swerved off the road into a canal 1.5km north of Saqlawiyah, near Ramadi. It sank, drowning six people – two women, three children aged between five and eight, and a baby.

Analysis of the logs by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Channel 4's Dispatches showed that, over the six-year period, four times as many civilians were killed in EOF incidents than those listed as insurgents.

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Leading article: The 'unknowns' were knowable Independent,Sunday, 24 October 2010

The Independent on Sunday always knew, if Tony Blair did not, that war has a terrible tendency to go wrong. That is why the bar for resort to military action has to be set very high indeed. This weekend the diabolic consequences of a reckless American reaction to 9/11, invading a country that had nothing to do – at the time – with al-Qa'ida, have been laid bare. The reality that the US military has sought to obscure has now been brought into the open. WikiLeaks presents a damning picture that confirms emphatically what this newspaper, alone among quality Sunday newspapers, has argued all along.

On 16 February 2003, the day after the biggest march this country has ever seen, we said: "The propaganda for war produced by the British and US governments has been laughably amateurish. The attempts by Messrs Bush and Blair to link Iraq with al-Qa'ida have not been convincing. So far the senior UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has not come across weapons of mass destruction. Even if he does, The Independent on Sunday would not support war.

"The key question in relation to weapons of mass destruction is whether Saddam would use them in the certain knowledge that such an act would provoke a war that would destroy him. We believe that deterrence still works. These are not lofty questions, but hard-headed and realistic objections to a war with no obvious cause."

Iraq has reaped the whirlwind sown by George Bush's insouciant refusal to consider the eminently knowable unknowns, to adapt the words of Donald Rumsfeld, his Defense Secretary. The deaths of 150,000 Iraqis, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. The killing by US soldiers of unarmed civilians, including children, and of Iraqis trying to surrender. The horrible mundaneness of

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friendly-fire incidents, including British troops killed by US soldiers because they were listening to their iPods. The turning of a blind eye to abuses by Iraqi security forces. The daily diary of mismanaged sectarian conflict.

None of this is likely to change minds about the case for war in 2003. But it should. Even those who insist that President Bush and Mr Blair acted from noble motives ought to accept that they have no defence against the charge of incompetence. The principal responsibility for the failure to take seriously the Doctrine of Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, "You break it, you own it", lies with President Bush and the Pentagon. Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were negligently dismissive of warnings of a power vacuum, sectarian strife and a breakdown of civil order. The number of US troops deployed was insufficient to prevent looting from the start. And the country still does not have a government, after the elections seven months ago.

But Mr Blair was warned too. This newspaper broke the story of his meeting in November 2002 with six academic specialists in Iraq, including Sir Lawrence Freedman and Professor George Joffe, who told him that occupying the country would be difficult at best and catastrophic at worst. One of those present told us: "I was staggered at Blair's apparent naivety, at his inability to engage with the complexities."

It was not the ignorance so much as the lack of curiosity that was so reprehensible; the wilful, casual, reckless refusal to consider the practicalities of running a country of 25 million people once the totalitarian lid on the pressure cooker was prised off.

Mr Blair continues to evade responsibility for this error of judgement. In his memoir, published last month, he claims that "the issue of the Sunni minority suddenly turned from rulers to ruled was extensively canvassed". But he suggests the real problem was that al-Qa'ida and Iran moved into the country after the invasion, intent on fighting the US and its allies, and that this could not have been foreseen.

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All parts of his analysis are wrong. Sunni-Shia tension was a known problem; the Americans failed to anticipate it. Jihadist ideologues and Iranian agents exploited it; and Messrs Bush and Blair had been repeatedly and explicitly warned that they would.

The Iraq war logs constitute a 400,000-page indictment in the court of history for one of the worst judgements in American foreign policy, in which Mr Blair finally faces an unanswerable charge of aiding and abetting. For what it is worth, when so many have suffered and died, those who marched, stood or spoke against the war have been vindicated.

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Iraq war logs: British legal threat as UN calls on Obama to look at torture claims• MoD and US condemn action taken by WikiLeaks• Lawyer warns crimes may have involved UK forcesMark Townsend, Jamie Doward and Paul Harris,Guardian,23 Oct. 2010,

Britain's role in the alleged torture and unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians may be the subject of legal action following the publication of nearly 400,000 leaked military documents by the website WikiLeaks.

British lawyers said the classified US army field reports embroiled British as well as American forces in an alleged culture of abuse and extrajudicial killings in Iraq. Solicitor Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, appearing alongside WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference in London today, said some of the deaths documented in the reports may have involved British forces and could now go through the UK courts.

