Killing America's Kids and Driving Them Insane

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Iraq slaughter not an aberration

Glen Greenwald
Salon
Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:34 EDT

Previously classified footage of
a July 2007 attack by U.S. Apache helicopters
that killed a Reuters journalist and several
other non-insurgents, published on WikiLeaks.

I was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange discussing the Iraq video they released yesterday, and there's one vital point I want to emphasize. Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That's why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre, and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today -- about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation -- is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.

But there's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we're seeing it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.

A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That's why it's repulsive to watch people -- including some "liberals" -- attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time." That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior.

As the video demonstrates, the soldiers in the Apache did not take a single step -- including killing those unarmed men who tried to rescue the wounded -- without first receiving formal permission from their superiors. Beyond that, the Pentagon yesterday -- once the video was released -- suddenly embraced the wisdom of transparency by posting online the reports of the so-called "investigations" it undertook into this incident (as a result of pressure from Reuters). Those formal investigations not only found that every action taken by those soldiers was completely justified -- including the firing on the unarmed civilian rescuers -- but also found that there's no need for any remedial steps to be taken to prevent future re-occurence.  What we see on that video is what the U.S. does on a constant and regular basis in these countries, and it's what we've been doing for years. It's obviously consistent with our policies and practices for how we fight in these countries, which is exactly what those investigative reports concluded.

The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- at least not primarily. Of course those who aren't accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.

All of this is usually kept from us. Unlike those in the Muslim world, who are shown these realities quite frequently by their free press, we don't usually see what is done by us. We stay blissfully insulated from it, so that in those rare instances when we're graphically exposed to it, we can tell ourselves that it's all very unusual and rare. That's how we collectively dismissed the Abu Ghraib photos, and it's why the Obama administration took such extraordinary steps to suppress all the rest of the torture photos: because further disclosure would have revealed that behavior to be standard and common, not at all unusual or extraordinary.

Precisely the same dynamic applies to the Pentagon's admission yesterday that its original claims about the brutal February killing of five civilians in Eastern Afghanistan were totally false. What happened there -- the slaughter of unthreatening civilians, official lies told about the incident, the dissemination of those lies by an uncritical U.S. media -- is what happens constantly (the same deceitful cover-up behavior took place with the Iraq video). The lies about the Afghan killings were exposed in this instance not because they're rare, but because one very intrepid, relentless reporter happened to be able to travel to the remote province and speak to witnesses and investigate the event, forcing the Pentagon to acknowledge the truth.

The value of the Wikileaks/Iraq video and the Afghanistan revelation is not that they exposed unusually horrific events. The value is in realizing that these event are anything but unusual.

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How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan: US soldiers are deliberately targeting civilians

Glen Greenwald
Salon.com
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 06:27 EDT

February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were "insurgents" or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of "honor killings" by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon's version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon's version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

One NATO official said that there had likely been an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim). The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, "US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened."

What is clear -- yet again -- is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly "reports" on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact. Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was "reported" by CNN on February 12:

Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an "honor killing." The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an "unnamed senior military official said" about the incident, and it even helpfully explained:

    An honor killing is a murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them.

    The U.S. official said it isn't clear whether the dishonor in this case stemmed from accusations of acts such as adultery or even cooperating with NATO forces.

    "It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing," said the official, who added the Taliban could be responsible. . .

    The operation unfolded when Afghan and international forces went to the compound, which was thought to be a site of militant activity. A firefight ensued and several insurgents died, several people left the compound, and eight others were detained.

Similarly, The New York Times, while noting that there were "varying accounts of what happened" among U.S. forces and their allies in the Afghan police, also passed along the Pentagon's false version of events with no questioning. Here's the NYT's February 12 article in its entirety:

Several civilians were killed in Paktia Province on Friday when a joint Afghan-NATO force went to investigate a report of militant activity, but NATO and the Afghan police gave varying accounts of what happened. A NATO statement said the joint force went to a compound in the village of Khatabeh, in the Gardez district, where insurgents opened fire on them from a residential compound. Several insurgents were killed  and a large number of men, women and children fled and were detained by the NATO force. Inside the compound, soldiers "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed," the NATO statement said. The Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, confirmed the episode but said the dead in the house were two men and three women, who he said were killed by Taliban militants. He said the killings took place while the residents were celebrating the birth of a baby.

CNN conveyed its version of events without the slightest contradiction or doubt, and the NYT simply ignored entirely the claims of the residents of the village -- notwithstanding the fact that serious conflicts about what actually took place were known from the very beginning. Consider, for instance, this February 12 article by Amir Shah of the Associated Press, who actually bothered to pick up a phone to determine if the Pentagon's claims were true before "reporting" them as fact; this is what Shah found:

However, relatives of the dead accused American forces of being responsible for the deaths of all five people when contacted by The Associated Press by phone.

A man who identified himself as Hamidullah said he had been in the home as some 20 people gathered to celebrate the birth of a son when a group of men he described as "U.S. special forces" surrounded the compound.

When one man came out into the courtyard to ask why, Hamidullah said he watched U.S. forces gun him down.


"Daoud was coming out of the house to ask what was going on. And then they shot him," he said.

Then they killed a second man, Hamidullah said. The rest of the group were forced out into the yard, made to kneel and had their hands bound behind their back, he said, breaking off crying without giving any further details.

A deputy provincial council member in Gardez, Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, said news of the operation has inflamed the local community that believes the Americans were responsible for the deaths.

"Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women. The people are so angry," he said.

The Pentagon's version of events was vehemently disputed from the start. But there was not a hint of any of that in the CNN or NYT "reporting," which simply adopted the press release claims of NATO forces. That Press Release, false from start to finish, claimed that "a combined force of Afghan and international troops last night found the bound and gagged bodies of two women and the bodies of two men during an operation in the province's Gardez district," and "members of the combined force found the bodies inside." Ironically, the Pentagon Press Release ended this way: "'ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,' ISAF spokesman Canadian army Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay said." On March 16 -- more than a month later, and only after a major investigative report about this incident was published by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London -- the NYT  ran a story detailing the gruesome claims of residents about what really happened; click that link for the horrific details and to get a sense for how false were the Pentagon and U.S. media's original claims about what took place.

Contrast the pure propaganda dissemination of the American media with the immediate reporting of the Pajhwok Afghan News, an independent news agency created in Afghanistan to enable war reporting by Afghans. Here is how they reported the Pakita incident from the beginning, on Febraury 12 (via NEXIS):

US Special Forces have shot dead a district intelligence chief along with four family members in the volatile southeastern province of Paktia, a senior police officer claimed on Friday. Brig. Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar explained that Daud and his family were celebrating the birth of his son. But acting on a misleading tip-off, foreign troops raided the intelligence official's residence. . . . He said the dead included Daud, his brother Zahir, an employee of the attorney's office, and three women. . . .

But the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed Afghan and international forces found the bound and gagged bodies of three women during the operation in Gardez late Thursday night. "The joint force went to a compound near the village of Khatabeh, after intelligence confirmed militant activity. Several insurgents  engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed," the ISAF press office in Kabul said. . . .

When the troops entered the compound, according to the press release, they conducted a thorough search and found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed. "The bodies had been hidden in an adjacent room."

Note the crucial difference: the Afghan news service shaped its report based on the statements of actual witnesses on the ground and local investigators, while also including the Pentagon's version of events. Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.

* * * * *

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All of this is a chronic problem, not an isolated one, with war reporting generally and events in Afghanistan specifically. Just consider what happened when the U.S. military was forced in 2008 to retract its claims about a brutal air raid in Azizabad. The Pentagon had vehemently denied the villagers' claim that close to 100 civilians had been killed and that no Taliban were in the vicinity: until a video emerged proving the villagers' claims were true and the Pentagon's false. Last week, TPM highlighted a recent, largely overlooked statement from Gen. McChrystal, where he admitted, regarding U.S. killings of Afghans at check points:  "to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." And as I documented before, the U.S. media constantly repeats false Pentagon claims about American air attacks around the world in order to create the false impression that Key Terrorists were killed while no civilians were.

At the Nieman Watchdog Foundation, Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan war reporter for The Times of London who published the March 13 investigative report, has a crucial, must-read piece on all of this. Amazingly, his Nieman piece was written three weeks ago, and recounted in detail: (a) how clearly the U.S.-led forces had lied about what happened in Paktia; and (b) the reasons why the U.S. media continuously spews false government propaganda about the war. Starkey wrote under this headline:

In this mid-March piece, Starkey explained how he had discovered that NATO's claims about the Paktia incident were false (he recounted that evidence in gruesome detail in the Times  on March 13, three days before the NYT finally returned to the story to correct its original reporting), and more importantly, highlighted why the U.S. media so frequently disseminates false NATO claims with no questioning:

The only way I found out NATO had lied -- deliberately or otherwise -- was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.

NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged. . . .

It's not the first time I've found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.

There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military's monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are "cowards," NATO attacks on civilians are "tragic accidents," intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.

Starkey describes some of the understandable reasons so many reporters do nothing more than regurgitate officials claims: resource constraints, organizations limits, dangers of traveling around, and the "embed culture." But he also recounts how NATO tries to intimidate, censor and punish any reporters like him who report adversely on official claims. Illustratively, in response to Starkey's March 13 article detailing what really happened at Paktia and the cover-up that ensued, NATO issued a formal statement singling him out and accusing him of publishing an article that was "categorically false." As recently as that mid-March statement, NATO was still claiming -- falsely -- that the women in Paktia were killed prior to the arrival of American troops, and they were impugning the integrity of the reporter (Starkey) who was proving otherwise (see the Update below for my interview with Starkey today).

There are some very courageous and intrepid reporters in Afghanistan, including some who work for American media outlets. It was, for instance, a superb and brave investigative report by the NYT's Carlotta Gall in Afghanistan that uncovered what really happened in that air attack on Azizabad and who documented the Pentagon's false claims. But far more often, Americans are completely misled about events in Afghanistan by the combination of false official claims and mindless stenographic American "journalism." And no matter how many times this process is exposed -- from Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight to Pat Tillman's death by Al Qeada -- this relentless propaganda machine never seems to diminish.

Update: I spoke this morning with Jerome Starkey, who is in Kabul, regarding his investigation into this incident and the various ways reporters are deterred from investigating NATO claims. The discussion, which is roughly 20 minutes in length, can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder here [scroll down to foot of article].

