Killing America's Kids and Driving Them Insane

[Harconen]

Mercenaries and assassins: The real face of Obama's "good war"

Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:36 EST
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/blac-d12.shtml

Reports that mercenaries employed by the notorious Blackwater-Xe military contracting firm participated in CIA assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan have further exposed the real character of so-called "good war" that is being escalated by the Obama administration.

Citing former employees of the firm and US intelligence agents, the New York Times reported Friday that Blackwater gunmen, ostensibly contracted as security guards, "participated in some of the CIA's most sensitive activities - clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees."

These "snatch and grab" operations - many of them involving killings of individuals suspected of participating in the resistance to US occupation - "occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater employees playing central roles," the Times reports.

Both the Times and the Washington Post quoted unnamed intelligence officials and ex-Blackwater operatives as asserting that the involvement of the company's mercenaries in assassinations and abductions was not planned. Rather, they claimed, it was a matter of the division of labor between CIA operatives and private guards supposedly hired for the purpose of protecting them becoming "blurred."

According to the Times, the Blackwater guards "were supposed to only provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to CIA officers and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected insurgents." The newspaper added, "But in the chaos of operations, the roles of Blackwater, CIA and military personnel sometimes merged."

The pretense that armed Blackwater contractors, most of them former US Special Operations troops themselves, would be used merely as security guards for CIA personnel is absurd on its face. Whatever justification was given for the contract, the "skill set" that Blackwater offered was precisely that of highly trained assassins.

A spokesman for Blackwater-Xe responded to the press reports by insisting that there was never any contract for the firm to participate in raids with CIA or Special Forces troops "in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else." He added: "Any allegation to the contrary by any news organization would be false."

The absence of a contract spelling out Blackwater's role in assassination missions is hardly surprising, given that the mercenary outfit's chief attraction for the CIA is precisely its ability to act without regard to any government oversight or regard for civil or military law. As the Post put it, citing a retired intelligence officer, "For government employees, working with contractors offered ways to circumvent red tape."

Blackwater's role as an extra-legal extension of the Central Intelligence Agency tasked with dirty operations with which the CIA did not want its employees directly associated is more than evident.

An article published in the current (January) edition of Vanity Fair, written by Adam Ciralsky, a former CIA attorney, cites intelligence sources in reporting that Eric Prince, the multi-millionaire Republican founder-owner of Blackwater, was not merely a private contractor, but a "full-blown asset" recruited by the agency precisely for such operations.

The central role played by Blackwater in the CIA's activities became increasingly clear as key agency officials left the CIA and took up positions in Blackwater's management. These included J. Cofer Black, the former head of the agency's Counter Terrorism Center, Enrique Prado, the center's former chief of operations, and Rob Richer, formerly the second-in-command of the CIA's clandestine service.

In Iraq, Blackwater's employees acted with complete impunity, killing large numbers of civilians without being held to account by either the Iraqi regime or US military commanders. The scope of this violence came to public attention in September 2007, when a convoy of Blackwater operatives stopped in Baghdad's Nisour Square and without provocation opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 17 Iraqis.

Six of the Blackwater mercenaries have been charged by federal prosecutors with voluntary manslaughter over the killings. One of them has pled guilty and is expected to testify against the others in a trial starting in February.

Meanwhile, the company is being sued in separate civil cases brought on behalf of 70 Iraqis over killings by the firm's employees in Iraq. Two ex-employees of Blackwater have filed affidavits in these cases charging that company head Prince may have either murdered or ordered the murders of individuals cooperating with the Justice Department's investigation of the firm.

Friday's report in the Times follows a series of revelations that have surfaced since last June, when CIA Director Leon Panetta briefed Congressional intelligence committees about a covert assassination program involving Blackwater, which he claimed to have only just discovered and terminated. Panetta asserted that the program had never been implemented. Until then, it had been kept secret from Congress, reportedly on the orders of former vice president Dick Cheney.

It was subsequently revealed that employees of Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services in an attempt to shed the firm's infamous reputation, were actively involved in an ongoing assassination program on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, carried out by means of Predator drones. The Blackwater mercenaries were assembling and loading the 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles used to carry out so-called "targeted killings," which have taken the lives of hundreds of civilians. In addition, they provided security for the drone bases and according to some reports, participated in intelligence operations that determined the targets for the attacks.

There have been at least 65 such aerial assassination strikes in Pakistan since August 2008, with a reported death toll of over 625 people. Some estimates put the number killed at over 1,000, many of them women and children. Most of these attacks have taken place since the Obama administration took office.

In addition to the more than 30,000 additional US troops being sent into Afghanistan, Obama has authorized the CIA to dramatically escalate the drone attacks. US officials have also warned the Pakistani government that these attacks are to be extended beyond the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan into Baluchistan, and potentially against the crowded city of Quetta, where Afghan Taliban leaders have reportedly taken refuge.

It is far from clear, based on the Times report, to what extent Blackwater's role in targeted assassinations, both from the air and on the ground, is continuing. Since 2001, the firm has netted over $1.5 billion in government contracts, providing armed mercenaries for the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon.

One thing is certain, assassinations of the kind involving Blackwater mercenaries are going to be carried out on a far greater scale as part of Obama's escalation of the US war in Afghanistan.

These plans were hinted at by Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. "There's no question you've got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable," Petraeus told the senators. "And we are intending to do that."

The general continued, "In fact, we actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy." He said that additional "national mission force elements" will be arriving in Afghanistan by next spring.

The "elements" cited by Petraeus include Special Operations units like the Army's classified Delta Force, as well as CIA hit squads and, in all probability, mercenary forces like those fielded by Blackwater.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, tapped by Obama to direct the Afghan war, was previously the head of the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command, which consists of such special forces troops and assassination squads. Petraeus said that McChrystal could brief members of the Senate committee on this element of the Obama surge in a closed session.

It is noteworthy that the controversy in the major media is centered on whether the use of Blackwater mercenaries to hunt down and murder individuals suspected of opposing the US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan represented an illegitimate use of private contractors in carrying out a core government function.

The murders themselves are not an issue. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order barring the CIA from directly carrying out assassinations or contracting them out to others. The decision followed a wave of public outrage over a series of revelations of CIA assassination plots around the globe that earned the agency the epithet "Murder, Inc."

In 2001, President George W. Bush overturned Ford's ruling, issuing his own intelligence finding that such restrictions no longer applied in the "global war on terrorism." The Democrats offered no objections, and the media has treated it entirely as a matter of course, while blacking out any serious reporting on the resulting carnage and victims.

As with every other essential question, President Barack Obama has adopted Bush's policy. "Targeted assassinations," extraordinary rendition, the use of mercenaries, all of the sordid crimes carried out under the Bush administration continue. These brutal methods are about to be unleashed with redoubled force against the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan as Obama oversees new war crimes.

[Harconen]

Tony Blair admits: I would have invaded Iraq anyway

Riazat Butt and Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:30 EST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/12/tony-blair-iraq-chilcot-inquiry

Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public.

The former prime minister made the confession during an interview with Fern Britton, to be broadcast on Sunday on BBC1, in which he said he would still have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him (Saddam Hussein)".

Significantly, Blair added: "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat." He continued: "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it's incredibly difficult. That's why I sympathise with the people who were against it (the war) for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision."

He explained it was "the notion of him as a threat to the region" because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people.

"This was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind. The threat to the region. Also the fact of how that region was going to change and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region and whilst he was there, I thought and actually still think, it would have been very difficult to have changed it in the right way."

Though Blair has always argued that Iraq would be better off without Saddam Hussein, to parliament and the public, he always justified military action on the grounds that the Iraqi dictator was in breach of UN-backed demands that he abandon his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme.

It is possible that Blair has shifted his ground in anticipation of his appearance early next year before the Chilcot inquiry. The inquiry has heard that Blair made clear to President George Bush at a meeting in Texas 11 months before the Iraq invasion that he would be prepared to join the US in toppling Saddam.

Blair was "absolutely prepared to say he was willing to contemplate regime change if (UN-backed measures) did not work", Sir David Manning, Blair's former foreign policy adviser, told the inquiry. If it proved impossible to pursue the UN route, then Blair would be "willing to use force", Manning emphasised.

The Chilcot inquiry has seen a number of previously leaked Whitehall documents which suggest Blair was in favour of regime change although he was warned by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, in July 2002, eight months before the invasion, that "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action".

Manning told Blair in March that year that he had underlined Britain's position to Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser.

"I said you (Blair) would not budge in your support for regime change, but you had to manage a press, a parliament, and a public opinion which is very different than anything in the States," Manning wrote, according to a leaked Whitehall document. A Cabinet Office document also seen by the Chilcot inquiry, dated July 2002, stated: "When the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford (his Texas ranch) in April, he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion ..."

Now Blair appears to be openly admitting that evidence of WMD - the purpose behind the now discredited weapons dossier he ordered to be published with the help of MI6 and Whitehall's joint intelligence committee - was not needed to invade Iraq, and he could have found other arguments to justify it.

Blair did say in a speech to Labour party conference in 2004, over a year after the invasion: "I can apologise for the information (about WMDs) that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.

"The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power."

Blair told the former This Morning presenter how his religious beliefs helped him in the invasion's immediate aftermath.

"When it comes to a decision like that, I think it is important that you take that decision as it were on the basis of what is right, because that is the only way to do it," he said.

"I think sometimes people think my religious faith played a direct part in some of these decisions. It really didn't. It gives you strength if you come to a decision, to hold to that decision. That's how it supports your character in a situation of difficulty."

Most "really hard" decisions involved a "downside and an upside either way", he added.

Sir John Sawers, Blair's former chief foreign policy adviser and now head of MI6, told the Chilcot inquiry on Thursday that Iraq was one of several countries where Britain would have liked regime change. Discussions took place on "political" actions to undermine Saddam, including indicting him for war crimes, Sawers said. There was no talk in 2001 in Whitehall of military action, he added.

"There are a lot of countries ... where we would like to see a change of regime. That doesn't mean one pursues active policies in that direction."

Harconens comment:

"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him (Saddam Hussein)". 

WTF??

2 milion people in Iraq death + God knows how many wounded, tortured...effects of depleted uranium on new born children (in Iraq and in US also), for thousands years to come.

US kids there are dieing every day, wounded, gone crazy, making suicides there and when they come beck to home, having children born with deformities...

FOR WHAT??

[Harconen]

Our Murderers in the Sky

Scott Ritter
TruthDig
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:00 EST
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/our_murderers_in_the_sky_20091210/?ln

War is hell, as the saying goes. Murder, on the other hand, is a crime. In this age of the "long war" pitting the United States against the forces of global terror, it is critical that the American people be able to distinguish between the two. The legitimate application of military power to a problem that manifests itself, directly or indirectly, as a threat to the legitimate national security interests of the United States, while horrible in terms of its consequences, is not only defensible but mandatory.

The true test of a society and its leaders is the extent to which every effort is made to both properly define a problem as one worthy of military intervention and then exhaust every option other than the use of force. It is true that President Barack Obama inherited the war in Afghanistan from his predecessor and therefore cannot be held accountable for that which transpired beyond his ability to influence. But the president's recent decision to "surge" 30,000 additional U.S. military troops into Afghanistan transfers ownership of the Afghan conflict to him and him alone. It is in this light that his decision must be ultimately judged.

In many ways, Obama's presentation before the Long Gray Line at West Point, in which he explained his decision to conduct the Afghanistan surge, represented an insult to the collective intelligence of the American people. The most egregious contradiction in his speech was the notion that the people of Afghanistan, who, throughout their history, have resisted central authority whether emanating from Kabul or imposed by outside invaders, would somehow be compelled to embrace this new American plan.

At its heart, the strategy requires a fiercely independent people to swear fealty to a man, Hamid Karzai, whose tenure as Afghanistan's president has been marred by inefficiencies and corruption (even Obama was forced to acknowledge the fraudulent nature of the recent election which secured Karzai's second term in office). Trying to reverse centuries of adherence to local authority and tribal loyalty with the promise of effective central government would represent a monumental challenge for the most efficient and honest of Afghan leaders. That we are attempting to do so behind the person of Karzai represents the height of folly.

For any military-based solution to have a chance of succeeding, we would need to deploy into Afghanistan an army of social scientists capable of navigating the complex reality of intertribal and interethnic relationships. They would require not only astute diplomatic skills that would enable them to bring together Hazara Shiite and Pashtun Sunni, or Uzbek and Tadjik, or any other combination of the myriad of peoples who make up the populace of Afghanistan, but also an understanding of multiple native languages and dialects. But the reality is we are instead dispatching 20-year-old boys from Poughkeepsie whose skill set, perfected during several months of predeployment training, is more conducive to firing three rounds center mass into a human body.

The nation-building or "civilian strategy" envisioned by President Obama, impossibly ambitious even under the most ideal conditions, simply cannot be achieved with the resources at hand, whether in 18 months or 18 years. That he has chosen to place at risk the lives of even more American troops, and by extension the citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the pursuit of such unattainable ambition is inexcusable.

The American military is unmatched in its ability to wage war. If the problem of Afghanistan was able to be defined in military terms alone, then perhaps Obama's surge would provide the basis of a solution. But the Afghan problem has never been a military problem. The United States has, from the very beginning of its Afghanistan misadventure, sought to define the mission within the overall context of a "war on terror." But the real mission revolves more around bringing to justice the perpetrators of mass murder and building international consensus to help prevent another such crime than it does any variation of closing with and destroying an enemy through firepower, maneuver and shock effect, which is the traditional core of any military operation.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, created problems best dealt with through diplomacy, law enforcement and intelligence. That the United States chose to define it instead as an act of war means that we have never assembled the tool set necessary to solve the Afghan problem, which explains a recent admission by U.S. military officers that, after eight years of war, America was at "square one" in Afghanistan.

Obama's characterization of the threat faced by the United States and its allies in the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) theater of operations is as misleading as it is inaccurate. There is no singular, homogeneous enemy to be confronted by a surging U.S. military. The notion that the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida fighters operating in both countries are part of an overarching Islamic fundamentalist movement seeking to export violence to the shores of America is fundamentally wrong. While the president may in fact have seen intelligence information (of undetermined veracity) that shows that some individuals or groups operating in the Af-Pak area of operations have in fact plotted such attacks, to characterize these players and their actions as representing a majority (or even significant minority) opinion among the thousands of fighters opposing the United States and its allies is just plain wrong. Yet, having accepted the definition of the Af-Pak problem in military terms, Obama had no choice but to accede to the solutions put forward by such charismatic military leaders as Gen. David Petraeus (the commander of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM) and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

It is not just that generals such as Petraeus and McChrystal dominate the public face of military leadership in America today. The real problem is that the organization they represent, CENTCOM, dominates the entire U.S. military - and, by extension, the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex - as no other unified command has done in U.S. history. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, the demands of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV) on the U.S. military establishment had competition from U.S. European Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Pacific Command, because of the Cold War. Today, the only show in town is CENTCOM, given that its theater of operations encompasses the principal zones of operation in the "war on terror."

The requirements of CENTCOM drive nearly every aspect of the U.S. military today, including training, procurement and operations. Even strategic nuclear forces have had their work impacted by the need of CENTCOM to strike deep underground targets associated with Iran's nuclear program. Given the inherently militarized nature of the "war on terror," CENTCOM has supplanted the Department of State as the "face" of America in terms of official interaction between the United States and the nations of an area of operations ranging from Africa to Pakistan.

CENTCOM therefore dominates issues such as economic assistance and other nation-to-nation interaction not normally associated with military operations. The combined military-diplomatic-economic activity associated with the work of CENTCOM provides it with unmatched leverage at home and abroad. While not intended as a direct result of the "war on terror," CENTCOM has morphed into a virtual nation-state, operating largely independent of traditional checks and balances associated with the functioning of unified military commands.

Despite the command's unprecedented power and influence, it would not have been all that difficult for Obama to stand up to the pressures brought to bear by CENTCOM in regard to Afghanistan. He is, after all, the commander in chief. The fact is, Obama opted out of any serious opposition to the plan for the most base of reasons - politics. Any serious effort on the part of Obama to meaningfully contest the CENTCOM-backed surge in Afghanistan would have triggered a contentious political struggle with both the military and Congress at a time when the president is pushing for passage of health care reform, the centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda. The reality is that, yet again, American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are being sacrificed for the political advantage of an American politician. This was a charge that was all-too-popular during the administration of George W. Bush. That such an accusation can so readily be applied to Barack Obama, after only a year in office, underscores the magnitude of the failure of leadership and imagination he has exhibited when it comes to the Af-Pak surge.

This lack of imagination was most evident in how the president sought to justify the Af-Pak surge. "This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaida," he said in his West Point speech. In addition to his gross oversimplification of the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and its relationship with al-Qaida, Obama felt compelled to press the same fear-induced 9/11 buttons that were the trademark of his predecessor. "It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak."

The continued focus on hunting down Osama bin Laden further underscores the lack of sophistication of his strategy. It is likely that bin Laden was not the central force behind the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, contrary to popular opinion. That honor goes to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's Egyptian associate whose radical Islamic fundamentalist credentials trump even those of his better-known Saudi Arabian partner, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaida operations chief currently in U.S. custody awaiting trial in New York.

That bin Laden was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, and should be held to account for his crimes, is not a question. But the notion that by somehow "getting" bin Laden the United States would break the back of al-Qaida today is absurd. People should start thinking about the day after bin Laden dies. Al-Qaida cells will continue to function as they did the day before bin Laden died. The biggest measurable change will be the level of popular support for al-Qaida worldwide - it will skyrocket as bin Laden's myth and demise inspire many thousands to join in a global jihad against the West and encourage fundamentalist Muslims from state and nonstate players alike to contribute countless more millions of dollars to underwriting this effort. There can be no greater boost to bin Laden's cause than America's continued singular focus on bringing him in, "dead or alive." The exclusive militarization of the ongoing "hunt" for bin Laden plays directly into the Saudi terrorist's game plan.

Revenge is not a defensible motive for a nation like the United States. Justice is. De-linking our hunt for bin Laden from the failed (and flawed) vehicle of the "war on terror" would be a wise move, but one that sadly is not going to happen in the foreseeable future if the rhetoric of Obama at West Point serves as a guide. And, in a nation that continues to be gripped (and manipulated) by the horrors of 9/11, it remains to be seen whether the concept of justice, as defined by American law, ideals and values, can ever be applied to the perpetrators of that crime. The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will serve as a litmus test in this regard. Given America's track record to date in handling the alleged 9/11 mastermind (the water-boarding of Mohammed 183 times continues to boggle the mind), it is hard to anticipate his exposure to the American legal system as anything but a kangaroo court.

The "war on terror" has shredded the concept of the rule of law, at least as applied by the United States within the context of this struggle. While Obama has made moves to fix some of the symptoms of the flawed policies of his predecessor, the underlying foundation of American arrogance and exceptionalism from which such policies emerged remains unchanged. There is no more telling example of this than the current program of targeted assassination taking place under the guise of armed unmanned aerial drones (also known as remotely piloted vehicles, or RPVs) operating in the Af-Pak theater of operations.

All pretense of either Afghan or Pakistani sovereignty disappears when these drones take to the air. Ostensibly used for intelligence gathering and lethal direct-action operations against so-called high-value targets (i.e., senior al-Qaida or Taliban leadership), RPV missions have become increasingly popular within the U.S. military and intelligence communities as a risk-free means of bringing maximum harm, in highly discriminatory fashion, to the enemy. Expansion of the United States' RPV effort in Af-Pak has become a central part of the surge ordered by Obama, complementing the 30,000 combat troops he has ordered deployed to the region. But exactly who is targeted by these RPV operations? While the U.S. military and intelligence community maintains that every effort is made to positively identify a target as hostile before the decision to fire a missile or drop a bomb is made, the criteria for making this call are often left in the hands of personnel ill-equipped to make it.

In the ideal world, one would see the fusion of real-time imagery, real-time communications intercept and human sources on the ground before making such a call. But in reality this "perfect storm" of intelligence intersection rarely occurs. In its stead, one is left with fragmentary pieces of data that are cobbled together by personnel far removed from the point of actual conflict whose motivations are geared more toward action than discretion. Often, the most critical piece of intelligence comes from a human source who is using the U.S. military as a means of settling a local score more than furthering the struggle against terror. The end result is dead people on the ground whose demise has little, if any, impact on the "war on terror," other than motivating even more people to rise up and struggle against the American occupiers and their Afghan or Pakistani cohorts.

Supporters of the RPV program claim that these strikes have killed over 800 "bad guys," with a loss of only about 20 or so civilians whose proximity to the targets made them suspect in any case. Detractors flip these figures around, noting that only a score or more kills of "high-value targets" can be confirmed, and that the vast majority of those who have died or have been wounded in these attacks were civilians. In a conflict that is being waged in villages and towns in regions traditionally prone to intense independence and religious fundamentalism, distinguishing good from bad can be a daunting task. Given the U.S. track record, under which tribal gatherings and family functions such as weddings have been frequently misidentified as "hostile" gatherings and thus attacked with tragic results, one is inclined to doubt the official casualty figures associated with the RPV strikes.

Rather than furthering the U.S. cause in the "war on terror," the RPV program, which President Obama seeks to expand in the Af-Pak theater, in reality represents a force-enhancement tool for the Taliban. Its indiscriminate application of death and destruction serves as a recruitment vehicle, with scores of new jihadists rising up to replace each individual who might have been killed by a missile attack. Like the surge that it is designed to complement, the expanded RPV program plays into the hands of those whom America is ostensibly targeting. While the U.S. military, aided by a fawning press, may seek to disguise the reality of the RPV program through catchy slogans such as "warheads through foreheads," in reality it is murder by another name. And when murder represents the centerpiece of any national effort, yet alone one that aspires to win the "hearts and minds" of the targeted population, it is doomed to fail.

Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of Target Iran (Nation Books, 2007).

[Harconen]

Army Releases November Suicide Data

IMMEDIATE RELEASE  No. 967-09
December 10, 2009
http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13182

                The Army released suicide data for the month of November today. Among active-duty soldiers, there were 12 potential suicides, all of which are pending determination of the manner of death. For October, the Army reported 16 potential suicides among active-duty soldiers. Since the release of that report, three have been confirmed as suicides, and 13 remain under investigation.
 
                There were 147 reported active duty Army suicides from January 2009 through November 2009. Of these, 102 have been confirmed, and 45 are pending determination of manner of death. For the same period in 2008, there were 127 suicides among active-duty soldiers.
 
                During November 2009, among reserve component soldiers who were not on active duty, there were two potential suicides. Among that same group, from January 2009 through November 2009, there were 71 reported suicides. Of those, 41 were confirmed as suicides, and 30 remain under investigation to determine the manner of death. For the same period in 2008, there were 50 suicides among reserve soldiers who were not on active duty.
 
                In a media roundtable on Nov. 17, 2009, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, confirmed that the total number of suicides in the Army during 2009 had exceeded the total for 2008.
 
                “We conduct an exhaustive review of every suicide within the Army,” said Brig. Gen. Colleen McGuire, director, Suicide Prevention Task Force. “What we have learned is that there is no single or simple answer to preventing suicide. This tells us that we must continue to take a holistic approach to identifying and helping soldiers and families with issues such as behavioral health problems, substance abuse, and relationship failures.”
 
                Although operational tempo and frequent deployments are often cited as possible causes for the Army’s increased suicide rate, data gathered through the Army’s efforts has not shown a link between operational tempo and suicide.
 
                “We have analyzed this part of the problem very closely,” said Walter Morales, Army suicide prevention program manager. “So far, we just haven’t found that repeated deployments and suicide are directly connected. Approximately 30 percent of suicides in the Army occur among those who have never deployed. Many others occur among those who have deployed once. This means we have to continue to reach the entire Army community with effective suicide prevention programs, for those who have deployed and those who haven’t.”
 
                In addition to the Army’s current campaign plan to improve the full spectrum of health promotion, risk reduction, and suicide prevention programs, the Army is testing pilot programs in virtual behavioral health counseling, enhanced behavioral health counseling before and after deployment, and expanded privacy protections for soldiers seeking substance abuse counseling.
 
                For example, the Army recently completed the Virtual Behavioral Health Pilot Program (VBHPP) at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. The VBHPP team is now analyzing the initial results to help the Army better determine whether the program should be expanded to additional units and locations. Army leaders can access current health promotion guidance in newly revised Army Regulation 600-63 (Health Promotion) at http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r600_63.pdf and Army Pamphlet 600-24 (Health Promotion, Risk Reduction and Suicide Prevention) at http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/p600_24.pdf .
 
                Soldiers and families in need of crisis assistance can contact Military OneSource or the Defense Center of Excellence (DCOE) for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury Outreach Center. Trained consultants are available from both organizations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
 
                The Military OneSource toll-free number for those residing in the continental U.S. is 1-800-342-9647; their Web site address is http://www.militaryonesource.com . Overseas personnel should refer to the Military OneSource Web site for dialing instructions for their specific location.
 
                The DCOE Outreach Center can be contacted at 1-866-966-1020, via electronic mail at Resources@DCoEOutreach.org , and at http://www.dcoe.health.mil .
 
                The Army’s comprehensive list of Suicide Prevention Program information is located at http://www.armyg1.army.mil/hr/suicide/default.asp .
 
                More information about the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program is located at http://www.army.mil/csf/ .

[Harconen]

For Iraq, Afghanistan and us, decade of war

  By BRIAN MURPHY,
Associated Press Writer Brian Murphy,
Associated Press Writer   – Fri Dec 11, 10:49 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091211/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_decade_s_end_the_wars

BAGHDAD – It was early April 2003. The city of Mosul in northern Iraq was in free fall.

The holdout units of Saddam Hussein's military had abandoned their posts sometime during the night. By midmorning, looters were helping themselves and vigilantes were beginning their revenge.

In a traffic circle, the garroted bodies of Saddam loyalists were propped up like scarecrows. At the university, libraries and labs were picked clean — right down to someone wheeling away a model skeleton that jiggled in a noisy dance of flailing arms and snapping jaw.

This is where I made a promise to a doctor I met amid the mayhem.

I had come across Dr. Salim Mohammed Yacoub after he banded together with colleagues to defend their hospital against the street pirates. We talked for a long time. It began with his views on the American-led invasion of his country but soon drifted into a broader conversation about the utter helplessness of civilians, like himself, caught in conflict.

He then said something as profound as anything I've ever heard about war.

"Remember, we don't live our lives in history books," Dr. Yacoub told me.

I knew instantly what he meant. Scholars and pundits can analyze the strategic outcomes and judge the winners and losers from a safe distance. But there is none of that as war unfolds. There are just moments.

They come in every imaginable form: a car bomb's lethal spray of metal and glass, a unit pinned down by an ambush, neighbors turning on neighbors, a soldier packing for another tour, the pre-dawn salute of President Barack Obama at Dover Air Force Base for 18 soldiers killed in Afghanistan in a single week.

It's these countless fragments that have built the narrative of the post-Sept. 11 years. We pore over them to try to make sense of where we are and seek clues about what could come.

It was just the beginning of America's second war when I sat with Dr. Yacoub. He said: Come find me in five or six years, God willing. Then we can talk more about the wars and what they mean.

I told him I would try my best.

We are now at that point.

The doctor was right about one thing. There is much to discuss.

In Iraq, it's now about holding the gains.

The country is moving toward some level of stability. But it came only after years that pushed Iraq perilously close to civil war between the Sunnis who lost power after Saddam's fall and the majority Shiites who took control of the aftermath. The tallies: more than 4,350 U.S. soldiers dead; at least 87,500 Iraqi civilians killed, according to government figures.

Insurgents still strike — most recently in late October with cars bombs that killed at least 155 people in strikes against Baghdad municipal offices — but the attacks no longer appear capable of bringing down the government or seriously altering the Pentagon's plans to pull out the last troops in about two years.

The war in Afghanistan launched by 9/11, meanwhile, seems to be drifting out of the grasp of America and its allies. This is because their enemy isn't a fixed target. The Taliban is not an army, but an ideology. It draws as much from its puritanical reading of Islam as it does from Afghanistan's own lore as a graveyard for invaders.

But what I really wanted to talk about with Dr. Yacoub is his own story since we last met.

I found Dr. Yacoub in November. I tracked him down through his hospital — now called Al Salam, or Peace — which was closed from 2005-7 when it was occupied by Kurdish fighters.

It's still surrounded by concrete blast walls in a city that's considered the last urban stronghold for al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents.

Dr. Yacoub remembered me and our conversation that day. I expected him to be surprised by my call and ask about my desire to make contact again. Instead, he simply recounted his life since the fall of Mosul. He sounded tired.

He remained in Mosul but kept a low profile while the hospital was closed. Doctors, academics and other professionals were sometimes hit by targeted killings by insurgents. Dr. Yacoub took no chances. He would rarely leave his neighborhood and managed to make some money with a home clinic.

Many colleagues fled to Syria or Jordan as the insurgency grew. He came close to leaving, but felt it was better to be a prisoner of violence in his own country than a refugee in another.

"So much suffering," he told me by phone. "I've seen so much suffering."

I reminded him of what he said to me in 2003 — that it would take years to gain a fuller perspective on the war. Certainly, I noted, violence is easing. This must be good news.

"Yes, yes," he said. "That is true. It is safer. I am back at work. But war goes deeper. It can break a soul. It can break the spirit. It robs people of hope. Those are wounds that take a long time to heal."

"Was the war worth it? That is a question not just for this war, but all wars. Ask me — ask the living — and they may say yes. We cannot ask the dead that question. But I think the answer might be different."

___

Brian Murphy has covered Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 and helped coordinate AP's coverage of the Iraq war from 2007-8. He is now based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

[Harconen]

Flashback: How to stop genocide in Iraq

By Samantha Power  SAMANTHA POWER, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning " 'A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide."

March 5, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-power5mar05,0,6844853.story

THOSE WHO SUPPORT remaining in Iraq increasingly can be heard invoking the specter of genocide as grounds for staying. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) warned that, if U.S. troops leave, "You'll see a bloodletting in Baghdad that makes Srebrenica look like a Sunday school picnic."

Some defenders of President Bush's approach, having backed the Iraq war from the start, have now settled on genocide warnings after each of their original justifications for being in Iraq — weapons of mass destruction, terrorism prevention, energy diversification, regional stabilization and democracy promotion — has crumbled one by one.

Other proponents of remaining in Iraq are not, in fact, looking to redeem their own faulty judgment. They are genuinely frightened that, as ferocious as the civil war there has become, a U.S. withdrawal could unleash an all-out slaughter. With increasing numbers of civilian corpses piling up every day, they have reason to worry.

Although critics of withdrawal do a masterful job of painting a grim picture of the apocalypse that awaits, they offer no account of how U.S. forces in Iraq will do more than preserve a status quo that is already deteriorating into wholesale ethnic cleansing. Although more than 115,000 U.S. troops have been in Iraq for the last four years, about 3.8 million Iraqis have fled their homes and at least 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing each month. It would be nice to think the surge of troops to Baghdad would help to staunch the flow. But with only one-third of the new troops on duty at any given time in a city of 6 million people, they will have no more success deterring the militias intent on carving out homogeneous Shiite or Sunni neighborhoods than U.S. forces have had to date. About 74% of Shiites polled and 91% of Sunnis — the people who have the most to fear from genocide — would like to see U.S. forces gone by the end of the year.



Unfortunately, many of those who favor a U.S. exit have recklessly waved off atrocity warnings or taken to blaming Iraqis for their plight. What is needed to stave off even greater carnage than we see today is neither assuming massacres won't happen nor suspending thought until the surge has demonstrably failed in six months — at which point other options may no longer be viable. Rather, we must announce our intention to depart and use the intervening months to prioritize civilian protection by pursuing a bold set of measures combining political pressure, humanitarian relocation and judicial deterrence.

First, although it has a familiar and thus unsatisfying ring to it, the most viable long-term route to preventing mass atrocities is to use remaining U.S. leverage to bring about a political compromise that makes Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds feel economically stable, physically secure and adequately represented in political structures. This is consistent with the position of leading U.S. generals and the members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, who have stressed that there is no military solution to Iraq's meltdown and urged the administration, the Iraqis and regional players to reopen broad-ranging political negotiations.

Instead of simply lining up behind Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government in the hopes that it will one day decide to stop ethnic cleansing, recent withdrawal proposals in Congress use the leverage of the proposed redeployment to press Iraqis to reach a political solution. A plan put forth by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has come under neoconservative fire for setting a target departure date, but it provides for flexibility to suspend the U.S. drawdown if Iraqis meet the key economic, political and security benchmarks they have committed to achieve this year. The plan would also retain some U.S. forces in Iraq and the region to help deter atrocities by sectarian militias and aggression from Iraq's neighbors.

