Scores killed in raids on Gaza

• The Observer,
• Sunday March 2 2008

Three Palestinians were killed on Saturday and at least six children were wounded in an Israeli missile strike on a house in Gaza City. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Israel’s military killed at least 60 Palestinians yesterday - almost half of them civilians, including four children - in its most violent assault on the Gaza Strip since the Islamic militant group Hamas seized power last June.

The latest deaths bring the number of Palestinians killed since a rocket fired from inside Gaza killed a 44-year-old Israeli in the town of Sderot last week to 80. Two Israeli soldiers also died in the fighting. Late last night, the office of the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was attacked by an Israeli aircraft, which hit the building with three missiles. Although no casualties were reported, witnesses said the building was destroyed.

The latest bloodshed comes as an Observer investigation revealed how Israel is again deliberately obstructing the transfer of urgent medical cases for treatment outside Gaza, in the latest extension of its policy of collective punishment of Palestinians.

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Could US Democracy Withstand Another 9/11?

The Reichstag fire helped transform Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship. What can we do to avoid a similar outcome?

By David T. Z. Mindich, AlterNet. Posted February 29, 2008.

On a cold January morning in 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of one of the world's great democracies. While the world has duly noted its 75th anniversary last month, it is not the cold January morning but a hot February night that should command our greatest attention. It was 75 years ago this week that the parliament building, the Reichstag, was set ablaze. As the Reichstag burned, Hitler was busy converting the chancellorship into a dictatorship.

As we engage in the democratic process of picking a new president, a look back at Hitler's dizzying rise is an instructive reminder of the fragility of democracy, then and now.

During the period of long simmering fears over an amorphous international threat -- communism -- German opposition forces were willing to give Hitler the chancellorship despite his capturing only a minority of votes during the recent election. But it was the Feb. 27 Reichstag fire, a fire that the Nazis accused a Dutch Communist of setting, that sent the country on a quick road to fascism. Within 60 days, Hitler had begun the process of arbitrary arrests, warrantless surveillance and searches, incarceration without charges, suspension of habeas corpus, the implementation of torture, the mustering of a private army, and was pushing through the passage of the "Enabling Act," which gave Hitler and his henchmen the power to ignore the legislative branch and write laws themselves.

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FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report

Hijacker had post-9/11 flights scheduled, files say

Larisa Alexandrovna | Raw Story, Feb. 28, 2008

Newly-released records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request contradict the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and raise fresh questions about the role of Saudi government officials in connection to the hijackers.

The nearly 300 pages of a Federal Bureau of Investigation timeline used by the 9/11 Commission as the basis for many of its findings were acquired through a FOIA request filed by Kevin Fenton, a 26 year old translator from the Czech Republic. The FBI released the 298-page “hijacker timeline” Feb. 4.

The FBI timeline reveals that alleged hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi, who was aboard the United Airlines flight which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, had booked a future flight to San Francisco. He also had a ticket for a trip from Casablanca to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

Though referenced repeatedly in the footnotes of the final 9/11 Commission report, the timeline has not previously been made available to the public.

The FBI timeline is dated Nov. 14, 2003 but appears to have been put together earlier (since the last date mentioned in the document is Oct. 22, 2001) and was provided to the 9/11 Commission during its 2003 investigation. The final Commission report cites the FBI timeline 52 times.

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Palestinians warned of bigger holocaust

Kuwait Times, March 1, 2008

JERUSALEM: A senior Israeli defence official said yesterday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a “shoah”, the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced “new Nazis”.

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes yesterday, said most of those killed were militants. Israeli leaders said cross-border rocket fire may leave them no choice but to launch a broader military offensive against Hamas, which seized Gaza in June after routing forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

One Israeli was killed in a rocket attack on Wednesday in the southern border town of Sderot. Hamas raised the stakes by using Soviet-designed Grad missiles, more powerful and accurate than improvised Gazan Qassams, to strike deep into the larger city of Ashkelon, home to 120,000 people. Visiting Ashkelon, Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Channel 10 television an Israeli response was “required” and that “Hamas bears responsibility for this deterioration and it will also bear the results”.

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Hope is on the rise in Pakistan

The Boston Globe, March 1, 2008

By Shuja Nawaz

AFTER THE recent elections in Pakistan that were marked by their relative peace and the return of the two leading parties that dominated the scene before General Pervez Musharraf's coup in 1999, some commentators in the United States fear that a civilian government and a more assertive parliament will be less willing to fight America's "war on terror" than Musharraf. They are also concerned that the new government might be affected by the generally anti-US sentiment that appears to have gained ground in Pakistan. Such views are based on false assumptions and are likely to confuse Pakistanis into thinking that elements in the United States prefer to deal with autocrats rather than popularly elected governments. The people of Pakistan seem to have more confidence in the changes that have occurred than their erstwhile friends in the United States. While the noise of parliamentary democracy rises in Pakistan, hope is also on the rise.

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US Navy flexes its muscles in front of Lebanon

Telegraph, UK, March 1, 2008

By Tim Butcher

America deployed a warship off the coast of Lebanon yesterday prompting anger from Iran-backed Hizbollah and surprise from the pro-Washington Lebanese prime minister.

Fouad Saniora said that he had not requested the display of naval power.

The USS Cole, a guided missile destroyer that was almost sunk by al-Qa'eda in a terrorist attack off Yemen eight years ago, was steaming in international waters just off the Lebanese coast.

An unnamed US military source said the deployment was meant as "a show of support for regional stability" because of Washington's concern about the political crisis in Lebanon.

Squabbling between the pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian factions has paralysed Lebanese politics for months, leaving the country unable to pass any basic legislation, including the national budget, or chose a head of state or president.

Members of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement supported and financed by Teheran, were critical of the move.

"This decision proves it's the United States which is interfering in Lebanese affairs and that this interference has taken on a military slant," Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hizbollah MP, said.

Settlers dig tunnels around Jerusalem

From The Times,UK, March 1, 2008

James Hider in Jerusalem

Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem’s Old City while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal, anti-settlement campaigners have told The Times.

One group, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said that settler tunnels could one day extend under the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, and claimed that extremists could use the access route to attack the structure in an attempt to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Settler groups flatly deny such allegations.

The tunnels are largely based on historical water wells or buried pilgrim routes, stretching from the Pool of Siloam in the Palestinian district of Silwan, where Jesus Christ is said to have cured a blind man, to the south and joining up with the Western Wall, the Jewish holy site.

Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and member of the anti-settlement group Ir Amin, believes that the underground system will then extend from the Western Wall tunnel, which is already open, via settler-owned properties in the Muslim quarter and eventually link up with an ancient quarry, run by a right-wing Jewish group and known as Solomon’s Stables, on the north side of the Old City, near the Damascus gate.

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