The Iraq logs, Shiner said, indicated that UK as well as US commanders were likely to have ignored evidence of torture by

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the Iraqi authorities, contrary to international law. He said: "Some of these deaths will be in circumstances where the UK have a very clear legal responsibility. This may be because the Iraqis died while under the effective control of UK forces – under arrest, in vehicles, helicopters or detention facilities."

A number of the documents detail allegations of abuse by UK soldiers. Two reports dated 23 June 2008 describe claims by two Iraqi men – both Shias – that they were punched and kicked by unidentified British soldiers. Both men, according to the reports on the WikiLeaks website, suffered injuries that would have been consistent with their claims. There is no apparent record of an investigation of the allegations.

The Ministry of Defence condemned the actions of WikiLeaks, adding that it investigated any allegations made against British troops. It said: "There is no place for mistreatment of detainees. Any civilian casualty is a matter of deep regret and we take any incidents extremely seriously."

As Assange defended the decision to disclose the documents – saying it was of "immense importance" to reveal the truth about the conflict – the UN warned that if the logs pointed to clear violations of the UN convention against torture, Barack Obama's administration had a clear obligation to investigate them.

Manfred Novak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said: "President Obama came to power with a moral agenda, saying we don't want to be seen to be a nation responsible for major human rights violations."

A failure to investigate credible claims of complicity in torture, Novak suggested, would be a failure of the Obama government to recognise US obligations under international law.

He said that states were prohibited from transferring detainees to other countries that could pose a risk to their personal safety.

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Experts who studied the documents said this principle appeared to have been breached.

Novak said it was not enough for Obama's administration to suggest the alleged crimes took place before it came to power. But the Pentagon dismissed Novak's concerns. It said: "We have fulfilled our obligations to report it [torture]."

The US Defence Department condemned the WikiLeaks release, describing the documents as raw observations by tactical units, which were only snapshots of tragic, mundane events. Assange said the snapshots of everyday events offered a glimpse at the "human scale" of the conflict. He told the news conference his motive for the disclosure was "about the truth".

Iraq Body Count, a private British-based group that has tracked the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war began in 2003, said its analysis of the logs had raised its total of civilian deaths from 107,369 to more than 122,000. IBC, which worked with WikiLeaks, said the war logs showed there were more than 109,000 violent deaths between 2004 and the end of 2009. They included 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy", 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces, and 3,771 coalition troops.

John Sloboda of IBC said: "They [the documents] show the relentless grind of daily killings in almost every town or village in every province."

While many Iraqi civilians welcome the release of the documents, the country's prime minister accused WikiLeaks of an attempt to sabotage his re-election hopes. Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, has been fighting for more than seven months to keep his job after national elections in March failed to produce a clear winner.

The release was also roundly condemned by the American authorities. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, attacked the disclosure of any classified information that threatened national

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security, or put at risk the lives of coalition forces or civilians. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell called the release "shameful" and said it "could potentially undermine our nation's security".

However, Assange said the Pentagon allegations were "simply not true" and that he was confident Iraqis were not named in the documents. He said the documents, published in a heavily censored form, contained "no information that could be harmful to any individual".

Undeterred by the Pentagon's reaction, WikiLeaks promised today to publish 15,000 more documents about the war in Afghanistan.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst who leaked documents in 1971 revealing how the American public was misled about the Vietnam war, made a surprise appearance at today's news conference and accused President Obama of attempting to stem the flow of military information.

Ellsberg, 79, also criticised Obama for playing a legal "experiment" with the arrest of US army whistleblower Bradley Manning, who is suspected of leaking a previous cache of war documents to WikiLeaks. Manning is in US military custody and faces a court martial next year.

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Israeli artist: IDF an army of evil Israeli artists join MachsomWatch tour of West Bank villages; slam IDF policies in crossings, say soldiers 'have no idea how bestial their behavior is' Yoav Zitun Yedioth Ahronoth,23 Oct. 2010,

Several Israeli artists and creators joined by dozens of other Israelis took part in a MachsomWatch tour of the West Bank Friday, in order to "get first hand knowledge of the evils of the occupation."

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MachsomWatch, founded in 2001, is an organization of peace activists which regularly protests Israeli presence in the West Bank.

Among the artists taking part in Friday's tour were actors Oded Kotler and Amnon Meskin and directors Ati Zitron and Ram Levy.