However, if this political pressure fails and U.S. forces remain unable to stave off an ever-widening civil war, the U.S. should go further and announce its willingness to assist in the voluntary transport and relocation of Iraqi civilians in peril. If Iraqis tell us that they would feel safer in religiously homogenous neighborhoods, and we lack the means to protect them where they are, we should support and protect them in their voluntary, peaceful evacuation — a means, one might say, to preempt genocide in advance of our departure.



The administration must help secure asylum for those Iraqis — and there are millions who fit this bill — who have a "well-founded fear of persecution." At the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees' conference scheduled for April, which will be attended by Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the United States, the overburdened countries of first asylum (Syria is sheltering 1 million Iraqis; Jordan has taken in 700,000) must be persuaded to reopen their gates to fleeing Iraqis. And Western countries must dramatically expand the number of resettlement slots for Iraqis. Astoundingly, the U.S. took in just 202 Iraqis last year and, although the maximum for this year was recently raised to 7,000, this is still not sufficient.

Finally, if we are serious about preventing further sectarian horrors, the U.S. must send a clear signal to the militias and political leaders who order or carry out atrocities that they will be brought to justice for their crimes. That means offering belated U.S. support to the International Criminal Court, the only credible, independent body with the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity and genocide.

Many of those who say U.S. troops should stay in Iraq to prevent genocide are the same people who for political reasons refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the calamity unfolding on our watch. The same people who modeled a war on best-case scenarios are now resisting ending a war by invoking worst-case scenarios. But after years of using the alleged needs of the Iraqi people to justify U.S. political postures, it is long past time to use the leverage we still have to actually advance Iraqi welfare.



Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

[Harconen]

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

Iraq War Atrocities
http://mindprod.com/politics/iraqatrocities.html


Atrocities


    Never in human history have such genocide and cruelty been witnessed. Such a genocide was never seen in the time of the pharaohs nor of Hitler nor of Mussolini
    ~ Mehmet Elkatmi head of Turkish parliament’s human rights commission on Bush’s genocide in the Iraq war. 2004-11-28, originally reported in the Sunday Times of Australia, since withdrawn.

What does Elkatmi mean? He clearly does not mean Bush has already killed 6 million people as Hitler did. He is referring to the cruelty. Even Hitler refused to use poison gas. Hitler and Stalin only used a handful of tortures. Bush has concocted over 70. Bush is a torture and atrocity gourmet. Further, Bush’s systematic extinction of the Iraqi people apparently has no motive. It is violence for the sake of violence.

   1. Private Joshua Key reported US soldiers playing soccer with the decapitated heads of Iraqi soldiers on CBC Newsworld. 2007-03-04.

2.

Six US soldiers have been charged with gang raping a 14 year old Iraqi girl then murdering her, and her 5-year old sister and her parents. Accused include Pcf. Steven Green of Midland Texas, Spc. James Barker, Sgt. Paul Cortez, Pfc. Jesse Spielman, Pfc. Bryan Howard and Sgt. Anthony Yribe. If these men are convicted, it would be fitting if they were treated for the rest of their lives as dangerous sex offenders and driven out of every town they try to live.

3.

The four soldiers — Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard and Spc. Juston R. Graber have been accused of killing blindfolded Iraqi detainees for sport.

4.

Col. Michael Steele ordered his soldiers to “kill all military age males”.

5.

 Lining up unarmed civilians and shooting them execution style, just as the Nazis did.

6.

 American soldiers used white phosphorus in the operation Phantom Fury attack on Fallujah. Though white phosphorus is not specifically banned, all incendiaries were banned by the UN in 1980. White phosphorus spreads on the skin and catches fire. It cannot be extinguished or washed off with water. See photos of the people killed with white phosphorous in Falluja. In military slang, white phosphorus is known as Willy Pete. or Whiskey Pete. Italian TV broke the story. The Boston Globe, All Headline News and Reuters reported the story. Italian TV did a documentary on the American use of white phosphorus on the citizens of Fallujah. You can play a low-res version of the movie online click to watch. You can download a higher quality version of the movie with BitTorrent in either Microsoft click to watch or Apple QuickTime format click to watch The movie deserves to be shown in IMAX, so please try for the hi-res version. Last revised/verified: 2005-11-08

7.

 Mark 77 Incendiary bombs All incendiaries have been banned by the UN since 1980. The department of defence has admitted to using MK-77 in Iraq. MK-77 is just napalm in canisters.

   8. Bush has completely ignored the Geneva conventions in this war. He has behaved even worse that Hitler in that regard. Read them for yourself the Geneva Conventions treaty the USA signed at the UN that it is flagrantly violating. America flagrantly targets civilians.
   9.

          You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like… victory.
          ~ Robert Duvall (born: 1931-01-05 age: 78), Apocalypse Now 1979

      American soldiers used napalm in the attack on Fallujah. Napalm has been banned by the UN since 1980. The Iraqi puppet government made this complaint against the USA. Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist Americans shot at with 400 bullets, accused the Americans of using napalm in Fallujah. : source
  10. mustard gas: even Hitler refused to use this.
  11. nerve gas: even Hitler refused to use this. On 2005-03-01, Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli of Iraq’s Ministry of Health made the revelation at a Baghdad press conference: U.S. forces used mustard gas, nerve gas and other burning chemical weapons against Iraqi civilians in their November assault on the city of Falluja.
  12. Depleted Uranium: click to watch featuring Pulitzer prize winner John Hanchette and Pentagon DU expert Dr. Doug Rokke, a serving officer for 30 years. It is mostly about the experiences with DU in the first Gulf War. America, Britain, Russia and Pakistan all convert their nuclear power plant wasted into DU weapons and sell them on the international market. A DU round is 10 pounds of solid uranium, contaminated with plutonium, americium, neptunium and uranium-236. It catches fire the instant it leaves the barrel. On impact, 40-50% spalls (breaks off into tiny bb sized shrapnel). The oxides form a fine inhalable powder. One third of the Gulf War vets are on permanent disability. [The Gulf War soldiers were in Iraq a tiny fraction of the time the soldiers are being kept in Iraq.] Rokke says he was ordered to lie about DU, because the military was determined to continue using it, despite the danger to US troops. Bush sent troops to Iraq with known defective gas masks. In the Iraq heat, the sweat breaks contact at the side of the face. Since the Iraq war started in 2003, American forces have fired at least 120 tons of shells packed with depleted uranium.
  13. American soldiers used poison gas in the attack on Fallujah. The US admitted to using banned white phosphorus bombs “for illumination” in the levelling of Fallujah.
  14. According to the prestigious medical journal Lancet, American soldiers killed over 100,000 civilians, most of them children.
  15. In one month of the war, Associated Press tallied 3,240 civilians deaths in Iraq. The count was fragmentary, and the complete toll is sure to be significantly higher.
  16. Before the war started, the World Health Organisation estimated that 100,000 Iraqi civilians could be wounded and another 400,000 hit by disease after the bombing of water and sewage facilities and the disruption of food supplies.
  17. The UN estimate was 100,000 people would be injured in the Iraq war.
  18. As of 2006-06-05 the estimate was at least 251,102 killed and 532,715 seriously wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  19. Iraqi ex-patriates who were in Iraq that I talked to estimated the number of civilian deaths as a result of the sanction bombings between 1 and 2 million. I find testimony of the victims more credible than that of the perpetrator of a crime.
  20. “How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.”
      George W. Bush, 2005-12-14.
  21. Killing 2/3 of the people in Fallujah. Not even Hitler was that ruthless.
  22. American soldiers tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay detention centre. The FBI corroborated. The story was carried by UPI, The New York Times (which did dozens of front page stories) and counterbias.com. Other paper carried it, but have since withdrawn their stories.
  23. Sgt. Erik Saar has written a book called Inside the Wire about his six months torturing POWs at Guantánamo.
  24. American soldiers sexually abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
  25. American soldiers raped children, both male and female.
  26. American soldiers are issued candy that they hand out to Iraqi children to attract them to form a human shield.
  27. U.S. soldiers held Iraqi women hostages in order to pressure male relatives to surrender.
  28. American soldiers cut off water supplies, bombed electric plants and sewage plants causing epidemics of cholera, dysentery and typhus.
  29. American soldiers have forbidden Iraqi farmers to grow anything unless they buy the seed containing terminator genes (to make the seed sterile) from American companies such as Monsanto.
  30. American soldiers bombed hospitals, mosques and private residences.
  31. Bush bombed the water treatment plant in Basra in order to kill children. This is a repeat of this same Geneva convention violation during the sanction bombings. This is deeply shameful thing to do because it targets children specifically. They die faster from lack of water and they die more quickly from drinking polluted water. This is a particularly grievous war crime. Dying of thirst is a hideous torture millions of times more painful than you would ever imagine. I have experienced being tortured this way personally. You must stop this.
  32. Ongoing burning crops using fireballs dropped from Apache helicopters.
  33. Assassinated the ITV news team after threatening both the ITV and BBC teams. They did not arrest, they blew them to tiny pieces.
  34. Shut down websites that showed any of the dead soldiers, civilians or destruction. They shut down yellowtimes.org. They shut down whatreallyhappened.com after PayPal cut them off so they could not receive donations. They shut down thenausea.org. I suspect they have a Denial of Service attack going on aljazeera.net. You can sometimes find the censored materials by searching with google and selecting cached.
  35. Destroyed the cameras of the Lebanon news team that discovered 40 dead Americans.
  36. The proposed Oregon anti demonstrator bill that provides a 25 year sentence without parole for any demonstrator, if anyone in a demonstration interferes with commerce or is rowdy, even if that person was a plant. By this law Martin Luther King would have got life at his first lunch counter protest.
  37. Dropped three precision bombs “by accident” on Iran. They claim these thing are accurate to the foot, but they could not even get the right country three times.
  38. Dropped five precision bombs “by accident” on Syria 482.80 km (300 miles) away from Baghdad. Strangely, no bombs at all fell “by accident” on Israel which is 321.87 km (200 miles) from Iraq.
  39. Landed five precision Tomahawk missiles “by accident” on Saudi Arabia.
  40. Sent a missile into a Kuwait shopping center.
  41. Bombed Children’s Hospital in Rutbah.
  42. illegal ammunition: used by military contractors.
  43. The United States stopped firing missiles at Iraq through Turkish airspace Friday after a missile in flight fell in southeastern Turkey.
  44. The American soldiers destroyed the Iraqi TV broadcasting station. The American government has intimidated, shut down or killed most of the effective voices opposing the war.

          The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself.
          ~ Joseph Sobran (born: 1946-02-23 age: 63)

  45. On 2003-04-02 US aircraft hit a Red Crescent maternity hospital in Baghdad, the city’s trade fair, and other civilian buildings killing several people and wounding at least 25, At least five cars were crushed with drivers burned to death inside.

You may think to yourself, our boys could never do things like that. Watch this video click to watch of US soldiers tormenting a crippled dog. The video of them shooting a dog has been pulled. People are more squeamish about killing dogs that killing Iraqi children.

    While in Iraq we had a sport of killing dogs whenever the Iraqis weren’t shooting us. So when I shot this one at about 50 yards with my M4 and it ran yelping to lower ground, we had to finish it so my friends and I went to it and started shooting it. I’ve never seen a dog take as many shots to the head at least 4 as this one did and then after we thought it was dead we dug a hole and when I picked it up with the shovel it came back to life, so we shot it a couple more times…its pretty funny.
    ~ M. D. formerly of A TRP 1-10 CAV 4ID

The problem I had with choosing one source out of thousands of possibilities to illustrate each point is that you may have decided to discount anything from the source I selected. Before you dismiss these allegations, please do a google search yourself and see if you can find information from sources you do trust. You would expect as much from any citizen in Hitler’s Germany to investigate the allegations of atrocity, would you not, no matter how strenuously the state denied them or how outrageously barbaric they sounded.

    Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
    ~ Otto von Bismarck (born: 1815-04-01 died: 1898-07-30 at age: 83)

The Pentagon shut down websites with news about the war. Your best bet for news is by passing it along in emails, or by searching google for the lesser known sites.

In comparison the Iraqis have been perfect gentlemen with only two types of atrocity:

   1. beheading
   2. burning a corpse
   3. Washington Post’s report on the conditions in the Iraqi prisons: breaking hand bones to the point of permanent deformity, dislocating shoulders by hoisting prisoners into the air by their arms tied behind their backs, shooting, packing 122 prisoners to a cell and rape.

Summary
The atrocities of the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing new. They are a direct consequence of imbalance of power. Americans overwhelm their victims in technology and wealth. That power necessarily corrupts. Humans, not just Americans, are hard wired to abuse excessive power over others. It took 500 years for the atrocities of the Spanish Conquistadors to become widely known. Spaniards, Nazis, Russians, Americans… like all humans, are deeply in denial of their own atrocities. They work hard to keep them hidden and to attack those who expose them.

[Harconen]

washingtonpost.com
Former Marine Testifies to Atrocities in Iraq
Unit Killed Dozens of Unarmed Civilians Last Year, Canadian Refugee Board Is Told

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 8, 2004; Page A20

TORONTO, Dec. 7 -- A former U.S. Marine staff sergeant testified at a hearing Tuesday that his unit killed at least 30 unarmed civilians in Iraq during the war in 2003 and that Marines routinely shot and killed wounded Iraqis.

Jimmy J. Massey, a 12-year veteran, said he left Iraq in May 2003 after a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress. He said he and his men shot and killed four Iraqis staging a demonstration and a man with his hands up trying to surrender, as well as women and children at roadblocks. Massey said he had complained to his superiors about the "killing of innocent civilians," but that nothing was done.

Massey, 33, of Waynesville, N.C., was the chief witness at a refugee board hearing for a U.S. Army deserter, Jeremy Hinzman, who is attempting to win asylum in Canada after he fled from Fort Bragg, N.C., rather than go to Iraq. Hinzman, 25, the first of at least three U.S. military deserters to apply for asylum here, argues that he refused to go to Iraq to avoid committing war crimes.

In Washington, a Marine Corps spokesman at the Pentagon said Massey's charges had been investigated and were unproved.

"We take such allegations very seriously," said Maj. Douglas Powell. "And Jimmy Massey, who is a former staff sergeant, out of the Corps, has made these statements before in the press. They've been looked into, and nothing has been substantiated."

Massey is a former Marine recruiter who served in Iraq as the staff sergeant for a platoon that ranged from 25 to 50 men. He testified that the killings occurred in late March or early April 2003 as his unit, the weapons company of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, moved northward to Baghdad and then beyond.

During one 48-hour period, Massey said under oath, his platoon set up roadblocks and killed "30-plus" civilians. He said his men, fearing suicide bombers, poured massive firepower into cars that did not stop as they approached the roadblocks. In each instance, he said, none of the cars was found to have contained explosives or arms.

"Why didn't the Iraqis stop? That is something that has plagued me every waking moment of the day," he said. He said they may have been confused by the Americans' gestures or thought that a warning shot was celebratory gunfire.

"I don't know if the Iraqi people thought we were celebrating their newfound freedom. But I do know we killed innocent civilians," Massey said. In one case, the driver of a car leaped out with his hands up. "But we kept firing. We killed him," Massey said. In another case, he and other Marines shot and killed four protesters near a checkpoint after a single incoming gunshot from an unknown source, he said. None of the protesters was found with arms.

The testimony of Massey, who was honorably discharged six months after his medical evacuation from Iraq, is the main surviving thrust of the strategy by Hinzman's attorney to put the Iraq war on trial at the refugee hearing. The asylum bids by Hinzman and two other servicemen are a dilemma for the Canadian government, which is seeking to repair relations with the Bush administration. Canada refused to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the war remains highly unpopular in Canada.

The government won a ruling that the legality of the Iraq war could not be an issue at the refugee hearing. But Hinzman's attorney, Jeffry House, has introduced testimonials and human rights reports to support Hinzman's claim that he would have been forced to violate the Geneva Conventions in Iraq.

Some of Hinzman's supporters, including House, are Vietnam-era draft dodgers. They compare Massey's testimony to the disclosure of the My Lai massacre of civilians in Vietnam.

Hinzman, who served a tour in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division, had applied for a transfer to a noncombat position in the Army. When that was rejected and his division was ordered to Iraq, Hinzman drove from Fort Bragg to Canada in January with his wife and infant son.

The family is living in a basement apartment in Toronto while their request is heard. If it is rejected, Hinzman has said, they expect to file appeals in the Canadian courts.

Staff writer Christopher Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45313-2004Dec7.html

[Harconen]

Atrocities in Iraq: 'I killed innocent people for our government'

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6201.htm

"We forget what war is about, what it does to those who wage it and those who suffer from it. Those who hate war the most, I have often found, are veterans who know it." - Chris Hedges, New York Times reporter and author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"

By Paul Rockwell -- Special to The Bee

Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 16, 2004 -- For nearly 12 years, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say gung-ho, Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life - Marine boot camp.

The Iraq war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S. invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was honorably discharged with full severance last Dec. 31 and is now back in his hometown, Waynsville, N.C.

When I talked with Massey last week, he expressed his remorse at the civilian loss of life in incidents in which he himself was involved.

Q: You spent 12 years in the Marines. When were you sent to Iraq?

A: I went to Kuwait around Jan. 17. I was in Iraq from the get-go. And I was involved in the initial invasion.

Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine?

A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn't see any humanitarian support.

Q: What experiences turned you against the war and made you leave the Marines?

A: I was in charge of a platoon that consists of machine gunners and missile men. Our job was to go into certain areas of the towns and secure the roadways. There was this one particular incident - and there's many more - the one that really pushed me over the edge. It involved a car with Iraqi civilians. From all the intelligence reports we were getting, the cars were loaded down with suicide bombs or material. That's the rhetoric we received from intelligence. They came upon our checkpoint. We fired some warning shots. They didn't slow down. So we lit them up.

Q: Lit up? You mean you fired machine guns?

A: Right. Every car that we lit up we were expecting ammunition to go off. But we never heard any. Well, this particular vehicle we didn't destroy completely, and one gentleman looked up at me and said: "Why did you kill my brother? We didn't do anything wrong." That hit me like a ton of bricks.

Q: He spoke English?

A: Oh, yeah.

Q: Baghdad was being bombed. The civilians were trying to get out, right?

A: Yes. They received pamphlets, propaganda we dropped on them. It said, "Just throw up your hands, lay down weapons." That's what they were doing, but we were still lighting them up. They weren't in uniform. We never found any weapons.

Q: You got to see the bodies and casualties?

A: Yeah, firsthand. I helped throw them in a ditch.

Q: Over what period did all this take place?

A: During the invasion of Baghdad.


'We lit him up pretty good'
Q: How many times were you involved in checkpoint "light-ups"?
A: Five times. There was [the city of] Rekha. The gentleman was driving a stolen work utility van. He didn't stop. With us being trigger happy, we didn't really give this guy much of a chance. We lit him up pretty good. Then we inspected the back of the van. We found nothing. No explosives.

Q: The reports said the cars were loaded with explosives. In all the incidents did you find that to be the case?

A: Never. Not once. There were no secondary explosions. As a matter of fact, we lit up a rally after we heard a stray gunshot.

Q: A demonstration? Where?

A: On the outskirts of Baghdad. Near a military compound. There were demonstrators at the end of the street. They were young and they had no weapons. And when we rolled onto the scene, there was already a tank that was parked on the side of the road. If the Iraqis wanted to do something, they could have blown up the tank. But they didn't. They were only holding a demonstration. Down at the end of the road, we saw some RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) lined up against the wall. That put us at ease because we thought: "Wow, if they were going to blow us up, they would have done it."

Q: Were the protest signs in English or Arabic?

A: Both.

Q: Who gave the order to wipe the demonstrators out?

A: Higher command. We were told to be on the lookout for the civilians because a lot of the Fedayeen and the Republican Guards had tossed away uniforms and put on civilian clothes and were mounting terrorist attacks on American soldiers. The intelligence reports that were given to us were basically known by every member of the chain of command. The rank structure that was implemented in Iraq by the chain of command was evident to every Marine in Iraq. The order to shoot the demonstrators, I believe, came from senior government officials, including intelligence communities within the military and the U.S. government.

Q: What kind of firepower was employed?

A: M-16s, 50-cal. machine guns.

Q: You fired into six or ten kids? Were they all taken out?

A: Oh, yeah. Well, I had a "mercy" on one guy. When we rolled up, he was hiding behind a concrete pillar. I saw him and raised my weapon up, and he put up his hands. He ran off. I told everybody, "Don't shoot." Half of his foot was trailing behind him. So he was running with half of his foot cut off.

Q: After you lit up the demonstration, how long before the next incident?

A: Probably about one or two hours. This is another thing, too. I am so glad I am talking with you, because I suppressed all of this.

Q: Well, I appreciate you giving me the information, as hard as it must be to recall the painful details.

A: That's all right. It's kind of therapy for me. Because it's something that I had repressed for a long time.

Q: And the incident?

A: There was an incident with one of the cars. We shot an individual with his hands up. He got out of the car. He was badly shot. We lit him up. I don't know who started shooting first. One of the Marines came running over to where we were and said: "You all just shot a guy with his hands up." Man, I forgot about this.


Depleted uranium and cluster bombs
Q: You mention machine guns. What can you tell me about cluster bombs, or depleted uranium?
A: Depleted uranium. I know what it does. It's basically like leaving plutonium rods around. I'm 32 years old. I have 80 percent of my lung capacity. I ache all the time. I don't feel like a healthy 32-year-old.

Q: Were you in the vicinity of of depleted uranium?

A: Oh, yeah. It's everywhere. DU is everywhere on the battlefield. If you hit a tank, there's dust.

Q: Did you breath any dust?

A: Yeah.

Q: And if DU is affecting you or our troops, it's impacting Iraqi civilians.

A: Oh, yeah. They got a big wasteland problem.

Q: Do Marines have any precautions about dealing with DU?

A: Not that I know of. Well, if a tank gets hit, crews are detained for a little while to make sure there are no signs or symptoms. American tanks have depleted uranium on the sides, and the projectiles have DU in them. If an enemy vehicle gets hit, the area gets contaminated. Dead rounds are in the ground. The civilian populace is just now starting to learn about it. Hell, I didn't even know about DU until two years ago. You know how I found out about it? I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine. I just started inquiring about it, and I said "Holy s---!"

Q: Cluster bombs are also controversial. U.N. commissions have called for a ban. Were you acquainted with cluster bombs?

A: I had one of my Marines in my battalion who lost his leg from an ICBM.

Q: What's an ICBM?

A: A multi-purpose cluster bomb.

Q: What happened?

A: He stepped on it. We didn't get to training about clusters until about a month before I left.

Q: What kind of training?

A: They told us what they looked like, and not to step on them.

Q: Were you in any areas where they were dropped?

A: Oh, yeah. They were everywhere.

Q: Dropped from the air?

A: From the air as well as artillery.

Q: Are they dropped far away from cities, or inside the cities?

A: They are used everywhere. Now if you talked to a Marine artillery officer, he would give you the runaround, the politically correct answer. But for an average grunt, they're everywhere.

Q: Including inside the towns and cities?

A: Yes, if you were going into a city, you knew there were going to be ICBMs.

Q: Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. They are not precise. They don't injure buildings, or hurt tanks. Only people and living things. There are a lot of undetonated duds and they go off after the battles are over.

A: Once the round leaves the tube, the cluster bomb has a mind of its own. There's always human error. I'm going to tell you: The armed forces are in a tight spot over there. It's starting to leak out about the civilian casualties that are taking place. The Iraqis know. I keep hearing reports from my Marine buddies inside that there were 200-something civilians killed in Fallujah. The military is scrambling right now to keep the raps on that. My understanding is Fallujah is just littered with civilian bodies.


Embedded reporters
Q: How are the embedded reporters responding?
A: I had embedded reporters in my unit, not my platoon. One we had was a South African reporter. He was scared s---less. We had an incident where one of them wanted to go home.

Q: Why?

A: It was when we started going into Baghdad. When he started seeing the civilian casualties, he started wigging out a little bit. It didn't start until we got on the outskirts of Baghdad and started taking civilian casualties.

Q: I would like to go back to the first incident, when the survivor asked why did you kill his brother. Was that the incident that pushed you over the edge, as you put it?

A: Oh, yeah. Later on I found out that was a typical day. I talked with my commanding officer after the incident. He came up to me and says: "Are you OK?" I said: "No, today is not a good day. We killed a bunch of civilians." He goes: "No, today was a good day." And when he said that, I said "Oh, my goodness, what the hell am I into?"

Q: Your feelings changed during the invasion. What was your state of mind before the invasion?

A: I was like every other troop. My president told me they got weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam threatened the free world, that he had all this might and could reach us anywhere. I just bought into the whole thing.

Q: What changed you?

A: The civilian casualties taking place. That was what made the difference. That was when I changed.

Q: Did the revelations that the government fabricated the evidence for war affect the troops?

A: Yes. I killed innocent people for our government. For what? What did I do? Where is the good coming out of it? I feel like I've had a hand in some sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed, ashamed about it.


Showdown with superiors

Q: I understand that all the incidents - killing civilians at checkpoints, itchy fingers at the rally - weigh on you. What happened with your commanding officers? How did you deal with them?
A: There was an incident. It was right after the fall of Baghdad, when we went back down south. On the outskirts of Karbala, we had a morning meeting on the battle plan. I was not in a good mindset. All these things were going through my head - about what we were doing over there. About some of the things my troops were asking. I was holding it all inside. My lieutenant and I got into a conversation. The conversation was striking me wrong. And I lashed out. I looked at him and told him: "You know, I honestly feel that what we're doing is wrong over here. We're committing genocide."

He asked me something and I said that with the killing of civilians and the depleted uranium we're leaving over here, we're not going to have to worry about terrorists. He didn't like that. He got up and stormed off. And I knew right then and there that my career was over. I was talking to my commanding officer.

Q: What happened then?

A: After I talked to the top commander, I was kind of scurried away. I was basically put on house arrest. I didn't talk to other troops. I didn't want to hurt them. I didn't want to jeopardize them.

I want to help people. I felt strongly about it. I had to say something. When I was sent back to stateside, I went in front of the sergeant major. He's in charge of 3,500-plus Marines. "Sir," I told him, "I don't want your money. I don't want your benefits. What you did was wrong."

It was just a personal conviction with me. I've had an impeccable career. I chose to get out. And you know who I blame? I blame the president of the U.S. It's not the grunt. I blame the president because he said they had weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.

About the Writer: Paul Rockwell ( rockyspad@hotmail.com) is a writer who lives in Oakland.

Copyright: Sacramento Bee

[Harconen]

Iraq Deaths

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq

The number is shocking and sobering. It is at least 10 times greater than most estimates cited in the US media, yet it is based on a scientific study of violent Iraqi deaths caused by the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.

Remind visitors to your site of the awful human costs of continued war by posting the Iraqi Death Estimator on your website. You can use the code in the box below.

Iraq Deaths Estimator

Embed:

<a href="http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq" _fcksavedurl="http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq"><img src="http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/images/iraqdeaths.gif" _fcksavedurl="http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/images/iraqdeaths.gif" alt='Iraq Deaths Estimator' border='0' /></a>

Sign the petition telling Congress that about a million Iraqis have likely been killed since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Help us expose to Congress the true costs of war.

A study, published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, estimated that over 600,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. Iraqis have continued to be killed since then. The death counter provides a rough daily update of this number based on a rate of increase derived from the Iraq Body Count. (See the complete explanation.)

The estimate that over a million Iraqis have died received independent confirmation from a prestigious British polling agency in September 2007. Opinion Research Business estimated that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed violently since the US-led invasion.

This devastating human toll demands greater recognition. It eclipses the Rwandan genocide and our leaders are directly responsible. Little wonder they do not publicly cite it. You can use the simple HTML code above to post the counter to your website to help spread the word.

Add your name to the petition telling Congress that about a million Iraqis have likely been killed since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Help us continue this important work with a tax-deductible contribution.

See the list of some folks we know have posted the counter.

[Harconen]

Poison DUst

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17249.htm

Poison DUst tells the story of young soldiers who thought they came home safely from the war, but didn't. Of a veteran's young daughter whose birth defect is strikingly similar to birth defects suffered by many Iraqi children. Of thousands of young vets who are suffering from the symptoms of uranium poisoning, and the thousands more who are likely to find themselves with these ailments in the years to come. Of a government unwilling to admit there might be a problem here. Filmmaker Sue Harris skillfully weaves the stories of these young veterans with scientific explanations of the nature of "DU" and its dangers, including interviews with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, New York Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez, noted physicist Michio Kaku, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Dr. Helen Caldicott and Major Doug Rokke- the former U.S. Army DU Project head.

Every American who cares about our troops should watch this film. Everyone who cares about the innocent civilians who live in the countries where these weapons are used should watch this film. And everyone who cares about the hatred of Americans that may result from the effects of our government's actions in using these weapons, should watch this film. Is there a cover-up?

[Harconen]

Iraqi Holocaust Denial by US & Puppet Iraqi Régime

Gideon Polya
Media With Conscience
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 02:15 EST
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/34979/42/

Not only is the US involved in an ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide (post-1990 violent and non-violent excess deaths 4.4 million), the US and its Iraqi Puppet Régime are grossly understating post-invasion mortality rates to the United Nations Population Division.

In the 2006 Revision of the United Nations Population Division the crude death rate in "deaths per 1,000 of population" was given as 8.3 (1980-1985), 6.9 (1985-1990), 9.6 (1990-1995; Gulf War and commencement of Sanctions in 1990 and Bombing in 1991), 10.0 (1995-2000), 10.6 (2000-2005; the invasion and occupation of Iraq commenced in March 2003); and 9.1 (2005-2010).

This data makes sense in that one would have expected the successive impositions of Sanctions, Bombing, War and finally violent Occupation would have increased the death rate in this period.

Further, the above estimates are conservative because the classic epidemiological study on post-invasion Iraq by top US medical epidemiologists estimated a crude death rate of 13.3 per 1,000 people per year in the 40 months post-invasion. [1]

Using UN Population Division data on the population of Iraq in the 1990-2009 period and using as a baseline death rate the 4 per 1,000 of population obtaining in a range of peaceful Developing Countries with similar demographics, the mid-1990-December 2009 non-violent excess deaths (non-violent avoidable deaths) were calculated to be 2.8 million.

Using the 2006 Revision of the United Nations Population Division one can readily estimate mid-1990- December 2009 under-5 year old infant deaths as 2.1 million.

It has been determined from World demographic data that the ratio of under-5 infant deaths/total non-violent avoidable deaths is about 0.7 for impoverished developing World countries. [2, 3]

Accordingly, one can estimate mid-1990-December 2009 excess deaths as 2.1 million/0.7 = 3.0 million, this being in good agreement with the above estimate of 2.8 million.

However "American Democracy" has intervened to radically distort this picture. In 2005, the Americans, having followed standard US global policies and murdered or imprisoned all the Iraqi political activists they didn't like, proceeded to hold "democratic elections" from which any survivors were also excluded. Nouri al-Maliki was elected to the US Puppet "Transitional National Assembly" in 2005 and became Prime Minister of the US Puppet Iraqi Régime in mid-2006.

This fraudulent exercise in "American Democracy" was rapidly reflected in UN Population Division statistics.

Thus in the 2008 Revision of the United Nations Population Division the crude death rate in "deaths per 1,000 of population" was given as 9.0 (1980-1985), 7.9 (1985-1990; a similar downward trend as for the 2006 Revision) , 6.7 (1990-1995; a further DECLINE despite the Gulf War and commencement of Sanctions in 1990 and Bombing in 1991), 5.2 (1995-2000; a further DECLINE despite Sanctions and massive Bombing), 5.3 (2000-2005; the invasion and occupation of Iraq commenced in 2003 but this massive imposition evidently had no significant effect on Iraqi death rate); and 6.1 (2005-2010; a huge decline from the 1985-1990 figure despite nearly 2 decades of impositions variously including Sanctions, Bombing, War and Occupation).

From this unbelievable post-2006 Iraqi data one can calculate mid-1990-December non-violent excess deaths as 0.8 million (as compared to the pre-2006 data estimate of 2.8-3.0 million).

This evident US and US Iraqi Puppet Régime fraud also extends to under-5 infant mortality data.

Thus the 2002 Revision UN Population Division data for under-5 infant mortality in Iraq in "deaths per 1,000 live births" was 205 (1950-1955), 172 (1955-1960), 160 (1960-1965), 136 (1965-1970), 116 (1970-1975), 93 (1975-1980), 73 (1980-1985), 57 (1985-1990), 82 (1990-1995), 131 (1995-2000), and 131 (200-205).