Update II: As I noted in the piece I wrote on the War on WikiLeaks, that site had obtained a videotape highly incriminating of the Pentagon. Today, they released it: it shows the gruesome killing of Iraqi civilians, including Reuters journalists, by American troops, an incident which the U.S. military insisted involved the killing of "insurgents." I'll be on MSNBC today at 4:00 p.m. EST to discuss these matters.

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Opium and the CIA: Can the US Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War in Afghanistan?

by Prof Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, April 9, 2010
Japan Focus - 2010-04-05

Alfred McCoy’s important new article (TomDispatch, posted on Global Research, April 5, 2010) deserves to mobilize Congress for a serious revaluation of America’s ill-considered military venture in Afghanistan. The answer to the question he poses in his title – “Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State? – is amply shown by his impressive essay to be a resounding “No!” . . . not until there is fundamental change in the goals and strategies both of Washington and of Kabul.

He amply documents that

    • the Afghan state of Hamid Karzai is a corrupt narco-state, to which Afghans are forced to pay bribes each year $2.5 billion, a quarter of the nation’s economy;

    • the Afghan economy is a narco-economy: in 2007 Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.

Map of Afghanistan showing major poppy fields and intensity of conflict 2007-08

• military options for dealing with the problem are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive: McCoy argues that the best hope lies in reconstructing the Afghan countryside until food crops become a viable alternative to opium, a process that could take ten or fifteen years, or longer. (I shall argue later for an interim solution: licensing Afghanistan with the International Narcotics Board to sell its opium legally.)

Perhaps McCoy’s most telling argument is that in Colombia cocaine at its peak represented only about 3 percent of the national economy, yet both the FARC guerillas and the right-wing death squads, both amply funded by drugs, still continue to flourish in that country. To simply eradicate drugs, without first preparing for a substitute Afghan agriculture, would impose intolerable strains on an already ravaged rural society whose only significant income flow at this time derives from opium. One has only to look at the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, after a draconian Taliban-led reduction in Afghan drug production (from 4600 tons to 185 tons) left the country a hollow shell.

On its face, McCoy’s arguments would appear to be incontrovertible, and should, in a rational society, lead to a serious debate followed by a major change in America’s current military policy. McCoy has presented his case with considerable tact and diplomacy, to facilitate such a result.


The CIA’s Historic Responsibility for Global Drug Trafficking

Unfortunately, there are important reasons why such a positive outcome is unlikely any time soon. There are many reasons for this, but among them are some unpleasant realities which McCoy has either avoided or downplayed in his otherwise brilliant essay, and which have to be confronted if we will ever begin to implement sensible strategies in Afghanistan.

The first reality is that the extent of CIA involvement in and responsibility for the global drug traffic is a topic off limits for serious questioning in policy circles, electoral campaigns, and the mainstream media. Those who have challenged this taboo, like the journalist Gary Webb, have often seen their careers destroyed in consequence.

Since Alfred McCoy has done more than anyone else to heighten public awareness of CIA responsibility for drug trafficking in American war zones, I feel awkward about suggesting that he downplays it in his recent essay. True, he acknowledges that “Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets,” and he adds that “the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region.”

But in a very strange sentence, McCoy suggests that the CIA was passively drawn into drug alliances in the course of combating Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the years 1979-88, whereas in fact the CIA clearly helped create them precisely to fight the Soviets:

    In one of history's ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia's opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region's highland warlords.

There was no such “accident” in Afghanistan, where the first local drug lords on an international scale – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abu Rasul Sayyaf – were in fact launched internationally as a result of massive and ill-advised assistance from the CIA, in conjunction with the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While other local resistance forces were accorded second-class status, these two clients of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, precisely because they lacked local support, pioneered the use of opium and heroin to build up their fighting power and financial resources.1 Both, moreover, became agents of salafist extremism, attacking the indigenous Sufi-influenced Islam of Afghanistan. And ultimately both became sponsors of al Qaeda.2

CIA involvement in the drug trade hardly began with its involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war. To a certain degree, the CIA’s responsibility for the present dominant role of Afghanistan in the global heroin traffic merely replicated what had happened earlier in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became factors in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.

One cannot talk of “ironic accidents” here either. McCoy himself has shown how, in all of these countries, the CIA not only tolerated but assisted the growth of drug-financed anti-Communist assets, to offset the danger of Communist Chinese penetration into Southeast Asia. As in Afghanistan today CIA assistance helped turn the Golden Triangle, from the 1940s to the 1970s, into a leading source for the world’s opium.

In this same period the CIA recruited assets along the smuggling routes of the Asian opium traffic as well, in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Italy, France, Cuba, Honduras, and Mexico. These assets have included government officials like Manuel Noriega of Panama or Vladimiro Montesinos of Peru, often senior figures in CIA-assisted police and intelligence services. But they have also included insurrectionary movements, ranging from the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s to (according to Robert Baer and Seymour Hersh) the al Qaeda-linked Jundallah, operating today in Iran and Baluchistan.3

CIA map tracing opium traffic from Afghanistan to Europe, 1998. The CIA cite, updated in 2008 states “Most Southwest Asian heroin flows overland through Iran and Turkey to Europe via the Balkans.” But in fact drugs also flow through the states of the former Soviet Union, and through Pakistan and Dubai.

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The Karzai Government, not the Taliban, Dominate the Afghan Dope Economy


Perhaps the best example of such CIA influence via drug traffickers today is in Afghanistan itself, where those accused of drug trafficking include President Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai (an active CIA asset), and Abdul Rashid Dostum (a former CIA asset).4 The drug corruption of the Afghan government must be attributed at least in part to the U.S. and CIA decision in 2001 to launch an invasion with the support of the Northern Alliance, a movement that Washington knew to be drug-corrupted.5

 
In this way the U.S. consciously recreated in Afghanistan the situation it had created earlier in Vietnam. There too (like Ahmed Wali Karzai a half century later) the president’s brother, Ngo dinh Nhu, used drugs to finance a private network that was used to rig an election for Ngo dinh Diem.6 Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, has pointed out the unlikelihood of a counterinsurgency program succeeding when that program is in support of a local government that is flagrantly dysfunctional and corrupt.7

 
Thus I take issue with McCoy when he, echoing the mainstream U.S. media, depicts the Afghan drug economy as one dominated by the Taliban. (In McCoy’s words, “If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.”) The Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy is variously estimated from $90 to $400 million. But the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the total Afghan annual earnings from opium and heroin are in the order of from $2.8 to $3.4 billion.8

 
Clearly the Taliban have not “captured” this economy, of which the largest share by far is controlled by supporters of the Karzai government. In 2006 a report to the World Bank argued “that at the top level, around 25-30 key traffickers, the majority of them in southern Afghanistan, control major transactions and transfers, working closely with sponsors in top government and political positions.”9 In 2007 the London Daily Mail reported that "the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government."10

 
The American media have confronted neither this basic fact nor the way in which it has distorted America’s opium and war policies in Afghanistan. The Obama administration appears to have shifted away from the ill-advised eradication programs of the Bush era, which are certain to lose the hearts and minds of the peasantry. It has moved instead towards a policy of selective interdiction of the traffic, explicitly limited to attacks on drug traffickers who are supporting the insurgents.11

 
This policy may or may not be effective in weakening the Taliban. But to target what constitutes about a tenth of the total traffic will clearly never end Afghanistan’s current status as the world’s number one narco-state. Nor will it end the current world post-1980s heroin epidemic, which has created five million addicts in Pakistan, over two million addicts inside Russia, eight hundred thousand addicts in America, over fifteen million addicts in the world, and one million addicts inside Afghanistan itself. Nor will it end the current world post-1980s heroin epidemic, which has created five million addicts in Pakistan, over two million addicts inside Russia, eight hundred thousand addicts in America, over fifteen million addicts in the world, and one million addicts inside Afghanistan itself. 

 
The Obama government’s policy of selective interdiction also helps explain its reluctance to consider the most reasonable and humane solution to the world’s Afghan heroin epidemic. This is the “poppy for medicine” initiative of the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS, formerly known as The Senlis Council): to establish a trial licensing scheme, allowing farmers to sell their opium for the production of much-needed essential medicines such as morphine and codeine.12

 
The proposal has received support from the European Parliament and in Canada; but it has come under heavy attack in the United States, chiefly on the grounds that it might well lead to an increase in opium production. It would however provide a short-term answer to the heroin epidemic that is devastating Europe and Russia – something not achieved by McCoy’s long-term alternative of crop substitution over ten or fifteen years, still less by the current Obama administration’s program of selective elimination of opium supplies.

 
An unspoken consequence of the “poppy for medicine” initiative would be to shrink the illicit drug proceeds that are helping to support the Karzai government. Whether for this reason, or simply because anything that smacks of legalizing drugs is a tabooed subject in Washington, the “poppy for medicine” initiative is unlikely to be endorsed by the Obama administration.

 
Afghan Heroin and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection

 
There is another important paragraph where McCoy, I think misleadingly, focuses attention on Afghanistan, rather than America itself, as the locus of the problem:

 
At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia's Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan's current opium crop at $65 billion.  Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan's farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance "to the drug mafia," leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government (emphasis added) in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.

 
What this paragraph omits is the pertinent fact that, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, only 5 or 6 percent of that $65 billion, or from $2.8 to $3.4 billion, stays inside Afghanistan itself.13 An estimated 80 percent of the earnings from the drug trade are derived from the countries of consumption – in this case, Russia, Europe, and America. Thus we should not think for a moment that the only government corrupted by the Afghan drug trade is the country of origin. Everywhere the traffic has become substantial, even if only in transit, it has survived through protection, which in other words means corruption.

 
There is no evidence to suggest that drug money from the CIA’s trafficker assets fattened the financial accounts of the CIA itself, or of its officers. But the CIA profited indirectly from the drug traffic, and developed over the years a close relationship with it. The CIA’s off-the-books war in Laos was one extreme case where it fought a war, using as its chief assets the Royal Laotian Army of General Ouane Rattikone and the Hmong Army of General Vang Pao, which were, in large part, drug-financed. The CIA’s massive Afghanistan operation in the 1980s was another example of a war that was in part drug-financed.

