Some reading

* "Some 56 years have passed," notes Meron Benvenisti in Ha'aretz, and Palestinians "are again fleeing in fear of the Israeli attackers." Such is life in Gaza amidst the anniversary of the nakbah.

* The IDF's shelling of a protest march in Rafah on Wednesday received widespread coverage, but such news only highlights the most obvious horror that has been perpetuated in the last two weeks during "Operation Rainbow." Donald Macintyre and Amira Hass fill in some of the blanks with separate reports from Rafah, and Chris McGreal examines the IDF's habit of sniping children.

* Why is Israel in Gaza right now, anyway? Neve Gordon says Sharon "is destroying Gaza in order to withdraw from it," all in keeping with his master plan of expanding the bounds of a "Greater Israel." In the Guardian, Jonathan Steele declares that "Israel's latest actions in Gaza are motivated by revenge, cynicism and desperation. As such, they have destroyed the political and moral capital that Sharon briefly acquired when he announced his unilateral plan to close the Israeli settlements in Gaza."

* Many have charged that the Bush administration's foreign policy, especially towards Israel, is being driven by Christian fundamentalists. I've long thought that was overstating the case, particularly since US policy towards Israel has changed little since 1967. But Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice has uncovered a memo that suggests I need to rethink this position.

* Eric Boehlert observes that the "more we find out about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the less it looks like a case of renegade soldiers" and UPI's Martin Sieff reports that the "scandal continues to metastasize by the day."

* Here are some of the recent revelations on the Iraq torture scandal: one witness says there is "definitely a cover-up" going on; the NY Times reports that "Army officials in Iraq responded late last year to a Red Cross report of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by trying to curtail the international agency's spot inspections of the prison"; the Washington Post reports that military intelligence officers were a distinct part of the interrogation process, as new details, photos, and videos emerge; four Iraqi journalists claim to have suffered "sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja," according to Reuters; NBC News reports that the Army's Delta Force is under investigation; and the Denver Post probes 5 brutal deaths which occurred in US custody.

* "If you were doing PR for Al Qaeda," avers Barbara Ehrenreich, "you couldn't have staged a better picture to galvanize misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around the world" than the image of female soldiers abusing Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib.

* A poll of Iraqis conducted by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies has found that Muqtada Al-Sadr is more popular than the Americans, and that nearly 90% of Iraqis view US forces as occupiers, not liberators.

* The Guardian reports on the "Wedding party massacre" in Iraq which killed 40. The Pentagon denies that it attacked a wedding party, claiming instead the strike was against "foreign fighters." Justin Huggler and Rory McCarthy investigate further.

* Earlier, from Afghanistan: what's up with the attacks on weddings?

* Jim Lobe reports on Ahmed Chalabi's winding road from White House to Dog House in only five months. What brought about Chalabi's astonishing fall from grace? And is he now an Iranian spy?

* Will Doug Feith soon be off to jail or out of a job? Considering nobody ever seems to be held accountable in this administration, probably neither.

* Ted Rall: "The pro-war pundits got the biggest story of their careers dead wrong. Now a lot of people are wrongly dead. The fact that this sorry lot still draw paychecks is a tribute to America's infinite capacity for forgiveness."

* The Guardian's Jonathan Steele writes that "as the miseries of Iraqis under occupation multiply, the burden of proof is increasingly on those who claim that pulling foreign troops out of Iraq would be worse than keeping them there. Playing on the bogeymen of 'chaos' and 'a security vacuum' can no longer go unchallenged." Meanwhile, the Pentagon pushes deeper into the abyss.

* Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina says the war on Iraq was waged for Israel's benefit. Justin Raimondo, who has been saying this for nearly two years, responds.

* As Nick Berg's death remains clouded in mystery, his father has lent his support to the UK's Stop the War Coalition. Here's the statement by Michael Berg that will be read aloud during a protest in London tomorrow.

* Scott Ritter - remember him? - chimes in on the sarin-filled artillery shell that was found in Iraq earlier this week. "If the 155-mm shell was a 'dud' fired long ago - which is highly likely - then it would not be evidence of the secret stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that the Bush administration used as justification to invade Iraq," he writes. However, the US doesn't seem to be forthcoming with information about the shell, so it's impossible to render any solid verdict on it.

* Two scholars at the Army War College have published a study which likens the political implications of the war in Iraq to the Vietnam debacle.

* "Tossing aside international law and the norms of civilised behaviour...is self-defeating," writes John Gray in an excellent piece for the Independent. "Not so long ago, the clash of civilisations was just a crass and erroneous theory, but after the recent revelations [from Iraq] it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. In toppling Saddam, the Americans destroyed an essentially Western regime, not unlike the Stalinist Soviet Union in its militant secularism. In doing so, they empowered radical Islam as the single most important political force in the country."

* In what the NY Times characterizes as an "unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress nearly two years ago," the Justice Department has put the lid on Sibel Edmonds' 9/11 testimony.

* Ed Herman takes a deserved swipe at Michael Tomasky and other liberals in search of a foreign policy.

* In another excerpt from their book Banana Republicans, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton probe "the highly effective political organizing strategy of the conservative coalition that brought the Bush administration to power."

* The Scotsman has a useful backgrounder on Sudan's forgotten genocide.

* Bill McKibben tackles some of the recent literature on climate change and resource depletion in a review for the NYRB.