The 2006 Revision data is similar, specifically 124 (1995-2000), 124 (2000-2005), and 105 (2005-2010). Using the 2006 Revision data one calculates mid-1990-December 2009 under-5 infant deaths totalling 2.1 million.

However the US and US Iraqi Puppet Régime data reflected in the 2008 Revision tells a radically different story. The under-5 infant mortality in Iraq in "deaths per 1,000 live births" was asserted in the 2008 Revision data to be 56 (1995-2000; a DECREASE from that before the Sanctions that are generally attributed as the cause of massive infant mortality in Iraq in the period 1990-2003); 45 (2000-2005; a further DECREASE under more Sanctions and Bombing and then Invasion and Occupation); and 41 (2005-2010; a further DECREASE after nearly 2 decades of Sanctions, Bombing and violent Occupation).

The mid-1990-December 2009 Iraqi under-5 infant deaths from the US and US Puppet Iraqi Régime data of the 2008 Revision total 0.8 million, 2.6 times lower than that determined using pre-2006 UN data.

As for post-invasion violent deaths in Iraq, 1990-2009, assessment is complicated by the position of the US military as summarized by US General Tommy Franks: "We don't do body counts". [4]

It has been estimated that 0.2 million Iraqis died in the Gulf War. Iraq Body Count currently estimates 95,000-103,000 violent post-invasion Iraqi death, but these estimates derive from utterly untrustworthy media and Puppet Government reports from a war zone. A 2008 US, US Puppet Iraqi Régime and WHO study has found about 150,000 post-invasion Iraqi violent deaths occurred between March 2003 and June 2006, this estimate being 4 times lower than the estimate from surveys by top US medical epidemiologists and the UK polling company ORB (see below). [4, 5]

Studies by top US medical epidemiologists from Public Health Schools of Johns Hopkins and Columbia University published in the top medical journal The Lancet indicated about 0.6 million violent Iraqi post-invasion deaths by July 2006. This work has been confirmed by the UK ORB polling company. The prestigious US organization Just Foreign Policy using such data now estimates post-invasion Iraqi violent deaths at 1.4 million. [1, 6]

Summary

1. According to the 2006 Revision UN Population Division data, medical literature data, and other authoritative sources, the Iraqi Holocaust has been associated with 1.1 million post-invasion non-violent avoidable deaths; 1.4 million violent post-invasion deaths; and 0.9 million post-invasion under-5 infant deaths (90% avoidable and due to gross US Coalition violation of the Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demands that an Occupier supplies food and medical requisites to "the fullest extent of the means available to it." In addition, avoidable deaths under Sanctions (1990-2003) totalled 1.7 million, violent deaths in the Gulf War totalled 0.2 million and under-5 infant deaths under Sanctions totalled 1.2 million. Iraqi refugees (both inside and outside Iraq) total 5-6 million.

2. The ongoing Iraqi Holocaust (1990-2009) involves 1.6 million violent deaths, 2.8 million non-violent excess deaths, 4.4 million violent and non-violent excess deaths, 1.9 million avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths and 5-6 million refugees - an Iraqi Genocide according to the UN Genocide Convention definition of "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". The Iraqi Genocide - still continuing under Nobel Peace Laureate Obama - is of a similar magnitude to the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation). [7, 8]

3. The US and US Puppet Iraqi Régime assertions, as reflected in 2008 Revision UN Population Division data, would have us believe that nearly 2 decades of Sanctions, Bombing, War and violent Occupation imposed on Iraq resulted in a steady decline in under-5 year old infant mortality, general death rate and avoidable death rate in Iraq.

4. The US under Obama and the US Puppet Iraqi Régime are involved in horrendous Iraqi Holocaust commission, Iraqi Holocaust denial, Iraqi Genocide commission and Iraqi Genocide denial.

5. All those politicians, public servants, academics and journalists complicit in the ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide (most notably George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, George Bush Junior, Barack Obama, John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair) should be arraigned for complicity in war crimes and genocide and /or for being accessories after the fact of war crimes and genocide.

=====

   1. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy & Les Roberts, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey", The Lancet, October 2006.

   2. Gideon Polya, "Layperson's guide to calculating Iraq deaths". MWC News, 6 April 2006 (link).

   3. Gideon Polya, "Iraq and Afghanistan: how many dying?", pp 78-80, in "Haditha Ethics - from Iraqi to Iran?", ed. Ken Coates, Spokesman for Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, London, 2006).

   4. Iraq Body Count.

   5. WHO, New study estimates 151,000 violent Iraqi deaths since Iraq invasion [March 2003-June 2006]".

   6. Just Foreign Policy.

   7. Gilbert, M. (1969), Jewish History Atlas (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London).

   8. Gilbert, M. (1982), Atlas of the Holocaust (Michael Joseph, London).

[Harconen]

Binyam Mohamed case: David Miliband steps up bid to hide proof of torture

Richard Norton-Taylor and Afua Hirsch
The Guardian
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:12 EST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/13/binyam-mohamed-david-miliband-cia-torture-appeal-court

Undated handout photo of Binyam Mohamed

Efforts will be stepped up tomorrow to suppress evidence of British involvement in the unlawful treatment of a UK resident, Binyam Mohamed, who says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan before being secretly rendered to Guantánamo Bay.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, is appealing against six high court judgments ruling that CIA information on Mohamed's treatment, and what MI5 and MI6 knew about it, must be disclosed.

In a case which lawyers on all sides agree is unprecedented, counsel for the Guardian and other media organisations, Mohamed and two civil rights groups, Liberty and Justice, will argue tomorrow that the public interest in disclosing the role played by British and US agencies in unlawful activities far outweighs any claim about potential threats to national security.

Miliband's lawyers will tell Britain's three most senior appeal court judges, led by the lord chief justice, Igor Judge, that if the CIA material is disclosed the US might cut off the supply of intelligence to the UK, thus harming national security.

Since losing in the high court, David Millband has instructed one of the country's most expensive advocates, Jonathan Sumption QC, to represent his position. Sumption, who recently withdrew his application to become a justice of the supreme court after reports of "hostility" from other judges, is reported to earn up to £3m a year and is described by experts as one of the bar's "most formidable" opponents".

Sources say the decision to instruct Sumption comes amid growing concern within the government at the high court rulings, which officials had confidently expected to be in their favour.

In their six judgments, Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones repeatedly challenged Miliband's claims. It is the first case in which the high court has questioned head-on claims by a government that evidence must be withheld on grounds of national security.

At the heart of the dispute is a seven-paragraph CIA document that the British government insists must remain secret. The two high court judges, who have seen the document, insist it does not contain any sensitive intelligence material. "What is contained in those seven redacted paragraphs gives rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".

The judges stated after hearing arguments put by Miliband's lawyers: "It was in our view difficult to conceive that a democratically elected and accountable government could possibly have any rational objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported as to how a detainee was treated by them and which made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters."

They added: "Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials, or officials of another state, where the evidence was relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be".

The two high court judges continued: "The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law," they ruled.

"A vital public interest requires ... that a summary of the most important evidence relating to the involvement of the British security services in wrongdoing be placed in the public domain ... Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy," they added.

The CIA information includes an account given to British intelligence "whilst [Mohamed] was held in Pakistan ... prior to his interview by an officer of the security service", the judges revealed earlier this year. The officer, known only as Witness B, is being investigated by the Metropolitan police for "possible criminal wrongdoing".

Miliband's claim that Britain's intelligence relationship would be jeopardised "lacks credibility on its face", the judges added.

The Guardian and other newspaper and broadcasting media groups argue that there is no wider public interest to be taken into account in the case than "open justice, the rule of law and democratic accountability".

Miliband was accused in the high court of wanting to suppress information about CIA activities even though details had already been disclosed by the Obama administration. Evidence that Miliband still wanted kept secret related to the question why "it was impossible to believe that President Obama would take action against the United Kingdom", the judges said.

Lawyers acting for the foreign secretary point to a letter sent by the CIA to MI6 in April, saying that if British judges ordered the information at issue to be disclosed the US might reassess its intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK. "The evidence that disclosure would cause serious harm to national security is overwhelming," Miliband's lawyers claim.

They point to a law lords ruling last year that the Serious Fraud Office could not pursue corruption allegations over arms sales by BAE Systems, Britain's biggest weapons maker, to Saudi Arabia because the Saudi government had threatened to stop intelligence-sharing with Britain. The case, in which Sumption also represented the government, has been described by critics as weakening the UK's reputation for observing the rule of law.

[Harconen]

Blair Will Give Iraq War Evidence in Public: Inquiry

Global Research
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:50 EST
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16531

The Iraq war inquiry said Sunday that former prime minister Tony Blair would be questioned "very much in public" amid fears that crucial evidence would only be heard in private.

Blair, who is to appear before the long-awaited official inquiry early next year, said in a BBC television interview to be screened Sunday that he would have backed the invasion of Iraq even if he had known that president Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

He said London would have used other ways to justify its support for the March 2003 US-led invasion to oust the Iraqi dictator.

The interview triggered concerns that when he testifies it would be heard behind closed doors.

Most evidence to the inquiry will be given in public, although closed hearings can take place for issues concerning national security or secret intelligence. Mindful of the risk, proceedings are broadcast with a one-minute delay.

The Independent on Sunday newspaper suggested that Blair's meetings with US president George W. Bush and details of the decision-making process that led to war would be dealt with in secret on grounds of national security and the need to protect London's relations with Washington.

However, a spokesman for the inquiry said: "Mr Blair will be appearing very much in public and will be questioned in detail on a wide range of issues surrounding Britain's involvement in Iraq.

    "We have said right from the start that he will be a key figure in the inquiry. Mr Blair has said that he is ready and willing to give evidence in public."

The inquiry opened last month, after Britain's mission in Iraq ended earlier this year.

Liberla Democrats leader Nick Clegg said following Blair's BBC interview that it is essential that as much of his evidence as possible is heard in public.

    "It would be wholly unacceptable for any of Blair's testimony to be held in private, except that which could directly compromise national security," he said.

    "Tony Blair's breathtaking cynicism in stating that he would have found any old excuse to go to war simply underlines how vital it is that we hear his testimony in public."

In his BBC interview, Blair said of Saddam and the lack of WMDs found: "I would still have thought it right to remove him. Obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat.

    "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it's incredibly difficult.

    "It was the notion of him as a threat to the region, of which the development of WMD was obviously one, and because you'd had 12 years of United Nations to and fro on this subject, he used chemical weapons on his own people -- so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind."

Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector in Iraq, said Blair's comments suggested a "lack of sincerity" over his stated reasons for going to war.

"The war was sold on the WMD, and now you feel, or hear that it was only a question of deployment of arguments, as he said, it sounds a bit like a fig leaf that was held up, and if the fig leaf had not been there, then they would have tried to put another fig leaf there," he told the BBC.

    "What could they have argued? Tony Blair talks about the threat to the region. I don't think that any country in the region, with the possible exception of Kuwait, really saw Iraq, which was prostrate at the time, as a threat."

Source - Agence France-Press

[Harconen]

Holocaust Survivor Talks About Obama's Peace Prize

by Hedy Epstein
Global Research, December 13, 2009
CODEPINK - 2009-12-10
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16529

It's strange to see President Obama accepting a Peace Prize as he escalates a war.

As a Holocaust survivor whose parents perished at Auschwitz in 1942, I know all too well what war looks like. I also know what peace looks like and I can tell you this: Sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to fight in one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan, is not making peace.

As President Obama accepts a Peace Prize he does not deserve, it's a good time to model what real peacemaking looks like. That's why-at the ripe age of 85-I'll be joining the Gaza Freedom March on December 31. Over 1,000 peacemakers from around the world will join hands with 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza as we walk together to the Israeli border. As Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, and members of many faiths we will come together as one humanity to condemn the brutal invasion of Gaza one year ago and demand that Israel lift the siege that has brought 1.5 million people to the brink of disaster.

You can show your support for real peacemaking by endorsing the Gaza Freedom March and telling your friends and community about this historic event!  http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/t/9750/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=2055

Around the globe, solidarity actions are already being planned for the week of December 27th--find one near you and join in the action! http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/p/salsa/event/common/public/search.sjs?distributed_event_KEY=548

You can also make a peace prayer flag. http://www.womensaynotowar.org/article.php?id=5211

Send them to us and we will carry them on the march. The peace prayer flags are an easy and powerful way to make sure your voice is present at this historic event.

Peace is not just making nice speeches, as President Obama did in Cairo when he told the Arab world that "we understand that the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable" and that America would not turn its back on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for justice and dignity.

That is why I am asking you to help us "walk the talk" by supporting the Gaza Freedom March.

With love for all humanity,

Hedy Epstein and the CODEPINK team

 

 Global Research Articles by Hedy Epstein

 

[Harconen]

Afghanistan Massacre on Eve of Obama's Surge

by Bill Van Auken
Global Research, December 13, 2009
World Socialist Web Site - 2009-12-10
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16528

With the first elements of 30,000 additional US troops set to arrive in Afghanistan next week, the massacre of as many as 15 civilians in a US raid has heightened fears that the Obama administration’s so-called surge will spell a dramatic rise in bloodletting.

 
The killings took place in eastern Laghman province in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Gulzar Sangarwal, the acting head of the provincial council, reported that 13 civilians were killed in the raid on the village of Armul, including one woman. Local villagers reported 15 killed, including children. Reuters news agency said its correspondent had seen the bodies of a woman and 12 men, several of them teenagers.


Local authorities have blamed the killings on US Special Forces troops.

 
The deaths triggered an angry protest that ended in still more killings. According to Reuters, some 5,000 villagers marched on the provincial capital of Mehtar Lam chanting slogans denouncing the US occupation, the puppet government of President Hamid Karzai and the provincial authorities. The crowd shouted “Death to America, Death to Obama and Death to Karzai” as they marched through the town.

 
The villagers carried the bodies of the civilians slain in the US raid, laying them in front of the provincial governor’s house.


Soldiers from the Afghan National Army opened fire with live ammunition in an attempt to disperse the crowd, reportedly killing two demonstrators outright and mortally wounding two others, who died in the local hospital.

 
Outrage over the killings spread to the neighboring province of Nangarhar, on the border with Pakistan. Pajhwok Afghan News reported that 3,000 students from Nangahar University occupied the main highway linking Kabul and the provincial capital of Jalalabad for hours on Wednesday, chanting slogans denouncing the US-led occupation and the Karzai regime and burning American flags. A US military column attempting to move down the highway was forced to turn back to Jalalabad.

 
As is its standard operating procedure in such incidents, the US command in Kabul initially denied that any civilians were killed in the raid. It issued a statement claiming that the occupation troops had only shot “militants” and insisting that there were “no operational reports to substantiate those claims of harming civilians, including women and children during this operation.”

 
Faced with protestors carrying the bodies of civilians, the second-highest ranking American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, backed off from the categorical denial Wednesday, stating that the raid had been a “confusing operation” and that the US military was “continuing to investigate.”

 
The massacre and mass protests in Afghanistan have taken place as 1,500 Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, prepare to deploy in southern Afghanistan next week. They will be followed by another 6,200 Marines and 3,400 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum, New York, who will be deployed by early next spring as the Pentagon implements President Barack Obama’s decision to increase US occupation forces to roughly 100,000.

 
These troops are being sent in to suppress not only the armed resistance but the increasingly evident mass opposition to the eight-year-old US occupation. Every operation, like the one in Laghman, further inflames this opposition and strengthens the insurgency.

 
In a continuation of the round of hearings on the escalation begun Tuesday by the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and the US ambassador in the country, Gen. Karl Eikenberry (ret.), before the Senate and House armed services panels, Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus testified Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

 
As a result of the US military escalation, “violence likely will increase initially, particularly in the spring as the weather improves,” Petraeus told the senators. He allowed that the situation in Afghanistan is “likely to get harder before it gets easier.”


US troops, he said, would “have to fight their way into enemy strongholds and clear enemy-controlled population centers.”

 
Recalling that he had testified before the same committee in support of the “surge” in Iraq, when he was the senior US military commander there, Petraeus said that the US operation in Afghanistan would be “tougher than Iraq,” and “the progress there likely will be slower in developing.”

 
An indication of just how slow came the day before in a joint press conference by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Kabul.

 
Karzai stated that it would be 15 to 20 years before Afghanistan would be able to sustain its own security forces.

 
For his part, Gates pledged that “our government will not again turn our back on this country or the region,” referring to the US abandonment of Afghanistan after spending billions of dollars to foment a Islamist guerrilla war against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul beginning in the late 1970s. As deputy director of the CIA, Gates was deeply involved in that operation, which ushered in three decades of war, costing well over a million Afghan lives.

 
“We will fight by your side until Afghan forces are large enough and strong enough to secure the nation on their own,” Gates continued. The defense secretary went on to debunk Obama’s pledge to begin withdrawing US forces in July 2011, saying that any drawdown of troops would be “gradual” and “conditions-based.” Whether such a withdrawal will take “three years or two years or four years remains to be seen,” he said.

 
According to the New York Times, Pentagon aides went further, clarifying that when Gates spoke of a withdrawal taking years, he was not referring to a complete pulling out of US troops, but merely to a “gradual change in the US military’s role.”

 
Clearly, Washington’s intention is to turn Afghanistan into a permanent base for the American military from which it can project its influence over oil-rich Central Asia and the energy pipeline routes out of the Caspian Basin. This, not the propaganda about Al Qaeda terrorism, is the driving force behind the US intervention.

 
The real scope of this military adventure was hinted at in an “after-action report” [PDF] prepared at West Point by Gen. Barry McCaffrey (ret.), who was invited to Afghanistan last month by General Petraeus to conduct a strategic assessment and spoke to scores of US military commanders and civilian officials.

 
McCaffrey—who supports the escalation—suggested that the US military faced a prolonged battle. “It may well cost us an additional $300 billion and we are likely to suffer thousands more US casualties,” he warned.

 
Next spring, when the US forces and the Taliban are both expected to launch military offensives, “We may well encounter ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] casualty rates of 300-500 a month,” McCaffrey predicted.

 
By next summer, he said, the Afghan operation will face “a burn rate in excess of $9 billion per month.”

 
McCaffrey gave no estimate on the number of Afghans who will be killed or wounded in the coming months, but clearly if this level of US casualties is anticipated, they will number many thousands.

 
The threat of increased death and destruction does not stop at the Afghan border. What has emerged clearly from the congressional hearings on the US escalation is that Washington is preparing to increase its military operations—through both drone missile attacks and cross-border raids by ground troops—against Pakistan.


Bipartisan support for such operations was in evidence at Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

 
The committee’s chairman, Senator John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, argued in his opening statement that “Pakistan is in many ways the core of our challenge.”

 
The ranking Republican on the committee, Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana, questioned whether the escalation was picking the right “battlefield where we will concentrate most of our available military resources.”

 
“The risk is that we will expend tens of billions of dollars fighting in a strategically less important Afghanistan, while Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders become increasingly secure in Pakistan,” said Lugar.

Bill Van Auken is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Bill Van Auken

[Harconen]

Al-Qaeda 'not behind Pakistan bloodshed': US militant

Agence France-Presse
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:32 EST
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gOWNt9h5JgndGfDUO_5e6SMnyOZA

Hong Kong - An American member of Al-Qaeda on Saturday issued a video denying the organisation was behind a recent deadly string of attacks in Pakistan that have killed hundreds of civilians.

Adam Gadahn said in a video entitled "The Mujahideen Don't Target Muslims" that the organisation was being framed by the United States and Pakistan and blamed the media for helping implicate Al-Qaeda in the attacks.

"The mujahideen have condemned, and continue to condemn, all attacks which indiscriminately kill and wound innocent Muslims," he said according to a transcript from US-based monitor IntelCenter.

Pakistan has been hit by a wave of deadly attacks blamed on Islamist extremists as the military presses a major offensive against Taliban fighters in their strongholds on the Afghan border.

October and early November saw a fierce surge in strikes, including a huge suicide car bombing on October 28 in a Peshawar market that killed 125 people in the worst attack in Pakistan in two years.

This week 49 people were killed when two bombs devastated a market in Lahore, engulfing shops in flames and burying people under the rubble.

In the video, Gadahn refers to "un-Islamic bombings which target Muslims in their markets, mosques, schools, shops and streets".

"The mujahideen declare themselves innocent of these attacks, and pronounce them part of a cynical, calculated and clandestine international campaign by the secular political forces," said Gadahn.

Born in 1978, Gadahn is a native of southern California and has appeared in several videotapes for Al-Qaeda since 2004.

A fierce Islamist insurgency has killed more than 2,670 people in attacks in Pakistan mostly blamed on the Taliban in the last two-and-a-half years.

[Harconen]

A Military Health Care System Over-stretched by Two Ongoing Wars
US: Soldiers Forced to Go AWOL for PTSD Care

by Dahr Jamail
Global Research, December 13, 2009
Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches - 2009-12-11
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16530

MARFA, Texas, Dec 11 (IPS) - With a military health care system over-stretched by two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more soldiers are deciding to go absent without leave (AWOL) in order to find treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Eric Jasinski enlisted in the military in 2005, and deployed to Iraq in October 2006 as an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army. He collected intelligence in order to put together strike packets - where air strikes would take place.

Upon his return to the U.S. after his tour, Jasinski was suffering from severe PTSD from what he did and saw in Iraq, remorse and guilt for the work he did that he knows contributed to the loss of life in Iraq.

"What I saw and what I did in Iraq caused my PTSD," Jasinski, 23-years-old, told IPS during a phone interview, "Also, I went through a divorce - she left right before I deployed - and my grandmother passed away when I was over there, so it was all super rough on me."

In addition, he lost a friend in Iraq, and another of his friends lost his leg due to a roadside bomb attack.

Upon returning home in December 2007, Jasinski tried to get treatment via the military. He was self-medicating by drinking heavily, and an over- burdened military mental health counsellor sent him to see a civilian doctor, who diagnosed him with severe PTSD.

"I went to get help, but I had an 8 hour wait to see one of five doctors. But after several attempts, finally I got a periodic check up and I told that counsellor what was happening, and he said they’d help me… but I ended up getting a letter that instructed me to go see a civilian doctor, and she diagnosed me with PTSD," Jasinski explained, "Then, I was taking the medications and they were helping, because I thought I was to get out of the Army in February 2009 when my contract expired."

As the date approached, a problem arose.

"In late 2008 they stop-lossed me, and that pushed me over the edge," Jasinski told IPS, "They were going to send me back to Iraq the next month."

During his pre-deployment processessing "they gave me a 90-day supply of meds to get me over to Iraq, and I saw a counsellor during that period, and I told him "I don’t know what I’m going to do if I go back to Iraq."

"He asked if I was suicidal," Jasinski explained, "and I said not right now, I’m not planning on going home and blowing my brains out. He said, ‘well, you’re good to go then.’ And he sent me on my way. I knew at that moment, when they finalised my paperwork for Iraq, that there was no way I could go back with my untreated PTSD. I needed more help."

When Jasinski went on his short pre-deployment leave break, he went AWOL, where he remained out of service until Dec. 11, when he returned to turn himself in to authorities at Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas.

"He has heavy duty PTSD and never would have gone AWOL if he’d gotten the help he needed from the military," James Branum, Jasinski’s civilian lawyer who accompanied him to Fort Hood told IPS. "This case highlights the need of the military to provide better mental health care for its soldiers."

Branum, who is also co-chair of the Military Law Task Force, added, "Our hope is that his unit won’t court-martial him, but puts him in a warrior transition unit where they will evaluate him to either treat him or give him a medical discharge. He’d be safe there, and eventually, they’d give him a medical discharge because his PTSD symptoms are so severe."

He’s turning himself in "because he is not a flight risk and wants to take responsibility for what he’s done," Branum stressed.

"It’s been a year, I want to get on with my life and go to college and become a social worker to help people," Jasinski said of why he is turning himself in to the military at this time. "I want to get on with life, and I don’t want to hide."

Kernan Manion is a board-certified psychiatrist, who treated Marines returning from war who suffer from PTSD and other acute mental problems born from their deployments, at Camp Lejeune - the largest Marine base on the East Coast.

While he was engaged in this work, Manion warned his superiors of the extent and complexity of the systemic problems, and he was deeply worried about the possibility of these leading to violence on the base and within surrounding communities.

"If not more Fort Hoods, Camp Liberties, soldier fratricide, spousal homicide, we’ll see it individually in suicides, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, family dysfunction, in formerly fine young men coming back and saying, as I’ve heard so many times, ‘I’m not cut out for society. I can’t stand people. I can’t tolerate commotion. I need to live in the woods,’" Manion explained to IPS. "That’s what we’re going to have. Broken, not contributing, not functional members of society. It infuriates me - what they are doing to these guys, because it’s so ineptly run by a system that values rank and power more than anything else - so we’re stuck throwing money into a fragmented system of inept clinics and the crisis goes on."

"It’s not just that we’re going to have an immensity of people coming back, but the system itself is thwarting their effective treatment," Manion explained.

According to the Army, every year from 2006 onwards there has been a record number of reported and confirmed suicides, including in 2009.

There has also been an escalation of soldier-on-soldier violence, as the Nov. 5 shooting spree at Fort Hood by Major Nidal Hassan indicates. In 2008 there was also a record number of suicides for the Marine Corps.

Jasinski’s case is representative of a growing number of soldiers returning from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan who are going AWOL when they are unable to get proper mental health care treatment from the military for their PTSD.

A 2008 Rand Corporation report revealed that at least 300,000 veterans returning from both wars had been diagnosed with severe depression or PTSD.

Jaskinski’s experience with the military has inspired him to offer advice for other soldiers who need PTSD treatment but are not receiving it.

"Do not, do not let a 5-10 minute review by a military doctor determine if you go to Iraq," he told IPS. "Even if you have to pay out of pocket, go civilian to a doctor… the military mental health sector is so overwhelmed, they won’t take care of you. Go see a civilian, and hopefully that therapist will help you… even then I’m not sure that will help… but you have to take that chance."

When asked what he feels the military needs to do in order to rectify this problem, he said: "A total overhaul of the mental health sector in the military is needed… we had nine psychiatrists at our centre, and that’s simply not enough staff, they are going to get burned out, after seeing 50 soldiers each in one day. We need an overhaul of the entire system, and more, good psychiatrists, not those just coming for a job, but good, experienced mental health professionals need to be involved."



Dahr Jamail's new book, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now available. Order the book here http://tinyurl.com/cnlgyu. Visit Dahr Jamail's website http://dahrjamailiraq.com **

As one of the first and few unembedded Western journalists to report the truth about how the United States has destroyed, not liberated, Iraqi society in his book Beyond the Green Zone, Jamail now investigates the under-reported but growing antiwar resistance of American GIs. Gathering the stories of these courageous men and women, Jamail shows us that far from "supporting our troops," politicians have betrayed them at every turn. Finally, Jamail shows us that the true heroes of the criminal tragedy of the Iraq War are those brave enough to say no.

Order Beyond the Green Zone: http://dahrjamailiraq.com/bookpage

 

Dahr Jamail is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Dahr Jamail

[Harconen]

Toxic munitions cause of baby deaths and deformities in Fallujah

by David Randall
Global Research, December 7, 2009
View Zone
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16442

In September this year, say campaigners, 170 children were born at Fallujah General Hospital, 24 per cent of whom died within seven days. Three-quarters of these exhibited deformities, including "children born with two heads, no heads, a single eye in their foreheads, or missing limbs". The comparable data for August 2002 -- before the invasion -- records 530 births, of whom six died and only one of whom was deformed.

 

The data -- contained in a letter sent by a group of British and Iraqi doctors and campaigners to the United Nations last month -- presaged claims made in a report in The Guardian yesterday that there has been a sharp rise in birth defects in the city. The paper quoted Fallujah General's director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais, as saying: "We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies... There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of brain tumours." Earlier this year Sky News reported a Fallujah grave-digger saying that, of the four or five new-born babies he buries every day, most have deformities. [right: Iraqi boys play with remains of US rocket.]

 

The campaigners' letter to the UN calls for an independent investigation to be set up, "the cleaning up of toxic materials used by the occupying forces, including depleted uranium and white phosphorus", and an inquiry launched to discover if any war crimes have been committed.

 

The campaigners believe that either white phosphorus or depleted uranium is a major, if not only, cause of the birth defects. White phosphorus, which US military has admitted firing on insurgents in heavily populated Fallujah, has a long history of military use, dating back to the First World War.

 

And although no scientific study has ever proved a causal link between depleted uranium and serious medical problems Ð and several studies seem to have proved the opposite -- it is by no means in the clear. Ever since the first Gulf War, its use has been linked to cancers among returning troops.

 

WHAT IS DEPLETED URANIUM?

 

Depleted Uranium, or DU, is a waste material left over from the nuclear industry. A vast amount of this waste DU is produced when natural uranium is enriched for use in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Only the uranium isotope U-235 can be used in nuclear processes, such as reactors and weapons. As most of this isotope is removed from naturally occurring uranium, the remaining uranium product comprises U-238 and smaller amounts of the more highly radioactive U-235 and U-234. DU is both chemically toxic and radioactive. It is this latter product, the left over uranium, comprising mainly U-238, which has been used to make 'depleted' uranium weapons. It is used for weapons because this heavy, dense metal is judged by the army to be an excellent penetrator of enemy armour, tanks, and even buildings.

 

A large amount of DU in the stockpiles held in the United States has been contaminated with recycled spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. For example trace amounts of U-236 and highly radioactive substances such as plutonium, neptunium and technetium were found in a DU anti-tank shell used in Kosovo. Hundreds of thousands of tons of this contaminated stock was exported to the UK, France and other countries in the 1990s. The extent to which this DU has been contaminated with recycled spent fuel is still unknown and undisclosed.

 

Governments have largely ignored the serious dangers this recycled fuel represents. A common defence used by the British and US governments and their militaries is to claim that depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium and therefore does not constitute a risk to human health. This statement is, however, misleading. In its natural form uranium is present in our environment in very small quantities as an ore, for example in rocks and soil. Conversely, the DU used by the military has been concentrated relative to background amounts, and is therefore many times more radioactive than uranium ore.

 

In May 2003 Scott Peterson, a writer with the US newspaper CSM, examined radioactivity levels next to DU bullets in Baghdad and found Geiger-counter readings were 1900 times greater than background radiation levels next to DU bullets. When natural uranium is concentrated in a similar form to 'depleted' uranium it emits about 40% more alpha radiation, 15% more gamma radiation and around the same level of beta radiation. The chemical toxicity of uranium does not depend on the isotope, therefore enriched, 'normal', and depleted uranium are equally toxic chemically.

 

It is extremely difficult and expensive for the nuclear industry to store DU. It is thought that the US currently has 1 billion tonnes of depleted uranium radioactive waste, while the UK has at least 50,000 tonnes. This waste is stored in cylinders at many sites across the US and UK and is vulnerable to corrosion and leaks owing to ageing cylinders and outside storage. It is stored mainly in the form of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) which can leak if the corroding cylinders are breached. At least 10 cylinders are known to have breached during the past 10 years.

 

Turning this DU waste into weapons solves some of the problem faced by the Government and nuclear industry, concerning what to do with these large stockpiles. Not only is DU practically free of charge for the arms manufacturers, but it no longer has to be stored and monitored indefinitely.

 

THE HEALTH EFFECTS OF DEPLETED URANIUM

 

Depleted uranium is a risk to health both as a toxic heavy metal and as a radioactive substance. The UK and US Governments have long sought to play down these risks. While, as late as 2003, the UK Government was claiming that DU presented no harm to soldiers or civilians, yet accumulating and alarming evidence from scientists, soldiers and activists has forced them to back down and recognise the risks posed.(1) However what is clear from reading all major studies is that more research urgently needs to be done. There exists very little research on the effects of uranium contamination in humans and accurate tests to understand exposure doses from military uses of DU have never been done.

 

There are three main routes through which DU exposure on the battlefield takes place: inhalation, ingestion and wounding.(2) As a DU penetrator hits its target some of the DU from the weapon reacts with the air in the ensuing fire and becomes a fine dust (often called an 'aerosol') that makes inhalation and ingestion a possibility for those in the area. Even after the dust has settled, the danger remains that it may be resuspended in the future by further activity or the wind, and again pose a threat to civilians and others for many years into the future. DU particles have been reported as travelling twenty-five miles on air currents.(3) Open wounds also allow a gateway for DU into the body and some veterans have also been left with DU fragments in their bodies, remaining after combat.