The group toured several Palestinian villages near the West Bank cities of Qalqilya and Nablus, the Elkana Local Council and the city of Ariel, which has been in the center of a cultural debate in the past months, after artists refused to perform in it newly inducted cultural hall.

Speaking with Ynet, the artists criticized Israel's occupation policies: "I knew of these things, buy I had no idea how horrible they really were," said Meskin.

"The little things, like the handicapped path at a crossing that remains closed because they can't find the key to it, or the soldiers' contradicting orders – one telling a Palestinian to stand, the other telling him to sit. And don't get me started on the burning of olive trees, which I'm sure is directed from somewhere."

The actor went on to doubt the IDF's assertions of ethics and morality, saying that, "The soldiers don’t understand how bestial their behavior is. They look at the Palestinian as if they were things, cockroaches. This is an army of evil."

'I'm ashamed of my people' "This day only proves that the Ariel petition was right," Kotler added. "I don't agree with the artists who later recanted, but I can understand that they were worried about their livelihood.

"There is no one here to tell the soldiers that what they're doing is immoral. They see the entire Palestinian population as terror suspects."

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"I've seen people, who despite being humiliated and abused, still receive (tour) groups with endless patience, I'm ashamed that I'm part of the force that humiliates them," Zitron told Ynet. "I'm ashamed of my people."

According to MachsomWatch's data, about 200,000 have been barred from entering Israel by order of the Shin Bet. Palestinian human rights activist Zacaria Zada warned that settlers' onslaughts of Palestinians were increasing: "The outposts around here are hubs of violence. Only a week ago, they torched 2,000 olive trees. There's a nearby highway I can take only on Shabbat, for fear I'll be attacked." Dalia Golomb, who headed the tour, told participants that "there are entire areas of Palestinian land here, whose owners live beyond the fence and cannot access their land. Every morning, thousands have to go through the hell of waiting at the crossings. If they are even five minutes late, they are deemed illegal Palestinian aliens."

Omar, a hothouse owner from Qalqilya, believes "both people are victims of their leadership. We know not all soldiers are the same. We absolutely love some of them, but this is a harsh reality."

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What led to IDF bombing house full of civilians during Gaza war?The order to bomb the house has been explained as the brigade commander's legitimate interpretation of drone photos shown in the war room.By Amira Hass Haaretz,24 Oct. 2010,

A Military Police investigation into an air strike that killed 21 Palestinian civilians during Operation Cast Lead, according to a recent Haaretz report, indicates senior air force officers had approved the attack. The report, published on Friday by Amos

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Harel and Anshel Pfeffer ("IDF probes top officers on Gaza war strike that killed 21 family members" ), alleges senior officers authorized the bombing despite being warned by more junior officers that civilians were likely located at or nearby the target site. One officer involved in approving the attack is then-Givati Brigade commander Col. Ilan Malka. To date it has not yet been determined whether he will stand trial as an officer involved in the affair.

The incident took place on January 5, 2009, in the Zeitun neighborhood of Gaza City. During Givati Brigade activity in Zeitun, a house there - home to the Al-Samouni family - was identified as harboring armed Palestinians. The Israel Air Force hit the house twice with missiles, killing 21 civilians, including women and children, and wounding 19 others.

While some Givati soldiers agreed to testify to Breaking the Silence (an organization of veteran combatants who served during the second intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to everyday life in the occupied territories ) about their part in Operation Cast Lead, notably absent are the soldiers who manned the position nearest the house that was bombed on Malka's orders.

On the morning of January 4, the commanders of this force ordered the dozens of members of the extended Samouni family to leave the three-story house (the home of Talal Samouni ), which they then turned into their outpost. The soldiers told them to gather in the one-story home of Wail Samouni, on the other side of the road and about 30 meters southeast. The Samounis took the fact that the soldiers themselves concentrated the family in one building, and saw that there were infants, children, women, elderly people and unarmed men, as insurance that they would not be harmed.

Despite the intense firing heard all around them that entire evening, the family's fears were mitigated by the proximity of the

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soldiers who had assembled them into the one home. Several of the Samouni men even left the house on Monday morning (January 5 ) to collect wood for a fire, hoping to bake pita and heat up tea. They also called out to a relative who had remained in his home, a few meters east of them, and suggested he join them because their house was safe.

Shortly before that, one of the women of the house ventured outside with a child to draw water from a nearby well, as the water tanks on the roof had been riddled by the soldiers' bullets a day earlier. The woman and the child were within view of the soldiers, a fact which the Samounis reported to Haaretz, in Gaza, over a year and a half ago. Their testimony received extensive coverage in Haaretz, in world media outlets, and in reports filed by Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations.