General Vang Pao and the Hmong Army

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx62qNR5Shc&feature=player_embedded

Video shows the CIA’s Hmong Army led by Gen. Vang Pao in action in Laos

Protection for Drug Trafficking in America

Thus it is not surprising that the U.S. Government, following the lead of the CIA, has over the years become a protector of drug traffickers against criminal prosecution in this country. For example both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the  indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,” on matters of “terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence.”14 When Associate Attorney General Lowell Jensen refused to proceed with Nazar’s indictment, the San Diego U.S. Attorney, William Kennedy, publicly exposed his intervention. For this he was promptly fired.15

A recent spectacular example of CIA drug involvement was the case of the CIA’s Venezuelan asset General Ramon Guillén Davila. As I write in my forthcoming book, Fueling America's War Machine,16

    General Ramon Guillén Davila, chief of a CIA-created anti-drug unit in Venezuela, was indicted in Miami for smuggling a ton of cocaine into the United States. According to the New York Times, "The CIA, over the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration, approved the shipment of at least one ton of pure cocaine to Miami International Airport as a way of gathering information about the Colombian drug cartels." Time magazine reported that a single shipment amounted to 998 pounds, following earlier ones “totaling nearly 2,000 pounds.”17 Mike Wallace confirmed that “the CIA-national guard undercover operation quickly accumulated this cocaine, over a ton and a half that was smuggled from Colombia into Venezuela.”18 According to the Wall Street Journal, the total amount of drugs smuggled by Gen. Guillén may have been more than 22 tons.19

But the United States never asked for Guillén’s extradition from Venezuela to stand trial; and in 2007, when he was arrested in Venezuela for plotting to assassinate President Hugo Chavez, his indictment was still sealed in Miami.20 Meanwhile, CIA officer Mark McFarlin, whom DEA Chief Bonner had also wished to indict, was never indicted at all; he merely resigned.21

Nothing in short happened to the principals in this case, which probably only surfaced in the media because of the social unrest generated in the same period by Gary Webb’s stories in the San Jose Mercury about the CIA, Contras, and cocaine.

Banks and Drug Money Laundering

Other institutions with a direct stake in the international drug traffic include major banks, which make loans to countries like Colombia and Mexico knowing full well that drug flows will help underwrite those loans’ repayment. A number of our biggest banks, including Citibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of Boston, have been identified as money laundering conduits, yet never have faced penalties serious enough to change their behavior.22 In short, United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has said that  “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” According to the London Observer, Costa

    said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result…. Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.23

A striking example of drug clout in Washington was the influence exercised in the 1980s by the drug money-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). As I report in my book, among the

    highly-placed recipients of largesse from BCCI, its owners, and its affiliates, were Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker, who declined to investigate BCCI;24 and Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined to investigate BCCI.25

In the end it was not Washington that first moved to terminate the banking activities in America of BCCI and its illegal U.S. subsidiaries; it was the determined activity of two outsiders  -- Washington lawyer Jack Blum and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.26

Conclusion: The Source of the Global Drug problem is not Kabul, but Washington

I understand why McCoy, in his desire to change an ill-fated policy, is more decorous than I am in acknowledging the extent to which powerful American institutions—government, intelligence and finance—and not just the Karzai government, have been corrupted by the pervasive international drug traffic. But I believe that his tactfulness will prove counter-productive. The biggest source of the global drug problem is not in Kabul, but in Washington. To change this scandal will require the airing of facts which McCoy, in this essay, is reluctant to address.

In his magisterial work, The Politics of Heroin, McCoy tells the story of Carter’s White House drug advisor David Musto. In 1980 Musto told the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse that “we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their rebellion against the Soviets. Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos?”27 Denied access by the CIA to data to which he was legally entitled, Musto took his concerns public in May 1980, noting in a New York Times op-ed that Golden Crescent heroin was already (and for the first time) causing a medical crisis in New York. And he warned, presciently, that “this crisis is bound to worsen.”28

Musto hoped that he could achieve a change of policy by going public with a sensible warning about a disastrous drug-assisted adventure in Afghanistan. But his wise words were powerless against the relentless determination of what I have called the U.S. war machine in our government and political economy. I fear that McCoy’s sensible message, by being decorous precisely where it is now necessary to be outspoken, will suffer the same fate.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His book, Fueling America's War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection is in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield.

He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Can the US Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War in Afghanistan? Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration" The Asia-Pacific Journal, 14-5-10, April 5, 2010.

See the following articles on related subjects:

Alfred W. McCoy, "Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State? The Opium Wars in Afghanistan."

Peter Dale Scott, America’s Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State

Peter Dale Scott, Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and the Afghan and Iraq Wars

Jeremy Kuzmarov, American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq

MK Bhadrakumar, Afghanistan, Iran and US-Russian Conflict

Peter Van Agtmael, All You Need is Heroin: U.S. Troops in Their Own Hand

Notes

1 Eventually the United States and its allies gave Hekmatyar, who for a time became arguably the world’s leading drug trafficker, more than $1 billion in armaments. This was more than any other CIA client has ever received, before or since.
2 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 74-75: “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, said by the 911 Commission to have been the true author of the 9/11 plot, first conceived of it when he was with Abdul Sayyaf, a leader with whom bin Laden was still at odds [9/11 Commission Report, 145-50]. Meanwhile several of the men convicted of blowing up the World Trade Center in 1993, and the subsequent New York “day of terror” plot in 1995, had trained, fought with, or raised money for, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [Tim Weiner, “Blowback from the Afghan Battlefield,” New York Times, March 13, 1994].
3 Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, July 7, 2008
4 New York Times, October 27, 2009.
5 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 536. At the start of the U.S. offensive in 2001, according to Ahmed Rashid, “The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA [Northern Alliance] allies” (Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia [New York: Viking, 2008], 320).
6 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997), 239. Cf. New York Times, October 28, 2009.
7 Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” Military Review, November-December 2009, 1.
8 The alert reader will notice that even $3.4 billion is less than 53 percent of the $10 billion attributed in the previous paragraph to the total Afghan GDP. These estimates from diverse sources are not precise, and cannot be expected to jibe perfectly.
9 “Afghanistan: Drug Industry and Counter-Narcotics Policy,” Report to the World Bank, November 28, 2006, emphasis added.
10 London Daily Mail. July 21, 2007. In December 2009 Harper’s published a detailed essay on Colonel Abdul Razik, “the master of Spin Boldak,” a drug trafficker and Karzai ally whose rise was “abetted by a ring of crooked officials in Kabul and Kandahar as well as by overstretched NATO commanders who found his control over a key border town useful in their war against the Taliban” (Matthieu Aikins, “The Master of Spin Boldak,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2009).
11 James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times, August 10, 2009: ”United States military commanders have told Congress that…only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”
12 Corey Flintoff, “Combating Afghanistan's Opium Problem Through Legalization,” NPR, December 22, 2005.
13 CBS News April 1, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/01/world/main6353224.shtml.
14 Cables from Mexico City FBI Legal Attaché Gordon McGinley to Justice Department, in Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36.
15 Scott, Deep Politics, 105; quoting from San Diego Union, 3/26/82.
16 Fueling America's War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection (in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield).
17 Time, November 29, 1993: “The shipments continued, however, until Guillen tried to send in 3,373 lbs. of cocaine at once. The DEA, watching closely, stopped it and pounced.” Cf. New York Times, November 23, 1996 (“one ton”).
18 CBS News Transcripts, 60 MINUTES, November 21, 1993.
19 Wall Stree Journal, November 22, 1996. I suspect that the CIA approved the import of cocaine less  "as a way of gathering information" than as a way of affecting market share of the cocaine trade in the country of origin, Colombia. In the 1990s CIA and JSOC were involved in the elimination of Colombian drug pingpin Pablo Escobar, a feat achieved with the assistance of Colombia's Cali Cartel and the AUC terrorist death squad of Carlos Castaño. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 86-88.
20 Chris Carlson, “Is The CIA Trying to Kill Venezuela's Hugo Chávez?” Global Research, April 19, 2007.
21 Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 400; Time, November 23, 1993. McFarlin had worked with anti-guerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980's. The CIA station chief in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, also retired.
22 The Bank of Boston laundered as much as $2 million from the trafficker Gennaro Angiulo, and eventually paid a fine of $500,000 (New York Times, February 22, 1985; Eduardo Varela-Cid, Hidden Fortunes: Drug Money, Cartels and the Elite Banks [Sunny Isles Beach, FL: El Cid Editor, 1999]). Cf. Asad Ismi, “The Canadian Connection: Drugs, Money Laundering and Canadian Banks,” Asadismi.ws: “Ninety-one percent of the $197 billion spent on cocaine in the U.S. stays there, and American banks launder $100 billion of drug money every year. Those identified as money laundering conduits include the Bank of Boston, Republic National Bank of New York, Landmark First National Bank, Great American Bank, People's Liberty Bank and Trust Co. of Kentucky, and Riggs National Bank of Washington. Citibank helped Raul Salinas (the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas) move millions of dollars out of Mexico into secret Swiss bank accounts under false names.”
23 Rajeev Syal, “Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor,” Observer, December 13, 2009.
24 Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 357.
25 Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 373-77.
26 Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 449.
27 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2003), 461; citing interview with Dr. David Musto. 
28 David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980; quoted in McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 462.

[bigron]

LightCaster

Thanks for your support and Kind Words

Ron

[LightCaster]

Iraq: Seven Years of Occupation

by: Raed Jarrar,
t r u t h o u t
Friday 09 April 2010

NWO-Nazi soldiers searching for more civilians to kill,
after they murdered over a 1.000.000. in a 7 years long occupation

On April 9, 2003, exactly seven years ago, Baghdad fell under the US-led occupation. Baghdad did not fall in 21 days, though; it fell after 13 years of wars, bombings and economic sanctions. Millions of Iraqis, including myself, watched our country die slowly before our eyes in those 13 years. So, when the invasion started in March of 2003, everyone knew it was the straw that would break the camel's back.

I still remember the day of the fall of Baghdad very clearly, as if it happened yesterday. My family and I had fled to my uncle's home in southern Baghdad because our neighborhood, located near Baghdad's airport, was bombarded by US airplanes in the days before. I remember the first US tank rolling down the street with a US soldier, wearing black gloves, waving his hand and some people waving back. That was one of the sadist day of my life, not only because Baghdad fell under a foreign occupation, but also because I knew it would be the beginning of another disastrous chapter in Iraq's history. Now, when I look back at all that happened under the occupation, I find that I was, unfortunately, right.

In the last seven years, one million Iraqis have been killed and millions more injured and displaced from their homes. The country's infrastructure was destroyed and Iraq's civil society has been severely damaged. A video posted this week by WikiLeaks is not an exception to how the US occupation operated in Iraq all along, but rather an example of it. While the video is shocking and disturbing to the US public, from an Iraqi perspective it just tells a story of an average day under the occupation. But even from the Pentagon's perspective, that attack was nothing exceptional. Reuters demanded an investigation into this particular attack because two of its employees were killed in it, and the Pentagon has already conducted an investigation that cleared all soldiers who took part of the attack of any wrongdoing. The video does not show an operation that went wrong, or where "rules of engagement" were not followed. It is simply how the US military has been doing business in Iraq for seven years now.