 

Inhaled DU dust will settle in the nose, mouth, lung, airways and guts. As a DU penetrator hits its target, the high temperatures caused by the impact ensure the DU dust particles become ceramic and therefore water insoluble. This means that, unlike other more soluble forms of uranium, DU will stay in the body for much longer periods of time. This aspect of uranium toxicology has often been ignored in studies of the health effects of DU, which base their excretion rates on soluble uranium. DU dust can remain in the sticky tissues of the lung and other organs such as the kidneys for many years. It is also deposited in the bones where it can remain for up to 25 years.(4) This helps explain why studies of Gulf War veterans have found that soldiers are still excreting DU in their urine over 12 years after the 1991 conflict (5) . Ingested DU can be incorporated into bone and from there will irradiate the bone marrow, increasing the risk of leukaemia and an impaired immune system. (6)

 

External exposure to DU entails exposure to alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Although the skin will block alpha particles, beta and gamma radiation can penetrate beyond the dead outer skin layers and damage living tissue. Beta particles can penetrate to a depth of 2 cm, while gamma radiation (through a process called 'the Compton effect') generates beta particle radiation along its trajectory through the body. Neither is all external exposure to alpha radiation harmless. Cataracts, for example, can be caused by exposure to alpha radiation.(7)

 

Inside the body, DU poses a health risk in a variety of ways to different organs. The kidneys are the first organ to be dfamaged by DU. At a high dose kidney uranium levels can lead to kidney failure within a few days of exposure.8 Lower doses lead to kidney dysfunction, and can lead to an increased risk of kidney disease later in life.

 

As a radioactive emitter, DU also presents a risk to the lungs. Traditionally, radiation dosimetry measures the extent of harm by calculating the external radiation absorbed by the tissues; the so-called 'absorbed' dose.(9)However because DU dust is inhaled or ingested, it can remain in the body tissues and emit intensive radiation over a longer period. This way it can cause a large amount of damage over a relatively small area, changing a person's genetic codes and causing cancers. For these reasons soldiers and civilians exposed to DU risk developing lung cancers, particularly if they are smokers because their lungs will already have been irritated.

 

There is much new evidence emerging about the risks from so-called 'low level' radiation and the damage it can do to DNA. Considerable evidence has been accumulated recently about the 'by-stander' effect, which shows that irradiated cells pass on damage to surrounding healthy cells. In this way it is thought low-level radiation can cause much greater damage than would otherwise be expected.(10) Studies have also shown that irradiated cells pass on chromosomal aberrations to their progeny so that non-irradiated cells several generations, or cell divisions later, will exhibit this radiation-induced genomic instability (RIGI).(11)

 

New evidence is also suggesting that the chemical toxicity of DU and its radioactivity reinforce each other in a so-called 'synergistic effect', which means it 'punches above its own weight' in terms of the damage it can do to cells. Alexandra Miller of the US Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in the USA found in a study in 2003 that when human bone cells are exposed to DU, fragments break away from the chromosomes and form tiny rings of genetic material. This damage was seen in new cells more than a month after removal of the DU, leading to an eight-fold increase in genetic damage relative to that expected.


It's not just in terms of increased risk of cancer that DU DNA damage can affect health. It is also implicated in causing a depressed immune system, reproductive problems, and birth defects. For example, a study of US Gulf War veterans has found that they are up to three times as likely to have children with birth deformities than fathers who had not served; and that pregnancies result in significantly higher rates of miscarriage.(12) A major 2004 Ministry of Defence-funded survey study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has found that babies whose fathers served in the first Gulf War are 50 per cent more likely to have physical abnormalities. They also found a 40 per cent increased risk of miscarriage among women whose partners served in the Gulf.

 

In Basra, in southern Iraq, there have been striking reports for a number of years about the rise in local childhood cancers and birth deformities seen there. The findings of a leading Iraqi epidemiologist, Dr Alim Yacoub,13 were presented in New York in June 2003 and suggest there has been a more than five fold increase in congenital malformations and a quadrupling of the incidence rates of malignant diseases in Basra.(14)

 

The Dutch Journal of Medical Science reported the findings of the Flemish eye doctor, Edward De Sutter. He found 20 cases out of 4000 births in Iraq of babies with the phenomenon anophthalmos: babies who have been born with only one eye or who are missing both eyes. The very rare condition usually only affects 1 out of 50 million births.

 

The damaging effects to health that DU weapons present are of particular concern because of the likelihood of civilians becoming exposed after conflicts have ended. Children especially are at risk because of playing in and ingesting contaminated soil and most of the health risks discussed are of particular danger to younger children.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINATION FROM DU

 

The release of DU into the environment can pollute land and water for decades to come. Its danger is not limited to battlefield releases but will expose present and future generations of civilians to contaminated food and water supplies. Environmental releases of this sort can also be expected to have negative effects on plant and animal life although little is known about this.

 

DU dust in the environment can become resuspended through weather conditions and human activity, such as farming. Of particular worry is that children are especially vulnerable to receiving significant exposures through playing on sites and ingestion of contaminated soil by way of typical hand-to-mouth activity.

 

DU can also contaminate soil through corrosion from the original penetrator. It is believed that 70-80% of all DU penetrators used in the Gulf and the Balkans remain buried in the soil. A United Nations Environment Programme study in Spring 2002 found that recovered penetrators had decreased in mass by 10-15%. Corrosion can feed uranium into groundwater, where it can travel into local water supplies. DU in soil can also enter the food chain since it is taken up by plants grown in it and by animals used for food. A UNEP post- conflict report on Bosnia and Herzegovina has indeed found that DU had also leached into local groundwater. The same study found that radioactive hotspots persisted at some of the sites studied. Klaus Toepfer, the Executive Director of UNEP, said at the time, "Seven years after the conflict, DU still remains an environmental concern and, therefore, it is vital that we have the scientific facts, based upon which we can give clear recommendations on how to minimise any risk".

 

The British and US militaries have demonstrated extreme irresponsibility in releasing DU into the environment, using it without proper monitoring or information about the risks it poses even in their own countries. In January 2003, the US Navy admitted routinely firing DU from its Phalanx guns in prime fishing waters off the coast of Washington state since 1977. At the Dundrennan testsite in Scotland around 30 tonnes of DU rounds have been fired into the Solway Firth. Only one has ever been retrieved, when it was found in a fisherman's net.

 

Both governments have been equally callous in their disregard concerning the long term risk to civilians in countries where they have used DU.

 

DU AND THE MILITARY

 

DU is used in a variety of military applications. It is attractive to the military, governments and the nuclear industry for three main reasons. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, it is in cheap and plentiful supply and solves the problem of storage and monitoring. Secondly, it is a very effective battlefield weapon because its high density and self-sharpening qualities enable it to penetrate hard targets with ease. Thirdly, DU is pyrophoric, which means it burns on impact, enhancing its ability to destroy enemy targets. The UK test firing of DU began at the Eskmeals range in Cumbria in the early 1960s. Testing continues today at Dundrennan, in Southern Scotland, most recently before the 2003 attack on Iraq. DU is now used in two types of ammunition in the British armed forces: the 120 mm anti-tank rounds (CHARM 3), which is fired by the Army's Challenger tanks and 20mm rounds used by the Royal Navy's Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (a missile defence system). The Phalanx system was developed by the US Navy and is used by both the Australian and British Navies. In 1993, a leaked Pentagon report revealed how the use of DU could lead to increased cancer risks: this leak caused the US manufacturers to switch to tungsten alternatives. Because of this the Royal Navy has been forced to convert its replacement ammunition to tungsten too, although it still has stockpiles of DU.

 

The US military uses DU mainly for its Abrahams tanks and A10 warplanes, although it is also used in its Bradley fighting vehicles, AV-8B Harrier aircraft, Super Cobra helicopter and its Navy Phalanx system. It is also used by the US military for a variety of other applications including bombshells, tank armour plating, aircraft ballast and anti-personnel mines. Although the US and UK militaries are the only countries who have been properly documented as using DU weapons, they are known to be held by at least seventeen other countries including: Australia, Bahrain, France, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

 

The testing of DU weapons has caused considerable contamination at test sites across the world. At Dundrennan, in Scotland, for example, a 2004 Ministry of Defence report revealed how, since 1982 over 90 shells had either been misfired or had malfunctioned and scattered fragments of DU across the ground. Despite searches, some of these fragments have never been recovered. Contamination levels were high in these areas, which have had to be fenced off. At Okinawa in Japan, and Vieques, an island of Puerto Rico, the US military used DU weapons without the appropriate licences and without informing their respective governments or local populations. In the US, the Army is attempting to walk away from its responsibilities to decontaminate former test sites, such as Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey and Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana.

 

It is now clear that the military have known the risks of depleted uranium but failed to provide safety instructions to soldiers in both the 1991 Gulf Wars and the Balkan conflicts. A study prepared for the US Army in July 1990, a month before Iraq invaded Kuwait, says: "The health risks associated with internal & external DU exposure during combat conditions are certainly far less than other combat-related risks. Following combat, however, the condition of the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives & combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU."

 

Furthermore, a leaked 1993 document from the US Army Surgeon General's office said, "When soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust they incur a potential increase in cancer risk ... that increase can be quantified in terms of projected days of life loss."

 

DU IN IRAQ

 

The 1991 Gulf War saw the first verified use of DU weapons. Around 320 tonnes of DU in weapons were used in the war, of which about 1 tonne was used by the UK military. According to data from the US Department of Defense, tens or hundreds of thousands of US military personnel could have been exposed to DU. Both the US and UK Governments refused any responsibility for decontamination and both refused to study the exposure rates or after-effects of this DU use. After a few years, evidence began to emerge from Iraq about the increasing incidence of cancer and birth deformities in the south of the country. After heavy US lobbying in November 2001 the UN General Assembly voted down an Iraqi proposal that the UN study the effects of the DU used there.

 

In the 2003 attack on Iraq, the US and UK militaries used DU again despite the lack of reliable data on the effects of using it in Iraq 12 years previously. The British Government has admitted using 1.9 tonnes of DU. Even though this is only a tiny proportion of all DU used in Iraq, it is double the amount used in 1991. The US authorities have still not said how much has been used, although an initial Pentagon source revealed 75 tons of DU may remain in Iraq from A-10 planes alone.

 

The implications for Iraqi civilians are very alarming. Unlike the first Gulf War, which was largely confined to desert areas, much of the DU use has been in built-up, heavily populated areas. The US Government has refused any cleanup of DU in Iraq, clinging to the statement that it has no link with ill health, while the British Government has for the first time admitted it does have a responsibility but says it is low on their list of priorities.

 

OTHER COUNTRIES CONTAMINATED BY DU

 

BOSNIA 1994-1995
 

DU rounds were used in Bosnia by US A-20 warplanes under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Around 10,800 DU rounds, or 3 tonnes, were used in Bosnia. However NATO always denied DU had been used until 2000, 6 years after the attacks, when media reports began to emerge. For all this time no cleanups or public awareness campaigns could be run, leading to unnecessary civilian exposures. The UNEP report,1 mentioned earlier, and released in March 2003, found DU contamination of drinking water and radioactive 'hotspots'. UNEP recommended ongoing monitoring of drinking water, cleanup of DU sites, cleaning of contaminated buildings and the release by NATO of all DU-attack coordinates.

 

KOSOVO, YUGOSLAVIA - 1999

 

US A-10 aircraft fired around 31,300 rounds of DU, or 9 tons of DU in areas of Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro during NATO action there in 1999. Partial information about the use of DU was released a year after the war when UN Secretary General KofiAnnan sent a letter requesting the information to NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson. An analysis in a UNEP Post-Conflict field study of recovered DU shells, published in March 2001, found that some of the shells were made with recycled uranium (that is, with uranium that had been through a nuclear reactor) and were contaminated with plutonium. The study did not find widespread contamination but did find evidence of airborne movement of DU dust. It also found localised points of concentrated contamination showing U-238 at 10,000 times normal background levels. The study recommended decontamination, removal of penetrators and drinking water monitoring. A separate report published by UNEP on DU contamination in Serbia and Montenegro found "widespread, but low-level DU contamination, airborne DU particles" and that "DU dust was widely dispersed into the environment."

 

As well as official reports there has been widespread anecdotal evidence of so-called 'Balkans syndrome' among both soldiers deployed in the region and civilian populations. Symptoms are similar sounding to "Gulf War Syndrome" with heightened levels of leukaemia, respiratory and immune system illnesses. By mid-2004 twenty-seven Italian soldiers have died of symptoms thought to be linked to DU exposure. A court in Rome ordered the Italian Ministry of Defence to compensate the family of Stefano Melone, a soldier who died of a malignant vascular tumour. According to the court, Mr Melone's death was "due to exposure to radioactive and carcinogen substances" on missions in the Balkans.

 

Tension was caused within NATO as member countries were not warned that their soldiers would be entering DU contaminated zones.

 

AFGHANISTAN 2001- 2004

 

There is some evidence that DU has been used in Afghanistan, although this has never been confirmed officially. For example, US A-10s and Harrier aircraft, which both use DU ammunition, are known to have been active in the region. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that the US has found radioactivity indicating DU use by the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.


Geneva Convention Rules (to which US and UK are signees)

 

- The limitation of unnecessary human suffering [Art.35.2]
- The limitation of damage to the environment [Art. 35.3 and 55.1]
- It is prohibited to employ weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering [Art. 35.3]
- It is prohibited to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment. [Art. 35.2]
- In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives. [Art. 48]
- Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. [Art.51.4]
- Care shall be taken in warfare to protect the natural environment against widespread, long-term and severe damage. This protection includes a prohibition of the use of methods or means of warfare which are intended or may be expected to cause such damage to the natural environment and thereby to prejudice the health or survival of the population. [Art. 55.1]

 Global Research Articles by David Randall

[Harconen]

Uranium in Iraq: the Poisonous Legacy of the Iraq Wars
Review of Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Joanne Baker's book

by David MacGregor
Global Research, November 15, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16098

Hegel remarks upon the appearance of “concrete evil” in history, the intermittent eruption of human malevolence on a colossal scale capable of destroying entire societies. Perpetrators of world-historical crimes are propelled solely by passion—by self-regard, greed and hatred—and pay no heed, Hegel noted, to “order and moderation, justice and morality.” [1] The imperialist assault on Iraq—which began with the First Gulf War, reached a peak with “shock and awe” attacks launched by U.S./U.K military forces in 2003, and continues today, nearly twenty years later—offers a horrendous example of unrestrained evil spread across a titanic canvas.

Abdul-Haq Al-Ani’s and Joanne Baker’s indispensable book spotlights the appalling criminal enterprise now working itself out in Iraq: Deliberate contamination of the Iraqi nation, its peoples, and natural environment with radiation from previously unheard of weapons of mass destruction—deadly implements of war fashioned from a practically inexhaustible global garbage dump of depleted uranium (DU).

Grisly newspaper photographs and televised images of the “Highway of Death” revealed in late February 1991 desert vistas of burnt-out, twisted Iraqi civilian and military vehicles destroyed in cold blood by US air strikes during Saddam Hussein’s hasty exit from Kuwait. Surely the world will be repelled by such savagery, many thought at the time. Surely these pictures alone will push popular sentiment against war, and propel combatants toward peace? But the cavalcade of cruelty on the road from Kuwait to Basra signaled just the beginning of a crusade that would unfold for most of the next two decades. And no photograph, no television video, nor even the senses of sight, taste, feeling and smell of witnesses on the ground could have revealed the secret corruption of those searing images, the deadly radioactive and toxic refuse emitted in clouds of invisible vapour from fired US missiles, shells and other armaments composed of DU that will contaminate the Gulf area for a millennium.

George H.W. Bush’s 1988 declaration that Saddam Hussein was “worse than Hitler” inaugurated a successful propaganda offensive vilifying the Iraqi people. The culumny against Iraq now extends to its inability to seek protection from radioactive and chemical poisoning by DU, or indeed to carry out and publicize scientific research on dangers presented to humans and animals by DU contamination. As documented in this book, US/UK governments treat DU deposits with serious concern, but only as regards their own territory and citizens. The people of Iraq have become a giant experimental colony for measuring the hazards of ionized radiation and toxicity associated with reckless deployment of DU.

From a purely military point of view, DU is highly cost-effective. [2] DU is a radioactive waste product generated by nuclear reactors and the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Suppliers are anxious to get it off their hands since gratis procurement by the military is a desirable alternative to prohibitively expensive, safe disposal of “nuclear tailings”. Just as chemically toxic as lead, DU is almost twice as heavy and much harder. DU is self-sharpening: DU bores through very tough materials while gaining ability to penetrate. DU at high velocity sears through hard targets such as tank armor and emerges on the other side with intense fire and deathly gases. As this book documents, over 2000 tons of burnt, pulverized and exploded DU have been scattered over Iraq by US/UK armed forces since 1991.

Beginning in 1991 the world stood by while western imperialism enforced a total blockade on Iraq: the first time in modern history that a nation has been entirely cut off from external trade and communications. Only barbaric sieges dating from the Middle Ages offer anything like the spectacle of suffering in Iraq. Even scholarly and scientific discourse fell victim. Without a murmur of dissent from the global community, imperialism barred Iraqi researchers and writers not only from vital materials required for research but also from international sources of scientific discovery and dissemination.

Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Joanne Baker offer in this book an initial scientific reckoning of DU despoliation from behind the uranium curtain. [3] The authors do not suggest that the poor state of health of the Iraqi people arises entirely from DU contamination. There are plenty of reasons for the massive increase in disease, including cancer and birth deformities, among Iraqis. US/UK imperialism destroyed the social infrastructure of the country, including water treatment plants, electric power installations, food markets, hospitals and schools. Uncontrolled oil fires polluted the air. Assaulted by malnutrition and infected water sources, the immunological systems of many Iraqi children have collapsed. Even the farcical trial and diabolical murder of Saddam Hussein did not satisfy western invaders. After the Iraqi leader’s removal, the embargo remained and infrastructure deteriorated even furtherPre-war Iraq enjoyed the professional services of 34,000 registered doctors. By 2006, 20,000 physicians had fled; 2000 of the remainder had been killed, and 250 kidnapped. By 2007, 8 million Iraqis required emergency aid and over half the population of 22 million suffered absolute poverty. The Red Cross reported last year that the humanitarian situation in Iraq was among the most critical on the globe.

Apologists talk about a “failure” of American and British policy in Iraq, the occupiers’ inability to construct a stable democratic system to replace the Ba’athist order under Hussein. [4] But peace and security were never on the order paper for US/UK militarism. Its job was to loot, divide, desecrate and cripple Iraq to ensure the country would never again thumb its nose at the western imperium.

According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, the crime of genocide involves acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. These acts include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group in whole or part. The authors present compelling evidence that the occupying powers’ indiscriminate use of DU in Iraq, along with the affects of blockade and invasion, conform to these elements of the definition of genocide.

This book includes the results of controlled studies by Iraqi scientists of the relation between the presence of DU, ionizing radiation, and malignant disease rates carried out under extremely adverse conditions 7-10 years after the 1991 assault. These epidemiological studies and measures of high radiation are necessarily rudimentary and incomplete. Yet combined with documented reports of birth defects and cancer related to radiation exposure since the 2003 invasion (including a marked increase in breast cancer among Iraqi women), these pioneering investigations present an extremely disturbing picture. Alarming evidence revealed by the authors of this book constitutes a strong case that US/UK invaders committed genocide in Iraq through indiscriminate employment of DU-armed weaponry.

Notes

1. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 21.

2. For a useful summary of the issues surrounding DU see Rob White, “Depleted Uranium, state crime and the politics of knowing.” Theoretical Criminology. Vol. 12(1):31-54, 2008.

3. The US Atomic Energy Commission detonated the first deliverable hydrogen bomb in 1954 in the Marshall Islands, code-named “Bravo”. Deadly radiation from the gargantuan nuclear fireball fell upon island residents, US scientists and armed forces personnel. The Eisenhower administration tried unsuccessfully to block news of the disaster. Critics dubbed the US cover up, “the uranium curtain.” Shane Maddock, “The Fourth Country Problem: Eisenhower's Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly; Summer 1998; 28, 3, p. 555.

4. E.g., Daniel Byman, “An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?” Security Studies, 17: 599–643, 2008.


 Global Research Articles by David MacGregor

[Harconen]

Rising military suicides
The pace is faster than combat deaths in Iraq or Afghanistan

By John Donnelly
http://www.congress.org/news/2009/11/25/rising_military_suicides

More U.S. military personnel have taken their own lives so far in 2009 than have been killed in either the Afghanistan or Iraq wars this year, according to a Congressional Quarterly compilation of the latest statistics from the armed services.

As of Tuesday, at least 334 members of the military services have committed suicide in 2009, compared with 297 killed in Afghanistan and 144 who died in Iraq, the figures show.

Lawmakers in recent years have been increasingly concerned about the growing problem of military suicides, especially in the Army. They have been holding hearings, passing bills and approving billions of dollars more than requested to improve mental health care for military personnel and veterans.

But even those who have been most intensely focused on the issue said they found the new numbers alarming. So far in 2009, the Army has had 211 of the 334 suicides, while the Navy had 47, the Air Force had 34 and the Marine Corps (active duty only) had 42.

“These numbers are just staggering and, tragically, are an indication that we are simply not doing the job of providing adequate mental health care for both our active-duty service people and our veterans, said Bob Filner, D-Calif., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

Armed forces personnel traditionally have had a much lower suicide rate than the population at large. Because the most recently available national suicide statistics from the Centers for Disease Control are from 2006, it is impossible to know whether the current military rate is higher than the current civilian rate. However, the civilian suicide rate for males ages 20-29 hovered around 20 per 100,000 during the first half of this decade. The Army said its suicide rate is now a bit higher than that for the first time.

Moreover, the total number who have killed themselves in 2009 is probably higher than 334, because the figure does not include unavailable suicide statistics for 2009 for Marine Corps reservists or veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have left the service.

The veterans’ numbers, in particular, could yet swell the totals considerably. The Department of Veterans Affairs said an average of 53 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans committed suicide each year between 2002 and 2006. And that number only includes suicides among the quarter of all veterans who use the VA's health system.

The rising number of suicides has coincided with U.S. military forces redeploying frequently to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Army leaders say they are unable to conclude that the deployments are the main cause of the suicide increase — one-third of the active-duty soldiers who killed themselves in 2009 have no deployment history, according to Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli.

But many senior members of Congress say they believe there is a connection.

Filner wants to hold hearings soon, saying they would show that the number of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is much higher than officially acknowledged once psychological wounds are accounted for.

Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, attributes the rising mental health problems to a lack of time at home between deployments.

"I was shocked to hear there's more suicides than people lost in Afghanistan" he said, attributing the upward trend to the "stress of a long war where people just don't have the opportunity to come home to get healed."

The Army, which accounts for the bulk of the suicides, is taking an aggressive approach to preventing them, through periodic screening and education to get help to those who need it, Chiarelli said at a Nov. 17 press briefing.

“Everyone is distressed at this extremely high rate,” said Gene Taylor, D-Miss., a senior member of House Armed Services. "About the only good thing is that Gen. Chiarelli has focused his efforts on it."

Congress is aware of the problem and has taken steps to address it, noted Daniel K. Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"In the past two years, Congress passed sweeping legislation to address veterans' mental health issues -- from a far reaching omnibus bill to raise VA mental health standards to a suicide prevention hotline," he said.

The newly enacted fiscal 2010 defense authorization law, for example, requires significant increases in mental-health providers in all the military services. Chiarelli said the Army needs hundreds more mental-health and substance-abuse counselors than it has.

Filner, meanwhile, has drafted legislation that would require the secretaries of Defense and Veterans Affairs to set up a pilot program to help servicemembers reintegrate in society after they return home from deployments. The program would mandate psychological evaluations and screenings for brain trauma and provide for follow-up care.

Filner is convinced the process of questioning military personnel is not thorough enough and that too much of a stigma is still attached to honestly speaking about emotional problems.

While the gross numbers are of concern, they do not tell the story so much as the rate of increase when compared with suicide rates in the overall population.

The Army and Marine Corps rates used to be lower than the comparable civilian rate. For example, it was 9 per 100,000 among those who had served on active duty in the Army in 2001. But in 2008, by comparison, the Army suicide rate among those who had served on active duty was 20.2 per 100,000 people.

Similarly, the active-duty Marine Corps rate in 2008 was 19.5 per 100,000 or just shy of the most recent civilian rate statistics available. It had been much less of a problem just a few years ago, going as low as 12.5 per 100,000 in 2002, Marine Corps figures show.

The suicide problem is expected to become more prominent as the debate continues over deployments in Afghanistan. As the public grows more restive about continued warfare on two fronts, lawmakers will be under pressure to address those concerns, and the political pressure will grow as next year’s midterm elections get closer.

The deployments to Afghanistan will probably only grow in the months ahead. President Obama is expected to announce next week that the U.S. force of about 68,000 in Afghanistan will swell next year, perhaps by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the approximately 115,000 U.S. forces in Iraq will go down to 50,000, but not until August 2010.

[Harconen]

Wars or Jobs: Decide Now

by David Swanson
Global Research, December 13, 2009
After Downing Street - 2009-12-12
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16527

Speech at White House, December 12, 2009


Can you imagine the outcries of national shame from liberal commentators if George W. Bush had accepted a peace prize by advocating for war and announcing his right to launch wars of aggression?  What an embarrassment that would have been! 

But Bush would have made such a speech with fewer troops in the field, fewer mercenaries in the field, a smaller war budget, a smaller military budget, bases in fewer nations, the imperial powers of the presidency less firmly established, and -- of course -- worse pronunciation.

And isn't that what matters?  The current president is smart and belongs to a different party, so when he continues and escalates wars we despised, wars we made great sacrifices to try to end, well either the wars must be better than we thought, or escalating them must be the really super smart way of ending them.  After all, the other war mongering party calls the president a foreign-born socialist traitor.  Except that they loved his speech in Oslo.

One reason Obama believes he can claim the power to launch wars is that Bush's lawyers produced on October 23, 2002, a memo proclaiming that presidents have that power.  And do you know what their central argument was?  Bill Clinton did it.  Bill Clinton launched minor attacks on Iraq and other parts of the world, not to mention the former Yugoslavia, and so therefore Bush had the right to do the same sort of things on a larger scale.

In right-wing rhetoric, Clinton was another socialistic traitor.  In legalistic arguments, he was the justification for Bush's crimes.  It's the same deal with Obama.  In the surface-level charade of partisan bickering, he's a socialist - a term applied without any particular meaning.  But underneath, his efforts to protect the criminals who preceded him and to continue their crimes are honored and appreciated.

Is Obama a war president?  Is the pope Catholic?  Because we have allowed presidents the power of war, the term "war president" will be redundant from here on out.  Presidents gain power through wars.  Presidents love wars.  I don't mean that President Obama has no choice.  He could defy expectations, refuse to be corrupted, and do what he is legally and morally required to do.  If you imagine such things are not possible, I would ask you to look at the career and comportment of Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

But we have gone two and a quarter centuries without presidents readily answering the demands of the public.  And this republic has lasted that long in large part because the public has compelled the Congress to restrain presidents.  I hate to say this, but I'm not against escalating a war.  I'm against continuing these wars at all.  And I don't want a president to end an escalation or a war.  I want the House of Representatives to deny this president the money!

But our representatives are largely bought and paid for, they're terrified of the corporate media, they're servants of party bosses.  Their corruption is the primary reason millions of people fantasize about lobbying the president.  Sometimes we like to think as well that pressuring Congress to do its job, even through the most aggressive nonviolent resistance, somehow constitutes a naïve faith in the system, whereas pleading with the emperor amounts to true populism. 

The people who wrote the U.S. Constitution got a lot of things wrong, but they were ahead of us on this one.  They knew that we could not have peace if a single individual had the power of war.  We must put the power of peace back in the Congress and force the House to use it.  They have a final vote next week on a war funding bill, and do you know how they intend to pass it?

They're going to include unemployment insurance in the same bill.  When it's not relief for hurricane victims it's education for veterans.  Now it's unemployment insurance as the lipstick on this pig of a bill, a bill that creates unemployment in the first place.  Investing money in wars creates fewer jobs than cutting taxes, and cutting taxes creates fewer jobs than investing in education, mass transit, infrastructure, construction, and other nonviolent industries.  Every dollar for war is a dollar less for jobs.

Congress members are perfectly aware they can vote No on the whole package until the war money is taken out and the unemployment insurance is left in.  And you know that you can force them to do it, now or in the coming weeks and months.  You know that much more difficult things have been done.  You know that it is far more enjoyable to engage in this struggle -- even in the cold -- than to sit home and complain.  You know that the time is rapidly approaching when we must do what any civilized nation would have long since done and nonviolently shut down this town.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book. 

David Swanson is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by David Swanson

[Harconen]

U.S. Marine Suicide Rates '01-'09

added December 11, 2009
http://current.com/items/91663788_u-s-marine-suicide-rates-01-09.htm

"Nothing to see here! Just keep moving along folks! Nothing to see here!"

[Harconen]

US Wants to Expand Drone Strikes Into Major Pakistani City
Officials: 'Real Discussion' of Attacking Quetta

by Jason Ditz
December 14, 2009
http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m61058&hd=&size=1&l=e

Top US officials say there is a "real discussion" going on right now about launching drone attacks against the Balochistan capital city of Quetta. The comments are the latest in a series of threats against the city, one of Pakistan’s largest.

Though the Pakistani government has looked the other way and even provided behind the scenes support for the various US drone attacks against Pakistan’s tribal areas, officials say a strike on Quetta would be a deal-breaker.

"We are not a banana republic," one official declared, adding that a US attack on Quetta "might be the end of the road." Pakistan’s military has likewise repeatedly warned against attacks on the city.

The US threats are ostensibly designed to counter the Quetta Shura, a group of Afghan exiles supposedly running much of the insurgency from the city. Pakistan has repeatedly denied that the Shura even exists, though on Friday Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar insisted that security forces had degraded them to the point they no longer pose a real threat.

[Harconen]

War crime case against Tony Blair now rock-solid

Neil Clark
First Post
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:13 EST
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/57361,news-comment,news-politics,war-crime-case-against-tony-blair-is-now-rock-solid

Neil Clark: A trial would be warmly welcomed by millions - so what happens next?

Tony Blair's extraordinary admission on Sunday to the BBC's Fern Britton - that he would have gone to war to topple Saddam Hussein regardless of the issue of Iraq's alleged WMDs - is sure to give fresh impetus to moves to prosecute our former prime minister for war crimes.

The case against Blair, strong enough before this latest comment, now appears rock solid. Going to war to change another country's regime is prohibited by international law, while the Nuremburg judgment of 1946 laid down that "to initiate a war of aggression", as Blair and Bush clearly did against Iraq, "is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole".

Blair's admission, that he "would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam]" regardless of the WMD issue, is also an acknowledgement that he lied to the House of Commons on February 25, 2003, when he told MPs: "I detest his [Saddam's] regime. But even now he [Saddam] can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. I do not want war... But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation."

The view that Blair is a war criminal is now mainstream: when comedian Sandi Toksvig, host of Radio Four's News Quiz, called him one on air, the BBC, according to the Mail on Sunday, did not receive a single complaint.

But while it is easy to label Blair a war criminal, what are the chances of him actually standing trial - and how could it be achieved? Various initiatives have already been launched.

The Blair War Crimes Foundation, set up by retired orthopaedic surgeon David Halpin, has organised an online petition, addressed to the President of the UN General Assembly and the UK Attorney General, which lists 14 specific complaints relating to the Iraq war, including "deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war" and violations of the Geneva Conventions by the occupying powers.

The campaigning journalist George Monbiot, who attempted a citizen's arrest of the former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, for his role in the Iraq war, said at the Hay Literary festival in 2008 that he would put up the first £100 of a bounty payable to the first person to attempt a non-violent citizen's arrest of Blair.

Monbiot has also called for the setting up of national arrest committees in countries which, unlike Britain, have incorporated the 'Crime of Aggression' into their domestic law. These committees would exchange information with one another and make sure that Blair "would have no hiding place".

If Blair is to face an international trial, then the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague - to which Britain is a signatory - would be the likeliest forum. While the ICC has said that it will not conduct prosecutions for the Crime of Aggression until it has been defined by its own working group, the court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the Sunday Telegraph in 2007 that he would be willing to launch an inquiry into US/UK war crimes in Iraq. Charges could also be brought against Blair at the ICC for failing to prosecute the war in a "proportionate manner".

From Iraq itself, there are also moves to bring Blair to book. It has been reported that lawyers acting for Tariq Aziz, the former deputy leader of the country, now held in captivity, have written to Britain's top legal adviser asking permission to prosecute Blair for war-crimeswar-crimes, in the light of his latest comments.