Straight from the war room A small wooden structure stood next to the house, and several of the men apparently began climbing onto it to take apart the boards. This activity was seen in drone photographs shown on the screen in the war room headquarters, which according to testimony obtained by Breaking the Silence is of poorer quality than the screen before the person operating the aircraft.

In the war room the poles the men were holding were taken to be RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades ) and the people carrying them were marked as a squad of terrorists who should be shot immediately. First the group of men outside the house was shelled. They ran into the home, which was then shelled twice. The structure was not destroyed, but because it was so crowded inside, dozens were killed and wounded.

One soldier who had testified to Breaking the Silence told Haaretz about two months ago that soldiers at another outpost, east of the Samouni compound, received information from the war room on the two-way radio that an RPG squad was walking around in the area.

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On the morning of Monday, January 5, a group of stunned Palestinian civilians, including a woman and her baby daughter whose fingers had been lopped off, arrived at that soldier's outpost. The soldiers managed to understand that the woman's husband had just been killed. The woman's husband, the soldier confidently told Haaretz, had been killed by a Palestinian RPG that was aimed at the other soldiers' outpost but by mistake had hit the adjacent Samouni home.

Most of the Givati soldiers who gave testimony to Breaking the Silence didn't even know 21 civilians had been killed in a shelling carried out under war-room orders, based on drone photographs. They didn't know in real time, nor did they know a year and a half later, when they spoke to Haaretz. They hadn't heard of the "Samouni" family, despite the extensive media coverage as well as the space devoted to this family's history in the Goldstone report.

Unknown details On January 4, 2009, the Sunday after the ground incursion had begun, a Givati force set up outposts and bases in at least six houses in the Samouni compound at the southeast end of Zeitun - as revealed upon matching the testimony of local Palestinians with that of the soldiers. Immediately after the ground incursion, IDF soldiers had already killed five Palestinian civilians, most of them from the Samouni family, in separate incidents that took place late at night and in the morning. One child who was seriously wounded when forces broke into his home, bled there to death until the next day - 24 hours after his father was killed at short range.

These details were also unknown to the soldiers that Haaretz found with the help of Breaking the Silence. They agreed to the organization's request to testify because they were horrified by two other incidents they witnessed, when their comrades killed civilians at close range. The soldiers were upset by the destructive actions of the IDF, the trigger-happy atmosphere and the virtual reality, as they described it, created by IDF spokesmen inside Israel, to the effect that there was serious fighting in the Gaza

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Strip. The soldiers soon understood that they were not actually confronting the dangerous Hamas resistance for which they had been prepared on the eve of the attack.

Until now the order to bomb a house full of civilians has been explained and understood as an ostensibly legitimate interpretation on the part of the brigade commander of drone photographs displayed on the screen in the war room. According to the findings of human rights organizations and Haaretz investigations, during the course of Cast Lead many other civilians were killed and wounded by aerial strikes, in a similar process: based on how drone photos on war-room screens were interpreted.

The many incidents described in the human rights organizations' reports indicate that the drone photographs are not as precise or clear as they are said to be, or that the technology considered "objective" also depends on commanders' interpretation: Children playing on the roof are liable to be regarded as "scouts," people trying to speak to their relatives over the phone are liable to be "signal operators for a terrorist brigade," and families that went to the garden to feed the goats, squads of Qassam launchers.

In the case of the Samounis, the possibility of cross-referencing sophisticated technological information with human information from the field was available 24 hours before the "RPG squad" ostensibly appeared on the war room screens.

No ambulances The Givati Brigade commander, fearing Hamas attempts to kidnap IDF soldiers, insisted that not a single ambulance enter the sector under his control. That was also learned from soldiers who spoke to Breaking the Silence. Testimony from the Zeitun area, which was reported by Haaretz in real time based on conversations with neighborhood residents, told of at least two children and two adults who bled to death after being shot by Givati soldiers, because the Red Cross and the Red Crescent were unable to coordinate with the IDF the approach of ambulances to the area.

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According to the testimony of the family of Hussein Ayedi, who lived in eastern Zeitun, only a week after he was injured and after daily coordination efforts by Physicians for Human Rights, were they allowed to leave on foot, under various conditions, and to meet up with ambulances at a distance of over three kilometers. According to one soldier who spoke with Breaking the Silence, brigade commander Malka insisted that if there were wounded, they should be taken on foot. But according to many reports from the field, sometimes even convoys of civilians were not allowed to progress on foot and the soldiers fired at them.