What is equally disturbing is the mainstream media coverage of the event. For example, in a piece published the day of the attack, The New York Times reported that two Iraqi Journalists were killed "as US forces clash with Militias." The New York Times' piece confirmed "American forces battled insurgents in the area" and covered the following statement from the US military:

    The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed. ''There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,'' said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

Now, after the video was leaked, we know that none of this is true. Iraqis killed in the attack were not "insurgents." US troops were not "hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades," the attack helicopters were not "called in" in response to hostilities and there was no "ensuing fight" that caused the massacre. In fact, after watching the video, there is no question that the US forces were clearly NOT engaged in combat operations against a hostile force. In addition to making the entire story up, the Pentagon has very conveniently omitted the part about the two children being injured.

This story is similar to hundreds of other stories printed by The New York Times and other mainstream media during the last seven years. Imagine how many tens of thousands of Iraqis who were labeled as "insurgents" and "militias" were killed and injured the same way. Imagine how many Iraqi children were killed and injured without a mention by the Pentagon or mainstream media. A number of international organizations, including Amnesty International, are now calling for an independent and impartial investigation into the July 12, 2007, helicopter attack shown in the leaked video. But I think this leaked video tells a bigger story than the attack itself. It tells a story of systemic, cold-blooded murder, and the shameful cover up by mainstream media and silence by international organizations.

Remembering the last seven years and conducting investigations is important, but what is more important and urgent is to end this occupation. This month marks both the seventh year of occupation and the beginning of the combat forces withdrawal in accordance with President Obama's plan. The current plan for US withdrawal is based on two sets of time-based deadlines. Obama's own plan to withdraw combat forces between April and August 31, 2010, and the bilateral security agreement's deadline for the withdrawal of all troops and contractors and shutting down all US bases by December 31, 2011.

While the Bush administration adopted a conditions-based withdrawal plan based on the mantra "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," the withdrawal doctrine under Obama has been time-based, not linked to conditions on the ground. The main problem with a condition-based withdrawal plans is that it creates an equation where deteriorating conditions lead to an extension of the military occupation. Unfortunately, many groups would like to see the US occupation of Iraq continue. Some groups, such as the Iraqi ruling parties or the military industrial complex in the United States, believe the occupation is in their self-interest. Others, such as al-Qaeda, hope to cripple the United States by keeping it engaged in a conflict that is taking an enormous toll on human lives, money and global reputation. And still others, such as Iran and other regional players, fear the re-emergence of a strong independent and united Iraq that would change the power balance in the Middle East.

The conditions on the ground are rapidly deteriorating in Iraq. After last month's general election, there is a dramatic spike in violence and growing threats to the security and political stability of the country. This week alone, hundreds of Iraqis were killed and injured because of car bombs, assassinations, and other armed attacks. Meanwhile, the Iraqi political establishment is struggling to form the new government. The US war machine is already trying to use this deterioration as an excuse to delay or cancel the withdrawal plan, or at least link it to conditions on the ground.

Going back to a condition-based plan will cost the US hundreds of billions more, will result in the deaths of countless more US soldiers and Iraqi civilians and, most importantly, will not bring Iraq closer to being a stable and prosperous country. The US occupation has never been a part of the solution and it will never be. Delaying or canceling the US withdrawal will only diminish what's left of US credibility and will add another layer of complications to the war-torn country. Many national US organizations, including Peace Action, are calling for a national day of action today to ask Congress and the White House to stick to the time-based withdrawal plan and bring the US combat forces as promised before the end of August.

The US has been engaged in military hostilities with Iraq and Iraqis since 1991. Even when Obama abides by the security agreement and ends the occupation next year, the US responsibility to compensate and help Iraqis help themselves will not be over. Our responsibility starts by ending the 20-year war, but it doesn't end there.

[LightCaster]

Ron

Welcome. We are here together, for the same reason, to spread the truth and to bring down the NWO. No need to thank me for that.

LC

[Jackson Holly]

Lightcaster:

Thanks to you for reviving this thread ... though it is very disturbing and saddening, this story must be out there, front and center. I don't know what happened to HARCONEN who carried this thread for a long time ... I know he is busy with his own truth site. But again, thanks.   

[LightCaster]

My dear friend,

I missed you also, I missed lots of good friends from Prison Planet Forum. This was my other home for a long time. But I wasn't be able to be here...it was hard for me...very hard. But I am happy to be back here with all of you good people. I love you all. I will do my best to revive my old threads, especially this one.

You are right, this thread is very disturbing and saddening. God only knows how many times i was ill from finding horrifying info about NWO crimes and posting it here. Truth MUST be told! We must expose NWO crimes and bring them down, for the sake of humanity, for our souls. God is on our side. We will win!

                                                     Love & Light

                                                                          Harconen

[LightCaster]

Confirmed: Obama authorizes assassination of U.S. citizen

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
Wed, 07 Apr 2010 04:08 EDT

late January, I wrote about the Obama administration's "presidential assassination program," whereby American citizens are targeted for killings far away from any battlefield, based exclusively on unchecked accusations by the Executive Branch that they're involved in Terrorism. At the time, The Washington Post's Dana Priest had noted deep in a long article that Obama had continued Bush's policy (which Bush never actually implemented) of having the Joint Chiefs of Staff compile "hit lists" of Americans, and Priest suggested that the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list. The following week, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the "right" to carry out such assassinations.

Anwar al-Awlaki

Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they're sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind. I won't repeat those arguments -- they're here and here -- but I do want to highlight how unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical this is in light of these new articles today.

Just consider how the NYT reports on Obama's assassination order and how it is justified:

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday. . . .

American counterterrorism officials say Mr. Awlaki is an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They say they believe that he has become a recruiter for the terrorist network, feeding prospects into plots aimed at the United States and at Americans abroad, the officials said.

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president. . . .

"The danger Awlaki poses to this country is no longer confined to words," said an American official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke of the classified counterterrorism measures on the condition of anonymity. "He's gotten involved in plots."
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama's America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens -- and a death penalty imposed -- is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone's guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America's newspapers -- cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they're granted -- to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist. It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist "involved in plots." These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth. And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?

Just to get a sense for how extreme this behavior is, consider -- as the NYT reported -- that not even George Bush targeted American citizens for this type of extra-judicial killing (though a 2002 drone attack in Yemen did result in the death of an American citizen). Even more strikingly, Antonin Scalia, in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, wrote an Opinion (joined by Justice Stevens) arguing that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. Government merely to imprison (let alone kill) American citizens as "enemy combatants"; instead, they argued, the Constitution required that Americans be charged with crimes (such as treason) and be given a trial before being punished. The full Hamdi Court held that at least some due process was required before Americans could be imprisoned as "enemy combatants." Yet now, Barack Obama is claiming the right not merely to imprison, but to assassinate far from any battlefield, American citizens with no due process of any kind. Even GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra, when questioning Adm. Blair, recognized the severe dangers raised by this asserted power.

And what about all the progressives who screamed for years about the Bush administration's tyrannical treatment of Jose Padilla? Bush merely imprisoned Padilla for years without a trial. If that's a vicious, tyrannical assault on the Constitution -- and it was -- what should they be saying about the Nobel Peace Prize winner's assassination of American citizens without any due process?

All of this underscores the principal point made in this excellent new article by Eli Lake, who compellingly and comprehensively documents what readers here well know: that while Obama's "speeches and some of his administration's policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era," the reality is that the administration has retained and, in some cases, built upon the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism. As Al Gore asked in his superb 2006 speech protesting Bush's "War on the Constitution":

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?

If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?

If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

Notice the power that was missing from Gore's indictment of Bush radicalism: the power to kill American citizens. Add that to the litany -- as Obama has now done -- and consider how much more compelling Gore's accusatory questions become.

[LightCaster]

UPDATE: When Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination, the Constitutional Law Scholar answered a questionnaire about executive power distributed by The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, and this was one of his answers:

5. Does the Constitution permit a president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?

[Obama]: No. I reject the Bush Administration's claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.

So back then, Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges. Now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges. Could even his hardest-core loyalists try to reconcile that with a straight face? As Spencer Ackerman documents today, not even John Yoo claimed that the President possessed the power Obama is claiming here.

UPDATE II: If you're going to go into the comment section -- or anywhere else -- and argue that this is all justified because Awlaki is an Evil, Violent, Murdering Terrorist Trying to Kill Americans, you should say how you know that. Generally, guilt is determined by having a trial where the evidence is presented and the accused has an opportunity to defend himself -- not by putting blind authoritarian faith in the unchecked accusations of government leaders, even if it happens to be Barack Obama. That's especially true given how many times accusations of Terrorism by the U.S. Government have proven to be false.

UPDATE III: Congratulations, Barack Obama: you're now to the Right of National Review on issues of executive power and due process, as Kevin Williamson objects: "Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. . . . Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. " But Andy McCarthy -- who is about the most crazed Far Right extremist on such matters as it gets, literally -- is as pleased as can be with what Obama is doing (or, as Gawker puts it, "Obama Does Something Bloodthirsty Enough to Please the Psychos").

UPDATE IV: Keith Olbermann's coverage of this story was quite good tonight -- see here.

[LightCaster]

The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit

by: Andy Worthington,
t r u t h o u t
Friday 09 April 2010

Such is the hysterical disregard for the law in parts of the United States that when, on March 22, District Court Judge James Robertson ordered the release from Guantánamo of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 38-year-old Mauritanian who was once described as the "highest-value detainee at the facility," Republican lawmakers were in uproar.

The Hill reported that Sen. Kit Bond (R-Missouri), the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, stated, "While Holder's Justice Department should appeal this outrageous decision , I'm not holding my breath. Holder seems more intent on closing Guantánamo Bay than keeping terrorists locked up where they belong." The Hill also reported that Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) sent a letter to Holder asking him to appeal the ruling, in which he wrote, "It is certainly possible, if not likely, that Mr. Slahi will re-engage in efforts to commit terrorist attacks against innocent Americans if allowed to go free. This ruling clearly puts the American people in danger and should not be allowed to stand."

