BAGHDAD — Tariq Aziz, a former top aide to Saddam Hussein, was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on Tuesday for crimes against members of rival Shiite political parties.
The ruling was the latest in a series of criminal cases against Mr. Aziz, 74, who as foreign minister and, later, deputy prime minister became the bespectacled face of Mr. Hussein’s government during and before the Persian Gulf war of 1991, which was triggered by Iraq’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait.
Because Mr. Hussein seldom left Iraq because of fears about his safety, Mr. Aziz represented Iraq in the diplomatic world. He surrendered to American forces in 2003, aware that he was among Iraq’s most hunted officials.
PressTVGlobalNews | October 23, 2010 - The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, between September 16 and September 18, 1982, during the Lebanese civil war. Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were massacred in the camps by the Israeli supporters Phalangist militia while the camp was surrounded by Israeli forces. In that period of time, Israel was at war with Lebanon. The Israeli forces occupied Beirut and dominated militarily the refugee camps of Palestinians and controlled the entrance to the city. Later, the Israeli forces were ruled to have been involved directly in massacres carried out in both camps.
This episode of Press TV's Remember Palestine looks at what brought on the massacres and why they are not recognized to the same extent that other atrocities in history have been.
RussiaToday | October 24, 2010 - The shocking WikiLeaks release, which has revealed thousands of unreported civilian casualties in Iraq, is the most accurate picture of war ever made, and it is food for thought, says the website's editor-in-chief.
The report, condemned by the Pentagon, claims that US commanders in Iraq ignored evidence of torture and the murder of civilians. "This material has revealed 15,000 previously unreported, undocumented civilian casualties. That's an extraordinary number of people who have never been spoken about before," Julian Assange said. "We also see that the cover up of torture by coalition forces well after Andrew Graham was a concrete policy, a secret policy: to not intervene with torture conducted by the fledgling Iraqi government," he added. "This is the most accurate description of a war that has ever been released into the historic record. There is nothing comparable.
It is the details of the deaths of 109,000 people, the wounding of 170,000 people, the detaining of nearly 200,000 people during a course of six years. Of course, that is only about a half the military action that went on during that period, because it is only the US view on things, but even so we see that there is nearly no street corner in Baghdad that did not have a body found that had been killed through violence in one form or another," he said. "We should start imagining it or stop supporting it. It is not good to support things that you do not understand," he pointed out.
"We need to understand what the reality of war is, if we are going to choose to engage in it." Assange said that WikiLeaks was now expecting some kind of response from the Pentagon, a counter-attack that follows each of the website's releases. "Last time it was names appearing in the material, which the Pentagon managed to successfully fool the press into believing was going to be a great big assassination list for the Taliban. But in fact, nearly all of those names were right to appear; they were the names of governors who were taking bribes by the US military, or the names of the radio stations that were taking bribes to put on propaganda content...
As recently as last week, NATO officials in Kabul said they could not find a single person that needed protecting or moving... And a letter has come out that was originally written on August 16th by Defense Secretary Gates stating that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods were revealed in that material, but of course, this was not the public line," he said.
AlJazeeraEnglish | October 23, 2010 - It is the biggest leak of military secrets ever. Al Jazeera has obtained access to almost 400,000 classified American documents. Torture, claims of murder at the checkpoint - revelations that make a mockery of the rules of combat.
Over the past ten weeks, working with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, Al Jazeera has read tens of thousands of documents, which we sourced through WikiLeaks.
There is a good reason that Washington did not want you to see them. They reveal the covering up of Iraqi state torture to the truth about the hundreds of civilians who have been killed at coalition road blocks.
There are fresh outrages involving private security contractors and we find out what the US really thinks about the Iraqi prime minister.
france24english | October 22, 2010 - Israel has started building at least 600 homes since the end of a construction freeze, watchdog Peace Now said on Thursday, in a move which the Palestinians slammed as "a flagrant act of defiance".
france24english | October 15, 2010 - For 60 years the Israeli Army have confiscated the bodies of Palestinian and Arab fighters. The corpses are kept in secret cemeteries and given identification numbers. The Palestinians call these cemeteries "Makaber el Arkam" the cemeteries of numbers
On October 7, 2010, the Afghanistan War entered its 10th year. This war is not making us any safer and is not worth the cost. We must join together to bring this war to a close.
AlJazeeraEnglish | October 10, 2010 - Rebiya Kadeer discusses with Riz Khan the trials and tribulations she has faced in fighting for human rights. The leading Uighur activist and philanthropist shares her stories of yielding persistence and strength.
"The President’s decision to escalate the war in that region alone costs the nation $33 billion," the legendary musician, actor and activist Harry Belafonte said at Saturday’s "One Nation Working Together" in Washington. "That sum of money could not only create 600,000 jobs here in America, but would even leave us a few billion to start rebuilding our schools, our roads, our hospitals and affordable housing. It could also help to rebuild the lives of the thousands of our returning wounded veterans."