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Pointing out the policies of Syria’s regime Kevin M. Kelley,Wicked Local Hingham (American media Web site with news from the Hingham Journal)Posted Oct 23, 2010

Hingham — I read with interest Ketan Gajria’s Sept. 30 special article to the Hingham Journal, “Isn’t Syria Part of the Axis of Evil?” I commend him for a well written piece describing his experience as a student of the Arabic language in Syria. His opening remarks reflect his curiosity as to “what an “evil” country actually is.” He later recounts, “That the majority of people whom he met drew a clear distinction between a country’s people and the policies of their government.”

Are Germany, Russia, China and Cambodia “evil” countries? No. However, in the 20th century these countries were led by dictatorial governments whose policies were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Syria is ruled by an authoritarian regime under President Bashar Al-Asad and dedicated to the highest levels of financial and military support to a wide range of international terrorist groups. Asad is a member of the Ba’ath party, which emphasizes socialism and secular Arabism. Members of President Asad’s

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Shiite sect, the Alawis, control most of the important military and security positions. Alawites make up roughly 10-12 percent of the Syrian population of 11-12 million. This has left Syria’s Sunni Muslims, who make up about 70 percent of the population, marginalized and frustrated.

In 1963, Hafiz Al-Asad, the Syrian Defense Minister and the father of the current president, came into power by a bloodless military coup. He sought to destroy a Sunni opposition party known as the Muslim Brotherhood in the stronghold of Hama, Syria’s fifth largest city. Hama was targeted because in early 1980, a coalition of clerics and trade unionists centered there issued a manifesto demanding among other things, that President Asad honor the Human Rights Charter, abolish the state of emergency, and hold free elections. Throughout the next year surprise searches of Hama and other Muslim Brotherhood strongholds became weekly events. During these roundups curbside executions were regularly carried out against youthful suspects, and the squares and sidewalks were littered with their bullet-riddled bodies. Torture, to ghastly to print here, was common.

Syria continues to be categorized as a state sponsor of terrorism since its designation in 1979. According to the U.S. State Department, Syria’s government supports U.S. listed terrorist groups and allow some of these organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to maintain headquarters in Damascus. The 2006 State Department Country Report says the Syrian government remains an active supporter of Hezbollah. Syria cooperates with other state sponsors of terrorism. Iranian arms bound for Hezbollah regularly pass through Syria. Syria effectively occupied and controlled neighboring Lebanon from 1990 to 2005. The results of a preliminary UN investigation into the February 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri implicated several top officials in the Syrian government. Syria provides training, weapons, safe-haven and logistical support to both leftist and Islamist Palestinian hard liners.

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According to U.S. Defense and intelligence reports, Syria has an active chemical and biological weapons program including significant reserves of the deadly nerve gas sarin. It also has ballistic missiles capable of delivering these weapons of mass destruction.

Does the government have ties to Al-Qaeda? No. The secular Arab nationalist Syrian government is hostile to the Sunni led fundamentalists of Al-Qaeda. The Alawites are a minority Shiite sect concerned that the country’s Sunni majority could rally against them. Political opposition to the president is not tolerated. Syria has been under a state of emergency since 1963. Syrian governments have justified martial law by the state of war that continues to exist with Israel and by continuing threats posed by terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda.According to Amnesty International, in February 1982, the government of Syria massacred an estimated 7,000 to 40,000 people. Known as the Hama Massacre, large parts of the old city were bombed and leveled. The attack has been described as possibly being the single deadliest act by an Arab government in the modern Middle East. Virtually the entire Muslim religious leadership in Hama, from sheiks to teachers to mosque care-takers who survived the battle for the city was liquidated afterward in one fashion or another; most anti-government union leaders suffered the same fate.And so it is. Instead of finding an “evil” country or a “terrorist” people, I’m glad that Mr. Gajria found a society “like any other, where people want to live in peace.” For him, it is a “home away from home.”

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In the Mideast, No Politics but God’s By ANTHONY SHADIDNew York Times,23 Oct. 2010,

BEIRUT — A line was uttered this month by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, that drew little notice in between his

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stentorian asides but said a great deal about politics today for Israelis, Palestinians and the larger Arab world.

To tens of thousands of supporters gathered here to welcome President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Mr. Nasrallah declared that Iran’s Islamic republic “supports the ‘no’s’ that the Arabs declared at the time of late President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Khartoum before many abandoned them. Iran renews these ‘no’s’ along with the Arab nation.”

