The Ability to See the Signs of God
It is He who sends down water from the sky. From it you drink and from it come the shrubs among which you graze your herds. And by it He makes crops grow for you and olives and dates and grapes and fruit of every kind. . There is certainly a sign in that for people who reflect. He has made the night and the day subservient to you, and the sun, the moon and the stars, all subject to His command. There are certainly signs in that for people who use their intellect. And also the things of varying colors He has created for you in the earth. There is certainly a sign in that for people who pay heed. It is He who made the sea subservient to you so that you can eat fresh flesh from it and bring out from it ornaments to wear. And you see the ships cleaving through it so that you can seek His bounty, and so that perhaps you may show thanks. He cast firmly embedded mountains on the earth so it would not move under you, and rivers and pathways so that perhaps you might be guided, and landmarks. And they are guided by the stars. Is He Who creates like him who does not create? So will you not pay heed? (Surat an-Nahl: 10-17)

In the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, there are Signs for people of intelligence: those who remember God standing, sitting and lying on their sides, and reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth: “Our Lord, You did not create this for nothing. Glory be to You! So guard us from the punishment of the Fire. (Surah Ali-’Imran: 190-191)

An excerpt from Were My African-American Ancestors Muslims
At the time Columbus discovered America, Islamic Empires held greater power in the Western World than European kingdoms. They controlled the overland trading routes that transported oriental goods from the Far East to Europe, ruling from India to Western Africa. According to Allan D. Austin in African Muslims in Antebellum America, Islam had penetrated areas such as Senegal, Timbuktu, and the Lake Chad area in Africa by 1100 C.E. From these localities westward to the Atlantic Ocean, slave traders kidnapped the majority of their victims. The rise of European maritime trade in the 16th and 17th centuries triggered the decline of Islamic political supremacy and introduced new nations as world leaders.

Historians have identified many authentic Arabic texts written in the United States before the Civil War. Many of these manuscripts have been reproduced in the books listed below. When translated, most turn out to be memorized sections of the Qu’ran, revealing slaves’ struggles to maintain differing religious beliefs in an oppressive Christian nation. These writings also reveal high levels of education attained by the authors in Africa prior to enslavement and forced emigration. Unfortunately slavery has largely silenced our present knowledge of these educated people. It is known that slave masters often placed Muslim slaves as supervisors over their fellow bondsmen.

A few examples of continuing humiliation and atrocities of Iraq:








For more pictures click here
PDF (800KB) Pictures

Thousands of innocent women & children attacked by dogs and sexually molested in US / UK concentration camps

By Robert C. Koehler

A picture may turn out to be worth, oh, $87 billion.

Pick your favorite. A naked Iraqi in a dog collar, a hooded guy on a
box wired to electrodes, naked men in a heap, and then they get worse. The
latest round features a prisoner, naked, of course, threatened by attack
dogs; in the next shot, he’s on the ground, bleeding, with a GI pressing a
knee into his back. And let’s not forget the corpses. Or the women.

Remember when Jessica Lynch was America’s heroine, rescued by Navy
SEALs from the sexual predators who had captured her? Here’s what Newsweek
wrote on April 14, 2003: “The possibility of mistreatment had been very much
on the mind of President Bush, who, according to a senior administration
official, had frequently raised concerns about American women’s falling into
Iraqi hands.”

That was then. A happy time, a unified nation. This is now. The lie
has exploded. Jessica Lynch has morphed into Lynndie England, cigarette in
mouth (you’ve come a long way, baby), giving a smirking thumbs-up to the
world as a prisoner is forced to masturbate in her presence.

We’ve entered the looking glass. Everything is precisely the opposite
of what it’s supposed to be. The Iraqis aren’t the ones with WMDs, we are.
And instead of Iraqi men molesting American women, American women are
molesting Iraqi men.

Apologies dribble out of the White House, laced with damage control.
Rumsfeld and Bush are sorry about the bad apples who violated the Geneva
Convention at Abu Ghraib and compromised America’s mission. I’ll bet they
are.

Especially the ones with the digital cameras.

So now the orchestrators of the horror show that is Iraq are tortured,
you might say, with their own dilemma: How do they fake remorse (these
people who refuse to keep a tally of the Iraqi civilian war dead) with
enough sincerity, and throw in enough scapegoats of sufficiently high rank,
to make it all go away and get America back on the right side of the looking
glass?

Well, I don’t think they can. These photos from hell have done
something even worse for the Bush war effort than depict crazed GIs acting
like Saddam’s little helpers. The pictures have bared the humanity of the
Iraqi “enemy”: They bleed, they feel shame, they have souls. They’re pretty
much just like us. We may lose our enthusiasm for killing them.

Calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation is a wholly inadequate reaction to
this scandal. Later, maybe. But if he’s dumped now (and replaced by Paul
Wolfowitz?), are we free to return to business as usual?

The public is suddenly receptive to the truth about the brutality of
the occupation of Iraq. American remorse ought to begin, I’d say, with a
dismantling of the prison system we’ve built there.

