The
US government has disclosed it’s imprisoned around 2,500 youths below
the age of eighteen as “illegal combatants” in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Guantanamo Bay since 2002. In a filing with the United Nations
Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Bush administration says most
of the youths were imprisoned in Iraq. 500 juveniles remain in US
prisons there. Ten juvenile prisoners are still being held at the
Bagram base in Afghanistan. Eight juveniles have been brought to
Guantanamo Bay. Two of them remain: Omar Khadr, now twenty-one years
old, and Mohammed Jawad, now twenty-three.
CIA Kidnap Trial Begins in Italy
In
Italy, the long-delayed trial over the CIA kidnapping of the Egyptian
cleric Abu Omar has begun. Twenty-six Americans are being tried in
absentia along with several former Italian intelligence officials. Omar
was seized on the streets of Milan in 2003 and taken to US bases in
Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt. There he says he was
tortured during a four-year imprisonment. Omar’s wife, Ghali Nabila,
opened the trial, testifying her husband was tied, beaten and
electrocuted during his ordeal.
We continue our coverage of the
sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, what
Palestinians call the Nakba,
or catastrophe. We begin with Tikva Honig-Parnass, an Israeli who
fought with Jewish paramilitary units and the Israeli army,
participating in the military operations that expelled over 750,000
Palestinians. Today, she’s an anti-Zionist leftist writer and activist
who has been involved with anti-occupation, women’s, and Mizrahi
movements in Israel since the 1960s. [includes rush transcript]
Sixty
years since the creation of Israel and displacement of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians, we host a debate on the legacy of 1948 and
the possibility of a just future for both Israelis and Palestinians
with three guests: Benny Morris, seen as one of the most important
Israeli historians of the 1948 war and after; Saree Makdisi, UCLA
professor and author of Palestine Inside Out; and Norman
Finkelstein, author of several books, including Image and Reality
of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah.
[includes rush transcript]
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