UN Says Israel Laid Anti-Personnel Mines in Lebanon

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, Nov 28 (Reuters) - The U.N. said on Tuesday Israel used anti-personnel landmines, banned by most countries, as well as cluster bombs during its July-August war in Lebanon.

It said four deminers, two British and a Bosnian were seriously wounded, and a Lebanese expert slightly hurt, at the weekend when they stepped on mines.

Israel is not among the 152 countries that have ratified the 1997 Ottawa pact banning the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines, which activists say kill and maim long after conflicts have ended.

But it is a party to a protocol of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which requires they be placed within a demarcated area to ensure that civilians are not harmed.

The incidents near the village of Deir Mimas were the “first evidence we have that the Israeli forces laid new mines in south Lebanon in 2006,” the United Nations Mine Action Co-ordination Centre South Lebanon (MACCSL) said. (….Full Article Here)

Robert Fisk: Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial

By Robert Fisk

12/01/06 “The Independent” — – More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete”? The “job” - Washington’s project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel’s image - is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.

History’s “deniers” are many - and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory - or because they have themselves so often promised victory - that fate will be kind. George W Bush - or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter - need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.

In 1967, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser insisted his country was winning the Six Day War hours after the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. President Carter was extolling the Shah’s Iran as “an island of stability in the region” only days before Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution brought down his regime. President Leonid Brezhnev declared a Soviet victory in Afghanistan when Russian troops were being driven from their fire bases in Nangahar and Kandahar provinces by Osama bin Laden and his fighters. (….Full Article Here)

Illegal Aliens Murder 12 Americans Daily
Death toll in 2006 far overshadows total U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, Afghanistan

By Joseph Farah
November 28th, 2006

WASHINGTON – While the military “quagmire” in Iraq was said to tip the scales of power in the U.S. midterm elections, most Americans have no idea more of their fellow citizens – men, women and children – were murdered this year by illegal aliens than the combined death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since those military campaigns began.

Though no federal statistics are kept on murders or any other crimes committed by illegal aliens, a number of groups have produced estimates based on data collected from prisons, news reports and independent research.

Twelve Americans are murdered every day by illegal aliens, according to statistics released by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. If those numbers are correct, it translates to 4,380 Americans murdered annually by illegal aliens. That’s 21,900 since Sept. 11, 2001.

Total U.S. troop deaths in Iraq as of last week were reported at 2,863. Total U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan during the five years of the Afghan campaign are currently at 289, according to the Department of Defense.

But the carnage wrought by illegal alien murderers represents only a fraction of the pool of blood spilled by American citizens as a result of an open border and un-enforced immigration laws.

While King reports 12 Americans are murdered daily by illegal aliens, he says 13 are killed by drunk illegal alien drivers – for another annual death toll of 4,745. That’s 23,725 since Sept. 11, 2001. (….Full Article Here)