Even without the torture, it’s an abomination, with a population by
some estimates as high as 18,000. It includes women and children. The
detainees are mostly civilians, rounded up in sweeps and late-night raids;
these are ordinary people yanked out of their lives and disappeared into
overcrowded pens like Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other places,
not to mention Guantanamo Bay.

They’re held in legal limbo, nameless, incommunicado. Loved ones are
told nothing. In response to their desperate pleas, sentries at Abu Ghraib
routinely pointed to a cardboard sign affixed to the barbed wire: “No visits
are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave.”

Here are the voices we’ve failed to hear until now: “The Americans
said they were taking my sons off for an hour of questioning. We have not
seen them since.” So Amal Salim Madi, age 65, told Agence France-Presse
about her three boys, missing since October.

“I have been here for five months!” This was the cry of a middle-aged
woman to U.S. reporters as they toured Abu Ghraib last week, reaching out to
them through steel bars (as reported by the Chicago Tribune). “I have
children.”

We must let these people go, as step one in ending our reign of
terror, a.k.a., our “mission,” in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s resignation can come
later. So can Bush’s impeachment.

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an
editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can
respond to this column at bob@commonwonders.com

More torture pictures:

http://www.fromallangles.com/iraq-war/files/torture-images.htm

http://www.thenausea.com/usa-iraq.html

http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/prison/abu-ghraib/

Evidence of US Soldiers Raping Women & Children

————————————————————————–
The Bush administration was bracing itself last night for the release
of new pictures and video footage from Abu Ghraib which show US soldiers
having sex with an Iraqi woman prisoner, troops almost beating a prisoner to
death, and the rape of young boys by Iraqi guards at the jail.
Senior officials have warned that the new images and details of the
abuse and torture at the prison west of Baghdad will be even more shocking
than those already released. They will undoubtedly place even more pressure
on President George Bush and his beleaguered Defence Secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, as they desperately try to limit the political damage from the
growing scandal.

NBC News has quoted military officials as saying that the new
photographsalso show US soldiers “acting inappropriately with a dead body”.
This may refer to a picture, which The Washington Post described but did not
publish, of Sabrina Harman, one of seven reservists charged with abuses,
posing with thumbs up next to a decaying corpse.

NBC also reported that the rape of young boys by Iraqi guards,
apparently in a special section of the prison, had been filmed by US
soldiers.

There are even suggestions that the murder of a prisoner has been
recorded. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina questioned
Mr Rumsfeld on Friday about why the abuse had not been detected earlier.
“The American public needs to understand we’re talking about rape and murder
here. We’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience.”

The new images will further rock the Bush administration, suffering
its worst crisis yet after photographs showing US army reservists abusing
and sexually humiliating prisoners caused international revulsion and
outrage. But the knowledge that the abuse was much more widespread, and that
there are more shocking images to come, is threatening even more problems
for Mr Bush as he prepares to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi government
on 30 June.

Further evidence emerged, meanwhile, that the abuse of prisoners by
military police reservists was ordered by military intelligence officers,
CIA operatives or even by privately hired civilian interrogators. Ms Harman
said they were told to break the prisoners down in preparation for
questioning.

“They would bring in one or several prisoners at a time already hooded
and cuffed. The job of the MP [military police] was to keep them awake, make
it hell so they would talk,” Ms Harman, 26, from northern Virginia, told The
Washington Post. “The person who brought them in would set the standards on
whether or not to ‘be nice’.”

A total of seven reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company
based in Cumberland, Maryland, have now been charged over the abuse,
including Lynndie England, 21, who was photographed with a prisoner on a
leash. Seven other soldiers have been reprimanded, and several relieved of
command.

Rumours of the existence of more pictures have been circulating in
Washington for days and were confirmed on Friday by Mr Rumsfeld, who said
they were “sadistic, cruel and inhuman”.

The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who revealed the extent of
the abuse, warned earlier last week: “It’s going to get much worse. This
kind of stuff was much more widespread.

“There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn’t want to mention on
national television … There were things done to young boys.”

US soldiers were last night accused of abusing children as young as 12
who were held as prisoners.

A former Iraqi inmate told ITV News he had seen the children beaten
and humiliated while US soldiers took pictures to use as computer
screensavers.

The atrocities allegedly took place in the Abu Grahib prison in Tikrit
where al-Jazeera journalist Suhaib Beder Al-Deen Al-Baz says he was
tortured.

He claimed he saw a naked girl of 12 beaten and a boy of 15 made to
run with cans of water and hit with a stick.

The boy’s father was also forced to wear a bra and a pair of knickers
while his captors laughed.

He told ITV: “I saw many cases of torturing. The Americans were
enjoying taking photos of it.”

More torture pictures:

http://www.fromallangles.com/iraq-war/files/torture-images.htm

http://www.thenausea.com/usa-iraq.html

http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/prison/abu-ghraib/