Whichever way it comes about, if Blair is forced to stand trial, there can be no underestimating the event's significance. Up to now, the only political leaders who have faced war crimes trials since World War Two are those who fell foul of the west - and in particular the United States of America. But the notion of international justice will never be taken seriously if western politicians are deemed to be exempt from the same rules that leaders in Africa and elsewhere are supposed to adhere to.

The prospect of Teflon Tony finally having to answer for his crimes in a court of law, would be warmly welcomed by millions of people throughout the world, not least all those who marched for peace through central London in February 2003, one month before the Iraq invasion.

There is widespread contempt for a man who has made millions while Iraqis die in their hundreds of thousands due to the havoc unleashed by the illegal invasion, and who, with breathtaking arrogance, seems to regard himself as above the rules of international law.

The next decade will tell us whether that is indeed the case.

[Harconen]

Blair And Bush - Narcissists or Psychopaths?

BBC News
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:03 EST
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8411326.stm

Thick as thieves - Bush and Blair lied - millions died

The ex-director of public prosecutions has accused Tony Blair of "sycophancy" towards President Bush.

"It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bushand went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn't want, and on a basis that it's increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible."

Sir Ken, who works at the same barristers' chambers as Mr Blair's wife Cherie, said: "Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that 'hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right'.

"But this is a narcissist's defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgement: it is certainly no answer to death."

Sir Ken MacDonald called the 2003 Iraq war a "foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions".

He said the former prime minister had used "alarming subterfuge" to mislead the British people into the conflict.

Mr Blair told the BBC at the weekend that it would have been right to invade even if it had not been thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Referring to Mr Blair's interview with Fern Britton, Sir Ken wrote in The Times: "This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage."

He said Washington had "turned his head and he couldn't resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him".

The belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was the key justification for the UK joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

No such weapons were found after the invasion and key bits of intelligence put forward by then Joint Intelligence Committee head Sir John Scarlett in the infamous 2002 weapons dossier later discredited.

'Different arguments'

Speaking on Fern Meets... on BBC One on Sunday, Mr Blair was asked whether the idea of Saddam having WMDs had "tilted" him in favour of war.

He replied that it was "the notion of him as a threat to the region of which the development of WMDs was obviously one" aspect.

Asked whether he would have invaded Iraq without the WMDs dossier, he said: "I would still have thought it right to remove him.

"I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat."

Mr Blair is due to give evidence in the New Year to the Chilcot inquiry into the war.

Sir Ken said the questioning so far by the panel had been "unchallenging", adding: "If Chilcot fails to reveal the truth without fear in this Middle Eastern story of violence and destruction, the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt."

[Harconen]

Financial, Economic and Climate Crisis Ushering In Brave New World 2009

James Quinn
The Market Oracle
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 04:52 EST
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article15762.html

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't! - William Shakespeare - The Tempest

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." - Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley wrote the dystopian novel Brave New World in 1931 at the inauguration of the last Crisis period in America. Dystopia is the often futuristic vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain. The novel was his response to the writings of H.G. Wells (Men Like Gods) and George Bernard Shaw which glorified socialism and a one World State. Orwell's 1984, written in 1948, is the other famous dystopian novel of the era. Huxley had visited America during the Roaring 20's and his experience provided the character for the novel. He was outraged by America's out of control materialistic egocentric society. He witnessed youthful superficiality, commercialization, sexual promiscuity, and a self centered culture. Fellow writer G.K. Chesterton explained his view of Huxley's novel:

"After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that optimism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolt against Utopia than against Victoria."


Using Technology to Control Society


Science and technology are not inherently good or bad. They can be used or misused. They offer promise or peril. Ultimately, humanity can benefit from science and technology or it can be detrimental to our planet. Huxley envisioned a horrifying future where mankind used science and technology in a self destructive manner. He was disillusioned with the decadence of society and disgusted by the behavior of his class. Huxley's outlook is a world where the vast majority of the populace is united under one World State. The world is restricted to two billion inhabitants. The inhabitants are strictly divided into five castes. The world is controlled by Alphas and their subordinates, Betas. Below them, in descending order of brainpower and physique, are Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Each caste is further subdivided into Plus and Minus (save for Epsilons, which are regular or semi-moron). Reproductive technology, referred to as the Bokanovsky Process, is used by the government (Alphas & Betas) to manage the number of human beings and their functions. The process is applied to fertilized human eggs in-vitro, causing them to split into identical genetic copies of the original. The State has eliminated procreation by loving couples. Ovaries are surgically removed from women. The lower caste children are created in hatcheries.

At the very pinnacle of society sit Alpha Double-Pluses, who serve as the future scientists and top administrators of the world. People in different castes are conditioned to be happy in their own way - they do not feel resentment towards other castes, but rather feel a slight contempt for people not members of their own caste. The upper castes are intelligent, and have managerial jobs, where as the lower castes do the manual labor. The Alpha's have what we would consider the best jobs, and it continues down until the Epsilons, who have the least skilled jobs. The Alphas are tall and fair, while the Epsilons are dark skinned.

The novel takes place in the year 2540 in London. The disturbing aspect is that we are now in the year 2009 and much of Huxley's vision has come to fruition. At the heart of the World State's control of its population is its rigid control over sexual mores and reproductive rights. Reproductive rights are controlled through an authoritarian system that sterilizes about two-thirds of women, requires the rest to use contraceptives, and surgically removes ovaries when it needs to produce new humans. The act of sex is controlled by a system of social rewards for promiscuity and lack of commitment. The United States has restricted population growth through a number of methods. Abortion on demand was made the law of the land in 1973. Since that date 50 million abortions have been performed in the U.S. I ask myself how many Martin Luther Kings, Stephen Hawkings, and Ernest Hemingways have been among those aborted before having the chance to positively impact our world.


Over 12 million women in the U.S. use the pill (available since 1960) on a daily basis in order to avoid pregnancy. The morning after pill was introduced in 1999. Planned Parenthood, created in 1916, has 850 locations in the United States offering easy access to abortions and other forms of contraception. The net result of these government supported efforts has been to cut the birth rate in half in the last century.

    "We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early success of science, but in a rather grisly morning after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimportant or actually deteriorated ends." - Aldous Huxley

The upper classes in the U.S. have persuaded the lower classes to restrict their reproduction. They promote non-consequential promiscuity among the other classes while reproducing and raising the new ruling class. American society is also segmented into castes as portrayed by Huxley. The Alpha Double-Pluses are the Harvard MBAs running Goldman Sachs and the other mega-banks. Others in the Alpha caste are the Bushes, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Clintons, Gores, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Paul Krugman. The Betas include Congressmen, bank executives, government bureaucrats, military leaders, and corporate executives. The Gammas and Deltas are the working classes that do the hard work without ever advancing. The Epsilons are the morons produced by the inner city public school system. They fill the non-thinking manual labor jobs of society.

The Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are brought up in conditioning centers. The Alphas and the Betas use technology to mould them into their predetermined roles in society. They use operant conditioning and sleep teaching to modify the behavior of the lower castes. Hatcheries rely on machines to condition bottled embryos to heat, sudden motion, and disease, allowing the embryos to fulfill their predestined jobs in specific climates. The science exists today to produce whatever traits are desired in our children. The procedure is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and is being practiced in fertility clinics in the U.S.

Those in control of America also use conditioning and teaching to keep the lower classes in their place. The ruling elite send their children to exclusive private schools, grooming them for Harvard, Yale and Stanford. This guarantees they will be given the high level positions in business and government. After decades of pumping billions of tax dollars into public schools while instituting politically correct diversity programs to dumb down the curriculum, the ruling elite have conditioned a vast swath of Americans to care more about Tiger Woods' driving and night putting skills than about the National Debt or the insidiousness of Federal Reserve induced inflation.

Just as in Brave New World, the ruling Alphas are White and the lowest class Epsilons are dark skinned. Blacks and Hispanics represent 50% of all the high school dropouts even though they only make up 25% of the population. This guarantees a life of blue-collar low paying jobs for these people. Whites obtain 78% of the advanced degrees, guaranteeing them the positions of leadership in society. The social welfare state implemented by the ruling elite provides enough sustenance to the lower classes to keep them anesthetized, ignorant and easily manipulated. Whites also obtain 77% of the bachelor's degrees, assuring that they will fill the Beta administrator positions in society.

Another technological method of keeping the masses tranquilized and distracted in the Brave New World is through high tech sports and entertainment. Sport is a pillar of the World State consisting of various games and activities which use high-tech equipment. Another key aspect of entertainment is the "feelies". Users rest their hands on metal knobs protruding from the arms of their chair, allowing them to feel the physical sensations of the actors on-screen (usually in sexually-themed films). The mass production of HDTVs, CD players, Laptop computers, Blackberries, iPhones, iPods, luxury automobiles and other electronic toys distributed to the masses through easy credit policies has successfully distracted the populace from the pillaging of the country by the Alphas at Goldman Sachs. The feelies of today are 24 hour cable TV with 600 stations, downloadable movies, an unlimited amount of free porn on the internet, strip joints, and prostitution. Sports addicts can attend baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, wrestling, boxing, auto racing, and Michael Vick sponsored dog fighting events year round, or watch it on TV 24 hours per day. With mindless jobs and unlimited distractions, the preponderance of citizens are as docile as sheep.

Soma is a biological method used by the Alphas to keep the lower castes sedated. It is a drug that provides an easy escape from the hassles of daily life and is employed by the government as a method of control through pleasure. It is ubiquitous and ordinary among the culture of the novel and everyone is shown to use it at some point, in various situations: sex, relaxation, concentration, confidence. It is seemingly a single-chemical combination of many of today's drugs' effects, giving its users the full hedonistic spectrum depending on dosage. As a kind of "sacrament," it also represents the use of religion to control society. Huxley's description of soma reveals its power:

"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is."

American leaders bluster about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, but their actions speak otherwise. Americans can sedate themselves legally with alcohol, over the counter prescriptions, and tobacco. Almost 10% of the entire U.S. population, or 27 million people, are taking anti-depressant pills. Over 4 million children are being drugged with Ritalin every day to make them malleable. The government looks the other way as the middle class uses marijuana, heroine, and cocaine. The Epsilons (Blacks & Hispanics) on the other hand are prosecuted, with 2.3 million of them occupying cells in the thousands of prisons in the U.S. There are thousands of churches in the U.S. preaching the good word and sedating the masses. As they preach morality and sacrifice, there have been recurring instances of sexual deviation covered up church hierarchy and the bilking of congregations out of millions in contributions for the enrichment of the church leaders.

Consumer Society


    "Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself from thinking. People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are." - Aldous Huxley

Huxley formulated his dystopian world after observing the excessiveness of Americans during the Roaring 20's. If he thought things were decadent and Americans were self consumed in the 1920's, Huxley's head would explode at the debauchery, ignorance materialism, and shallowness of Americans today. Our landfills contain more wealth than entire Third World countries. We throw away over 100 billion pounds of edible food per year. In his Brave New World Revisited, written in 1958, Huxley clearly laid out the dangers of consumerism:

"Consumerism re­quires the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts (including the more insidious arts) of persuasion. Under a free enterprise system commercial propa­ganda by any and every means is absolutely indis­pensable. But the indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings."

"Consider a simple example. Most cos­metics are made of lanolin, which is a mixture of purified wool fat and water beaten up into an emulsion. This emulsion has many valuable properties: it penetrates the skin, it does not become rancid, it is mildly antiseptic and so forth. But the commercial prop­agandists do not speak about the genuine virtues of the emulsion. They give it some picturesquely volup­tuous name, talk ecstatically and misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food. "The cosmetic manufacturers," one of their number has written, "are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope." For this hope, this fraudulent implication of a promise that they will be transfigured, women will pay ten or twenty times the value of the emulsion which the propagandists have so skilfully related, by means of misleading symbols, to a deep-seated and almost universal feminine wish -- the wish to be more attrac­tive to members of the opposite sex. The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely sim­ple. Find some common desire, some widespread uncon­scious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensa­tory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true."

Our economic advancement has been marketed to Americans as "true happiness from consumption". Every need can be realized through material gain. Success as a society is measured by GDP growth and the facade of prosperity. In Brave New World children are conditioned from birth to value consumption with such platitudes as "ending is better than mending," which means buy a new one instead of fixing the old one. America has become the definitive throwaway society. Product waste has grown from 92 pounds per person per year in 1905 to 1,242 pounds per person per year in 2005. American human beings are lumped into the category of consumers by the mainstream media. Consumerism and consumer debt have been the contaminated lifeblood of the United States for the last three decades. Government actively promotes gambling by the poor, offering them false hope for riches. Americans squander $160 billion per year on lotteries and in casinos. Our society has become even more extreme than the Brave New World as we have outsourced our production to foreign countries, thereby gutting our economy. Even at the dawn of television Huxley realized the immense power for propagandists:

"Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country. Today, thanks to radio and television, he is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children."

The mass media is owned and controlled by mega-corporations run by the Alphas of our society. Colleges graduate thousands of people with the skills to manipulate the uninformed masses through advertising and propaganda. What passes for news organizations are just propaganda machines for a particular point of view. The public is distracted by the seemingly major differences between the two main political parties. The reality is that both parties are controlled by banking and corporate interests who pay for the laws that benefit their interests. Huxley's description of political candidates in 1958 is even truer today:

"The methods now being used to merchan­dise the political candidate as though he were a deo­dorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything."

News people must be beautiful and entertainment is indispensable. They provide the people what they want - 24 hour coverage of Tiger Woods' sex life, weeks of reporting about Michael Jackson's death, and 10 seconds about the $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities we are leaving future generations. Truth is an inconvenience in the consumer society.


Incompatibility of Happiness & Truth


"Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations." -Aldous Huxley

Mustapha Mond, World State Controller, believes that the population is better off with happiness than truth. In the Brave New World happiness is represented by immediate gratification of every citizen's desire for food, sex, drugs, nice clothes, and other consumer trinkets. If the proletariats think they are happy, they won't need to think or question reality. The World State cannot allow individuality to blossom. Free thinking individuals seek the truth. Spending time alone is considered an outrageous waste of time and money. Confession to a craving for individuality is shocking, horrifying, and embarrassing. John, the savage, grew up outside the World State and has studied Shakespeare. Everything that Shakespeare stood for: passion, love, intensity, seeking truth, relationships, and tragic endings, are at odds with the World State foundation. They cannot allow truth and true human happiness to exist in society or the Alphas will lose control.

The United States is the richest most powerful country in the history of the world. Our poorest live better than the aristocracy lived 100 years ago. We have indoor plumbing, air conditioning, heaters, clean water, automobiles, trains, jet airplanes, televisions, CD players, portable gadgets galore, free public education, fast food, gyms to work off the fast food, movies, the internet, restaurants, bars, concerts, sporting events, casinos, home improvement stores, grocery stores, discount stores, Wal-Mart, clothes stores, jewelry stores, dollar stores, churches, Disney World, Las Vegas, and Graceland. These are the "things" that are supposed to make Americans happy. Going into the woods alone, like Thoreau, to think is frowned upon. The propagandists sell the American public happiness in the form of material goods and services. If you don't feel happy, take a pill. If you aren't happy with your appearance have plastic surgery. If your spouse isn't making you happy, cheat or get a divorce and try again. If your neighbor outdoes you by getting a $20,000 kitchen remodel, get yourself a $40,000 kitchen remodel. Happiness is a 6,000 sq ft McMansion with 5 bathrooms, a pool, game room, and Jacuzzi for your family of three. Having your neighbors see you driving a BMW 750Li will surely make you happy. Wearing a Rolex will definitely make you happy. If you die with the most toys, you're still dead. Until reading a book to your three year old at bedtime is valued more than staying at the office until 10:00 pm to complete an investment offering, our society is destined for decline. Ours is not to reason why, but simply to do and die with a bare minimum of fuss.

In the Brave New World the policies of the State dehumanize the population. Stability and artificially induced happiness are more imperative than humanity and truth. Mustapha Mond explains to John that social stability has required the sacrifice of art, science, and religion. John protests that, without these things, human life is not worth living. After John eventually succumbs to the lure of the World State version of happiness, he hangs himself. An ending truly worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. The pillars of our society are based upon the acquisition of material possessions using debt. Our society glorifies steroid taking athletes, sex crazed sports icons, drugged out entertainment personalities, vacuous TV housewives, and moronic cosmetically enhanced movie stars. Those who seek truth through questioning the status quo or digging for answers to questions the State doesn't want asked, risk alienation and scorn. The Alphas (bankers) of our society issue the debt and convince the masses that accumulating more stuff will make them happy. The Alphas (media titans) use their mass media to persuade, manipulate, and sell their message of material happiness to the masses. The Alphas (politicians) use the taxes collected from the masses and the dollars printed by the bankers to distribute social welfare benefits to the lower classes, keeping them sedated and under control. Seeking the truth through the study of literature, the questioning of authority, and pondering of our existence on this earth are rare. Those who question and doubt the propaganda put out by those in authority are shunned and denigrated as being unpatriotic.

    "Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know."- Aldous Huxley


Dangers of an All-Powerful State


"Freedom is therefore a great good, tolerance a great virtue and regimentation a great misfortune. Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, with­out freedom, human beings cannot become fully hu­man and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them." - Aldous Huxley

The all powerful State in Brave New World uses technology and mind control starting before birth until death to instruct people what they want. Power over the citizens is maintained by lulling them into a false sense of happiness and contentment to the point where personal freedom and thinking are unnecessary. Superficiality is encouraged by the World Controllers. The consequences of citizens rolling over to the rulers are a loss of dignity, morals, values, and emotions - in short, a loss of humanity. Amazingly, this book was written in 1931. Huxley's vision, which seemed so outrageous in 1931, has come to fruition in less than 70 years, versus the 600 years in the novel. Huxley realized that technological advances which are almost universally hailed as progress are fraught with danger. Man has built higher than he can climb; man has unleashed power he is unable to control. Brave New World is Huxley's warning to make man realize that since knowledge is power, he who manages and exploits knowledge exerts the authority. Science and technology should be the servants of man - man should not be adapted and enslaved to them.

In the novel the "Nine Years' War" broke out in 2049 AD. It can be deduced that the conflict broke out in Europe, affected most of the planet, and caused enormous physical damage. It is repeatedly stated that chemical and biological weapons were broadly used during the war, particularly in mass air-raids against cities. Following the war the global economy collapsed and created an unprecedented worldwide economic crisis. Realizing that they could not force people to adopt the new lifestyle, the World Controllers instead united the planet into the One World State and began a nonviolent movement of change. This campaign included the closing of museums, the suppression of almost all literature published before 2059 AD, and the destruction of the few historical world monuments that had survived the Nine Years' War. The type of war described in the novel is a very feasible scenario in our current environment. It is interesting that a worldwide economic crisis was the trigger for a One World Government. Our current worldwide economic crisis has resulted in our Federal Reserve propping up European banks with U.S. taxpayer funds and unprecedented coordination between worldwide fiscal policies.

Huxley wrote his novel in 1931 at the outset of the Great Depression. His vision did not take long to crystallize. FDR initiated social programs on a vast scale to satiate the masses with manual labor government created jobs and social services that encouraged reliance upon the state at the expense of freedom and liberty. His nightmare world became more of a reality after World War II as progressives were successful in creating the United Nations, NATO, World Bank, IMF, Bretton Woods system, and GATT. These organizations reduced the freedom of individual countries to the benefit of worldwide bureaucracies. These organizations have gained power over time, but their total incompetence and ineffectiveness has kept them from gaining total control over world populations.

We are now at a crucial juncture as the worldwide financial crisis and the sham global warming crisis are being used by the New World Order crowd to confiscate more of our freedoms and liberties. Socialist minded world leaders Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, along with the revered Henry Kissinger have referenced a New World Order while offering their Keynesian spending solutions to the worldwide financial crisis. A number of Obama advisors have written they support a one world government. The Copenhagen Conference on Global Warming has drawn thousands of one world government apostles. They want to use the scientifically unproven environmental crisis as a way to impose worldwide taxes on sovereign nations and to compel the citizens of the world to honor their green agenda. The use of propaganda in our school systems to scare children by telling them that polar bears are all dying, is part of their plan. Again, the subtle use of media and propaganda to influence the thinking of the willfully ignorant public has worked.


Dystopian Nation


When I started this article I was unsure whether Huxley's nightmare would resonate in our current reality. Sadly, much of his novel applies to our society. Even sadder, our society now resembles an amalgamation of the two most famous dystopian novels in history: 1984 and Brave New World. Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the two views of the future:

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no-one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."

Our civilization has fused the worst of both novels. Many people in our country aren't capable of reading a book. Supposedly educated people have no interest in reading a book. The government withholds or manipulates information that is spoon fed to the public. Trivial meaningless information floods the airwaves, keeping the public continuously diverted from seeking truth. The truth is lost in shades of grey and purposeful misinformation. Supposed differences between the ruling parties distract the public from realizing they are being fleeced by those in power. Government has used fear to create agencies and departments that have taken away our liberties and freedoms through Orwellian surveillance techniques. Our dumbed down culture of hero worship, material pleasures, and ego enhancement is the representation of triviality. The Alphas have used our fears and desires to distract us from their plans to dominate and control every aspect of our lives. Their success is all but assured at this point.

I'm not optimistic that there are enough Americans who value freedom over presumed safety, security, and social welfare benefits. The public has been duped into believing thrilling falsehoods rather than unexciting truths. Huxley explains how the propagandists have stolen our freedom:

"In their anti-rational propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically pervert the resources of lang­uage in order to wheedle or stampede their victims into thinking, feeling and acting as they, the mind-manipulators, want them to think, feel and act. An education for freedom (and for the love and intelli­gence which are at once the conditions and the results of freedom) must be, among other things, an educa­tion in the proper uses of language."

I do not pretend to have the answers. Intellectual curiosity, a skeptical nature, and not buying into our shallow culture are the best chance for change. Reading or re-reading Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited will open your eyes to our plight. The current Fourth Turning will end in glory or tragedy. The choices we make as a society in the next 10 to 15 years will ultimately decide our fate. Huxley's advice in Brave New World Revisited is wise, pertinent, and implementable today:

    * As recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely func­tional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily cooperating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Govern­ment.

    * If you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternately humanize the me­tropolis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and co­operate as complete persons, not as the mere embodi­ments of specialized functions.

As citizens of the American Republic we must answer the question posed by Huxley:

"Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worthwhile to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything?"

    "There is no darkness but ignorance. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." - William Shakespeare

[Harconen]

US Iraq jail an 'al-Qaeda school'

Al Jazeera
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 11:50 EST
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/2009121274712823455.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBWlcnkZk9A&feature=player_embedded

Extremists held in a US-run detention centre in Iraq were allowed to teach fellow detainees how to use explosives and become suicide bombers, a former inmate has told Al Jazeera.

Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee of Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, said that US officials did nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating young detainees at the camp.

"Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers," Mohammed said.

"For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals]."

Adel, who was held for four years without charge at Camp Bucca, said that extremists were allowed to speak freely to fellow inmates.

"In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority," he said.

"He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees - they became extremists like him."


Bomb suspects


A senior Iraqi interior ministry official said in November that former inmates of Camp Bucca were suspected of involvement in two recent deadly bomb attacks in Baghdad.

"The two suicide bombers and the majority of suspects detained after the twin bombings of August 19 against the foreign affairs and finance departments ... were released shortly before from Camp Bucca," the official told AFP news agency.

"We reached the same conclusion for the double attack of October 25, which left 153 dead," the official said of the bombings of the justice and public works ministries, after which 73 people were arrested.

Imad Manhal Sultan, a man held by US troops for three months in 2007, told Al Jazeera that he was brutally attacked by inmates of Camp Bucca during a 24-hour stay at the facility.

He lost his eyes and part of his tongue after a four-minute long assault that he says only occurred because of the US military's failure to monitor the camp's detainees.

"The Americans send those they want dead to extremist camps," he said.

"They passed information that I was a lawyer working for the court in Baghdad. That would make me their enemy since the court issues unjust verdicts against detainees."

The US military denies that moderates were radicalised in the camp, which has held thousands of Iraqis since it was opened in 2003 and shut down in September.

"When we came up with a model of detainee housing in which we separated individuals by tens - and they had no other access to anybody else - they became tremendously frustrated," said General David Quantock, the deputy commanding general of detainee operations for the Multi-National Force in Iraq.

US military statistics say that four percent of the 100,000 people held in different prisons over the years returned to violence.

While the percentage is relatively low, it is unclear how many of those held at the camp were involved in violence to begin with.

[Harconen]

Obama's Dirty War

by Douglas Valentine
Global Research, December 14, 2009
Consortium News - 2009-12-13
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16541

In his Nobel Peace Prize speech, President Barack Obama declared “we’re in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from spreading throughout that country.” The phrasing signals that his war escalation will follow the dictates of what the CIA calls political and psychological warfare, the cornerstones of counterinsurgency.

By viewing this “cancer” as a political and ideological threat – as much as a military one – the U.S. counterinsurgency strategies will merge violence against armed enemies with attacks on their unarmed supporters, as has happened in such conflicts around the world, from Indochina to Latin America to Africa.

In Algeria, the French dubbed their counterinsurgency “la sale guerre,” the dirty war, due to its reliance on terror to coerce the civilian population into submission. The elements of dirty war traditionally include murder, kidnapping, torture, disappearances and the total disruption of the nation’s political, cultural, and economic infrastructure.

Obama’s Dec. 10 speech in Oslo also marked an important juncture for him as he took on the job of selling a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, which has already been stained by the blood of thousands of innocents killed in bombing raids that targeted militants mixed with non-combatants.

Obama’s speech is being hailed by prominent U.S. neoconservatives who believe they have surprisingly found in the young President a far more effective spokesman for their interventionist cause than the inarticulate George W. Bush.

“The shift in rhetoric at Oslo was striking,” observed neocon theorist Robert Kagan in a Washington Post op-ed. “Gone was the vaguely left-revisionist language that flavored earlier speeches, highlighting the low points of American global leadership -- the coups and ill-considered wars -- and low-balling the highlights, such as the Cold War triumph.”

Indeed, in his speech, Obama shoved six decades of those bloody low points behind one five-word clause, “whatever mistakes we have made.”

Obama seems to have shouldered the job of salesman for the war in Afghanistan. But it is not necessary for Obama to win the support of the majority of the American people for the war since many Americans simply will rally around the flag and support the troops.

Obama and his national security team are also aware that public opinion can change if the war is not won quickly enough. Thus the public must be made to feel there is an on-going, urgent need for the war.

So, Obama packages the war as a cure for cancer. He makes it a matter of personal survival, like chemotherapy and radiation that take a terrible toll on the patient’s body, but are necessary for the patient’s survival.

The public will suffer what it is told is the cure for what ails Afghanistan, if it believes the cure will dispel fear and insecurity in America.

Beyond relying on fear and patriotism, Obama’s war council knows that public confusion is helpful. Most Americans don’t have the time to learn the truth – in this case, that there is no “insurgency” or “counterinsurgency,” but rather a resistance movement by Afghan nationalists – especially among the Pashtun tribe – to American military occupation.

What Is Counterinsurgency?

In his recent speeches, President Obama defines America’s objectives in Afghanistan as: 1) suppressing the Taliban and national resistance forces to American occupation and the Karzai regime; 2) eliminating several score members of Al Qaeda; and 3) creating a stable pro-American government and economic infrastructure.

David Galula, author of Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (RAND Corporation, 1964) and a recognized authority on the matter, stresses that counterinsurgency includes “building or rebuilding a political apparatus within the population.”

In this sense any counterinsurgency is, in reality, an insurgency. In Afghanistan, the Taliban ruled for several years until the U.S. and the CIA-backed Northern Alliance drove them out.

Obama may define the Taliban as the insurgents, but the Taliban, who control many parts of Afghanistan, view the Americans as backing an insurgency against Taliban rule.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s military strategy for defeating the Taliban is to “protect the people from terror” through the tactic of “clear and hold.”

To “clear and hold” means to drive the Taliban out of their secure areas in the countryside, which Obama proposes to do through his “surge” of 30,000 troops, and then occupy those areas while systematically killing enough Taliban and nationalist forces (in urban areas as well), so that they no longer resist the occupation.

The model for this “clear and hold/surge” strategy is Iraq. According to the conventional wisdom that dominates Official Washington, President George W. Bush’s 2007 “surge” and the “clear and hold” strategy “won” the war in Iraq.

The reality may have been much different – with a variety of factors including paying off Sunni tribes in 2006 and the grudging U.S. agreement in 2008 to withdraw from Iraq playing bigger roles in the drop in violence – but that is not what Washington’s influential neoconservatives and their allies want people to believe.

For instance, Establishment journalists Evan Thomas and John Barry at Newsweek explain that “clear and hold” works because it protects the “friendly civilians” who provide the intelligence that enables CIA and U.S. Special Forces to precisely find and kill members of the resistance and Al Qaeda.

    “By ratcheting back the heavy use (and overuse) of firepower,” they claim, “McChrystal has reduced civilian casualties, which alienate the locals and breed more jihadists.”

However, the reality is far less humane and clinical.

First, the assertion that a counterinsurgency war is gentler than the shock and awe of, say, the Iraq invasion is false. It is more a psy-war argument intended to deceive a target population in, say, the United States into thinking that innocents are not being killed.

Second, the assertion that only “jihadists” are targeted for assassination is another deception. In fact, thousands of people are fighting not for religious reasons, but for nationalist reasons – Afghans opposed to American invaders and their collaborators.

Third, the notion that civilians provide information because they are “friendly” to the Americans is misleading, since most intelligence is coerced or simply bought.

The Newsweek correspondents, however, are correct when they say that Obama’s war is modeled on the CIA’s Vietnam-era Phoenix Program, whose goal was to “target and assassinate Viet Cong leaders.”

Waging a successful dirty war depends on identifying and killing enemy leaders – both combatants and non-combatants – as well as spreading disinformation as to who is the enemy and why they are being killed.

As is well known, the CIA developed the Phoenix Program in Vietnam as the ultimate, systematic means for fighting a dirty war, encompassing both counterinsurgency and counter-terror.

The CIA and U.S. Special Forces have further refined the Phoenix Program over the past 40 years. Phoenix-style operations have become the weapon of choice in the “global war on terror.”

Intelligence

Intelligence is gained primarily through 1) informants, 2) detainees, 3) interrogations, 4) defectors, 5) electronic intercepts, 6) agents involved in surveillance and theft of documents (etc), and 7) the insertion of penetration agents inside the enemy infrastructure.

1) Voluntary civilian informants typically work for money, ideology or personal reasons like vengeance; more often civilian informants are coerced – they have debts, secrets or are simply framed and given no choice. Coercing informants is the CIA’s strong suit.

2) Detainees only provide coerced information – in an effort to escape a jerry-rigged legal system in which Americans deny them due process. Producing informants and detainees is one of the major means that occupiers employ to rip apart – through suspicion, fear, confusion and divided loyalties – a nation they wish to control.

3) In the Afghan conflict, interrogations are conducted largely by members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) or the Afghan secret police (KHAD) under the supervision of their counterpart CIA and U.S. military officers in jointly managed facilities. “High Value” targets captured in unilateral U.S.-directed Phoenix operations are interrogated by CIA and U.S. military intelligence personnel in secure (off-limits to Afghans) facilities.

The CIA and U.S. military purchase from individuals members of the corrupt the Karzai government the right to operate secret unilateral interrogation and detention centers, as well as the right to use unilateral CIA and U.S. Special Forces paramilitary teams to target, capture and kill resistance members.

After eight years, America’s secret detention and torture centers are due to be handed over to the Afghan secret police. Suspects will hereafter appear before “review boards” which will afford them a slim chance to challenge their internment and present evidence of their innocence. Reporters and international human rights officials may soon be granted access too.

Interrogation often is a word for torture. As reported in the Nov. 28 Washington Post: "Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban."

4) After interrogation, defectors are indoctrinated by former defectors who have repented. Defectors are made to prove their loyalty by serving as translators or interrogators, or by joining CIA-funded militias and paramilitary teams, and then sent back into enemy territory to contact Taliban and other resistance members and recruit more defectors.

5) Electronic intercepts are almost entirely unilateral, and are directed largely against the ANA, KHAD and Karzai government to detect double agents. Unilateral intercepts are also the method which U.S. security forces use to monitor the activities of corrupt and drug-dealing officials in the Karzai government. The CIA uses evidence of corruption to control these individuals.