As it transpired, Attorney General Eric Holder was not happy with the ruling either and did not need to be slandered by Senator Bond to issue his own complaint. Speaking from a meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, Holder said that, although "[w]e obviously respect the decision that the judge made, [h]opefully an appeals court will look at the evidence that we presented in the habeas proceeding and come to a contrary conclusion."


The Torture of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The reasoning behind Judge Robertson's ruling is not yet clear, as his opinion has not been publicly released. Noticeably, however, Slahi was subjected to several years of torture, which began soon after he was taken in by the Mauritanian authorities on November 20, 2001, at the request of the Bush administration. "My country turned me over, shortcutting all kinds of due process of law, like a candy bar to the United States," he said in his combatant status review tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004.

After he handed himself in, he was transferred by the US to Jordan - one of at least 15 prisoners rendered to Jordan by the CIA between 2001 and 2004 - where he was held for eight months and where, he said, what happened to him was "beyond description," and he was tortured "maybe twice a week, a couple times, sometimes more." He was then transferred to the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan for two weeks and arrived in Guantánamo on August 4, 2002.

As the highest-value detainee at Guantánamo - in the days before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other high-value detainees were flown in from secret CIA prisons in September 2006 - Slahi was again subjected to torture, which included prolonged isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, death threats and threats that his mother would be brought to Guantánamo and gang-raped. This program, which was implemented in May 2003 and augmented with further "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, culminated in August 2003 in an incident when Slahi was taken out on a boat, wearing isolation goggles, while agents whispered, within earshot, that he was "about to be executed and made to disappear." As Der Spiegel explained in an article in 2008, "He was so terrified that he urinated in his pants."

After this, as Slahi himself described it (in a letter to his lawyers dated November 9, 2006), "I yes-sed every accusation my interrogators made. I even wrote the infamous confession about me was planning to hit the CN Tower in Toronto based on SSG [redacted] advise. I just wanted to get the monkeys off my back."

However, his treatment was so severe that, in May 2004, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch of the Marine Corps, who had been assigned his case as a prosecutor the year before, resigned rather than pursue the case. In a meeting with the chief prosecutor, Army Col. Bob Swann, Lieutenant Colonel Couch "told Colonel Swann that in addition to legal reasons, he was 'morally opposed' to the interrogation techniques 'and for that reason alone refused to participate in [the Slahi] prosecution in any manner.'"

By all accounts, Slahi's torture ended as soon as he began cooperating. As Der Spiegel explained in 2008 and The Washington Post reported last week, after he "broke," he became one of Guantánamo's most cooperative prisoners, granted special privileges, including fast food and a small garden plot and regarded as a source of invaluable information - even though more skeptical observers might conclude that the information provided by a man broken by torture might, in fact, be less than reliable.

However, it is improbable that whatever tortured confessions were extracted from Slahi - who has persistently maintained that he had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks - would have been enough for Judge Robertson to grant his habeas petition, unless it was, in addition, demonstrated to him that other sources alleging Slahi's involvement with the 9/11 hijackers were also unreliable.


Doubts About Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Significance

Here, the US authorities' claims about Slahi begin to look rather dubious. Although the 9/11 Commission Report described him as "a significant al-Qaeda operative" who "recruited 9/11 hijackers in Germany," the more detailed narrative, as revealed in the report, is less conclusive. Instead, as I explained in my book "The Guantánamo Files":

t was stated that Ramzi bin al-Shibh and three of the 9/11 hijackers - Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jeddah - were traveling on a train in Germany when they met a man named Khalid El-Masri and "struck up a conversation about jihad in Chechnya." El-Masri told them to contact a man named Abu Musab (Slahi's alias) in Duisburg, but when they met him, he told them it was difficult to get to Chechnya because travelers were generally detained in Georgia and advised them to go to Afghanistan for training instead.


As I also explained:

Slahi himself has disputed this story, denying an allegation that he "recruited for jihad," but even if it were true, it proves only that he was a recruiter for a war in Chechnya that was regarded by many Muslims as a legitimate struggle, who sent would-be recruits for training in long-established training camps in Afghanistan and does not connect him in any meaningful way to 9/11.

Despite this, the US authorities have persistently presented his activities in Germany as more significant than the 9/11 Commission Report suggested, choosing to ignore the official story - that the hijackers attracted bin Laden's attention once they were in Afghanistan - and claiming that Slahi arranged for one of them "to meet Osama bin Laden and that this individual then swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and became an important and influential al-Qaeda member."


The US government's star witness is Ramzi bin al-Shibh and as Der Spiegel explained in 2008, the recruitment story originally came from him. However, bin al-Shibh was also tortured in US custody and, in addition, as Der Spiegel noted:

The German investigators familiar with the history leading up to the 9/11 attacks are more cautious in their assessment of Slahi's position within al-Qaeda. They say that bin al-Shibh's statements about Slahi recruiting the attackers has "legend status," and that none of their information supports his assertions.


We will have to wait for Judge Robertson's opinion to be released to discover whether these were his conclusions too, but it certainly seems possible, just as it also seems probable that the authorities' attempts to implicate Slahi in all manner of other plots - in particular Ahmed Ressam's plot to blow up Los Angeles Airport in 1999 - are also overblown. Slahi said that he falsely confessed to being part of Ressam's plot while being tortured in Jordan and explained that, although he moved to Canada in 1998, hoping to find work as an electrical engineer, he returned to Mauritania in January 2000 because he was kept under constant surveillance by the intelligence services. "Wherever I went I had people right behind me at the market watching my butt," he said in his tribunal at Guantánamo. "I said what the heck? This is not the life I want to live."

Overlooked in the assertions that Slahi was a key figure in the 9/11 attacks, rather than, perhaps, a peripheral figure in jihadi circles, is a specific explanation for why the Americans asked the Mauritanian authorities to detain him in November 2001. As I also explained in "The Guantánamo Files":

It was not as if he was an unknown quantity. As well as being questioned in Canada, he had been investigated in Germany, had been questioned in Senegal on his way to Mauritania in January 2000 and had also been questioned on two occasions by the Americans themselves: by three FBI agents and "another guy from the Department of Justice" in Mauritania in February 2000 and again in October 2001, when an American agent took part in an interrogation and, according to Slahi, threatened to bring in "black people" to torture him.

If he really had anything to hide after all this, it seems unlikely that he would have so willingly waited around for the Mauritanian authorities to pick him up at his house on November 20, 2001, when his long ordeal began.

While Slahi's story, stripped of its core allegations, begs questions about what kind of involvement with jihadi groups is necessary for a judge to deny a Guantánamo prisoner's habeas corpus petition and hurl him back into ongoing detention without charge or trial, a case that followed Slahi's a few days later demonstrated that being in Afghanistan at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001 and being in some sort of proximity to Arab forces fighting with the Taliban, was enough for a prisoner to lose their habeas petition.

[LightCaster]

A Taliban Recruit Loses His Habeas Petition

The prisoner in question, Mukhtar al-Warafi, a Yemeni who was 27 years old when he was seized in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, survived a massacre in a mud-walled fortress, Qala-i-Janghi, where hundreds of prisoners - mostly, but not all, foot soldiers for the Taliban - had been taken after surrendering to the Northern Alliance. According to a statement read out by a military officer assigned to represent him at a review board at Guantánamo, al-Warafi studied medical procedures in Yemen, "had nothing to do whatsoever with the Taliban," and went to Afghanistan "to help provide medical assistance to the poor and the public."

As with Slahi, the opinion of the judge in his case, Royce C. Lamberth, has not yet been released, but it is certain that Judge Lamberth will not have been convinced by al-Warafi's story and will not have accepted his statement that, although he admitted traveling to Khawaja Ghar in Afghanistan and carrying an AK-47, he said that he had it for self-defense and that it was given to him by a doctor he worked with at a clinic, nor his statement that he provided first aid at the al-Ansar clinic in Kunduz, for all types of people, but not "to wounded soldiers."

I am not yet in any position to say whether I think Judge Lamberth made the correct call in al-Warafi's case, but as with other cases where peripheral figures involved with the Taliban have been consigned to indefinite detention as a result of losing their habeas petitions, I must reiterate that each of these results does nothing to justify the Bush administration's detention policies in the war on terror.

Instead, rulings like these demonstrate only that, in defining who can legitimately continue to be held at Guantánamo, the Executive, lawmakers, the Supreme Court and the lower courts have all allowed an unjustifiable situation to prevail in which minor foot soldiers are still being equated with terrorists. This is in spite of the fact that it is patently obvious that the former should, all along, have been held as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, rather than being flown halfway around the world to an experimental interrogation camp where large numbers of them were, in one way or another, subjected to variations of the enhanced interrogation techniques to which Slahi was subjected.

To critics of the habeas cases, like the Brookings Institute's Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney, the seeming discrepancy between the ruling in the cases of Slahi and al-Warafi will only reinforce the opinions they voiced in an op-ed for The Washington Post back in February, when they claimed that judges were making wildly different rulings because, when "the Supreme Court asserted jurisdiction over Guantánamo in summer 2008," the justices "coyly refrained from giving any guidance on the myriad important questions that the cases it authorized would predictably generate."

Wittes and Chesney want Congress to establish new rules, but, in a letter to the Post, David Cole of the Center for Constitutional Rights demolished this argument, pointing out that that "their complaints are predicated on a naive view of both the judicial process and the legislative process and their prescription is unlikely to solve the 'problem' they identify."

Cole continued:

No one should be surprised that different judges reach different results on difficult legal issues. That's why we fight about judicial appointments and why we have an appellate process that facilitates uniform rules.

Nor is legislation likely to reduce the disagreements. First, it is wildly optimistic to think that this Congress could agree on a detention standard. Second, the inquiries involved - such as assessing whether statements are voluntary or coerced, how far the "taint" from a coerced statement extends to other evidence, or whether an individual poses a threat that warrants preventive detention - are not susceptible to bright-line rules, but require careful case-by-case application of standards. It's a job for judges, not Congress.


Cole is undoubtedly correct. However, what these recent rulings have shown is not that anyone should have a problem with judges reaching different verdicts, but that in ordering the release of Slahi, but not the release of al-Warafi, the problems are not with the judges, who can discern whether there is any evidence or not, but with the fundamental confusion between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This confusion is enshrined in the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which provides the basis for detaining those associated with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

If no proof was found that Slahi was associated with al-Qaeda, that should be enough to secure his release. If, on the other hand, al-Warafi was associated with the Taliban, on the very fringes of al-Qaeda activity in Afghanistan during the US-led invasion, I cannot see how that justifies his ongoing detention.

