mideastmessenger.com

 Steve Rhodes, flickr.
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spoke yesterday at the UNITY conference of minority journalists about his recent overseas trip to the Middle East and Europe.
 I covered the talk! Check out what he had to say.

PHOTO: Nof Zion, an Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, Franz Elzenbaumer, flickr
Israeli President Ehud Olmert just gave the OK for 750 housing units to be built in the West Bank settlement of Givat Ze’ev.
Olmert has barred ministries from approving new settlements without his approval, but this expansion will not likely go over well with Palestinians. Settlements are a […]

PHOTO: Abu Ghraib torture stencil, Duncan C, flickr 
Abu Ghraib sticks out as one of the most shocking moments of the Iraq War. When pictures of the torture and humiliation that took place at the prison were released in 2004, the world was dumbfounded.
A new film by American filmmaker Errol Morris revisits the incident in a film he has […]

PHOTO: Hamas supporters, eremi, flickr
Hamas’ current control of Gaza made the Bush administration extremely unhappy. When the group wrenched power from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a coup last year in the summer, sanctions were imposed on Gazans, supplies were stopped, funding from nations across the world stopped flowing in and the tiny territory was […]

PHOTO: People dressed as Guantanamo Bay prisoners protest in Washington D.C. on January 11, 2008, Keith Ivey, flickr. 
Sami Al Hajj is a “household name” in the Arab world according to New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristoff. 
A cameraman for the Arabic news network Al Jazeera, he was captured by American forces in Afghanistan while trying to cover the war. He […]

PHOTO: A mother and child at Muqdadiyah Hospital in Iraq, JamesDale10, flickr. 
The Iraqi Interior Ministry said it is going to start rounding up beggars and the mentally ill off the streets. Their reason is they want to prevent these vulnerable people from being lured into militant groups.
The ministry has pledged to place those rounded up in “governmental institutions that […]

PHOTO: Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, World Economic Forum, flickr. 
George W. Bush can’t be too happy about this. The prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, held talks with Iran in Tehran. The Al Jazeera article says he is “the most senior UAE official to make a bilateral […]

PHOTO: Pakistan prime minister Pervez Musharraf at the World Economic Forum in 2006, user World Economic Forum’s photos, flickr. 
Pakistani lawyers were blasted with water cannons at a rally protesting the detention of Pakistan’s deposed chief justice. The late Benazir Bhutto’s husband led a rally attended by 100,000 supporters and urged them to “save” the country. A suspected suicide bomber […]

 PHOTO: Christiaan Briggs, flickr creative commons.
Ahmad is an Iraqi kid whose leg got blown off in a car bomb. He has stunning green eyes contrasted by jet black hair and olive skin. He’s featured in Richard Engel’s video on Iraqi children paying the price of war on Engel’s MSNBC.com Iraq blog.
Why Engel’s reports are not more […]

President George W. Bush lied about Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was not stockpiling uranium. There was no al-Qaida-Iraq link. A non-profit media watchdog group went through and systematically counted how many false statements the Bush administration made before the invasion.
It’s been proven that people knew that before the war started, […]