6) The CIA and U.S. military run agents in liaison with the ANA and KHAD, as well as unilaterally, against the resistance and against the ANA, KHAD and Karzai government.

Recruiting agents is especially difficult in Afghanistan because the Taliban do not have politics, per se. They also are not capitalists and have not succumbed to the cash nexus. They do not have bookkeepers nor do they organize in Western-style hierarchies. They do not issue press releases, broadcast their plans and strategies, or allow photography (which can confound CIA assassins).

These ideological precepts make them nearly impervious to blackmail, extortion and corruption – the CIA’s standard means of penetrating the enemy infrastructure, and the means by which it controls top-ranking officials in the Karzai government.

The Taliban will meet with foreigners to negotiate land and mineral rights, as well as form alliances - but they are loath to deal with Americans, which further hampers the CIA’s ability to insert agents in its ranks.

In addition, the CIA and U.S. military gain intelligence about the Taliban, other resistance groups and Al Qaeda through translated documents, interrogations conducted through interpreters, and Afghan agents and informants. There is no way of knowing if this intelligence is reliable, but that does not much matter.

The main function of intelligence in a dirty war is to support U.S. policies, both stated and unstated. Intelligence managers skew intelligence to this political purpose, as happened with the bogus reports of WMD in Iraq.

Any policy can find sup¬porting intelligence, especially when the meaning of words is garbled by collaborators and indoctrinated employees who are required to report positively from the field, for their own survival and/or profit.

As one Phoenix Program veteran explained to me: "The Vietnamese lied to us; we lied to the Phoenix Directorate; and the Directorate made it into documented fact. It was a war that became distorted through our ability to create fiction.”

Intelligence programs have two other major functions in a dirty war. One is to map out the clandestine organizations that drive the resistance, so they can be destroyed.

At the secret detention centers it operates in Afghanistan, the CIA draws up blacklists of Taliban and other members of the resistance based on their social and family ties, position within the infrastructure, age, sex and profession.

The idea is to send paramilitary teams out to capture them, make them inform on their comrades, turn them into double agents, or kill them and their families and friends. None have any right to due process.

Some instances of these death squad operations have surfaced during U.S. military disciplinary proceedings. For instance, in one case, an Afghani, identified as suspected insurgent leader Nawab Buntangyar was encountered on Oct. 13, 2006, by an Afghan army patrol led by U.S. Special Forces Capt. Dave Staffel.

While the Americans kept their distance out of fear the suspect might be wearing a suicide vest, the man was questioned about his name and the Americans checked his description against a list from the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan, known as “the kill-or-capture list.”

Concluding that the man was Buntangyar, Staffel ordered Master Sgt. Troy Anderson to fire from a distance of about 100 yards away, putting a bullet through the man’s head and killing him instantly.

The soldiers viewed the killing as “a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement,” the International Herald Tribune reported. “The men said such rules allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified him.”

Staffel’s civilian lawyer Mark Waple said the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded that the shooting was “justifiable homicide,” but a two-star general in Afghanistan then instigated a murder charge against the two men. But that case foundered over accusations that the charge was improperly filed. [IHT, Sept. 17, 2007]

In Afghanistan, the CIA also focuses Phoenix-style teams on Taliban judicial officials operating religious law courts and assessing and collecting taxes; resistance members operating business fronts for purchasing, storing or distributing food and supplies, including farm products; public health officials who distribute medicine; security officials who target American collaborators and agents; officials in transportation, communication and postal services; military recruiters; and military leaders and forces.

The other major purpose of the intelligence programs is to understand how resistance leaders organize Afghans to cope with the violence the CIA and U.S. military are visiting upon them. Through opinion poll and surveys, the CIA tries to understand what drives people into the resistance or, conversely, into the arms of the corrupt Karzai regime.

Based on this attitudinal or socio-psycho-anthropological intelligence, the CIA seeks to establish its own parallel government, free of corruption, but modeled on Afghan sensibilities.

How to Disguise a Dirty War

The CIA forms its parallel government under cover of the U.S. State Department and its AID missions, in conjunction with the military. Again, psywar is the main ingredient.

Traditionally, Christian "missions" brought medicine and literacy to uncivilized native populations in Africa, North and South America, and Asia. In the process, the benighted natives were softened up for conquest, colonization and exploitation, no matter how well-intentioned the missionary.
Indeed, the more effective the missionary’s message, the softer the natives became.

The CIA through AID missions serves the same softening-up function today, though its Gospel is materialistic “economic development,” not the spiritual Word of God.

In either case – by accepting the outsider’s medicines, material goods and message – the natives tacitly accept the outsider’s authority. They are converted into a compliant workforce; recruited into the occupation army; become petty bureaucrats in the puppet government; and, most importantly, assist the internal security apparatus.

As with the Christian missionaries of old, the modern AID worker may be well-intentioned. But he or she is no less and agent of conquest.

As one U.S. aid worker in Afghanistan recently said to me: “The ANA [the Afghan National Army] is really good: people trust them and share intelligence with them, something they are not willing to do with internationals.”

Obviously, this AID worker does not acknowledge the Taliban as being Afghans.

Though I do not have enough information to cite a specific example about AID organizations in Afghanistan serving as CIA fronts, I’ll describe one that existed in Thailand during the Vietnam War.

In 1967 the CIA formed DEVCON, a component of Taylor Associates, a CIA proprietary company that marketed itself as a community development counseling service. DEVCON in turn sponsored the Hilltribe Research Center in Chiang Mai.

The CIA used the Hilltribe Research Center as a way of maintaining contact with agents and recruiting informants. As a cover for its espionage activities (and to baptize the natives in the cash nexus), the Center bought and marketed the handicrafts of native people in the area.

As part of the CIA’s parallel government in Thailand, the Center also employed teachers, agronomists, animal husbandry-men and engineers. These Thai nationals doubled as intelligence agents and served as cut-outs to debrief the tribal people on insurgents and drug traffickers.

(The Hilltribe Research Center also famously employed Puttaporn Khramkhruan, a CIA agent who was arrested for smuggling opium to the United States. CIA agents in the Karzai government are most certainly following in Puttaporn’s footsteps.)

As with the Thai employees of DEVCON, Afghans who collaborate with the CIA must inform on their countrymen, often directly to CIA officers who may be posing as AID workers. All AID workers and their Afghan counterparts are affiliated with the parallel government and are obligated to preach the party line: they refer to the resistance as “insurgents” in exchange for their prosperity and for their survival.

As the U.S. AID worker in Afghanistan told me: “Security comes before development. The wrath on informants [should the resistance prevail] will make the rape camps of Serbia look like picnics in the park.”

The terror that accompanies collaboration enables U.S. Army “civic action” and “psywar” teams (often under CIA direction) to train Afghan converts how to build perimeter defenses around their villages.

When not administering medicine and forming militias, U.S. Special Forces units, having learned how to dress and act like natives, slip into the countryside at night and, using intelligence from their assets, "snatch and snuff" the local Taliban and resistance cadre. Urban units do likewise in cities.

Sometimes they also may engage in “black propaganda” activities, inflicting some outrage on the population that can be blamed on the enemy.

Instilling terror in the converted, as well as the resistance, is the main job of the counterinsurgent, his allies (and useful idiots) in the media, and aid workers: people whom author Graham Greene would describe as acting “like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

The critical importance of terror is well understood by the gurus at CIA headquarters. As former CIA Director William Colby said, "The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply."

As the prime apologist of the CIA's Phoenix Program, Colby knew the importance of wrapping American terror in humanitarian and educational packages and selling it to the public as “protecting the people from terrorism.” That is exactly how he described Phoenix to Congress: as protecting people from terrorism.

It doesn’t matter that many Taliban men, women and children may be pure in thought and deed, or that their motivations may be honorable, simply seeking to defend their homes from foreign occupiers.

Most do not participate in terrorism or even guerrilla action, and yet they and their sympathizers are dehumanized – a necessary step for those included in the computerized Phoenix blacklists in Langley and Kabul, and targeted for destruction.

Meanwhile, at least in the mainstream American news media, the U.S. government’s intentions are always characterized as heroic, generous, even therapeutic. Which is how good can be made to equal bad.

Protecting the People

Dependent on official government sources, the U.S. news media often helps justify the killing of the enemy’s civilian supporters by blurring distinctions between combatants and non-combatants.

In Afghanistan – as in Vietnam – special programs offer bounties to help target the enemy’s political leaders, like a Taliban “shadow” or “second” governor in a province where Karzai’s official or “first” governor is likely despised by the indigenous population because of his corruption.

As Griff Witte wrote in the Washington Post on Dec. 8, 2009, the Taliban has “an elaborate shadow government of governors, police chiefs, district administrators and judges that in many cases already has more bearing on the lives of Afghans than the real government.”

Witte quoted Khalid Pashtoon, “a legislator from the southern province of Kandahar who has close ties to Karzai,” as saying: “These people in the shadow government are running the country now."

Witte cites the case of “the shadow governor, Maulvi Shaheed Khail,” who “is regarded as fearsome but clean. A former minister in the Taliban government, he became the shadow governor here last year after being released from government custody. Residents said he spends most of his time in exile in Pakistan but occasionally crosses the border to discuss strategy with his lieutenants.”

In many parts of Afghanistan, Witte continues, “Afghans have decided they prefer the severe but decisive authority of the Taliban to the corruption and inefficiency of Karzai's appointees. From Kunduz province in the north to Kandahar in the south, even government officials concede that their allies have lost the people's confidence and that, increasingly, residents are turning to shadow Taliban officials to solve their problems.”

All of these statements are confirmed by my independent source in Afghanistan.

And yet, while Witte reflects the facts of the matter when interviewing an Afghan, he veers into propaganda when quoting official U.S. sources.
Specifically, he claims that all Taliban officials are combatants: “There are no clear lines between the Taliban's fighting force and its shadow administration. Insurgents double as police chiefs; judges may spend an afternoon hearing cases, then take up arms at dusk.”

For instance, regarding the role of a province’s “second governor,” Witte writes that this political leader “sneaks in only at night. He issues edicts on ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ stationery, plots attacks against government forces and fires any lower-ranking Taliban official tainted by even the whiff of corruption.”

Through the phrase “plots attacks against government forces,” Witte’s article contributes to the notion that all political figures in the Taliban are “legitimate” military targets whether they are engaged in combat or not.

Secret Government

The entire intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan is the foundation of the CIA’s own secret government. And just as the CIA operates under the cover of U.S. and NATO AID missions, it lurks behind the Karzai government.

Obama now is struggling to present the Karzai government in the best terms possible, though in reality it is no different than the corrupt political apparatus the CIA built in South Vietnam.

In 1965, the CIA named Air Force General Nguyen Cao Ky as chief of national security in South Vietnam. In exchange for a lucrative narcotic smuggling franchise, Ky then sold the CIA the right to create a parallel government of collaborators and miscreants. Called the Revolutionary Development Program, it consisted of numerous CIA covert action programs composed of South Vietnamese officials on the CIA payroll.

The same phenomenon exists in Afghanistan, where the CIA has awarded members of Karzai’s inner clique essentially immunity to traffic in narcotics in exchange for their acquiescence to U.S. operations inside Afghanistan, including covert actions, detention centers, informants, hit teams, etc.

The CIA’s tolerance of drug dealing by their clients is legendary. In Indochina, one freewheeling CIA agent in Thailand, Puttaporn Khramkhruan, used his protected status to smuggle opium to the United States. After Puttaporn finally was arrested in 1973, William Colby and the CIA prevented the Justice Department from prosecuting him.

Similarly in the 1980s, the CIA ensured that U.S. law enforcement agencies looked the other way regarding cocaine smuggling by the Nicaraguan contra rebels and heroin trafficking by the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

This history is not lost on Karzai and the bandits in his regime. A recent article by the McClatchy Newspapers noted that after U.S. militarists blocked a diplomatic solution in Afghanistan – in favor of Obama’s surge – Karzai was spared from having to make meaningful reforms; he even refused to send his drug-dealing brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, into a comfortable exile.

After eight years of U.S. military occupation and misrule by the corrupt Karzai regime, the Afghans cooperating with this operation – the informants, interrogators, hit teams and corrupt pols – understand the wrongheadedness of what they’re doing, but their prosperity and lives depend on U.S. patronage.

As a result, the definition of “insurgent” gets skewed to mean anyone who is not allied with the Karzai regime or compliant with the U.S. occupation.

I would like to close this article by quoting from John Cook, a U.S. military officer assigned to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. CIA officers gave instruction to Phoenix advisers at the Vietnamese Central Intelligence School. Cook said:

    “There were forty of us in the class, half American, half Vietnamese. The first day at the school was devoted to lectures by American experts in the insurgency business. Using a smooth, slick delivery, they reviewed all the popular theories concerning communist-ori-ented revolutions....

    “Like so many machines programmed to per¬form at a higher level than necessary, they dealt with platitudes and theories far above our dirty little war. They spoke in impersonal tones about what had to be done and how we should do it, as if we were in the business of selling life insurance, with a bonus going to the man who sold the most policies.

    “Those districts that were performing well with the quota system were praised; the poor per¬formers were admonished. And it all fitted together nicely with all the charts and figures they offered as support of their ideas."

Like many of his colleagues, Cook resented "the pretentious men in high position" who gave him unattainable goals, then complained when he did not reach them.

Forty years later, the Obama administration is embarking on the same bloody journey.

As he demonstrated in Oslo, Obama’s job is now to preserve the myth of America as altruistic liberator. But the larger truth is that the “cancer” Obama seeks to destroy in Afghanistan is more a projection of the dark side of the American psyche than a real threat to U.S. national security or to the safety of the American people.

Obama’s counterinsurgency is part of a dirty war for world dominance.

Douglas Valentine is author of The Phoenix Program, which is available through Amazon, as well as The Strength of the Wolf and the new book Strength of the Pack.

His Web sites are http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html, http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/,  and http://trineday.com/paypal_store/product_pages/Strength_of_the_Pack.html

 Global Research Articles by Douglas Valentine

[Harconen]

Middle East War: Emperors of Silent Wars

Propaganda, destruction and madness

by Ali Jawad
Global Research, December 14, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16540

Ever since the fall of Baghdad, the volatility of virtually the entire Middle East has been ‘off the charts’. Principally, this development had to do with the ridiculous, grand-sounding imperial project of heralding in a watershed of democracy through the use of shocking and awful means.

As soon as the greatest military force in history stepped foot on Arabia – adamant to grab the will of Providence by the collar – flashpoints began to spark up left, right and centre. The scars and pains of millions were not to distract the emblem of freedom from its historic mission.

That is one chunk of the story.

The other begins with the view that it would be far too simplistic to presume that the actions of the global superpower triggered no hubris on the part of its regional clients and hirelings. It would be useful to recall after all, that the birth-pangs of a New Middle East were only proclaimed (albeit incredibly prematurely on hindsight) when the supreme client rained death over southern Lebanon.

Not only did the regional axis of moderate Arab clients – alternatively referred to as the Arab Center – have a part to play, but an incredibly important one too; especially after the realisation in the first, belated instance of sanity, that one required much more than state-of-the-art weaponry to effect any sort of ‘real’ change. Thenceforth, the geopolitical struggle for the Middle East has largely been re-packaged into a sectarian one, with regional moderates representing the “Sunni” bastion and the axis of evil led by “Shi’ite” Iran.

For the Arab Center, this constituted a high point as far as its relevance and stature are concerned on the Middle Eastern chessboard. As with all big lies [1], the sectarian deception had its fair share of “success” stories, but the masses were never going to be fooled by it forever. It was only a matter of time before there were cries of, ‘enough, no more!’

In Lebanon, Sunnis and Shi’ites converged on downtown Beirut and offered their Friday prayers together in a show of indissoluble unity; an act of faith itself. The pillars of deception began to crumble and with it went the fading chances of “success”. But blind, morally corrupt rulers know no markers. 

And so we witness the march of the Saudi monarchy into the ravaged Saada province in its attempts to renew once more, the sectarian myth.

Political commentary and media reporting is awash with talks of rebel “Shi’ite” Houthis – funded by Iran – warring against “Sunni” Yemen and Saudi Arabia. As evidenced by recent experience, very little needs to be done in the way of PR to draw the media to proffer the language of the elite.

An elementary ingredient of any successful war effort has to do with garnering support for your cause at the expense of adversaries. At another level, it is essential to draw a veil of silence on the crimes you commit in war in order to maintain that elusive saintly halo, whilst applying the reverse yardstick for adversaries. One can safely state that at both levels, the western media has been more than happy to oblige to the narrative of the Saudi monarchy.

Keeping aside news rooms, and trailing the buck to the top; the foremost accomplice to America’s imperial project, Britain, has been at the heart of the agenda to reinvent the sectarian card.

Take for instance, the words of the UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr. David Miliband to the House of Commons on November 26, when he stated: “we have seen no evidence of external interference”[2], and place these against the omniscient declarations of Mr. Ivan Lewis, Minister of State for Middle Eastern Affairs, in an interview to the Al-Arabiya Satellite Channel only two days earlier:

“Of course (sic), there is a proxy war going on there [in Yemen]. There is no doubt (sic) there is Iranian interference, the size of which we are not yet aware of, and we do not know whether it is direct Iranian interference. However, it is clear that Iran nourishes and encourages rebels and terrorists, which is unacceptable.”[3]

At a time when the Iraq Inquiry is ongoing, you might dare hope it would imprint some humility on a deceptive, mendacious political culture that has, and continues to, cost the lives of thousands. Nay; all vain dreams! Further, the level of disinterest across Western capitals to even consider the possibility of Saudi violations in Saada is truly shocking; less so perhaps, if one takes into account the overall context of a political climate that is geared to criminalize, ipso facto, only one state in the region.

Saudi government- funded media outlets on their part speak of an apocalyptic Iranian, Shi’ite takeover of the Arab heartland in an orchestrated media war which aims to “[paint] Iran as the troublemaker of the Middle East, a major threat to regional stability, and an agent of chaos in many Arab countries, including Iraq and Yemen”.[4]

Decades of political and economic marginalization have conveniently travelled down an Orwellian memory hole; instead, the cause of Yemeni Zaydis has been reduced to a ‘Saudi vs. Iran’ proxy war.

Away from the Saudi newspeak, the reality on the ground in Saada is heart-breaking.[5] “Of the 3,000 under fives targeted by a recent screening in the camp”, IRIN reports “667 cases (22 percent) were severely malnourished”. According to the UNHCR, existing shelter and aid resources are being strained after the IDP population in the main Al Mazrak 1 camp more than doubled over the last month.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia not only persists with its blind targeting of innocent civilians, but also continues to deport displaced refugees fleeing from the fighting. As of 19 November, the number of deportations was estimated at 1,040.[6]

With the emergence of more unified motivations for justice amongst the global masses, and conversely, an intensification of injustice and arrogance amongst power elites, the muted response of ‘dissident culture’ to the carnage in Saada should evoke great concern. Adopting a paradigm of ‘selective solidarity’ risks exposing fundamental contradictions within antiwar movements, and inherently diminishes the efficacy of the wider movement on its more vocal and identifiable causes owing to the cross-relatedness of the various flashpoints in the Middle East.

Additionally, as pointed to above, the political elites in Western capitals equally resort to propaganda and untruths in order to re-package happenings on the ground in Saada as elsewhere across the Middle East. Keeping aside notions of selective impunity on usage of propaganda and lies, these propaganda campaigns are employed to fit into grander narratives. In this case, the renewal of the sectarian myth and the demonization of Iran, and all that these entail.

For the above reasons, and for the simple truth of the grave human suffering in Saada, we’ve got to move.


Notes:
1. ‘The Myth of Sectarianism in the New Middle East’, Global Research, 27 April 2009 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13378

2. See: House of Commons Daily Debates, 26 November 2009 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/cm091126/text/91126w0013.htm

3. ‘Demonstrations in Sanaa demand expulsion of Iranian Ambassador’, Al Arabiya News Channel, 25 November 2009 http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/11/25/92313.html

4. ‘The hidden war’, Al Ahram Weekly, 5-11 November Issue http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/971/re4.htm

5. 'Saada Under Siege', CounterPunch, 23 October 2009 http://www.counterpunch.org/amiri10232009.html

6. See: Yemen Humanitarian Update, OCHA, 19 November 2009 http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWFiles2009.nsf/FilesByRWDocUnidFilename/MYAI-7Y28DQ-full_report.pdf/$File/full_report.pdf


Ali Jawad is a political activist and a member of the AhlulBayt Islamic Mission (AIM); http://www.aimislam.com

[Harconen]

Malalai Joya: "Afghans Are Fed Up With the U.S. Occupation and the Corrupt, Mafia-state of Hamid Karzai"

by Mike Whitney
Global Research, December 13, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16524

It's too bad Barack Obama didn't consult with Malalai Joya before giving his Nobel acceptance speech on Thursday. The ex-Afghan Parliamentarian could have helped the president to see that the ongoing US occupation is damaging to both American and Afghan interests. Afghanistan is not the "just war" that Obama defends so passionately in his speech. It's part of a larger US geopolitical strategy which Joya outlines in her new book "A Woman Among the Warlords: The extraordinary story of an Afghan who dared to raise her voice". US policymakers have decided to establish a beachhead in Central Asia to monitor the growth of China, surround Russia, control vital resources from the Caspian Basin, and provide security for US mega-corporations who see Asia as the "market of the future." It is the Great Game all over again. "Victory" in Afghanistan means that a handful of weapons manufacturers, oil magnates, and military contractors will get very rich. That's it. It has nothing to do with al-Qaida, "democracy promotion" or US national security. That's all just public relations pablum.
 
"A Woman Among the Warlords" is an explosive book that takes a scalpel to many of the illusions surrounding the US invasion of Afghanistan. For example, most Americans have never heard about the "Warlord Strategy", a term that is commonplace among Afghans.  That's because it doesn't mesh with the western media's narrative about Afghan "liberation".   The truth is, US war-planners, led by Sec Def Donald Rumsfeld,  settled on a plan to hand over entire regions of Afghanistan to the warlords  before the first shot was fired. The whole "liberation"-meme was just a ruse to elicit support for the war. How many Americans would support sending more troops if they knew that the original justification of the war was a bunch of baloney?

Here's how Joya sums it up in her own words:

"The people of Afghanistan are fed up with the occupation of their country and with the corrupt, Mafia-state of Hamid Karzai and the warlords and drug lords backed by NATO.... It is clear now that the real motive of the U.S. and its allies, hidden behind the so-called “war on terror,” was to convert Afghanistan into a military base in Central Asia and the capital of the world’s opium drug trade. Ordinary Afghan people are being used in this chess game, and western taxpayers’ money and the blood of soldiers is being wasted on this agenda that will only further destabilize the region....

I offer my condolences to the families here who have lost their loved ones.  (They) are the victims of the wrong policy of your government. The families of Afghan civilians killed in this war share your feelings of loss. If we turn these sorrows into strength, we can end this war. Bringing the troops home at the end of 2011 is too late; the troops should be withdrawn as soon as possible, before more Afghan and American lives are needlessly lost."

Joya is focused and uncompromising; a one-woman wrecking crew. She's also an electrifying speaker who can bring an audience to their feet when she rails against the war. People can sense her intensity, her honesty, and her unwavering commitment to justice. Unlike Obama, she isn't disposed to lofty-sounding platitudes that only serve to perpetuate war and suffering. (Obama Nobel speech: "We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.") Joya's goal is peace; an end to 30 years of war, an end to US occupation and religious fanaticism.  Regrettably, Obama's military escalation ensures that the conflict will drag on for years to come bringing misery to even more people.

Malalai Joya:  "As I write these words, Afghanistan is getting progressively worse.  We are caught between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and US/NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other.... Obama's military build up will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians.... I hope that the lessons in this book will reach President Obama and his policymakers in Washington, and warn them that the people of Afghanistan reject their brutal occupation and their support of the warlords and druglords." ("A Woman Among the Warlords", p5)

"A Woman Among the Warlords" gives readers a glimpse of the vast destruction brought on by the US invasion. Joya repeatedly denounces  Rumsfeld's strategy which restored warlords to power, thus, condemning 32 million Afghans to a life of fear under war criminals and human rights abusers. She also takes aim at the media which provided cover for the warlords by referring to them as the "Northern Alliance"--or the equally misleading--"United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan". As Joya points out, attitudes  about the conflict are largely shaped by disinformation, omissions and propaganda. Obama's Noble speech proves that those same lies will now be delivered by a more competent spokesman.

Malalai Joya:  "While the United States bombed from the sky, the CIA and special forces had already arrived in the northern provinces of Afghanistan to hand out millions of dollars in cash and weapons to Northern Alliance commanders. They were the same extremists whose militias had pillaged Afghanistan during the civil war: Dostum, Sayyaf, Khalili, Rhabbani, Fahim, General Arif, Dr. Abdullah, Haji Qadir, Ustad Atta, Mohammad, Daoud, and Hazrat Ali among others. ...Fahim, another ruthless man with a dark past. The western media tried at the time to portray these warlords as "anti-Taliban resistance forces and liberators of Afghanistan," but in fact Afghan people believed they were no better than the Taliban." (Ibid, pg 52)

As the Taliban fled across the Pakistan border amid heavy aerial bombardment, the warlords seized entire provinces reestablishing their iron-fisted rule over the local people.  The Bush administration succeeded in replacing one repressive regime with another. No attempt was ever made to establish democracy.

From the New York Times November 19, 2001: "The galaxy of warlords who tore Afghanistan apart in the early 1990s and who were vanquished by the Taliban because of their corruption and perfidy are back on their thrones, poised to exercise power in the ways they always have."

Joya provides biographical sketches of many of the warlords, including Abdul Rasul Sayyaf,  a rabid fundamentalist "who massacred thousands in Kabul during the 1990s." In one Kabul purge he ordered his soldiers, "Don't leave anyone alive--Kill them all." Sayyaf was "the person who invited international terrorist Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan during the 1980s. He also trained and mentored Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , the man who the US claims was the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks." (p 67)

How many Americans would continue to support the war if they knew they were protecting the friends of bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
 
Malalai Joya again: "Most people in the west have been led to believe that intolerance, brutality, and severe oppression of women in Afgahnistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie, more dust in the eyes of the world from the warlords who dominate the American-backed, so-called democratic government of Hamid Karzai. In truth, some of the worst atrocities in our recent past were committed during the civil war by the men who are now in power."

During the blackest days of the Afghan civil war in 1992, a group of warlords seized Kabul razing much of it to the ground. "The militias of Dostum, Sayyaf, Massoud, Mazari, and Hekmatyar pillaged the city, robbing families and slaughtering and raping women. Eventually, anywhere from 65,000 to 80,000 innocent people were killed in Kabul alone, though there are no official figures for the staggering death toll. According to the United Nations, more than 90 percent of the city was destroyed. (Eventually) "the country was split up into fiefdoms, ruled by the whims of rival thugs and warlords." (Ibid p26)

Joya's Solution: "Withdraw All Foreign Troops"

Malalai Joya: "Some people say that when the troops withdraw, a civil war will break out. Often this prospect is raised by people who ignore the vicious conflict and humanitarian disaster that is already occurring in Afghanistan. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people. The terrible civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal certainly could never justify... the destruction and death caused by that decade-long occupation." (p 217)...Today we live under the shadow of the gun with the most corrupt and unpopular government in the world. (p 211)

The war that one reads about in the western media, is not the real war.  Obama supporters should get a copy of "A Woman Among the Warlords" and compare the reality of occupation to the propaganda in the newspapers. The fact is, the United States has handed Afghanistan over to a group of genocidal maniacs  and religious zealots. Even now, the warlords could not continue their brutal repression of the Afghan people without the continued support of the United States. Many of the warlords are still on the US payroll, which Obama somehow failed to mention in his "Peace Prize" speech.

"A Woman Among the Warlords" is a great-read and the perfect antidote for the incessant barrage of war propaganda. It's definitely worth a look.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Mike Whitney

[Harconen]

Deadly Blast Hits U.S. Institute in Afghanistan

Press TV
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:18 EST
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=113774&sectionid=351020403

A huge explosion has ripped through an American institute in southern Afghanistan, killing at least five people including a foreigner, according to officials.

The blast occurred in Gardez in Paktia province on Tuesday, a province spokesman told Press TV.

The spokesman, Rouhollah Samoun, also said that seven vehicles were damaged in the attack.

No group has claimed responsibility for the powerful blast yet.

The attack took place as another explosion near a hotel in Kabul killed at least eight people and injured 40 others.

The second blast occurred after a car bomber detonated his vehicle in the center of Kabul outside the Heetal Hotel.

[Harconen]

The Great Game: U.S., NATO War In Afghanistan

Fifty or more countries in a single war theaterGlobal Research,
by Rick Rozoff
Global Research, December 5, 2009
Stop NATO
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16422

The U.S. (and Britain) began bombing the Afghan capital of Kabul on October 7, 2001 with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines and bombs dropped from warplanes and shortly thereafter American special forces began ground operations, a task that has been conducted since by regular Army and Marine units. The bombing and the ground combat operations continue more than eight years later and both will be intensified to record levels in short order.

The combined U.S. and NATO forces would represent a staggering number, in excess of 150,000 soldiers. By way of comparison, as of September of this year there were approximately 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and only a small handful of other nations' personnel, those assigned to the NATO Training Mission - Iraq, remaining with them.

"Secretary Gates has made clear that the conflicts we're in should be at the very forefront of our agenda. He wants to make sure we're not giving up capabilities needed now for those needed for some unknown future conflict. He wants to make sure the Pentagon is truly on war footing....For the first time in decades, the political and economic stars are aligned for a fundamental overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business."

Afghanistan: Historical Precedents and Antecedents

Over the past ten years citizens of the United States and other Western nations, and unfortunately most of the world, have become accustomed to Washington and its military allies in Europe and those appointed as armed outposts on the periphery of the "Euro-Atlantic community" engaging in armed aggression around the world.

Wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and lower profile military operations and surrogate campaigns in nations as diverse as Colombia, Yemen, the Philippines, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Ossetia and elsewhere have become an unquestioned prerogative of the U.S. and its NATO partners. So much so that many have forgotten to consider how comparable actions have been or might be viewed if a non-Western nation attempted them.

Thirty years ago this December 24 the first Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to assist a neighboring nation's government to combat an armed insurgency based in Pakistan and surreptitiously (later quite openly) supported by the United States.

In the waning days of that year, 1979, and in the early ones of the following Soviet troop strength grew to some 50,000 soldiers.

Great Game

It is worth noting in this regard that in 1839 Britain invaded Afghanistan with 21,000 of its own and Indian colonial troops and in 1878 with twice that number to counter Russian influence in the country in what came to be called the Great Game.

On January 23, 1980 U.S. President James Earl (Jimmy) Carter stated in his last State of the Union Address that "The implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War."

When the Soviet Union began withdrawing its forces from the nation - the first half from May 15 to August 16, 1988 and the last from November 15, 1988 to February 15, 1989 - their peak number had been slightly over 100,000.

On December 1 of 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was deploying 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan in addition to the 68,000 already there and two days later "Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress...that the surge force of 30,000 going to Afghanistan will grow to at least 33,000 when support troops are included." [1]

That is, over 100,000 troops. Along with private military and security contractors whose number is even larger.

Soviet troops were in Afghanistan barely over nine years. American troops are now involved in the ninth year of combat operations in the country and in less than four weeks will be engaged in their tenth calendar year of war there.

On November 25 White House spokesman Robert Gibbs assured the people of his nation that "We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan. We are not going to be there another eight or nine years." [2] The implication is that the U.S. may wage a war in Afghanistan that could last until 2017. For sixteen years.

The longest war in American history prior to the current one was that in Vietnam. U.S. military advisers were present in the country from the late 1950s onward and covert operations were carried on in the early 1960s, but only in the year after the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident - 1965 - did the Pentagon begin major combat operations in the south and regular bombing raids in the north. The last American combat unit left South Vietnam in 1972, seven years later.

The U.S. (and Britain) began bombing the Afghan capital of Kabul on October 7, 2001 with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines and bombs dropped from warplanes and shortly thereafter American special forces began ground operations, a task that has been conducted since by regular Army and Marine units. The bombing and the ground combat operations continue more than eight years later and both will be intensified to record levels in short order.

Since late last summer the U.S. and its NATO allies have launched regular drone missile and attack helicopter assaults inside Pakistan. Had the Soviets attempted to do likewise thirty years ago - when their own borders were threatened - Washington's response might well have triggered a third world war.