There are, we are told, a number of terrorists in Guantánamo - as many as 35, according to the recommendations made by President Obama's interagency task force, regarding those who should be put forward for trials. On last week's evidence, however, neither Slahi nor al-Warafi qualify as terrorists and neither, I believe, should continue to be held.

[LightCaster]

Afghanistan's My Lai Massacre

by: Jason Leopold,
t r u t h o u t

When Charlie Company's Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley's men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company, who witnessed the whole thing and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.

Today's war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties or homes "suspected" of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable "collateral damage" of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake - a massacre, which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others in Kunar Province on December 26.

Sadly, no principled soldier with a conscience like pilot Thompson tried to save these children. No observer had the guts of a Bernhardt to report what he had seen. No Ridenhour among the other serving US troops in Afghanistan has investigated this atrocity or reported it to Congress. And no American reporter has investigated this war crime the way Hersh investigated My Lai.

There is a Hersh for the Kunar massacre, but he's a Brit. While American reporters, like the anonymous journalistic drones who wrote "CNN's" December 29 report on the incident took the Pentagon's initial cover story - that the dead were part of a secret bomb squad - at face value, Jerome Starkey, a dogged reporter in Afghanistan working for the Times of London and the Scotsman, talked to other sources - the dead boys' headmaster, other townspeople and Afghan government officials - and found out the real truth about a gruesome war crime - the execution of handcuffed children. And while a few news outlets in the US like The New York Times did mention that there were some claims that the dead were children, not bomb makers, none, including CNN, which had bought and run the Pentagon's lies unquestioningly, bothered to print the news update when, on February 24, the US military admitted that in fact the dead were innocent students. Nor has any US corporate news organization mentioned that the dead had been handcuffed when they were shot. Starkey reported the US government's damning admission. Yet still the US media remain silent as the grave.

Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to execute a captive. Yet, in Kunar on December 26, US-led forces, or perhaps US soldiers or contract mercenaries, cold-bloodedly executed eight hand-cuffed prisoners. It is a war crime to kill children under the age of 15, yet in this incident a boy of 11 and a boy of 12 were handcuffed as captured combatants and executed. Two others of the dead were 12 and a third was 15.

I called the secretary of defense's office to ask if any investigation was underway into this crime or if one was planned, was told I had to send a written request, which I did. To date, I have heard nothing. What the Pentagon has done - no surprise - is to pass the buck by leaving any investigation to the International Security Assistance Force - a fancy name for the US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It's a clever ruse, since Congress has no authority to compel testimony from NATO or the ISAF as it would the Pentagon. A source at the Senate Armed Services Committee says the ISAF is investigating, and that the committee has asked for a "briefing" - that means nothing would be under oath - once that investigation is complete, but don't hold your breath or expect anything dramatic.

I also contacted the press office of the House Armed Services Committee to see if any hearings into this crime have been planned. The answer is no, though the press officer asked me to send her details of the incident. (Not a good sign that House members and staff are paying much attention - the killings led to countrywide student demonstrations in Afghanistan, to a formal protest by the office of President Hamid Karzai and to an investigation by the Afghan government, which concluded that innocent students had been handcuffed and executed and, no doubt, contributed to a call by the Afghan government for prosecution and execution of American soldiers who kill Afghan civilians.)

There is still time for real heroes to stand up in the midst of this imperial adventure that may now appropriately be called Obama's War in Afghanistan. Plenty of men and women in uniform in Afghanistan know that nine innocent Afghan children were captured and murdered at America's hands last December in Kunar. There are also probably people who were involved in the planning or carrying out of this criminal operation who are sickened by what happened. But these people are, so far, holding their tongues, whether out of fear or out of simply not knowing where to turn. (Note: If you have information you may contact me.)

There are also plenty of reporters in Afghanistan and in Washington who could be investigating this story. They are not. Don't ask me why. They certainly should not be able to call themselves journalists - at least with a straight face.

[LightCaster]

US War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off

by: Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

In my 1950s childhood, Ripley's Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: "If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and forever." Or if you were young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine's parody, "Ripup's Believe It or Don't!"

With our Afghan and Iraq wars on my mind, I've been wondering whether Ripley's moment hasn't returned. Here, for instance, are some figures offered in a Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the "drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq": "There are... more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq."

Admittedly, that list lacks the "believe it or not" tagline, but otherwise Ripley's couldn't have put it more staggeringly. And here's Pillsbury's Ripley-esque kicker: the American drawdown will be the "equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York."

When it comes to that slo-mo drawdown, all the numbers turn out to be staggering. They are also a reminder of just how the Pentagon has been fighting its wars in these last years -- like a compulsive shopper without a 12-step recovery program in sight. Whether it's 3.1 million items of equipment, or 3 million, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million, whether 341 "facilities" (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which will still be operating in 2011 with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them), or more than 350 forward operating facilities, or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.

Those sorts of figures define the U.S. military in the Bush era -- and now Obama's -- as the most materiel-profligate war-making machine ever. Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a "boardwalk" that typically included a "Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet." Atypically enough, however, a TGI Friday's, which had just joined the line-up, was recently ordered shut down along with some of the other stores by Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal as inimical to the war effort.

In Ripley's terms, if you were to put all the vehicles, equipment, and other materiel we managed to transport to Iraq and Afghanistan "four abreast," they, too, might stretch a fair way around the planet. And wouldn't that be an illustration worthy of the old Ripley's cartoon -- all those coffee makers and port-a-potties and Internet cafes, even that imported sand which, if more widely known about, might change the phrase "taking coals to Newcastle" to "bringing sand to Iraq"?

For all the sand Iraq did have, from the point of view of the U.S. military it didn't have the perfect type for making the miles of protective "blast walls" that became a common feature of the post-invasion landscape. So, according to Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, U.S. taxpayer dollars floated in boatloads of foreign sand from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to create those 15-ton blast walls at $3,500 a pop. U.S. planners are now evidently wondering whether to ship some of the leftover walls thousands of miles by staggeringly roundabout routes to Afghanistan at a transportation cost of $15,000 each.

When it comes to the U.S. drawdown in Iraq and the build-up in Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of unbelievable.
Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making "friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies." It's all socked away in the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.

When it comes to the U.S. drawdown in Iraq and the build-up in Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of unbelievable.
Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making "friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies." It's all socked away in the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.

Believe it or not (small change department), the Pentagon is planning to spend an initial $50 million from a "$350 million Pentagon program designed to improve the counterterrorism operations of U.S. allies" on Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of whom, in the latest version of the Coalition of the Billing, just happen to have small numbers of troops deployed in Afghanistan. The backdrop for this is Canada's decision to withdraw its combat forces from Afghanistan in 2011 and a fear in Washington that the larger European allies may threaten to bail as well. Think of that $50 million as a down payment on a state bribery program -- and the Pentagon is reportedly hoping to pry more money loose from Congress to pay off the smaller "allies" in a bigger way in the future.

Believe it or not, the Defense Logistics Agency shipped 1.1 million hamburger patties to Afghanistan in the month of March 2010 (nearly doubling the March 2009 figure). Almost any number you might care to consider related to the Afghan War is similarly on the rise. By the fall, the number of American troops there will have nearly tripled since President Obama took office; American deaths in Afghanistan have doubled in the first months of 2010, while the number of wounded has tripled; insurgent roadside bomb (IED) attacks more than doubled in 2009 and are still rising; U.S. drone strikes almost doubled in 2009 and are on track to triple this year; and fuel deliveries to Afghanistan have nearly doubled, rising from 15 million gallons a month in March 2009 to 27 million this March. (Keep in mind that, by the time a gallon of gas has made it to U.S. troops in the field, its cost is estimated at up to $100.)

[LightCaster]

Believe it or not, according to a recent report by the Pentagon inspector general, private contractor KBR, holding a $38 billion contract to provide the U.S. military with "a range of logistic services," has cost Washington $21 million in "waste" on truck maintenance alone by billing for 12 hours of work when, on average, its employees were actually putting in 1.3 hours.

Believe it or not, the State Department has paid another private contractor, Triple Canopy, $438 million since mid-2005 simply to guard the massive, 104-acre U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest on the planet. That's more than half the price tag to build the embassy, the running of which is expected to cost an estimated $1.8 billion dollars in 2010. Triple Canopy now has 1,800 employees dedicated to embassy protection in the Iraqi capital, mainly Ugandan and Peruvian security guards. At $736 million to build, the embassy itself is a numbers wonder (and has only recently had its sizeable playing field astroturfed – "the first artificial turf sports field in Iraq" -- also assumedly at taxpayer expense). Fans of Ripley-esque diplomatic gigantism should have no fears about the future either: the U.S. is now planning to build another "mother ship" of similar size and cost in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Believe it or not, according to Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com, nearly 400 bases for U.S. troops, CIA operatives, special operations forces, NATO allies, and civilian contractors have already been constructed in Afghanistan, topping the base-building figures for Iraq by about 100 in a situation in which almost every bit of material has to be transported into the country. The base-building spree has yet to end.

Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan -- and his company has no trucks. (He hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises little oversight.

Believe it or not, the staggering logistics effort underway to transport part of the American way of war from Iraq to Afghanistan is now being compared by those involved to Hannibal (not Lecter) crossing the Alps with his cohort of battle elephants, or to that ancient conqueror of conquerors, Alexander the Great ("the largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar"). It has become commonplace as well to say, as President Obama did at Bagram Air Base on his recent six-hour Afghan drop-in, that the U.S. military is "the finest military in the history of the world," or as his predecessor put it even more emphatically, "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known."

The Ripley-esque numbers, however, tell a somewhat different story. If war were really a Believe It or Not matter, or victory lay in the number of hamburgers transported or the price of fuel consumed, the U.S. military would have been the winner long ago. After all, it may be the most product-profligate military with the heaviest "footprint" in history. Though it's seldom thought strange (and rarely commented upon in the U.S.), the Pentagon practices war as a form of mass consumption and so, not surprisingly, bears a striking resemblance to the society it comes from. Like the Taliban, it carries its way of life to war on its back.

It's striking, of course, that all this is happening at a moment when, domestically, small businesses can't get loans and close to 10% of the population is officially out of work, while state governments are desperately scrabbling for every available dollar (and some that aren't), even as they cut what would once have been considered basic services. In contrast, the Pentagon is fighting its distant wars as if American pockets had no bottoms, the national treasury had no limits, and there was quite literally no tomorrow.

