The political elite in Bulgaria, under uncrowned King Simeon II as Prime Minister, is closely allied to Washington and NATO. Specially beholden to the Bush administration and engineering its own new forms of Homeland Security, the political class in Sofia is now engaged in new efforts to suppress and silence dissent, branding anarchists as a threat to “national security.”

The most flagrant example of this new wave of repression against alternative expression in the country is the arrest of Elitsa, a 20-year-old anarchist in mid-July, in the city of Dobrich in far northeastern Bulgaria.

Statement on recent events surrounding Israel's "Apartheid Wall"

ISRAEL"S Law Of Return gives every Jew the right to automatically acquire citizenship(LAW OF RETURN, 5710-1950). As a secular Jew living in South Africa I would like to renounce this right before the eyes of the world in protest at the construction of a "seperation barrier" walling off Israel from the West Bank , the Palestinian Authority, and consequently the entire world. This barrier dubbed "the apartheid wall" by Palestinians, is similar in its intention and scope to the Berlin Wall

The most obvious historical parallel to the barrier, the Berlin Wall, was 155 kilometers long. Israel's barrier, still under construction, is expected to reach at least 650 kilometers in lenght. The average height of the Berlin Wall was 3.6 metres, compared with the current height of Israel's Wall -- 8 metres.

Israel's barrier is therefore planned to be four times as long and in places twice as high as the Berlin Wall. During the past two weeks, both the highest court in Israel and the highest court in the international legal system, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, have issued rulings condemning Israeli states' controversial security barrier. This is in addition to a UN resolution on June 07 2004 condemning Israel's construction of the wall.

As a South African who has lived under and experienced apartheid, I say: Stop this madness. The wall is nothing more than a sign that the Israeli state is caving into pressure from extremists and throwing away both the opportunity for peace and the freedom to coexist independently from fear. Let go of your paranoia and the mental straightjacket which presumes that anybody can be seperated from the international community for very long or expect to enjoy a reasonable and fulfilled life behind a wall.

This wall is the real "apartheid", since building it creates the impression that the situation is intractable and beyond help, while Palestinians and Israeli's alike, seem incapable of finding a solution for themselves without interfearance from global super-powers like Britain and America.

The recent crisis has its roots in the failure of both the Clinton and Bush administration to facilitate the peace process in complete honesty and to allow peace negotiations to occur free from the pressure of television ratings, domestic politics and the expectations from foreign donors who have no right to be involved in the process to begin with. As a secular Jew, living in the diaspora, I must now forego my right to return to Israel in the hope that people living in the Middle East will come to similar conclusions about themselves and the conflict will resolve itself.

David Robert Lewis

Cape Town

21-07-2004

שחרורה של עיראק מחיי האזרחים ואוצרותיה של הארץ ממשיך

מה עומד מאחורי גל זה וכיצד להלחם בו?

Israel in Iraq: Evidence Mounts

by Jon Elmer
The NewStandard
Further evidence of the presence of Israeli operatives in Iraq arose this weekend when the general formerly in charge of the U.S.-run Iraqi prison system, herself considered partly responsible for torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons under her command, told the BBC that she met an Israeli interrogator working in a U.S.-run "intelligence center" in Baghdad. Brigadier General Janet Karpinski told BBC Radio in an interview on Saturday that she met with a man who claimed to be Israeli and that he "did some of the interrogation" at the facility.

Karpinski is the highest-ranking official to confirm an Israeli presence in Iraq. As the head of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Karpinski was responsible for all of Iraq's 17 U.S.-run prison facilities. She was suspended in May for her role in the systemic torture carried out by personnel under her command in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.

Disclosures suggesting Israeli involvement in the ongoing occupation of Iraq are damaging to the U.S.' already meager credibility in the Middle East. Anger toward Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands, which the U.S. has backed since 1967, as well as its own human rights abuses and reputation for torturing Arab prisoners, render suspicion of Israeli involvement in Iraq an explosive issue throughout much of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Kamal Muhammad, the manager of al-Aswar furniture shop in Baghdad gave a predictable reaction to the Jerusalem Post. "The Americans and the Israelis are one," he said. "They are the same enemy. Israel is just the baby of the U.S. with the same policies."

In an interview last week with The Signal, a newspaper in Santa Clarita, Cal., Karpinski said she was "shocked" by the Israeli interrogator's presence, and that the development struck her as "unusual."

But a mounting body of evidence indicates that the presence of Israeli operatives working in Iraq is not at all unusual.

New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh told the BBC that his sources – which include high ranking Lebanese and Turkish officials – confirm the presence of Israeli agents in Iraq. Hersh said it is his understanding that one of the Israeli aims was to gain access to detained members of the secret Iraqi intelligence unit who specialized in Israeli affairs, the BBC reports on its website.

In an article last month, Hersh quoted a senior CIA official and Israeli intelligence officer describing how agents of Israeli's Mossad intelligence service were active in Iraq, while Israeli commandos were training militants in the Kurdish areas of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Hersh found this information to be "widely known" in the U.S. intelligence community.

A top US military official quoted in the Washington Post on Sunday denied claims of Israeli presence in Iraq, calling the story an "urban legend."

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom similarly dismissed Gen. Karpinski's claims as "completely baseless," telling Israel's Army Radio: "We are not involved in any way in Iraq. We are not involved in training or in interrogations, or in anything else. The whole claim is preposterous."

The Foreign Minister's assertion is contradicted by significant documentation of Israeli-American "strategic cooperation" with regard to intelligence sharing and training in Iraq.

A December article in the Guardian described how Israeli advisers are involved in training U.S. special operations troops in counter-insurgency tactics to be used in Iraq. The operations being trained are said to include the use of assassination against resistance leaders. Quoting US intelligence and military sources, Guardian writer Julian Borger reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sent urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of U.S. Army Special Forces.

On that same day, the Associated Press ran a story under the headline "U.S. employs Israeli tactics in Iraq," in which American and Israeli officials publicly noted "high-level meetings" and "strategic cooperation" between the two countries on the subject of operations in Iraq.

In a July letter in Army Magazine, Brigadier General Michael Vaneter, the deputy chief of staff at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, acknowledged that he had "recently traveled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counter-terrorist operations in urban areas."

In relation to the presence of Israeli interrogators and contractors working within U.S. prisons in Iraq, the torture report by General Antonio Taguba refers to "third country nationals" involved in the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq. A company at the center of the scandal, CACI International, has extensive links to the IDF and Israeli military intelligence.

Chemical Warfare on the West Bank