The “no’s” refer to a dramatic Arab summit in Sudan in 1967, when, after Israel’s crushing defeat of its neighbors, Arab states declared “no” to peace with Israel, “no” to negotiations with it, and “no” to recognition of it. Nasser, the Egyptian president, was the standard-bearer of a secular nationalism whose moment had ended with that war; today, Iran is, by choice or default, the scion of a generation of opposition politics that now alone bears an indelibly religious stamp.

In a region once convulsed by a potpourri of ideologies — from unreconstructed Maoists to millenarian Salafists — no one is left standing save Islamist movements, from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas in the Palestinian territories to Hezbollah, perhaps the most formidable. Be it opposition to Israel, to autocratic Arab regimes, or to the plethora of injustices visited on Arabs, the Islamists are the only ones with a broadly popular message and an ardent following, with a fleeting exception or two.

Their ascendancy is not new; for a generation, they have eclipsed their secular and leftist predecessors, whom they often act (and sometimes speak) like. But the legacy of their virtual monopoly on opposition is becoming more and more clear. They have reinterpreted conflicts — between Arab and Israeli, East and West — and have highlighted the degree to which the very notion of identity has shifted in the Arab world; so much so that “Arab” may soon become passé in defining that world. And with a politics bereft of ideology beyond faith, they have narrowed the avenues for change in a region whose inhabitants desperately want it.

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These movements often exude a canny pragmatism. Islamists in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories have all embraced electoral success; in time, they may even reinforce a democratic body politic. But on issues from poverty to Palestine, they have imposed a paradigm of morality, ethics and occasional absolutism that tends to neglect society’s most pressing problems or turn them into unrequitable anthems.

This is a large reason that for reformers, provocateurs and critics outside their orbit, pessimism is the fashion today. “Religious politics or politicized religion has taken over,” said Fawwaz Traboulsi, a historian, columnist and longtime leftist activist from Lebanon. Asked if there was any counterexample out there — beyond the quixotic fringes and uncompromising idealists — he shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think there is.”

The American University of Beirut hosts a collection of hundreds of posters from an age that was violent, tumultuous but, to many in the region, more capable of hope that solutions for the region’s deep problems could be found. They are eclectic, from the agitprop of secular Palestinian groups to the intoxicating promises of Lebanese partners bent on abolishing the nation’s vaguely feudal system a generation ago.

Many are imbued with the iconography of the third world liberation movements of the day. (Read: ample imagery of the Kalashnikov rifle.) The haircuts date the photos. So do the terms. (“Armed struggle,”rather than today’s preferred “jihad.”) But they capture a fervent idealism. To the West, it may have been the era of the massacre at Munich, hijackings and the rise of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. But to many Arabs, it was a time pregnant with the promise of real change, when the Palestinian movement captured the Arab imagination to a degree unmatched before or since.

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“Through revolution comes the liberation of women,” one poster reads. “Palestine is for people ... Whatever their religion,” another declares. Other slogans tout the P.L.O. as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” a rueful artifact given the divisions today between the stridently religious Hamas and a rump, nominally secular Palestinian Authority that is engaged, fitfully, in unpromising negotiations with Israel. A Lebanese poster quotes the promise of one bygone leader: “The new leadership that is capable of building a real Lebanon is neither an Islamic leadership nor a Christian leadership but rather a national leadership.”

The slogans are more than nostalgia: they poignantly illustrate what is no longer really debated — women’s rights, secular citizenship that transcends today’s more primordial identities (Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, Christian and so on), and the yawning gap between rich and poor. For many Islamists, social welfare is an issue of charity and benevolence, not of restructuring society.

“Radical” is a word journalists often deploy. So is “militant.” They are shorthand and, as such, do little to describe what today’s Islamist opposition really represents.

“They are radical only in the sense that they reject Israeli hegemony in the region,” said Karim Makdisi, a professor at the American University of Beirut. Indeed, Hezbollah long ago set aside enforcement of social conservatism in Lebanon, for the sake of unifying its diverse constituency. While 25 years ago it called for an Islamic state along the lines of Iran, it is now firmly part of the prevailing sectarian order. Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, it helps represent a rising middle class. “They are not against the state at all,” said Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer and critic. “The only thing is that they want to dominate it in their own way.”

Their greatest legacy may be on the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which both Israel and its Islamist opponents have inexorably moved

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away from a struggle between competing nationalisms and toward a historic clash of religions — more messianic, more grounded in identities as Muslims and Jews and, in that, more dangerous. Bringing the sacred into the debate makes compromise altogether more difficult. Jewish fundamentalism against Islamic fundamentalism, Mr. Khoury called it: “That is a sign of catastrophe, and this is the situation we’re in now.”

In Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon where Christian militiamen massacred hundreds and perhaps more after Palestinian fighters withdrew in 1982, there is still the iconography of an older age. But the posters of Arafat and the dictums of his Fatah movement are faded. Even the pictures feel obsolete; the eyeglass frames are unfashionably thick. “The nation of Muhammad,” slogans read now.

They unfurl down the narrow street, past Palestinian children playing in trash dumps with almost no hope of returning to their forefathers’ land, past cobwebbed electric wires that rival Baghdad’s dysfunction, past the telling stench of sewage. “Martyrdom is life,” a poster reads. “Jihad until victory or martyrdom,” another adds.

At his grocery store, Ghassan Abdel-Hadi, a father of four, sat with relatives a few days after Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit. Down the street, there was a denunciation of the Palestinian Authority for being “American lackeys.” One merchant praised Hezbollah for paying for his father’s operation. Mr. Abdel-Hadi himself was no ideologue. He politely held out hope, even if, pragmatically, he feared the worst.

“When no one supports you, you have to rely on God,” the shopkeeper said. “You put your trust in him and off you go to face what’s ahead.”

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HOME PAGEEditorial: The final reasons for going to war are being swept awayThe allegations of allied complicity in torture point to a complete moral failureThe Observer,24 Oct. 2010,

There was no single reason why Britain and the US went to war in Iraq. The motives that inspired George W Bush and Tony Blair have been variously dissected, analysed and psychoanalysed. It is too early for history to have formed a settled view on the war, but the case that it was a monumental error gets ever more compelling.

Most of the official justifications for war, on grounds of security from terror and weapons of mass destruction, have been discredited. The only element of moral authority left in the decision might be that Saddam Hussein ran a murderous regime, characterised by torture and extra-judicial killing. It could indeed have been the duty of western powers to intervene against such atrocity. But the western occupiers quickly became complicit in atrocities of their own, as new leaked military documents reveal.

The files, passed to WikiLeaks and reported in today's Observer, reveal how allied forces turned a blind eye to torture and murder of prisoners held by the Iraqi army. Reports of appalling treatment of detainees were verified by the US army and deemed unworthy of further investigation. Responsibility for disciplinary action was passed to the Iraqi units that had perpetrated the abuse. In a handful of cases, allied soldiers are directly implicated in abuse.

The leaked files expose a cavalier attitude towards international law with regard to the treatment of enemy soldiers and disgraceful tolerance of civilian casualties.

The thrust of these allegations is not new. But each extra piece of evidence builds a portrait of a military occupation deeply implicated in practices that were illegal under international law and unconscionable in the eyes of any reasonable observer.

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The terrible truth about British and American involvement in Iraq seems increasingly to be that it was not just a strategic failure, it was, for the occupying powers, a moral catastrophe.

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Prize for imprisoned Syrian lawyer Ibrahim JadelkarimRadio Netherlands,23 October 2010,

The Amsterdam Bar Council has awarded Syrian lawyer Muhanad al-Hassani a prize for his human rights work. Mr al-Hassani is in Syria's Adra prison serving a sentence for defending human rights and political prisoners.

Every year, the prize is awarded to a lawyer who champions constitutional law. Muhanad al-Hassani has ended up with a lengthy prison sentence as a result of his activities. The official charge is disseminating information which undermines national feelings and spreading false information about Syria abroad. This is a tried and tested formula to put human rights activists and other opponents of the government behind bars.

ScandalGerm Kemper, president of Amsterdam's Bar Council, attended two sessions of Mr al-Hassani's trial in Damascus. He is outraged:

"There are three judges and a Public Prosecutor in robes on a stage. They conduct a kind of conversation with the man behind bars over the heads of the public. Nothing substantial happens: it's never about the case, the content, the evidence, or anything like that. It is a scandal, and then you've got to keep your mouth shut."

MemoThe Syrian lawyer's prize was picked up by Iyas al-Maleh, the son of an 80-year-old colleague of Mr al-Hassani, who is also serving

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time in Adra prison for similar offences. Mr al-Maleh, Sr defended Mr al-Hassani during his trial.

During the award ceremony, Iyas al-Maleh was visibly moved when he read a memo written by Mr al-Hassani in his prison cell. He dedicated the prize to all Syrian lawyers who defend constitutional law. And to all political prisoners in Syria and to young Syrians who deserved a better life.