And there's one more small contrast to be made when it comes to the finest military in the history of the world: for all the private security guards, mountains of burgers, lakes of gasoline, miles of blast walls, and satchels of cash to pass out to the locals, it's been remarkably unsuccessful in its pacification campaigns against some of the motliest forces of our time. The U.S. military has been fought to something like a draw by relatively modest-sized, relatively lightly armed minority insurgencies that don't even pass muster when it comes to shooting straight.

Vast piles of money and vast quantities of materiel have been squandered; equipment by the boatload has been used up; lives have been wasted in profusion; and yet the winners of our wars might turn out to be Iran and China. The American way of war, unfortunately, has the numbers to die for, just not to live by.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in May. To catch a special TomCast audio interview in which Jonathan Schell and Engelhardt discuss war and nuclear weapons from the 1960s to late last night, simply click here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.

[Note on Sources: Let me offer a small series of bows to six websites I find invaluable for keeping up on America's wars. Each is a regular morning stop on my tour of the Internet: Antiwar.com, a site full of surprises, which collects the most interesting reporting of the day on America's wars and incursions; Juan Cole's Informed Comment which, for years now, has provided an analytic framework for, and a brilliant running commentary on, American war policy in the Middle East; the War in Context whose canny editor, Paul Woodward, recently aptly termed the American war in Afghanistan "a war of indifference"; Asia Times, a high-quality online publication that provides regular overviews on the Middle East and Asia; Noah Shachtman's Danger Room at Wired, a must-visit for the latest in U.S. military developments; and Katherine Tiedemann's "Daily Brief" at the AfPak Channel which provides a daily summary of key mainstream reporting on the Afghan war.

In addition, special thanks go to Christopher Holmes, my eagle-eyed volunteer copyeditor in Tokyo who keeps TomDispatch remarkably error-free, week in, week out. His is a major labor of love and, even though I don't say so often enough, couldn't be more appreciated day in, day out!]

[ImmortalTRUTH]

Thank you LightCaster.. You truly bring light and truth to this world of Lies and Propaganda.. Thank you..

[LightCaster]

Thank you LightCaster.. You truly bring light and truth to this world of Lies and Propaganda.. Thank you..

You are welcome ImmortalTRUTH, thank you for reading my posts. I am mostly doing research, and connecting the dots. Rarely commenting it, cuz i leave to people who are reading it to make their own conclusions from it.

I wish that i can do more...to really make some change in this world of pain and suffering. I am hoping that those wars will stop soon. But there are lots of thing that can't be undone. Depleted Uranium will be where it is for a billions of years, making DNA mutations, causing cancer, DU baby's, horrors that can't be described. War veterans will come home with all kinds of physical and mental problems, and we can't bring back from dead victims of this genocide to their love ones. Most of those things can't be undone.

[bigron]

Harconen !!

I got the impression it was U   !!


You do have a distinct way of posting  !

Great to have you back Friend

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK

Ron

[Jackson Holly]

Harconen !!

I got the impression it was U   !!


You do have a distinct way of posting  !

Great to have you back Friend

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK

Ron

+1!

[LightCaster]

Thank you friends...you are making my hart warm, i really don't know what to say...thank you so much.

[LightCaster]

How Many Americans Does It Take to Slaughter a Third World Child?

by Jay Janson
April 9, 2010

Disturbing eye-rebounding videos and on-the-scene, cringing to watch or read, graphic reports of civilians dying at the hands of U.S. military in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan — resurfacing again on network and radio newscasts, in some newspapers and of course, as always, on the Internet.

As in the past, they bring a certain amount of world reaction in concern and condemnation with the more intense pain and outrage reserved for the children’s lives taken. The president of Afghanistan, elected under US military occupation, after years complaining and protesting uselessly, warns of his own possible defection over the "indiscriminate killing by foreign armed forces" among other issues.

How many Americans have been involved in the collateral slaying of children in America’s wars and bombings within defenseless populations of the so called underdeveloped world since the end of World War Two?

How much effort, by how many Americans, has gone into producing each child’s violent death during undeclared wars in Third World nations? Some innocent child made poor and disadvantaged for its country’s history of brutal colonial occupation and plunder by industrial powers that continue to exploit through neocolonialist financial oppression, killed by foreign invaders of American nationality.

The question might equally be asked regarding each dead Korean child or each Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian child, of each child who was killed in its own various Latin American or African country, and since 9/11, each Pakistani, Afghani, Iraqi, Somali, Sudanese, Yemeni, and Lebanese child, all so precious and lovely while they were alive during the time allotted to them by destiny and the military necessities of Americans.

Below are seven multiple answers to the question – how many Americans does it take to collaterally slaughter1 a child during an undeclared American war on some of each child’s countrymen?

1. Today, it can be said to take only one American sitting in a facility somewhere in the U.S. Mid-West or a pilot or gunner in a plane or helicopter looking at an electronic screen map of coordinates pressing the release button that fires a missile. Takes only one American finger to press a button on an American weapon of mass destruction to end a child’s life. During earlier wars, and even now, the finger might be on the trigger of a machine gun or bomb-sight.

2. It takes two Americans – one on the ground to call in the coordinates for a strike, the other in the air, or half a world away, to fix the cross hairs on the area where the child was – or is — before pressing the release button. Or in earlier wars, one to give the order and another to fire the shot to take down a child while aiming at one of his countrymen.

3. It takes hundreds of collaborating American servicemen and officers involved in a military presence or maneuver at some particular place and time that sets the stage for the calling in of a missile strike — in earlier times, to set the stage for the opening of a bombardment in which a child shall perish. Few will ever see the actually pitiful remains of each child that is no more. Often there is nothing but body parts only its family can recognize.

4. It takes hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas and at home engaged in the manufacture, transport and maintenance of weapons, some realizing their part in making the killing of children possible, but others shutting this out of mind, grateful for the money earned. Without these horrific high-tech devices, each child’s death would not be made possible or a reality by the military.

5. It takes a minimum of tens of millions of Americans openly supporting the killing in which each child’s slaughter is a part, convincing or intimidating hundreds of other millions to accept each child’s death as necessary to the preservation of American safety or to the maintenance of their own prerogatives, privileges and level of consumption. Without their cooperation, the war on each child’s countrymen would not be feasible.

6. It take generations of Americans frightened into silently accepting the dispatching of each child by command of mentally disadvantaged political leaders and the all-wars-promoting conglomerates of the information media cartel under the ownership of, and controlled by, the criminally insane power elite of the Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex . If the war on each child’s countrymen were, or had been, unacceptable to enough Americans, it could not have been waged and no dear child would have been destroyed over all these decades nor in this past week.

7. It has taken, and continues to take, a rather limited number of Americans in the entertainment and information industry working hard over half a century as network anchors, commentators, station managers, talk-show hosts, editors and reporters to bring about the activity of Americans described in each of the foregoing six answers to the query – how many Americans does it take to collaterally slaughter a child in a third world country? (Collaterally, of course, for what American is his or her right mind would go overseas for the sole purpose or intention of killing a child?).

Maybe consider turning off Network TV, Radio, and stop reading corporate owned newspapers and magazines, or better yet notice, and get angry about, their promotion of all past and every single possible future war in some way or another.

It is a rare occasion when a child’s death is begrudgingly reported on our privately licensed public air wave frequencies, for our American monopolized "free’ press and electronic media has prime criminal responsibility for each wonderful child’s brutal passing, and their employees are in some discomfort increasingly aware of their murderous roles.

1. "Slaughter," as in "manslaughter," defined as "the unlawful killing of a person, without malice or premeditation, there being no specific word for 'woman or child slaughter’ as they are understood within "manslaughter.’" [↩]

Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, "killed by the Americans" they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com.

[LightCaster]

C.Hill : Iraq - The Price Was Well Worth It.

...Watching an american terrorist say that the price was well worth it, after 7 years of a ravaging destruction, that has erased Iraq and its people, into a background of indifference, poverty, exile, disease, and death  - for me encapsulates everything that you represent, that you collectively represent ---EVIL...

Source

[LightCaster]

Yes, No, Maybe...

Layla Anwar
uruknet.info
April 10, 2010

All Bullshit...All Bullshit...

I keep reading articles about the torture that went on and still goes on in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo and all other shadow prisons...in Eastern Europe, in Middle East and in Africa...

And the question is always did the americans, canadians, english coalition authorities know about it ? Did they all receive direct orders, did they engage and participate in it too, was it a policy, how widespread was it..etc etc...

BULLSHIT QUESTIONS.

And all act oh so shocked....us the americans, us the canadians, us the english, us the poles, us whoever the f**k it is who is there....

Could it be ?

YES IT CAN BE

The torture was/is not only policy.....in which you engaged....the torture is ALSO a reflection of your HATRED, your RACISM....in other words even if there was no policy for it, you would have still engaged in it.....

You really need to face facts --- you hate Arabs, you hate Muslims and at any given opportunity you will not shun from making it known, and at any given opportunity you will gladly lash your Judeo-Christian hatred and your Judeo-Christian sexual frustrations (may I add) on these people.....with or without any official policy, with or without any chain of command and orders....

f**k you and f**k every thing you represent.

Oh and by the way, the same american filth unit responsible for Abu Ghraib is heading back to Baghdad.

f**k you again.

[LightCaster]

Shamed Abu Ghraib Military Police Unit to Be Sent Back to Iraq
Army Insists Few Former Members Still in the Unit

Jason Ditz
uruknet.info
April 9, 2010

Six years after the scandal that shocked the nation and left seven members of the group convicted of mistreatment of Abu Ghraib detainees, the 372nd Military Police Company will soon be sent back to Iraq.


According to an Army spokesman, the unit will be sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, for training later in the month, and will be sent back to Iraq some time in the summer. The Army insists they have full confidence in the unit, and noted that very few of the members from 2004 are still in the unit.

The reserve unit was initially formed in World War 2, and served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. The nation has only recently been reactivated, after over five years of reserve status.

The seven convicted members of the company faced charges including sexual, physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of war. Of the seven only one, Charles Graner Jr., remains in prison.

[LightCaster]

'As I watch the footage, anger calcifies in my heart'

Haifa Zangana

A novelist and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein's regime gives her reaction to the Wikileaks Iraq video

April 10, 2010


I know the area where this massacre was committed. It is a crowded working-class area, a place where it is safe for children to play outdoors. It is near where my two aunts and their extended families lived, where I played as a child with my cousins Ali, Khalid, Ferial and Mohammed. Their offspring still live there.


