USA soldier guilty in Iraqi death - Terrorism/UK & WMDs/’War on Terror”/Israel
21/2/08
A military jury in Hawaii has convicted a soldier of aggravated assault in the killing of an Iraqi man last year. The jury has found Army Specialist Christopher Shore not guilty of third-degree murder on Wednesday but guilty of the lesser charge. The soldier had blamed the June 23 killing on his platoon leader. Shore says he shot at but intentionally missed the victim when ordered by the platoon leader to finish him off.
See: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CCF03EA0-5F7C-4698-A0CC-E837F46F7BA3.htm
Report: U.K. gov’t hid reference to Israel on Iraq weapons dossier
21/2/08
The British newspaper The Guardian reported Thursday that the Foreign Office in London had successfully managed to conceal a reference to Israel in a September 2002 document on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, fearing harm to bilateral ties. The Guardian says that the word “Israel” was handwritten next to a statement in the “now discredited” dossier which said that “no other country [apart from Iraq] has flouted the United Nations’ authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.” According to The Guardian, “a senior Foreign Office official” says that the move was aimed at preventing any damage to relations between Israel and the United Kingdom.
See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/956645.html
USA in quandary over helping victims of Palestinian terror, or the PA
Shmuel Rosner; 21/2/08
Dr. Katherine Baker, a microbiologist from Pittsburgh, says it wasn’t by chance that she decided to research germs. “People,” she says, “are too difficult to understand.” Last Thursday afternoon she stood at the entrance to the office of Congressman Mark Kirk, exhausted after three days of meetings with people - those creatures she finds so difficult to understand. Each time she mentions the morning of July 31, 2002 her eyes water up. She recalls how she woke up in the morning intending to plan a birthday party for her son who was just about to return from Israel, and how by the end of that day she was planning his funeral instead. Benjamin Blutstein was at the wrong place at the wrong time, one of five U.S. citizens killed in the Hebrew University cafeteria bombing in Jerusalem.
See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/956647.html
War on Terror: The Fight for Right Terminology
Mark Trevelyan; 21/2/08
It was just days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 that President George W. Bush spoke of a “crusade” against terrorism — a phrase which evoked barbarous campaigns by medieval Christians against Islam. Bush has long since dropped the expression but the choice of language in his “war on terror” — itself a highly controversial label — remains as heated and divisive an issue as ever. At a major conference on terrorism in Brussels this week, for example, debate on how to tackle Al-Qaeda was punctuated by repeated arguments over the terms “jihad” and “jihadist”.
See: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=107003&d=21&m=2&y=2008