The USSR did not deploy troops from any of its fellow Warsaw Pact nations in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In a historical irony that warrants more commentary that it has received - none - every one of those nations now has forces serving under NATO and killing and dying in the Afghan war theater: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the former German Democratic Republic (subsumed under a united Federal Republic, which has almost 4,500 soldiers stationed there).     

They are among troops from close to 50 nations serving or soon to serve under NATO command on the Afghanistan-Pakistan war front, which include the following from the Alliance and several of its partnership programs:

NATO members:

Albania
Belgium
Britain
Bulgaria
Canada
Croatia
The Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
The Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Turkey
The United States (35,000 troops with as many more on the way)

Partnership for Peace/Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC):

Armenia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bosnia
Finland
Georgia
Ireland
Macedonia
Montenegro
Sweden
Switzerland (withdrawn last year)
Ukraine

Contact Countries:

Australia
Japan (naval forces)
New Zealand
South Korea

Adriatic Charter (overlaps with the Partnership for Peace):
Albania
Bosnia
Croatia
Macedonia
Montenegro

Istanbul Cooperation Initiative:

United Arab Emirates

Trilateral Afghanistan-Pakistan-NATO Military Commission:
Afghanistan
Pakistan

Miscellaneous:

Colombia
Mongolia
Singapore

The above roster includes seven of fifteen former Soviet republics (another development worthy of consideration), with Moldova after this year's "Twitter Revolution" and Kazakhstan, where in September the U.S. ambassador pressured the government for troops, candidates for deployments under Partnership for Peace obligations. (Both had earlier sent troops to Iraq.) Their participation would lead to 60% of former Soviet states having troops committed to NATO in Afghanistan. With Moldova added, every European nation (excluding microstates like Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City) except for Belarus, Cyprus, Malta, Russia and Serbia will have military forces serving under NATO in Afghanistan.

Never in the history of world warfare have military contingents from so many nations - fifty or more - served in one war theater. In a single nation. Troops from five continents, Oceania and the Middle East. [3]

Even the putative coalition of the willing stitched together by the U.S. and Britain after the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 and until troops were pulled for redeployment to Afghanistan only consisted of forces from thirty one nations: The U.S., Britain, Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand and Ukraine. Twenty two of those thirty one contributors were former Soviet bloc (Albania remotely) nations or former Yugoslav republics that had recently (1999) joined NATO or were being prepared for integration into or in other manners with the bloc.

The world's last three major wars - those in and against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq - have been used as testing and training grounds for the expansion of global NATO.

The consolidation of an international rapid response (strike) force and occupation army under NATO control was further advanced this week with Obama's troop surge speech on the 1st and follow-up efforts by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen to recruit more allied troops at the recently concluded meeting of NATO (and allied) foreign ministers.

On December 4 "NATO's top official said...that at least 25 countries will send a total of about 7,000 additional forces to Afghanistan next year 'with more to come,' as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to bolster allied resolve." [4] In attendance at the NATO meeting in Brussels were also an unspecified number of foreign ministers of non-NATO nations providing troops for the Afghan war, top military commander of all U.S. and NATO forces General Stanley McChrystal and Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta.

7,000 more NATO troops with "more to come" would, added to some 42,000 non-U.S. soldiers currently serving with NATO and 35,000 U.S. forces doing the same, mean at least 85,000 troops under NATO command even without the 33,000 new U.S. troops headed to Afghanistan. The bloc's largest foreign deployment before this was to Kosovo in 1999 when at its peak the Alliance-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) consisted of 50,000 troops from 39 nations. [5]

The combined U.S. and NATO forces would represent a staggering number, in excess of 150,000 soldiers. By way of comparison, as of September of this year there were approximately 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and only a small handful of other nations' personnel, those assigned to the NATO Training Mission - Iraq, remaining with them.

Among NATO member states Italian Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa recently announced an increase of 1,000 troops, bringing the nation's total to almost 4,500, 50% more than had previously been stationed in Iraq.

Poland will send another 600-700 troops which, added to those already in Afghanistan, will constitute the largest aggregate Polish military deployment abroad in the post-Cold War era and the highest number of troops ever deployed outside Europe in the nation's history.

Britain will provide another 500 troops, with its total rising to close to 10,000.

Bulgarian Defense Minister Nikolay Mladenov said last week that "there is a strong possibility that the country will increase its military contingent in Afghanistan." [6] To indicate the nature of the commitments new NATO member states shoulder when they join the Alliance and what their priority then becomes, three days earlier Mladenov, speaking of budgetary constraints placed on the armed forces because of the current financial crisis, affirmed that "We may cut down some other items of the army budget, but there will always be enough money for missions abroad." [7]

Washington has also pressured Croatia, which became a full member of the bloc this past April, to supply more troops and Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor hastened to pledge that "Croatia, being a NATO member, would fulfill its obligations." [8]

The Czech republic's defense minister, Martin Bartak, spoke after the Obama troop surge speech earlier this week and threatened the Czech parliament by stating "it will have to be explained to allies why the Czech Republic does not want to take part in the reinforcements while Slovakia and Britain, for instance, will reinforce their contingents...." [9]

Slovakia has announced that it will more than double its forces in Afghanistan.

The German parliament has just renewed for another year the deployment of the nation's almost 4,500 troops in Afghanistan, the maximum allowed by the Bundestag, although discussions are being held to increase that number to 7,000 after a conference on Afghanistan in London on January 28. German armed forces in the country are engaged in their nation's first ground combat operations since World War II.

A news report on December 3 said that U.S. ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey was pressuring Ankara to provide a "specific number" of troops and to be ""more flexible" [10] in how they will be deployed, meaning that Turkey must drop so-called combat caveats and engage in active fighting along with its NATO allies.

After meeting with U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden on December 4, Hungarian Prime Minister Gyorgy Gordon Bajnai vowed to send 200 more soldiers to the South Asian war zone, an increase of 60% as Hungary currently has 360 there.

Regarding NATO partner states, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia Celeste Wallander was in Armenia to secure that nation's first military deployment to Afghanistan, the handiwork of NATO's first Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia Robert Simmons [11], who has also gained a doubling of troops from neighboring Azerbaijan and a pledge of as many as 1,000 Georgian troops by next year.

During a press conference at NATO headquarters on the first day of the Alliance's recent Afghan war council, December 3, the bloc's chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed gratitude to the United Arab Emirates for dispatching troops to Afghanistan and "hosting...the alliance's International Conference on NATO-UAE Relations and the Way Forward in the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative last October." [12]

The Istanbul Cooperation Initiative was launched at the NATO summit in Turkey in 2004 to upgrade military partnerships with members of the Mediterranean Dialogue (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). [13]
 
A U.S. military news agency published an article on December 3 that discussed the Quadrennial Defense Review currently being deliberated on at the Pentagon.

Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III, who before assuming that post was Vice President of Government Operations and Strategy for Raytheon, was quoted as boasting that "The Quadrennial Defense Review...will be unlike any other: the first to be driven by current wartime requirements, to balance conventional and nonconventional capabilities, and to embrace a 'whole of government' approach to national security....This is a landmark QDR."

Lynn also said that "Secretary Gates has made clear that the conflicts we're in should be at the very forefront of our agenda. He wants to make sure we're not giving up capabilities needed now for those needed for some unknown future conflict. He wants to make sure the Pentagon is truly on war footing....For the first time in decades, the political and economic stars are aligned for a fundamental overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business." [14]

The more than eight-year war in Afghanistan is not going to end in 2011, Obama's asseverations notwithstanding, nor will it be the last of its kind. It will continue to engulf neighboring Pakistan with the threat of also spilling over into Central Asia and Iran.

The crisis confronting the world is not only the war in South Asia: It is war itself. More particularly, the recklessness of the self-proclaimed sole superpower and the military bloc it heads in arrogating to themselves the exclusive right to threaten nations around the world with military aggression.

If that policy is not brought to an end by the real international community - the more than six-sevenths of humanity outside the greater Euro-Atlantic world (as it deems itself) - Afghanistan will not be this century's last war front but its first and prototypical one. Portents are of even worse to come.

Notes

1) New York Daily News, December 4, 2009
2) New York Times, November 26, 2009
3) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army
   Stop NATO, August 9, 2009
   http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army
4) Associated Press, December 4, 2009
5) U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan’s History
   Stop NATO, September 24, 2009
   http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/u-s-nato-poised-for-most-massive-war-in-afghanistans-history
6) Sofia News Agency, November 26, 2009
7) Standart News, November 23, 2009
Xinhua News Agency, December 3, 2009
9) Czech News Agency, December 2, 2009
10) PanArmenian.net, December 3, 2009
11) Mr. Simmons’ Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border
    Stop NATO, March 4, 2009
    http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/mr-simmons-mission-nato-bases-from-balkans-to-chinese-border
12) Emirates News Agency, December 3, 2009
13) NATO In Persian Gulf: From Third World War To Istanbul
    Stop NATO, February 6, 2009
    http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/nato-in-persian-gulf-from-third-world-war-to-istanbul
14) American Forces Press Service, December 3, 2009


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Rick Rozoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Rick Rozoff

[Harconen]

US fighter jets attack Yemeni fighters

Global Research, December 14, 2009
Press TV
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16542

Yemen's Houthi fighters say that US fighter jets have launched 28 attacks on the northwestern province of Sa'ada.

The US has used modern fighter jets and bombers in its offensive against the Yemen fighters, Houthis said in a statement.

According to the statement, the US fighter jets have launched overnight attacks on the Yemeni fighters, the Arabic Almenpar website reported.

The development comes as The Daily Telegraph on Sunday reported that the US has sent special forces to Yemen to train its army.

The reports of the US military intervention in Yemen come as Saudi Arabia is also lending full support to the Yemeni government's crackdown on Yemen's Houthi minority.

Saudi Arabia has launched cross-border ground attacks against Yemeni fighters and its fighter jets have reportedly dropped phosphorus bombs on Yemen's northern areas.

International aid agencies and some UN bodies including United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have voiced concern over the dire condition of the Yemeni civilians who have become the main victims of the conflict in the country.

The United Nations which according to its charter is set up "to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace" has failed to adopt any concrete measures to help end the bloody war.

[Harconen]

International Law: The First Casualty of America's Drone War

A comprehensive legal analysis of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan

by Max Kantar
Global Research, December 14, 2009
Znet - 2009-12-12
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16539

ABSTRACT. This report utilizes well-established principles of both treaty and customary international law as a measuring stick for attempting to determine the legal and moral legitimacy of the covert U.S. policy of using drones to attack targets in Pakistan. This analysis is unique in that it uses both broad assessments as well as pertinent individual case studies with the purpose of chronicling the details of several drone attacks over a period of 45 months in the interest of legal evaluation. Drawing from a vast collection of reliable press reports, independent human rights testimonies, and the most prominent, mainstream studies, this report is quite possibly the most comprehensive analysis on the topic to date and likely the first of its kind to appear in the wake of the US-Pakistan drone controversy.

 

For nearly four years, the United States has been using unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as "drones," to repeatedly bomb targets in Pakistan. [1] The drone strikes, operated primarily by the CIA, are reportedly launched with the intention of killing top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and holding the Pakistani government accountable. Since the Obama administration has taken office, the U.S. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan has markedly intensified, consistent with the trends established in the final eight months President Bush's second term. Although the bombings of Pakistan fall into a much broader strategic U.S. policy in the region, it is the purpose of this analysis to focus solely on the legal implications and human costs of the drone strikes in Pakistan.

 

First I will review the existing reports entailing the legal status—combatant or noncombatant—of those killed in U.S. attacks. Secondly, I will provide a brief and basic overview of the laws of war and their immediate applicability regarding the protection of civilians and noncombatants in international armed conflicts in accordance with the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Additional Protocols of 1977, and customary international law. Third, I will examine several case studies of various U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan in order to determine whether or not international law is being observed by United States. Fourth, I will briefly evaluate the fundamental legal credibility underlying the attacks using both the existing analyses provided by legal scholars and rights groups and well-established principles of law rooted in the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Fifth, using the available body of documentary evidence compiled by independent journalists, human rights groups, strategic analysts, media reports, and legal experts, as well as taking into consideration the basic tenets of international law in the context of the U.S. attacks, I will juxtapose the substance of U.S. actions with fundamental American legal standards with the purpose of establishing an appropriate technical classification for the United States' drone policy in Pakistan. Lastly, I will conclude this analysis with a few final remarks addressing unanswered questions while also making some basic recommendations.

 

I am going to argue the position that the United States is in violation of international law on several counts in regards to its bombings of Pakistan. Drawing on highly relevant and uncontroversial legal precedents established by the International Criminal Court, I will argue that strict adherence to even the most elementary standards of international law would require criminal prosecution of several high-level Bush and Obama administration officials ranging from the state department to the CIA.

 

Casualty Reports and Assessments

 

The most cited and controversial report to date on the casualty results of U.S. drone strikes is the April 2009 report published by Pakistan's leading English daily, The News. [2] The report was authored by Amir Mir who is known by leading American strategic analysts as "a well-regarded Pakistani terrorism expert." [3] The report, relying on internal Pakistani government sources, alleges that from January 14, 2006 to April 8, 2009, U.S. drone bombings killed 687 civilians and 14 al-Qaeda operatives, amounting to a ratio of nearly 50 civilians killed for every al-Qaeda operative killed, or a 94% civilian death rate. Out of 60 total strikes, only 10 hit any al-Qaeda targets. The sources attributed the failed drone attacks to "faulty intelligence information" which resulted in the "killing [of] hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children." It goes on to detail the numbers of deaths, the statuses of the victims, and the dates of specific attacks, all within annual and monthly time frames.

 

This report has since been cited and endorsed by several relevant and mainstream commentators, despite the fact that it has been largely ignored, or at best, marginalized and down-played, by the mainstream media in the United States. Most notably, in a meeting with Congress this past May, former senior counterinsurgency advisor to the U.S. Army, David Kilcullen, told the U.S. government to "call off the drones" noting that "since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area." In a New York Times article [4] just weeks later, Kilcullen co-authored an editorial with Andrew Exum—a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former Army officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan—in which they cited the casualty ratio and figures from The News' April 2009 report as evidence of the lack of precision in the drone policy. [5]

 

The Brookings Institution published an analysis of the U.S. drone policy in Pakistan last July.[6] The analysis, written by Senior Fellow, Daniel Byman, concluded that despite the difficulty in determining exact numbers of civilian casualties, it was likely that "more than 600 civilians" have been killed by U.S. attacks at the time of writing. "That number suggests," the report continued, "that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died." This assessment is highly significant for multiple reasons. The centrist Brookings Institution is arguably the most powerful and influential think tank in the United States, as noted by the authoritative Think Tank Index magazine. Brookings also routinely garners by far the most media citations annually.[7] To say the least, it is quite noteworthy that the most mainstream and establishment think tank in the United States has gone on record saying that 90% of those killed in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have been innocent civilians.

 

Two of America's leading counterterrorism experts, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, are the authors of the most recent analysis of casualties resulting from U.S. drone strikes. [8] In their analysis, Bergen and Tiedemann attempt to calculate the numbers of people killed by U.S. drone strikes from January 2006 to October 19, 2009. For documentation, the authors rely on "accounts from reliable media organizations with substantial reporting capabilities in Pakistan."[9] Bergen and Tiedemann ultimately conclude that between 757-1,012 people have been killed by U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, of which 252-316 (33-31%) are thought to have been civilians. The Bergen-Tiedemann analysis, while ambitious and certainly of some limited value, does in fact contain multiple, glaring errors. The report cites two drone strikes (January and October) for the year 2006 and concludes that no known civilians were killed in either attack. For the January attack, the authors claim that 18 al-Qaeda/Taliban militants were killed by the drone strike and cite a CNN report to justify their conclusions.[10] However, the CNN report cited by the authors is dated July 29, 2008 and explicitly states that the respective al-Qaeda operative—whom the article is about—was not killed in 2006 (despite inaccurate reports at the time) but rather is thought to have been killed over two years later in 2008.[11] While the July 2008 CNN report cited by Bergen and Tiedemann in fact makes no mention of civilian deaths nor does it provide a casualty total for the January 2006 attack, it has long since been conceded that each of the 18 killed in the January 2006 strike have been identified as civilians and no al-Qaeda operatives were among the dead. [12]

 

In regards to the October 2006 strike in Bajaur province, the only citation provided by the authors is either inaccessible or nonexistent; however, it's irrelevant because the Pakistani newspaper, DAWN, covered the strike in detail at the time and it subsequently contradicts the authors' assertions that the 80+ people killed were militants. [13] When the Bergen-Tiedemann findings are adjusted to correct their mistakes for casualties in 2006, the civilian death toll becomes 352-416 or 46-41% (respectively) of the total body count.

 

Furthermore, there appear to be significant gaps in the authors' calculations of the range of civilians likely to have been killed in drone strikes launched in the year 2009. For example, in appendix 1, each drone strike documented details the number of people killed for each of the following groups: Al Qaeda/Taliban leaders, Al-Qaeda/Taliban (lower-level militants), and "others" which includes civilians and often times, the total number killed in the particular attack. In the list of strikes and casualties for the year of 2009, the total number of "others" exceeds considerably the range of civilian deaths cited by the authors for the same time period (see appendix 2) even when the total of the "others" is derived after subtracting the corresponding tallies of militants and militant leaders (when the distinction is made). This suggests that the authors are willing to, at times, assume that unconfirmed, or rather, unidentified victims [14] may be included in the possible range of militants killed but not in the corresponding civilian totality. These assumptions undermine the validity of Bergen and Tiedemann's calculations for the year 2009 (of militant-civilian ratios) and subsequently suggest that the number of civilian casualties in 2009 may be significantly higher than conveyed by the numbers produced by Bergen and Tiedemann. This problem is compounded by the fact that of the 43 drone strikes launched in 2009 (up to October 19) in 12 cases, the number of people killed, as well as the legal status of the victims, was "unknown"—due to no fault of the authors—and therefore could not be factored into the ratio calculations at all.

 

For the years 2007 and 2008, the authors' findings, classifications, and citations appear to be consistent with the available documentary record. The rate of "unknown" casualties is also much lower for these periods. It is worth noting that for 2008, according to the Bergen-Tiedemann analysis, nearly 60% of the casualties were found to have likely been civilians.

 

 Overall, the Bergen-Tiedemann analysis—especially when adjusted for its demonstrable factual errors for drone strikes in 2006—reveals that a very large number of those killed by U.S. drone strikes are in fact civilian noncombatants (between 41-46%). Moreover, when one considers the aforementioned gaps in the Bergen-Tiedemann findings as well as the ambiguity and obscurity entailed in a considerable number of media reports regarding the legal status of the victims, it seems reasonable to conclude that the civilian death toll may indeed be considerably higher, as suggested by the other analyses cited here. Either way, it is apparent that civilians are being killed a rate close to that of suspected low-level militants, if not significantly higher.

 

In addition, it is important to note that many Pakistanis have since been killed by drone strikes in the months following the publication of both the Brookings analysis and the Bergen-Tiedemann casualty report. Many more have been killed—likely well over two hundred—in the seven months that have passed since the Mir report was published in The News.

 

Due to both the covert nature of the U.S. attacks as well as the difficulty of verifying testimonies, events, and reports from Pakistan's often tumultuous tribal regions, it is virtually impossible to confirm or establish exact casualty numbers of militants and civilians. Many of the media reports cited in the Bergen-Tiedemann analysis, for example, are problematic due to the fact that reported casualty numbers and legal statuses of the victims are quite often derived solely from the statements of government officials who, as Bergen and Tiedemann openly concede, are more than likely to make sweeping claims that only militants, and no civilians, were killed in any given strike. [15] Yet in spite of these difficulties, observers have every reason to suspect and reasonably conclude that, as all of the aforementioned reports suggest, civilians are being killed a rate close to that of suspected low-level militants, if not at a rate that greatly exceeds the numbers of suspected militants and leaders killed. Furthermore, it is a matter of zero controversy that the intended targets—high-level leaders of al-Qaeda/Taliban—are rarely killed; of the roughly 1,000 people killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, only about twenty were leaders of militant organizations.

 

The U.S. government essentially has a policy of not speaking publicly about the drone attacks in Pakistan, except of course, when on extremely rare occasions, they hit their "high value" targets. Officials do routinely claim though, that the attacks are "very precise and [are] very limited in terms of collateral damage."[16] However when asked for evidence to back up their claims—perhaps just a list of civilian casualties to prove their assertions—officials always refuse. One of the leading investigative journalists in the U.S., Gareth Porter, writes that the government's "refusal to share...even the most basic data on the bombing attacks...suggests that managers of the drone attacks programs have been using the total secrecy surrounding the program to hide abuses and high civilian casualties."[17] Indeed, if the attacks are in fact minimizing civilian casualties, why wouldn't the government produce evidence to set the record straight? Surely releasing such information is not a matter of security; the government regularly brags about the fifteen or so al-Qaeda leaders they have killed. The truth is, of course, that by all informed and independent accounts, the drone attacks are killing a very significant number of innocent and defenseless civilians. Until the government—or anyone else for that matter—provides evidence to contradict the existing documentary record, interested parties will have to reject unqualified, unsubstantiated, and self-serving claims that the U.S. attacks are minimizing civilian killings.

[Harconen]

International Law

 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the international community considerably expanded on the system of international humanitarian law specifically applicable to states, largely—though not exclusively—with the purpose of officially criminalizing the wartime actions and practices of the Nazis. The primary achievement of these efforts has been the establishment of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which serve as the bedrock of international humanitarian law. In the decades following the war, the international community continued to expand on and codify the laws of war and the basic inalienable rights of all peoples. In 1977 two amendment protocols were added to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, known as Additional Protocol I and II, respectively.[18] Just over a decade prior to these amendments, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and was enshrined into the system of international law in March of 1976.[19]

The Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions relates specifically to the "Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts" and is widely understood to represent customary international law. It has been a key document—perhaps the key document—in the International Criminal Tribunal prosecutions of war criminals in regards to conflicts in Sierra Leone, the Former Yugoslavia, and The Democratic Republic of Congo.

It should be noted that while the United States is a signatory to the Additional Protocols of 1977 it has not yet acted to ratify them. With a handful of exceptions aside, virtually the entire world—168 states—has ratified the Protocols, including every European state. Despite having actively been involved in drafting the Protocols along with every other major world power, the U.S. refused, and presumably continues to refuse ratification on the basis that, Protocol I in particular, "legitimizes groups involved in wars of national liberation,"[20] a claim that, even if it were true—the Protocols were designed strictly to protect all civilian populations—it is not morally clear why that would be undesirable, especially given the revolutionary history of the Americans.[21]

Furthermore, it is generally accepted—even by the United States—that the principles and provisions outlined in the Additional Protocols fundamentally reflect customary international law, applicable to all states regardless of circumstance.[22] The applicability of customary law has been reaffirmed by the Statute of the International Court of Justice which states that The Court in its rulings and deliberations "shall apply [among other sources] international custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law."[23] Likewise, in an official declaration and appeal on the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Additional Protocols, the International Committee of the Red Cross clearly stated that the 1977 amendments largely "already form a set of rules of customary law valid for every State, whether or not it is party to the Protocols" (emphasis added).[24]This principle of universal customary international law—specifically as it applies to the Protocols—was also reaffirmed yet again as recently as ten years ago by the highest criminal court in the world when the ICC ruled on the principle of discrimination—a core provision and theme in Protocol I—and its universal and longstanding applicability "in all armed conflicts."[25]

It is also of considerable significance that the Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions have been absolutely vital in their role in helping to bring war criminals to justice in international prosecutions that were indeed supported by the United States, most notably in the case of the Former Yugoslavia.[26] Even momentarily putting aside the universal principle of customary international law, certainly all would agree that if it is proper to convict some war criminals on the basis of the provisions in the Protocols, then it is appropriate that the respective principles should apply to all parties in all armed conflicts. It is for these reasons that I will argue that the basic provisions and principles in the Additional Protocols in actuality do apply to the United States and its drone policy specifically. Likewise, I will also argue that the major breaches of international law—those cited and reviewed in this analysis—committed by the U.S. in its drone attacks indeed constitute violations of universal customary international humanitarian law in accordance with the opinion of the International Committee for the Red Cross.[27]

In the forthcoming case studies of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, I will focus attention primarily on the following Articles of Additional Protocol I: Article 17 (Role of the civilian population and of aid societies), Article 51 (Protection of the civilian population), Article 52 (General Protection of civilian objects), Article 53 (Protection of cultural objects and places of worship), and Article 57 (Precautions in attack).[28] These Articles and the fundamental provisions and principles which they largely—if not entirely—represent, reflect the well-established and generally uncontroversial rules of customary international humanitarian law.[29] In these instances for the sake of concision and clarity, I will cite the aforementioned Articles from Protocol I. It stems from these presumptions then that in the following case studies it is to be assumed that invocations of the most basic principles in Protocol I constitute customary international humanitarian law.

As a matter of clarification, the case studies reviewed here have been selected not for their uniqueness, but precisely for their relative, practical equivalence in relation to other U.S. attacks on Pakistani targets. While it is true that some cases have been specifically chosen to illustrate certain violations, on the whole the selected cases are, more or less, typical of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.
After evaluating the impending case studies in the context of these Articles, I will briefly introduce Article 6 of Additional Protocol II and Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with the purpose of establishing a slightly different though highly relevant framework for evaluating the principle presupposition underlying the legal rationale for the U.S. attacks.
Case Study #1

The first case study selected is the September 8, 2008 missile attack on a North Waziristan village. The drones fired at least five missiles at a religious school founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani—a Taliban leader (who was formerly financed by the CIA) and the official target of the U.S. attack. At least 17 people were killed with some estimates reaching as high as 23.[30] Of those killed, at least eight were children. Haqqani's wife, sister, and sister-in-law were all killed as well. Roughly twenty were wounded, most of which were women and children according to doctors on the scene. Haqqani was not present at the time of the bombing.[31]
This attack clearly constitutes a violation of Article 51(2) which states that "the civilian population...shall not be the object of attack." Even if we accept the claim that the target of the attack was legitimate, the strike was launched directly at a school—by definition, probably containing children—which is obviously a civilian center. Under Article 52(3) the law clearly states that "in case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes such as...a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed NOT to be so used."

Firing several powerful missiles into one building is definitively indiscriminate in terms of distinguishing between military and civilian targets. Article 51(4) clearly prohibits attacks which fail to discriminate between military and civilian objects and targets. It states that "an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated" is prohibited.
It also seems evident that the U.S. planners of the bombings did not take the necessary precautions required by Article 57 to make certain that civilians would not be the object of attack. Section 2 of Article 57 states that "those who plan or decide upon an attack" must take "all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of the attack with a view to avoiding...[or] minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life...." Planners of the military action must "do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects...." No evidence was or has since been produced that would suggest any such precautions were taken in earnest. It should be further noted that the documentary record of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan reveals a disturbing trend of inadequate and insufficient efforts to comply with this aspect of international law. In the next case study I will take a closer look at these trends in particular.

[Harconen]

Case Study #2

 

In one of the earliest drone attacks in Pakistan, the U.S. fired several missiles—as many as ten—into the village of Damadola, located in the Bajaur tribal area on January 13, 2006. According to The Washington Post, "the target was a dinner celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha." The individual whom the U.S. was hoping to kill was Ayman al-Zawahiri, an al-Qaeda deputy. The CIA had reportedly received some evidence—possibly derived from an interrogation of another al-Qaeda operative—that al-Zawahiri was going to be attending the holiday dinner.[32] This case study will deal with two major aspects of apparent legal violations, namely those of indiscriminate attacks and the failure to take the required precautions in carrying out the attack.

 

Initially, U.S. and Pakistani officials declared that up to four members of al-Qaeda were killed in the bombings. ABC News could hardly contain its euphoria over the killings and declared the Muslim holiday gathering to be a "terror summit."[33] When the dust settled after the blasts, at least three houses were totally destroyed and at least 18 people were killed, with some reports putting the death toll as high as 22.[34] By all accounts, five children and five women were among the dead while 14 of the dead were likely from the same family.[35] Furthermore, it has since been confirmed that the "terror summit" was nothing of the sort, with U.S. and Pakistani officials later admitting that "none of those al-Qaeda leaders" previously alleged to have "perished in the strike" were in fact killed, noting that "only local villagers were killed."[36]

 

This attack constitutes a flagrant violation of several Articles of Protocol I and customary law in general. A home hosting a religious holiday dinner is not of military character and could not qualify as a military objective unless it was clear that the home itself was "by [its] nature, location, purpose, or use [making] an effective contribution to military action" in accordance with Article 52(2). If it is true that U.S. planners of the attack struck the home with the intent of killing Ayman al-Zawahiri, this would also constitute a major breach of the principle of discrimination. According to Article 51(5) an attack is considered indiscriminate when "bombardment by any methods or means...treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village, or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians and civilian objects." Also indiscriminate is "an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life...which would be excessive in relation to the...direct military advantage."

 

It appears that the U.S. attack, by the first definition of an indiscriminate attack hardly even rises to the level of indiscrimination; while militants likely may have been known to frequent the area, there was no reported distinct military objective in the immediate area which was attacked. Undoubtedly, CIA operatives were certainly aware of the fact that bombing a civilian object which might or might not contain a "high value target" would absolutely be expected to cause "incidental loss of civilian life," though one could hardly call such killings "incidental" in light of the predictable and well-understood consequences of such an undertaking. In a public statement summarizing its letter of concern to then-President Bush, Amnesty International arrived at similar conclusions:

    "...the fact that air surveillance, witnessed by local people, took place for several days before the attack indicates that those ordering the attack on the basis of this information were very likely to have been aware of the presence of women and children and others unconnected with political violence in the area of the attack."[37]

The attack seems to fall unambiguously into the category of Article 51(2) which states that "the civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack" under any circumstance. Given the apparent level of practical information likely to have been possessed by the planners of the attack prior to the actual strike, the bombing appears to constitute a willful and direct attack on civilians. The next case study will review this particular principle more closely. For the moment though, I will continue forward on to the second major aspect of legal accountability in the current case study.

 

From the reports cited above it appears that the "evidence" possessed by the CIA regarding the supposed presence of Ayman al-Zawahiri at the dinner party stemmed from "from the interrogation of another al-Qaeda leader, Abu Faraj al-Libi, who had been captured eight months earlier." It is almost certain that al-Libi was tortured into providing such information,[38] which according to Pakistani intelligence, turned out to be totally false rather than just "slightly off."[39] In this context it appears quite likely that U.S. planners did not even begin to approach their minimal obligations required by all forms of law to, as it is stated in Article 57(4) "take all reasonable precautions to avoid losses of civilian lives and damage to civilian objects." Section 2 makes clear that planners of the attack must "do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects." Commanders are required under the same section to "refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life...." A small bit of information provided from one man (likely under considerable duress) clearly does not constitute "doing everything feasible to verify" the information, and more importantly, to verify that civilians would not be in the line of fire. If this could not be verified or guaranteed to a reasonable degree, the strike should not have been permitted. The obvious fact, as noted above, is that bombing entire houses to ostensibly kill one or more individuals inside, simply cannot be a lawful discriminatory attack unless it is absolutely clear that only lawful military targets are inside and that the physical object of attack is being used for military objectives.

 

In all of the casualty reports cited in this paper, the primary explanation provided for the overwhelming civilian death toll in comparison with alleged actual targets is the use of poor and unreliable evidence by the attackers. When reviewing the numerous media reports of individual drone attacks, the issue of unsubstantiated and sloppy evidence is a constantly reoccurring theme. Several mainstream press reports have surfaced over the past several months which suggest that the CIA is essentially playing Russian roulette with the lives of Pakistani people living in the tribal areas. In their June analysis of U.S. drone policy, TIME magazine wrote that "tribesmen have told TIME of agents who drop microchips near targets; the drones can lock onto these to guide their missiles or bombs with pinpoint precision."[40] The Guardian has reported similar findings, citing local testimony as well as a Taliban video capturing a young man confessing to dropping microchips at random houses in exchange for payment from the CIA.[41] While some officials have written off the confession as "extremist propaganda" journalist Gareth Porter cites a "knowledgeable" internal Washington source who says that "the Guardian article is consistent with past CIA intelligence-gathering methods" in the region. The source told Porter, "We buy everything. Everything is paid for."[42]

 

The Guardian was also told by "a former CIA officer who served Waziristan [a tribal area in Pakistan] in 2006" that "the CIA recruits a network of paid, and sometimes unwitting, informers" mostly comprised of "poor local men."[43] TIME describes similar findings through its own "reports from Waziristan."

