ISRAEL's Supreme Court Says OK to Use NAZI Tactic of Collective Punishment on Helpless Palestinians: Israeli Army Bulldozed more than 100 Palestinian Homes

Other Breaking News LATEST!!: The current President of the Iraqi Governing Council, Izzedine Salim, also known as Abdel-Zahraa Othman, was killed this morning in a car bombing in Baghdad. Salim was killed in an attack on his four-car convoy near a U.S. base west of Baghdad, Qatar-based Al Jazeera reported.Izzadine Saleem is the current Iraqi Council President, a rotating position. He was the highest-ranking Iraqi official killed during the U.S.-run occupation. His death occurred about six weeks before the United States plans to transfer power to Iraqis on June 30 and underscores the risks facing those perceived as owing their positions to the Americans. Read HERE and HERE for more ISRAEL's army to destroy hundreds MORE homes... Read here for more article by Donald Macintyre North Korea: North Korea vowed Friday to never accept US demands for a complete dismantling of its nuclear programme, calling it a humiliating measure that can only be imposed on a country defeated in a war.Read here for more US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a secret operation last year that expanded interrogation methods used in Afghanistan to the Abu Ghraib prisonin Baghdad, The New Yorker magazine reported Saturday. Rumsfeld authorized the highly secret operation to obtain intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq after deadly bombings in August last year, said the report, citing unnamed current and former intelligence officials. The report was released on the magazine's Web site. The program "encouraged physical coercion and the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq," the report added. Read here for more Read here article by Justin Raimondo "The Secret of Abu Ghraib -Exposed!": " Thank the gods for Seymour Hersh - without him, the truth about what went on at Abu Ghraib prison – and the dark forces behind it – would probably still be locked away in a safe somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. His latest piece in the New Yorker follows up on his earlier exposé. We now learn, the "black ops" program was personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and implemented by his subordinates, chiefly undersecretary for intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, who said on Capitol Hill last week, "We didn't know!" As it turns out, they did know. In the wake of 9/11, a special Pentagon operation was set up by Rumsfeld – code-named "Copper Green" – that was in effect a secret army, complete with its own air force. Rumsfeld commanded into existence an elite unit of "black" operatives to be used to go after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. What is termed a "special-access program" allows officials to get around such cumbersome obstacles as constitutional government and the rule of law, as Hersh points out. Read here for more London-based, Australian journalist John Pilger's latest documentary film, Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror, has won the gold award in the political category at the prestigious 2004 WorldMedia Festival. Founded in 2000, the Hamburg-based WorldMedia Festival is the only global competition for all categories of media. This year the festival attracted 300 entries from 23 nations. Read here for more Defense Secretary Rumsfeld produced a list of 60 companies but withheld all mention of two of the biggest and best-connected recruiting firms alleged to be at the centre of the torture scandal - CACI in Washington and Titan in San Diego, California. CACI, for example, placed Steve Stefanowicz, a former reservist from the Philadelphia area who had once worked in naval intelligence, in Iraq. According to his fellow interrogator Torin Nelson, CACI hired interrogators over the phone, without even meeting them. CACI website entries show increasingly frantic efforts to attract interrogators, with the qualifications required being reduced from seven years' interrogation experience, to five years, to two. In Iraq, the status of the CACI interrogators was ambiguous. Mr Nelson said some of his colleagues went around in desert camouflage uniform. "We contractors were often able to establish our own method of actually implementing the chain of command's intent, which was to glean information for intelligence purposes." Mr Stefanowicz ended up being accused in the now-notorious leaked classified Taguba report, of telling untrained and unsupervised reservist military policemen to abuse the Abu Ghraib prisoners. He remains in Iraq, according to the US army on "administrative duties" while investigations continue. The accused soldiers below him, however, all face courts martial, beginning this month. strong>Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution said "No lawmakers seemed to know that they were hiring civilians as interrogators. They had this concept that the civilians were there to mow lawns and answer phones." Read here for more Latest Coalition Military Fatality in Iraq: As of 15 May 2004 Total Fatalities since May 1, 2003: 721 March 20th through May 1st: 139 Hostile US Fatalities Since May 1, 2003: 463 Hostile Fatalities Since May 1, 2003: 519 US deaths since July 2, 2003: 578 (Pres. Bush announces, "Bring Them On") Total Fatalities since December 13, 2003: 349 (Saddam Hussein is captured) Total Hostile Fatalities since December 13, 2003: 281 (Saddam Hussein is captured) * Other - Polish: 4 * Other - Danish: 1 * Other - Spanish: 11 (1 Military Diplomat, 2 Army Soldier, 8 Central Intelligence Agents ) * Other - Italian: 17 * Other - Ukrainian: 6 * Other - Bulgarian: 6 * Other - Thai: 2 * Other - Estonian: 1 * Other - Salvadoran: 1 * Other - Netherlands 1 Click here for more statistics on casualities in Iraq

Read here article by Mark Mackinnon "Israel approves razing Palestinian homes" in Globe and Mail

Dozens of Palestinians fled their homes here Sunday in anticipation of another wave of demolitions after Israel's Supreme Court on Sunday rejected a petition from a Palestinian rights group seeking to stop the razing of homes in Rafah, which is located on the border between Gaza and Egypt.

The three judges said the army had a "real, imminent need" that justified the demolitions.

During three days last week, dozens of houses were destroyed in some of the most intense fighting in the nearly four-year-long struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. The United Nations relief officials who oversee this refugee camp said more than 1,000 people were made homeless. Read here for more

Israel's Supreme Court gave its approval to the plan, which is expected to leave thousands of people homeless, by lifting a temporary injunction on the demolition of homes in the Rafah refugee camp.

The court rejected an appeal by Palestinian families, ruling that the demolitions could be justified as a self-defence measure.

"Hundreds of houses have been marked for destruction," aides quoted Moshe Yaalon, Israeli army chief of staff, as telling a weekly cabinet meeting.

A late-night missile strike in Gaza City knocked out power to 40,000 people while targeting an office of Palestinian president Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.

Despite the opposition of the White House and thousands of peace demonstrators, Israel said Sunday that it will intensify its operations in the Gaza Strip and demolish "hundreds" more Palestinian homes in an effort to stop arms smuggling and attacks against its troops

No time frame was given for the demolition, but Israel's Channel One television reported that troops and vehicles were massing outside Rafah last night after the Supreme Court's decision.

Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz reportedly said that he will step up military activity. "We started continuous air strikes. We will deepen the fighting," news agency reports quoted him as saying.

Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qureia accused the Israeli court of "ethnic-cleansing crimes and collective punishment of innocent civilians." The Palestinian Authority was expected to seek a UN Security Council resolution to stop the demolitions.

The plan to bulldoze yet more homes also came in the face of criticism from Washington, Israel's staunchest ally.

Speaking at a gathering of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in neighbouring Jordan, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the White House could not support home demolitions as a military tactic.

"The kind of actions that they're taking in Rafah with the destruction of Palestinian homes we oppose," Mr. Powell said.

The apparent aim of Israel's home-demolition plan in Rafah is to widen what's known as the Philadelphi route, a thin stretch of land running between the Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Israel plans to hold on to the route even in the event of a pullout from Gaza, saying it needs to maintain a military presence there in order to halt arms smuggling across the border.

Sunday night, dozens of Palestinians began evacuating their homes after hearing news of the Supreme Court's decision.

"I don't know what to take. I will start with clothes or the refrigerator or the television," 52-year-old Abed al-Majid Abu Shamala said as he prepared to leave a four-storey building in Rafah.

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