"Syria has been in under siege since 1963," said Mr Kemper during the ceremony. "That means there have been severe limits on the right to free speech and the right to free association for 48 years."

European boycottMeanwhile, the Syrian Bar Council has expelled Mr al-Hassani, so that he can no longer practice law when he is released from prison. Iyas al-Maleh called on Dutch lawyers to boycott the Syrian bar. He is also trying to implement a boycott at the European level. Mr Kemper supports him:

"I am already working on having the Syria bar removed from the international organisation of lawyers. I spoke on the matter at an international congress in Vancouver. The executive said it would look into the matter of suspending Syria or even removing it in the near future."

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Guardian: "Iraq: the war logs - one day, 146 deaths".. New York Times: "Leaked Reports Stir Political Disputes in Iraq".. The Faster Times: "Wikileaks and the Dawn of the Transparent Age"..

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HEADLINES of the American, British and Israeli newspapers about WikiLeaks:

Washington Post:- Iraqi PM: WikiLeaks release politically timed - Secret war files offer grim new details on conflict - SpyTalk: Files likely pose little threat to Blackwater - BlogPost: More on WikiLeaks release- Constructing the Iraq of 2025- WikiLeaks continues to face challenges

New York Times:- WikiLeaks Founder, Trailed by Notoriety- Use of Contractors Added to War’s Chaos in Iraq- Mix of Trust and Despair Helped Turn Tide in Iraq- Leaked Reports Stir Political Disputes in Iraq- Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias - A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq - Detainees Fared Worse in Iraqi Hands, Logs Say - The Iraq Archive: The Strands of a War

Los Angeles Times:- WikiLeaks documents indicate U.S. forces failed to stop prisoner abuse by Iraqis- New details raise questions about US military knowledge of sectarian slaughter in Iraq- WikiLeaks documents give Iraqis a fuller picture of war- WikiLeaks reports of abuse by Iraqi forces deepens political divide in Iraq - Analysis: Leaked Iraq war logs highlight risk that American pullout could lead to chaos - WikiLeaks documents indicate U.S. forces failed to stop prisoner abuse by Iraqis - Wikileaks: Classified U.S. documents detail prisoner abuse by Iraqi army, police

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- Leaked US military document says American hikers detained by Iran were on Iraqi side of border - Wikileaks posts thousands of classified U.S. documents on Iraq war - WikiLeaks' Iraq war documents: No U.S. investigation of many abuses - Obama administration braces for WikiLeaks release of thousands of secret documents on Iraq war

Guardian:- Iraq war logs: British legal threat as UN calls on Obama to look at torture claims - One day in Iraq: the background - Iraq: the war logs - one day, 146 deaths - Iraq war logs: UN calls on Obama to investigate human rights abuses - Iraq war logs: Obama must investigate torture claims, says UN envoy - Iraq war logs: Pictures from one hellish day of the conflict - Iraq war logs: live reaction and WikiLeaks address - Iraq war logs: military privatisation run amok - Iraq war logs: disclosure condemned by Hillary Clinton and Nato - WikiLeaks Iraq war logs: Why Iraq has the right to know the full death toll - Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture

Independent:- Robert Fisk: The shaming of America - Torture, killing, children shot – and how the US tried to keep it all quiet - Assange defends leaks, and says more will come - Menzies Campbell: Nasty, brutish and refusing to go away - Leading article: The 'unknowns' were knowable

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Daily Telegraph:- Wikileaks: UN calls for US to investigate torture claims - Wikileaks: two cases of alleged abuse by British troops - WikiLeaks founder gives news conference in London - WikiLeaks: Obama faces tough questions on Iran - Wikileaks: how Iran devised new suicide vest for al-Qaeda to use in Iraq

Haaretz:- Leaked Iraq documents cause neither shock nor awe in Arab world- Secret U.S. files paint picture of abuse and Iran interference in Iraq- Pentagon calls WikiLeaks release "shameful"

Jerusalem Post:- Iraqi PM: WikiLeaks release politically timed- WikiLeaks to publish 15,000 more Afghan war papers

Yedioth Ahronoth:- WikiLeaks irks Pentagon with Iraq files release - Iraqi PM on the defense in WikiLeaks release - Critics denounce Iraqi PM over WikiLeaks material - Secret US docs: Iran, Hezbollah trained Iraqi militants - Files: Iraqi deaths higher than US count - Al Jazeera: Wikileaks to uncover US army cover-up of prisoners' torture

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