 

TIME goes on to report that the "thermal cameras" on which drone operators rely to verify their targets, "are notoriously imperfect. Even under ideal conditions, images can be blurry." In perhaps the most chilling revelation, TIME writes that "in one of several stills from drone video seen by TIME, it's hard to tell if a group of men is kneeling in prayer or [if] the men are militants in battle formation." As one top security official told TIME, "the basic problem with all aerial reconnaissance is that it's subject to error."[44]

 

These findings suggest systematic and egregious violations of Article 57 of Protocol I regarding "Precautions in attack." Taking all feasible precautions prior to carrying out military actions in order to ensure the protection of civilians and noncombatants is universally recognized as a fundamental principle of customary international law as well.[45] Regrettably, such reports also coincide well with the documentary record of the bombings which reveal functionally methodological patterns of a total lack of precaution being taken over and over again in the U.S. campaign of drone strikes. Purchasing data seems inherently unreliable in itself, especially when those being paid and solicited are some of the most poor and desperate people in the world. The use of microchips is also inherently unreliable and insufficient as a means of taking precautions and verifying targets to ensure the protection of civilians and civilian objects, as is unequivocally obligatory by all interpretations of international humanitarian law. Coupled with the reportedly poor visibility of the drones' thermal cameras, these practices are a virtual recipe for indiscriminate attacks and attacks on individual civilians and civilian populations, quite possibly constituting serious war crimes or crimes against humanity. Based upon available reports and evidence, as well as the tangible results of numerous U.S. attacks over an extended period of time it appears quite apparent that even minimal precautions—let alone "all reasonable precautions" which is required by law—are not being undertaken by U.S. planners. This suggests a callous disregard not only for well-established international law, but for innocent civilian life—including children—in Pakistan on the part of the United States government. There is no doubt that U.S. officials are certainly aware of the predictable consequences of their actions and the risks to civilian life that are being taken by those planning and carrying out the drone attacks.

[Harconen]

Case Study #3

 

Case Study #3 will first address the principle of discrimination using a May 2008 bombing which successfully killed an alleged al-Qaeda target. Next, using as examples, two additional attacks, (October 2006 & October 2009) as well as the aforementioned May 2008 strike, I will briefly look at the role the U.S. attacks are playing in disrupting the then-Pakistani peace process.

 

On May 14, 2008 two hellfire missiles were fired into the Damadola area killing 12-15 people—possibly more—and injuring an untold number of others. The presumed target of the strike, Abu Suleiman al-Jazairi, "a highly experienced Algerian militant," was killed in the attack.[46] The buildings attacked by the drone included a two-story compound where "militants" were thought to be having dinner and the home of a local "militant commander." Pakistani security officials "presume[d] that all those present there [had] been killed." By all accounts, women and children were among the dead although the exact number is unknown.

 

This attack is unlike the previous case studies only in that it actually succeeded in hitting its target. The same principles apply in terms of the failure of the U.S. attackers to distinguish between military and civilian objects and targets. Like the previous case studies, the May 14, 2008 strike (henceforth "the May 2008 strike") represents a clear violation of sections 4 and 5 of Article 51 which prohibits attacks that treat military and civilian objects as one in the same. Article 50(3) states that "the presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character." The May 2008 strike has since proven to have killed perhaps over a dozen people—including women and children who under the law enjoy the highest protections against attack—in the process of assassinating one man.

 

In 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia rejected the defendant, Stanislav Galic's claims that the presence of military targets within a civilian center essentially justifies an indiscriminate attack. The Court ruled authoritatively that it is unlawful to "target" military objectives within a civilian area when the attacker could reasonably "expect excessive civilian causalities to result from the attack." Citing a specific example, The Court ruled that

    "Although the number of soldiers present at the game was significant, an attack on a crowd of approximately 200 people, including numerous children would clearly be expected to cause incidental loss of life and injuries to civilians excessive in relation to the direct and concrete military advantage anticipated."

Likewise, it could easily be said for the May 2008 strike, as well as many other U.S. drone strikes, that

    "Although the number of militants present in the [immediate] area was significant, an attack on buildings with at least fifteen people, including numerous women and children inside would clearly be expected to cause incidental loss of life and injuries to civilians excessive in relation to the direct and concrete military advantage anticipated."

According to the same ruling, a strike can only be carried out if the "military character of a target has been ascertained." It is not clear that U.S. planners were able to ascertain that the target of the May 2008 strike was of military character. Although it is unlikely, assuming that planners did in fact (incorrectly) ascertain the military character of the target, the strike is prohibited from being carried out if it is "expected to cause incidental loss of life, injury to civilians" and so forth. Also applicable to the earlier case studies, the International Criminal Court officially has taken the position civilian deaths of this kind can hardly be considered "incidental." The ruling of the Trial Chamber deserves full quotation:

    "...indiscriminate attacks, that is to say, attacks which strike civilians or civilian objects and military objectives without distinction, may qualify as direct attacks against civilians. It notes that indiscriminate attacks are expressly prohibited by Additional Protocol I. This prohibition reflects a well-established rule of customary law applicable in all armed conflicts (emphasis added)."

Thus, according to the Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions, well-established customary international law, and the ruling of the highest court in the world, indiscriminate attacks—the defining characteristic of U.S. drone strikes—which kill or injure civilians are not to be considered "accidental" or "unintentional" but rather "direct attacks against civilians." Under the law, such attacks fall into the same category as a suicide bombing in the sense that it is by definition, nondiscriminatory and thereby considered to be plainly an attack on civilians. This reflects the principle of proportionality as it applies to discrimination.[47]

 

The second aspect of the May 2008 strike that needs to be addressed is the timing of the attack. According to a report issued in the prominent Pakistani newspaper, DAWN, which consistently provides reliable coverage from the tribal areas, "significantly, the missile strike came while a prisoner exchange was taking place between the government and militant commander, Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan." The article goes on to quote a "militant spokesman, Maulvi Muhammad Omar" who observed that "the missile strike was an attempt by the United States to derail the peace process between militants and the government."[48] In itself, the timing may or may not have been incidental and the assertion that the U.S. was attempting to "derail" potential peace agreements could be equally subject to suspicion. However, the specific timing of such an attack turned out not to be an isolated incident. In at least two other known cases U.S. drones attacked tribal area people and infrastructure in what appears to have been an attempt to sabotage ceasefire/neutrality agreements with area militants and the government of Pakistan.

 

In late October of 2006 the U.S. attacked a religious seminary in the same area of Bajaur province in Damadola on precisely "the day the government was expected to sign a peace agreement with militants in Bajaur replicating the September 5 truce reached with militants in North Waziristan." The attack predictably destroyed the possibility of the truce. DAWN reported that had the peace agreement been signed, it "would have resulted in the grant of a pardon to the two most wanted militants, Maulana Faqir Mohammad and Maulvi Liaqat. Both had been charged with harboring and providing shelter to Al Qaeda operatives."

 

Lending more credibility to the notion that the U.S. attacks were aimed at squashing a potential truce between the Pakistani government and the tribal area militants is the fact that there was no ostensible, declared, or even suspected "high value target" present at the scene of the October bombing. In fact, the strike was arguably the most blatant attack—and the most deadly—on a civilian population that the U.S. has carried out in Pakistan thus far. It has been confirmed that 82 people were killed in the strike on the religious school. While most of the victims were young male students in their early twenties "12 of them were said to be children in their early teens."[49] The fact that there was zero conceivable military advantage to the attack is further evidence that the strike may have been carried out for purely political reasons.

 

In another similar, more recent example, on October 21, 2009, a U.S missile strike in South Waziristan killed twelve people, likely including several children while maiming at least two girls, aged four and six.[50] The strike was politically significant because, according to AP reports, "it hit territory controlled by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a militant leader the [Pakistani] army has coaxed into remaining neutral during the [army's] offensive against the Mehsud faction in South Waziristan."Pakistan's military incursion into South Waziristan has been widely recognized as a policy derived from heavy and escalating U.S. pressure to confront tribal area militant strongholds in service of U.S. interests in occupied Afghanistan.The AP article goes on to report that the government of Pakistan "considers Bahadur, along with militant leader Maulvi Nazir of South Waziristan, lesser priorities because they focus on battling U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, not targets inside Pakistan."[51] Combined with the aforementioned examples, this fact lends serious credibility to the notion that the U.S. government indeed had a very strategic interest in using violence to destroy any neutrality agreements between Bahadur controlled militants and the Pakistani government. Furthermore it is not clear that any significant militant leader was being specifically targeted in the strike. A suspected al-Qaeda explosives expert, Abu Musa al Masri, was initially reported to have been killed in the attack, but U.S. intelligence officials have been admittedly unable to confirm this claim. It is worth noting that al Masri has been falsely reported dead on at least two prior occasions as well.[52]

 

Lastly, when considering the regional events which have unfolded in the months and years that have passed since the May 2008 strike and the October attacks of 2006 and 2009, it is not unrealistic or irrational to suspect that the U.S. indeed was pursuing a very real interest in blocking any sort of settlement between tribal militants and the Pakistani government. While it is not the purpose of this analysis to explore the entire geopolitical context of US-Pakistan-Afghanistan relations, it is certainly beyond reasonable debate that in the past several months—indeed since the Obama administration took office—the U.S. has strongly pushed and pressured the government of Pakistan to wage massive counterinsurgency campaigns against suspected militant strongholds in areas under Pakistani authority and sovereignty, as was seen, for example, in the Pakistani Army's ruthless operation in the SWAT Valley in April and May of 2009, as well as the army's incursion into South Waziristan which was launched in mid-October of 2009.

 

The purpose of raising questions in these cases regarding the purpose of individual U.S. attacks is to determine the legal implications of the nature of the strikes. If indeed the United States attacked on one or more occasions targets in Pakistan with the purpose of inflaming tensions between militants and the government in order to sabotage attempts at establishing a truce or ceasefire, the U.S. is potentially guilty of severe violations of the most fundamental rules of international law in making "the civilian population...the object of attacks," in the pursuit of a political goal (Section 2 of Article 51). Nonetheless, regardless of the political purpose of the attacks reviewed in this particular case study, it appears that serious violations of international law were likely committed by the U.S. in terms of discrimination and proportionality, possibly amounting to serious war crimes.

[Harconen]

Case Study #4

 

Case Study #4 contains accounts of two separate drone attacks. They have been grouped together in the interest of concision, and on the basis that the two incidents are characteristically similar and represent uniquely worrying developments in U.S. drone policy.

 

On Tuesday, May 19, 2009 three travelers passed through the village of Khaisor in North Waziristan. In keeping with traditional tribal area hospitality, local villagers served them a meal. Upon finishing their food, the travelers promptly moved on and left the village. These travelers happened to be members of the Taliban. U.S. drones, which routinely conduct surveillance flights of the area, apparently made note of the presence of the three Taliban men. At 4:30 a.m. the following morning (May 20th) a drone bombed the homes of the villagers who fed the men, ultimately "killing 14 women and children and two elders, [and] wounding 11."[53]

 

It is almost certain that drone operatives were aware that the three militants had indeed left the area long before the strike was launched. If the drone operatives were keeping such close surveillance on the area as to notice the otherwise insignificant occurrence of three traveling men passing through the village, it is likely that they took note of the militants' quick departure as well. The fact that the U.S. attacked the village the following day, well after the travelers had left, suggests that the bombing was intended to punish the villagers for feeding the ‘enemy' by bombing their homes, in a clear attack on civilian noncombatants including several children. The attack was further likely meant to intimidate locals into not providing any hospitality or aid to suspected militants in the future.

 

There is no doubt that the Khaisor strike constitutes a flagrant violation of Article 51(2) which plainly rejects any notion that civilians may under any circumstance be the object of attack. More specific to this case, Article 51(6) explicitly forbids the use of violence against civilians as a means of revenge or intimidation: "Attacks against the civilian population or civilians by way of reprisals are prohibited." Article 52(1) goes on to say that "civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals."

 

Just less than one month later (June 18th) in Raghzai, South Waziristan, a U.S. drone fired two missiles into a compound, killing one person. Immediately, locals rushed to the scene to rescue wounded survivors. The drone, still hovering over the area, seized the opportunity and fired an additional two missiles at the villagers who were attempting to attend to the wounded, killing 12 more people, 13 in all.[54] It was suspected that "Taliban commander," Wali Mohammed, may have been the initial target of the attack. Mohammed was reportedly not in the compound.[55]

 

This attack is significant for its deliberate targeting of local people who hurried to the site of the attack in an attempt to provide aid and assistance to those who were wounded in the initial strike. It again appears that drone operatives may have bombed and killed hospitable local villagers in an attempt to both punish and intimidate the general civilian population for its own purposes. Not only are attacks which are leveled against civilian noncombatants expressly prohibited under all circumstances, but moreover, international law—by both treaty and custom—specifically prohibits attacks on noncombatants seeking to provide aid to the wounded. Article 17(1) states that "the civilian population and aid societies...shall be permitted, even on their own initiative, to collect and care for the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked, even in invaded or occupied territories. No one shall be harmed prosecuted, convicted, or punished for such humanitarian acts." It is reasonable to conclude, based on the available evidence that both the attacks of May 20th and June 18th likely constitute considerable breaches of fundamental principles and provisions of all standards of international law which are applicable in all armed conflicts.

 

Case Study #5

 

On Tuesday, June 23, 2009, hundreds of Pakistanis attended a funeral in the Makeen district of South Waziristan for a suspected Taliban leader who was killed in a drone strike earlier that morning. Towards the end of the funeral as people were giving their last prayers, three missiles were fired from at least two U.S. drones directly into the crowd of mourners. Various reports put the death toll at roughly 70-80 people. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 35 of the dead were local villagers, among them ten children between the ages of 5-10 years old and four local tribal elders. Doctors told journalists and reporters that "most of the injured brought to them were [elderly] people."[56] According to one report at least 45 civilians were killed.[57] Another account suggested that "mostly civilians were killed in the strikes."[58] Every report agrees on the fact that no prominent or significant militant leader was harmed in the attack.

 

By all standards, the missile strikes on the funeral constitute, at best, both a disproportionate attack and a categorical failure to discriminate between military and civilian objects and targets, which as noted in Case Study #3, legally qualifies as a direct attack on civilians. Worse yet, it seems beyond controversy that the U.S. attack violates Article 53(a) which prohibits all parties from committing "any acts of hostility directed against [among other things]...places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples." Article 53(c) also prohibits "[making] such objects the object of reprisals."

 

These prohibitions on attacking places of worship render any claims of the June 24th funeral strike being a legitimate attack null and void, regardless who might have been in attendance. No reasonable standard of what constitutes a military objective or military character could possibly be applied to an unsuspecting crowd of mourners and worshippers praying at a funeral.

 

Extrajudicial Executions


Up until now, for the sake of evaluating the substance and results of the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, I have been tacitly assuming that the drone strikes are legitimate under international law as long U.S. operatives take proper precautions and distinguish between civilian and military objects. Virtually all mainstream commentary in the United States—critical or otherwise—on U.S. drone policy functions with the fundamental presupposition that the U.S. government has the right to target and kill suspected leaders of militant organizations at its own discretion.

 

In an official public statement on January 31, 2006, Amnesty International summarized and expanded upon a letter it wrote to then-President George W. Bush regarding recent drone strikes in Bajaur [Tribal] Agency. In the letter, Amnesty expressed its concern that "a pattern of killings carried out with [the drones] appeared to reflect a U.S. government policy condoning extrajudicial executions." The letter reiterated to the President that "extrajudicial executions are strictly prohibited under international human rights law. Anyone accused of an offence, however serious, has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and to have their guilt or innocence established in a regular court of law in a fair trial."

 

While making note of the close security and intelligence relationship shared by the U.S. and Pakistan, Amnesty International observed the fact "that the USA believed they knew the location of suspects, [which] suggests that it may have been possible to attempt to arrest the suspects in order to bring them to trial" rather than simply making assassination attempts. "The failure to attempt such arrest," AI continued, "points to a policy of elimination of suspects and a deliberate disregard of the duty to prosecute in a fair process."[59] Although Amnesty was making reference to one particular attack, the same principles clearly could apply to all U.S. attempts at targeted killings of "high value targets" in Pakistan.

 

In addition to international human rights law, extrajudicial assassinations are prohibited in accordance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States has ratified. Article 6(1) states that "Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life" (emphasis added). The subsequent Section of Article 6 further stipulates that the "penalty [of death] can only be carried out pursuant to a final judgement rendered by a competent court."[60]

 

Also reflecting clear standards of international law is Article 6(2) of Additional Protocol II. The following provisions reflect principles similar to those outlined in the ICCPR and are specifically applicable if the U.S. in its drone strikes in Pakistani territory is perceived to be working in concert with the government of Pakistan. Section 2(d) reaffirms that "anyone charged with an offence is presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law." Section 2(e) of Article 6 stipulates that "anyone charged with an offence shall have the right to be tried in his presence."[61]


The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Philip Alston, has also criticized the drone strikes on the basis that "drones/Predators are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law." Alston, who is also a professor of law at New York University and co-chair of the law school's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, has repeatedly called on U.S. administrations to disclose both the details of the drone program and the subsequent legal basis under which the program is being operated. So long as the U.S. government refuses to openly discuss its drone assassination policy, Alston says, "you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws."[62]

 

In the past, several U.S. administrations have attempted to legally justify their authority to arbitrarily assassinate people on the grounds that longstanding executive orders banning extrajudicial executions do not apply to anyone declared to be an "enemy commander."[63] This interpretation has no legal significance or acceptance among independent human rights groups, the International Court of Justice, the ICRC, the United Nations Council for Human Rights, or any other legitimate authority on international law. In fact, such an interpretation is virtually indistinguishable from the Bush administration's claim that those whom the U.S. declare to be "enemy combatants" are not entitled to human rights protections and Prisoner of War status guaranteed to them under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Of course, these legal distortions have since been widely discredited, even rejected as illegitimate by David Petraeus, the Commanding General of the "Multi-National Force" in Iraq under former President Bush.[64] The prohibition on extrajudicial executions is a core principle of both treaty law and customary law. U.S. drone attacks in this sense differ from the obviously illegal act of shooting a suspect on his knees in the back of the head with handgun only in that U.S. attacks often kill defenseless civilians at high rates, who often have no meaningful relation to any military conflict.

[Harconen]

Technical Classifications

 

In this analysis of U.S. drone policy towards Pakistan I have reviewed the most prominent and mainstream casualty reports, numerous independent accounts compiled by journalists and human rights workers, and have generally drawn from an extremely diverse, credible, and international collection of media reports chronicling the details of several drone attacks over a period of 45 months. Using a broad range of international legal conventions, protocols, covenants, customs, and high court rulings, I have sought in earnest to determine the legal status of U.S. actions and policy. Based upon these uncontroversial and universal standards of law it appears beyond any reasonable legal objection that the United States in its nearly four year policy of bombing Pakistan with unmanned aerial vehicles is guilty of a very large amount of war crimes, including failure to take proper precautions in the interest of protecting civilian life, failing to discriminate between military and civilian objects, disproportionate attacks, extrajudicial executions, committing acts of hostility and violence against places of worship, direct attacks on the civilian population and individual civilians, willful attacks on civilians seeking to provide assistance to the wounded, and making civilian objects the object of attack and reprisal.

 

Furthermore, using the official legal standards of the United States government as articulated in the U.S. code—legislation which has passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate—it appears that the drone strikes would be technically classified as "international terrorism" which refers to "activities [transcending national boundaries] that— involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State...or that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction [or] assassination...."[65]

 

Recalling the judgment of the International Criminal Court which ruled that indiscriminate attacks qualify as direct attacks against civilians and recognizing the nature of the strikes reviewed in Case Studies 3-5 in particular, it is the opinion of this analysis that the actions of the U.S. government in respect to its bombing campaign in Pakistan appear to have been often intended to intimidate or coerce civilian populations and to influence the conduct of the Pakistani government through violence. It is also certain that indiscriminate attacks, direct attacks on civilians, and extrajudicial assassinations would be clear violations of the criminal laws of the United States or of any other State.

 

 

 

Final Remarks

 

This report has generally avoided the potential issues of aggression and violation of sovereignty due to the widespread belief, both in the United States and Pakistan, that the Pakistani government while publicly opposing most drone attacks has indeed privately given the U.S. the green light to carry out such attacks. However, even if the allegations are true, it is unclear if the consent of the government of Pakistan has any substantial effect on the U.S. policy. Also, it is notable that according to public opinion polls, the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis, 76%, are opposed to the U.S. strikes, with 80% entirely opposed to U.S. involvement in Pakistan's internal struggle against terrorism.[66] The argument could certainly be made that the U.S. strikes do in fact constitute a violation of the Charter of the United Nations under Article 2(4) as well as a violation of the principles of the Nuremburg Tribunal which not only prohibits the crime of aggression but declares it to be "the supreme international crime."

 

Nevertheless, the documentary evidence of the nature, practice, and results of U.S. bombings juxtaposed with well-established principles of international law suggests the near-certainty of the commission of many war crimes over a sustained period of time on the part of the United States government. In light of these implications, it is the opinion of this analysis that the U.S. government should declare an immediate and unconditional moratorium on drone strikes and "targeted killings" of any kind, in Pakistan or elsewhere. It is also the opinion of this analysis that an independent fact-finding commission should be appointed by the United Nations to gather data and testimonies in order to investigate these allegations further. In the United States, representative government bodies should immediately take measures to declassify CIA and State Department documents regarding existing legal memos on the use of targeted killings and all other relevant information concerning the human costs of the drone policy. Congress might also subpoena officials from both the Bush and Obama administrations and the Central Intelligence Agency to testify under oath to this end. If indeed it is determined by either Congress or the UN fact finding commission that abuses and violations have likely taken place, those responsible should be charged and tried in the International Criminal Court, in accordance with reasonably analogous precedents and the basic guidelines of international law.

 


Max Kantar is an independent writer and Michigan based human rights activist. He frequently writes on U.S. foreign policy, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, social justice, and mainstream American media coverage. He can be contacted at maxkantar@gmail.com.

 

 

Notes
 

[1] Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (military aircraft without people inside them) which are operated by computer remote control. The drones are capable of carrying several Hellfire missiles and multiple 500-pound laser-guided bombs. Drones are also used extensively for surveillance purposes. In the case of US strikes in Pakistan, the drones are guided and monitored from Creech Air Force base in the state of Nevada. It is not matter of certainty where the actual drones are launched from. Although it was previously assumed that the drones were being launched from military bases in Afghanistan, Senator Diane Feinstein told a U.S. Senate hearing in February that the drones were being flown from an air base inside Pakistan.

 

[2] Amir Mir, "60 drone hits kill 14 al-Qaeda men, 687 civilians," The News, April 10, 2009, http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=21440.

 

[3] Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, "The Drone War," The New Republic, June 3, 2009, http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2009/drone_war_13672.

 

[4] David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, "Death From Above, Outrage Down Below," New York Times, May 17, 2009.

 

[5] It should be noted though that the authors did express reservations about the certainty or lack thereof regarding the casualty numbers provided in the April report published in The News. However, given Kilcullen's repeated endorsement of the April report, readers might reasonably attribute this mild reservation to Exum.

 

[6] Daniel L. Byman, "Do Targeted Killings Work?," Brookings, July 14, 2009, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0714_targeted_killings_byman.aspx.

 

[7] "About Brookings," Brookings, http://www.brookings.edu/about/reputation.aspx. See the reports linked for Think Tank Index and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

 

[8] Peter Bergen & Katherine Tiedemann, "Revenge of the Drones: An Analysis of Drone Strikes in Pakistan," The New America Foundation, October 19, 2009, http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/revenge_drones.

 

[9] The media organizations consistently and exclusively cited by Bergen and Tiedemann include (in their own words) "reports in the New York Times, Washington Post,

 

[10] CNN, "Official: Al Qaeda weaons expert likely killed in U.S. airstrike," July 29, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/07/29/pakistan.strike/index.html.

 

[11] Ibid.

 

[12] Craig Whitlock, "The New Al-Qaeda Central," The Washington Post, September 9, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/08/AR2007090801845.html.

 

[13] Anwarullah Khan, "82 die as missiles rain on Bajaur: Pakistan owns up to strike; locals blame US drones," DAWN, October 31, 2006, http://www.dawn.com/2006/10/31/top1.htm. Note: In regards to the title which suggests that the Pakistani government may have been responsible for carrying out the strike, this claim has since been categorically abandoned by the Pakistani government. It is now a matter of zero controversy that US drones were indeed responsible for the attack, just as the locals had been saying all along. Bergen and Tiedemann also are apparently unaware of this development as they noted reservations about the identity of the attacker. For clarification: Christina Lamb, "US carried out madrasah bombing," The Sunday Times, November 26, 2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article650044.ece.

 

[14] ‘Unconfirmed' or ‘unidentified' in this instance refers to the legal status (rather than the name) of those killed in drone attacks.

 

[15] Bergen & Tiedemann, "Revenge of the Drones." See appendix 2. It is worth mentioning that for 2009, and generally speaking, a considerable majority of the media reports cited relies heavily, if not exclusively, on statements from government sources. Such information should be reviewed with general skepticism for the reason that, as virtually every independent observer has acknowledged, civilian casualties are inevitable in drone strikes due to, among other factors, the poorly constructed tribal infrastructure, systematically unreliable intelligence, the civilian nature of the areas surrounding suspected compounds, and the civilian nature of many of the objects attacked by drones (such as homes).

 

[16] CNN, "U.S. airstrikes in Pakistan called ‘very effective,'" May 18, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/18/cia.pakistan.airstrikes/. 

 

[17] Gareth Porter, "US-Pakistan: CIA Secrecy on Drone Attacks Data Hides Abuses," Inter Press Service News Agency, June 12, 2009, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47196.

 

[18] International Humanitarian Law - Treaties and Documents, "Geneva Conventions of 1949 & Additional Protocols," International Committee of the Red Cross, http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/CONVPRES?OpenView. Any reference made to the Geneva Conventions and its Additional Protocols henceforth can be cross checked or reviewed here where the full text of all four conventions and all three protocols can be accessed.

 

[19] Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm. Any reference made to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights henceforth can be cross checked or reviewed here where the full text of the Covenant can be accessed.

 

 

 

[20] "Geneva Conventions," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2009
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2009 Microsoft Corporation.

 

[21] It is widely understood that the fear of "legitimizing national liberation movements" had much to do with Palestinian nationalism (the PLO) and resistance to US-backed Israeli occupation. It is also likely that this object stemmed largely in part from longtime US fears of what postwar planners called "radical third world nationalism," meaning quite literally, popular movements in poor countries aimed at improving the living standards of the poor majority at the expense of catering to foreign investors.

 

[22] "Geneva Conventions," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia.

 

[23] "Statute of the Court," International Court of Justice, http://www.icj-cij.org/documents/index.php?p1=4&p2=2&p3=0.

 

[24] Cornelio Sommaruga, "Appeal by the International Committee of the Red Cross on the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Additional Protocols of 1977," International Review of the Red Cross, http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/57JNUX.

 

[25] "The Prosecutor v. Stanislav Galic: Judgment and Opinion," Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, December 12, 2003 (http://sim.law.uu.nl/sim/caselaw/tribunalen.nsf/6c3f0d5286f9bf3cc12571b500329d62/31f622000d199e48c12571fe004be26e?OpenDocument). See the second heading, "Attack on Civilians as a Violation of the Laws or Customs of War" and correspondingly, section 57.

 

[26] Ibid.

 

[27] International Committee of the Red Cross, "List of customary rules of international humanitarian law," March 31, 2005, http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/customary-law-rules-291008.

 

[28] To be clear, until otherwise stated, all following references to "Articles" of international law in respect to the case studies should be assumed to be derived from Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

 

[29] International Committee of the Red Cross, "List of customary rules of international humanitarian law."

 

[30] Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, "U.S. attack on Taliban kills 23 in Pakistan," New York Times, September 9, 2008.

 

[31] "Civilian deaths in Pakistan attack," Al Jazeera English, September 8, 2009, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2008/09/2008985226998512.html.

 

[32] Whitlock, "The New Al-Qaeda Central."

 

[33] Habibullah Khan and Brian Ross, "U.S. Strike Killed Al-Qaeda Bomb Maker," ABC News, January 18, 2006, http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1517986. 

 

[34] Christina Lamb, "Airstrike misses Al-Qaeda Chief," The Sunday Times, January 15, 2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article788673.ece.

 

[35] Imtiaz Ali in Damadola and Massoud Ansari, "Pakistan fury as CIA airstrike on village kills 18," The Daily Telegraph, January 15, 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/1507895/Pakistan-fury-as-CIA-airstrike-on-village-kills-18.html.

 

[36] Whitlock, "The New Al-Qaeda Central."

 

[37] Amnesty International, "Pakistan: US involvement in civilian deaths," January 31, 2006, http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=ENGASA330022006.

 

[38] It has been well documented by Human Rights Watch as well as others that Pakistani security forces routinely torture prisoners and detainees. It is simply rational to assume that a fairly high-level al-Qaeda operative like al-Libi was also tortured into providing, what turned out to be, false information.

 

[39] Whitlock, "The New Al-Qaeda Central." 

 

[40] Bobby Ghosh and Mark Thompson, "The CIA's Silent War in Pakistan," TIME, June 1, 2009.

 

[41] Declan Walsh, "Mysterious ‘chip' is CIA's latest weapon against al-Qaida targets hiding in Pakistan's tribal belt," The Guardian, May 31, 2009.

 

[42] Porter, "US-Pakistan: CIA Secrecy on Drone Attacks Data Hides Abuses."

 

[43] Walsh, "Mysterious ‘chip' is CIA's latest weapon...."

 

[44] Ghosh and Thompson, "The CIA's Secret War...."

 

[45] ICRC, "List of customary rules of international humanitarian law."

 

[46] Jason Burke, "Al-Qaeda chief dies in missile air strike," The Guardian, June 1, 2008.

 

[47] "The Prosecutor v. Stanislav Galic: Judgment and Opinion," Netherlands Institute of Human Rights. Again, see the second heading, "Attack on Civilians as a Violation of the Laws or Customs of War" and correspondingly, section 57.

 

[48] Anwarullah Khan, "12 killed in drone attack on Damadola," DAWN, May 15, 2008, http://www.dawn.com/2008/05/15/top5.htm.

 

[49] Khan, "82 die as missiles rain on Bajaur: Pakistan owns up to strike; locals blame US drones."

 

[50] Hussain Afzal and Nahal Toosi, "Missile strike could complicate Pakistan battle," Associated Press, October 21, 2009, http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/10/21/missile-strike-could-complicate-pakistan-battle/ (accessed November 15, 2009). 

 

[51] Ibid.

 

[52] Bill Roggio, "Al Qaeda commander reported killed in US airstrike," The Long War Journal, October 21, 2009, http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/10/al_qaeda_commander_r_1.php (accessed November 15, 2009).

 

[53] Kathy Kelly, "Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan," The Huffington Post, June 9, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-kelly/visitors-and-hosts-in-pak_b_213472.html.

 

[54] Kathy Kelly, "Now We See You, Now We Don't," The Huffington Post, June 25, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-kelly/now-we-see-you-now-we-don_b_220578.html.

 

[55] Pir Zubair Shah, "Pakistan Says U.S. Drone Kills 13," New York Times, June 19, 2009.

 

[56] Mushtaq Yusufzai, Irfan Burki and Malik Mumtaz, "No prominent militant killed in drone attack," The News, June 25, 2009, http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=22926.

 

[57] "‘US Drone' hits Pakistan funeral," Al Jazeera English, June 24, 2009, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/06/20096244230395712.html.

 

[58] "Missile attacks kill 50 in South Waziristan," DAWN, June 24, 2009, http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/04-suspected-us-drone-strikes-swaziristan-qs-03.

 

[59] Amnesty International, "Pakistan: US involvement in civilian deaths."

 

[60] Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." See note 19 for link.

 

[61] International Humanitarian Law - Treaties and Documents, "Geneva Conventions of 1949 & Additional Protocols," International Committee of the Red Cross. See note 13 for link.

 

[62] Agence France-Presse, "US Drone Strikes May Break International Law: UN," CommonDreams.org, October 28, 2009, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/10/28 (accessed November 15, 2009).

 

[63] Bergen and Tiedemann, "The Drone War."

 

[64] Scott Horton, "Petraeus: Bush Administration Violated Geneva Conventions," Harper's Magazine, June 1, 2009, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/06/hbc-90005079.

 

[65] Find Law, "Cases and Codes: US Code," http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/. Search Title 18, Section 2331. 

 

[66] Jane Perlez, "Pakistanis Continue to Reject U.S. Partnership," New York Times, September 30, 2009.

 

 Global Research Articles by Max Kantar