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CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chavez said Friday that Fidel Castro is not dying of cancer, saying he had spoken with the ailing Cuban leader by phone and he is eating cautiously and well enough to joke. "Fidel doesn't have cancer. I'm very well-informed ... he's instructed (Cuban officials) to inform me of all the details of what is happening," Chavez said during a speech in Caracas. He said the two leaders had spoken twice on Thursday and discussed a series of new projects between Venezuela and Cuba, including plans for joint oil expeditions. He reiterated previous comments that Fidel's...

What if Baghdad Bob was right all along? Friday, December 08, 2006 Remember Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? He was the former Iraqi information minister who became a folk hero in the West because of his unintentionally hilarious daily briefings even as coalition forces tightened the noose around the regime's neck. Nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" by a credulous American press corps all too willing to parrot Bush administration propaganda, the Iraqi bureaucrat had a talent for lurid prose that hinted at a poetic sensibility beneath the nonsense. Among my favorites were: "God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of the...

In an open letter, Saddam Hussein told Iraqis "victory was at hand" and urged insurgents to show magnanimity to opponents, saying he himself forgave Iraqis who aided the killers of his two sons. In the letter dictated to his chief lawyer Khalil Dulaimi during a four-hour meeting on Saturday in his prison, the former Iraqi leader also said Iraqis should put aside differences and set only one goal - to drive U.S. troops out of Iraq. "Victory is at hand but don't forget that your near-term goal is confined to liberating your country from the forces of occupation," Saddam said...

YOU WOULD think that a consensus report from all 16 U.S. intelligence services concluding that he has blown the "war on terror" would be a really big deal to the president. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence. Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9/11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush's branded "what, me worry'' countenance. Instead, predictably, the administration's response to the leaked conclusions of the shared assessments of both civilian and...

Lebanon, Reuters, AP, microcosm There is so much honest news to peddle, I don’t know why the media is offering us so much pure visible tommyrot when it comes to the Israeli attacks, unless they openly favor Hezbollah and have an axe to grind. We have some pretty compelling evidence that the results of the IDF attack on Qana was a put up job and the media’s trumpeting of it all was excessive and came without any serious investigation of Hezbollah’s claims. Reuters soon ran into trouble with their sad sorry attempt to peddle additional smoke signals in a photo...

The news wire services are circling the wagons around their propaganda photos from Qana: News agencies stand by Lebanon photos.8/1/06 3:02:32 pm:If the wire services truly want to settle the timing issue, all they need to do is release the actual timestamps from when the photographs were taken. Digital cameras automatically record this information in the photograph itself, so it would be a simple matter for the wires to provide it.Will they? Or are we simply supposed to take their word for it?UPDATE at 8/1/06 4:30:31 pm:For me, by the way, the timing issue is actually not the most damning...

  Nasrallah: Israel temporary country   Hizbullah chief says during televised speech ‘Lebanese are standing strong, and it is clear the enemy has not achieved any military objectives’; adds: When in any Arab-Israeli conflict were two million Israelis forced to flee or enter bomb shelters? Roee Nahmias  Hizbullah Chief Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday during a speech aired by Al-Manar TV "the bombardment of Afula is just the beginning. Many cities in (Israel’s) center will be attacked if the barbaric aggression against us continues. When in any Arab-Israeli conflict were two million Israelis forced to flee or enter bomb shelters?”...

Text of report by Lebanese Hezbollah TV Al-Manar on 24 July In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. "Fight them and Allah will punish them by your hands, cover them with shame, help you to victory over them, and heal the breasts of Believers." [Koranic verses] Within the context of the heroic epic fought by the Islamic Resistance and in fulfilment of its promise to defend the homeland, dignity, and honour, since 0800 [0500] today, the mujahidin have been confronting an armoured force of the enemy army, backed by a company of paratroopers, which its trying to advance...

CAIRO, Egypt — The U.S. airstrike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was just a stroke of luck, according to a Web statement posted Tuesday in the name of the umbrella group for Iraqi insurgents. The statement from the Mujahedeen Shura Council, or Consultative Council of Holy Warriors, was an attempt to discredit reports from the U.S. and Iraqi authorities that Zarqawi was known to be meeting key advisers at a house in a grove of palm trees north of Baghdad when U.S. fighter-bombers blasted the building last Wednesday evening.

Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf ('Baghdad Bob') THEN ...Al-Sahaf’s daily press briefings in the lead-up to the war and in its first weeks led to him being nicknamed Baghdad Bob or Comical Ali (an allusion to “Chemical Ali,” the nickname of former Iraqi defense minister Ali Hassan al-Majid.) He gained a considerable cult following, with several Web sites devoted to his outrageous claims...as coalition troops stormed the capital, al-Sahaf declared, "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad."... NOW On 25 June 2003, the London newspaper The Daily Mirror reported that al-Sahaf had been captured by coalition...

Could all problems cause move by US to take aggressive action. Could problems justify such moves? Maybe.

LONDON, September 22 (IranMania) - EU military attaches walked out in protest at a parade in Tehran Thursday after ballistic missiles were rolled past carrying vitriolic anti-US and Israeli slogans, diplomats told AFP. "There was a common position among the European Union members that, if the military parade included any slogans that attacked our allies, we would leave," said a diplomat. "The military attaches from the embassies of France, Italy, Greece and Poland were present at the parade, and when they saw the slogans they promptly left," said another diplomat. At the parade, Iran showed off six of its Shahab-3...

Mohammed Said al-Sahaf has been entertaining the world for the past three weeks. Kim Sengupta profiles Saddam’s minister of information Baghdad We shall slaughter them all. God will barbecue their bellies in hell. We trap and beat them everywhere. I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad.’ The last declaration was made while a US army Abrams tank could be clearly seen blazing away across the Tigris. Welcome to the world of Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, who until Tuesday was Iraq’s minister of information. During the war, Sahaf was by far the most high-profile member of Saddam Hussein’s...

We have received a number of requests for this graphic -- it isn't very well done -- but it makes a point. But feel free to use it and distribute it however you wish. It would be funny if there weren't alot of truth to it. It was posted on our website at Americans for Dr. Rice with the following: One would think so after watching his continuing efforts to undermine the US War on Terror for his own political motives during yesterday's Senate testimony of Donald Rumsfeld, high ranking generals and DoD officials. He used the occasion as a...

Arab Media: Our Faith, Their Lies Dr. Khaled Batarfi, kbatarfi@al-madina.com When the “Voice of Arabs” radio told us triumphantly in the 1960s that Nasser’s Egypt had the strongest army in the region and could throw Israel in the sea if they choose to, we believed. When young, revolutionary, the Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi promised to be the unifier of the Arab world after the death of Nasser, we believed. When Baathists and Arab nationalists carried the “One Arab nation with eternal message” slogan, we believed. Then came “Alnakbah” (the disaster) of June 5, 1967, when the one army of Israel...

Former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is unwilling to testify against Saddam Hussein at a future war crimes trial, his lawyer told Agence France-Presse after a four-hour meeting with his client on Thursday at a US base near the capital. "Tariq Aziz told me that he will not take the witness stand against Saddam," said Badi Aref Izzat. The lawyer said that Aziz, who has been in US custody since his surrender in the immediate aftermath of last year's US-led invasion, had had no opportunity to see the ousted president. The 11 senior aides currently in custody were being...

FOR TWO WEEKS Eason Jordan has been engulfed in a blogswarm. During remarks at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the now-former CNN executive accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq for murder. The unleashed fury of the blogosphere eventually overcame a media blackout to force Jordan from his job, discredit the American media, and start a debate on the nature of blogging that derived directly from the mainstream media's attempt to cast the entire effort as a partisan witch hunt.But the media has no one but itself to blame--as it stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence...

Bob Mulholland, official spokesman for the California Democratic Party, recently referred to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s support for redistricting as a “Hitler-esque power grab.” The comment, made just days after Schwarzenegger led the annual Capitol Hanukkah celebration, was published in the Capitol Morning Report, a newsletter read religiously by political insiders and news reporters in Sacramento. Although Mulholland’s comparison of the governor and the man who slaughtered millions of innocent people surely reached the desk of every policymaker in California, only one responded. Republican Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League in his Orange County district, was quoted...

That’s right, they won. And they won big. No, it’s not just that Dems came within 3% of winning a very tough election. That alone is a very real and important accomplishment, but it’s not the key. The real point is that if the Democrats are serious about the long-tem goal of building a broad and enduring democratic majority then getting 51% of the vote is not always the right test of a particular campaign’s success. Sometimes you have to lose an election to build the foundation for later victory. Just ask the Conservative Republicans. They can recite you this...