The Reuters photographer we see being killed so casually in the film, Namir Noor-Eldeen, did not live there, but went to cover a story, risking his life at a time when most western journalists were imbedded with the military. Noor-Eldeen was 22 (he must have felt extremely proud to be working for Reuters) and single. His driver Saeed Chmagh, who is also seen being killed, was 40 and married. He left behind a widow and four children, adding to the millions of Iraqi widows and orphans.


Witnesses to the slaughter reported the harrowing details in 2007, but they had to wait for a western whistleblower to hand over a video before anyone listened. Watching the video, my first impression was, I have no impression. But the total numbness gradually grows into a now familiar anger. I listen to the excited voices of death coming from the sky, enjoying the chase and killing. I whisper: do they think they are God?


"Light 'em all up!" one shooter says.

"Ah, yeah, look at those dead bastards. Nice," says another.

"Well, it's their fault bringing their kids into the battle," one says when ground troops discover two children among the wounded.


In their Apache helicopter, with their sophisticated killing machinery, US soldiers seem superhuman. The Iraqis, on the ground, appear only as nameless bastards, Hajjis, sandniggers. They seem subhuman – and stripping them of their humanity makes killing them easy.


As I watch, I feel the anger calcify in my heart alongside the rage I still feel over other Anglo-American massacres: Haditha (which has been compared to the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war); Ishaqi (where 11 Iraqi civilians were killed in June 2006); Falluja; the rape and killing of A'beer al-Janaby and her family; the British Camp Breadbasket scandal.


We often hear of the traumas US soldiers suffer when they lose one of their ranks, and their eagerness to even the score. We seldom hear from people like the Iraqi widow whose husband was shot, who looked me in the eye last summer, and said: "But we didn't invade their country." Unlike this video, the injustice she feels will not fade with time. It is engraved in the collective memory of people, and will be until justice is done.

________________________________________________________________

[LightCaster]

The Inflicted Wounds of America's War Machine:

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Infertility

by Bob Nichols
San Francisco Bay View
2010-04-07

PTSD and its effects on U.S. soldiers and their families is a ghastly story with no end. PTSD is, in large part, though, an entirely Pentagon, or American war machine, inflicted wound.

 
Boot camp and combat is bad enough; and such forced inhumanity as committing war crimes against civilians causes soldiers to suffer the mental trauma of PTSD. In addition, there is an unseen agent or disease vector at work here as well.

 
There, on the battlefield, the happy boys sent off to war by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Fleet Week – an event responsible for a big chunk of the enlistments in the U.S. Navy and Marines – will probably come in deadly contact with another San Francisco Bay Area product: depleted uranium, aka DU, and weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas and aerosols, UO.

 
Iraq and virtually all the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia have been continually dosed for almost 20 years with thousands of tons of weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas, also known as “depleted uranium.”

 
When used as directed, the depleted uranium bullets, shells and bombs become a lethal uranium gas or aerosol. The poison uranium oxide gas aerosols last for billions of years and never stop indiscriminately maiming and killing, which is a war crime in itself.

 
The deadly radioactive poison was developed by the Manhattan Project in 1945 when they were making the first atomic bombs. The Manhattan Project became the Bay Areas’ two nuclear weapons labs.

 
San Francisco’s Rep. “Nuclear Nancy” Pelosi and her friends at San Francisco-based Bechtel are all set to make more atomic bombs, too. Bechtel is a nuclear capable corporation and manages the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab.

 
Depleted uranium is called “depleted” only because less than one half of 1 percent of the uranium isotope 235, the bomb making isotope, is removed when the U.S. government makes atomic bombs. The currently remaining billion and a half pounds of uranium isotopes are often given free to politically connected arms manufacturers. That radioactive uranium is then used to make bullets, shells, missiles, mines and bombs to sell to the U.S. government a second time.

 
San Francisco based lawyer Karen Parker is an expert in the International Law of Armed Conflict, commonly called “war crimes” law. The law and treaties require that weapons can be “turned off” after the battle is over.

 
Simple as that. Anything else is a war crime, punishable by hard labor in prison or death by hanging.

 
Army and civilian researchers have shown that uranium oxide (UO) poison gas particles migrate right up the olfactory nerve to the brain. This is when the uranium poison gas weapons are used by soldiers as directed by arms manufacturers and military regulations.

 
In addition, UO particles are small enough to go through combat uniforms and penetrate the skin of soldiers. Once inside their bodies, the poison uranium gas is drawn to their brains, bones, and testicles or ovaries. Of course, this applies to civilians and animals as well.

 
Over a million U.S. soldiers have been on the ground in Iraq and Central Asia. The medical disability rate is over 60 percent and “PTSD” is a common diagnosis. Soldiers from the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy report similar medical problems as well.

 
One milligram (mg) of uranium oxide poison gas is about the size of one of the periods at the end of these sentences. When soldiers can absorb UO through their skin, there is nothing to limit their exposure to one milligram or a thousand. That goes for civilians too.

 
Each tiny milligram shoots about 1,251,000 powerful radioactive bullets a day with a range of about 20 cells of the human body for thousands or even billions of years. This is according to noted mathematician and radiation expert, Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., GNSH.

 
She should know, Dr. Bertell serves on several Pentagon radiation committees and has for decades.

 
Uranium munitions, containing weaponized uranium oxide gas and aerosols, are used by presidential order in U.S. war zones. Privates and corporals do not decide to use these poisonous uranium gas weapons on their own. No, that order comes from the American president.

 
Uranium oxide gas weapons are called “genocidal weapons.” They maim and kill millions of people, their animals and their land. The actual targets by the U.S. Expeditionary Forces are the populations of Central Asia and the Middle East, about a billion people.

 
The U.S. Expeditionary Forces are quite successful in targeting and dosing these large populations. In so doing the soldiers poison themselves with depleted uranium too. The American presidents don’t care. Should we care if the president doesn’t?

 
There is a Middle Eastern country that requires all 18-year-olds to join national service for several years. This country even has a roughly comparable health care system to America for a population of 7,233,701, according to the CIA World Factbook. The country is Israel.

 
All Israeli soldiers donate a sperm sample that is immediately frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored in a sperm bank at University Hospital in Jerusalem. Recent professional analysis shows Israeli sperm concentration has declined by 40 percent in less than 10 years.

 
This is a dangerous and precipitous collapse in human sperm concentration. While opinions differ as to the causes, Israel is swimming in a sea of uranium oxide gas partly from its own and American uranium oxide weapons. The DU attacks the sperm and eggs of male and female soldiers. Civilians and animals too.

 
In addition, Israel borders the Mediterranean Sea, as do 21 other countries. For 20 years, a branch of the Italian Mafia called ‘Ndrangheta in the South of Italy, next door to Sicily, have grown a thriving nuclear waste disposal business into an estimated 2007 US$65 billion a year “legal illegal business,” as Mafia operations are called in Italy.

 
The infamous “EcoMafia” load derelict cargo ships with high level nuclear wastes and used reactor cores, then sink them in the Mediterranean and along the African coasts. As a result, Israelis swim in a radioactive sea.

 
Since 20 percent live sperm is considered to be the beginning of infertility, Israel will be sterile in less than 10 years at this rate of decline. The estimated 7 million Israeli Jews will have no more children soon after that. This catastrophic development has already occasioned legislative hearings in Israel’s Knesset. The hearings were covered by Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Israeli sperm concentration is just an example of what is happening to human sperm all over the Middle East and Central Asia, by the choice and force of will of successive U.S. presidents.

 
The American war machine has consequences. PTSD is just one of them. The poison gas cannot be contained, undone or recalled. There is no antidote; there is no cure. There is no escape.

 
Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award winning writer and a San Francisco Bay View correspondent. A former bomb maker in a U.S. government factory in rural Oklahoma, he reports on the two nuclear weapons labs in the Bay Area. He can be reached at duweapons@gmail.com.


   Sources

CNN, “Who Are the ‘Ndrangheta?”

Dr. Ronit Haimov-Kokhman cited by Ofri Ilani, “Study: Quality of Israeli sperm down 40 percent in past decade,” Haaretz, 11/05/2009

Google: Mafia + “nuclear waste” + Mediterranean for an up-to-date listing of thousands of articles on this crime against humanity.

Ann Garrison, “San Francisco recruits; Blue Angels over the Bay”

Central Intelligence Agency World FactBook

Caleb E. Finch, “The Biology of Human Longevity”

[LightCaster]

Revolving door of multiple tours linked to PTSD

By SHARON COHEN
AP
2010-04-10

It wasn't his first tour in Iraq, but his second and third when Joe Callan began wondering how long his luck would last — how many more months he could swerve around bombs buried in the dirt and duck mortars raining from the skies.

It was only natural, considering the horrors he'd seen: One buddy killed when a mortar engulfed his tent in flames. A fresh-faced Marine sniper dead (also a mortar) on his first day in Iraq. A 9-year-old Iraqi boy, blood trickling from his head, after he was mistakenly shot by U.S. troops.

Three tours in four years and Callan wanted out. Out of Iraq, out of the Marines.

"I became numb," he says. "I just wanted to be home. And that became more intense each time."

When Callan did return to New Mexico, he couldn't sleep. He drank heavily. He had a short fuse. "I knew," he now says, "I was different. But I didn't think it was going to be that bad."

Maj. Jeff Hall's world imploded after his second tour in Iraq.

Overwhelmed with guilt and rage, the 18-year Army veteran became so depressed that one day he lay on the ground and pointed a pistol at his head. The only reason he didn't kill himself, he says, is he didn't want his two daughters to discover him. "I couldn't do that to my kids," he says. "I had seen people with their heads blown off."

But the war had pushed Hall to the brink. "I had no peace at all," he says.

No peace — on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, or in the minds of men and women who fought there. Callan and Hall are among hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops who've served multiple tours; they're also among the tens of thousands diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

That is not a coincidence.

With two long wars — Afghanistan is in its ninth year and Iraq just entered its eighth — the U.S. military finds itself straining to maintain a steady flow of troops. More than 2 million men and women have been deployed to serve in both conflicts, and more than 40 percent of them have served at least two tours, according to military records.

Nearly 300,000 troops have served three, four or more times. (The vast majority of deployments last more than six months.)

For these men and women, life becomes a revolving door of war, home, then back to combat — sometimes within months — as they face the same dangers, the same stresses and the same agonizing separation from family.

Multiple tours, according to several studies, have been linked to stress, anxiety and PTSD, which is often marked by nightmares, flashbacks, angry outbursts and insomnia.

"It's common sense," says Dr. Judith Broder, founder of The Soldiers Project, which provides free, confidential counseling to returning troops and their families. "The more deployments there are, the greater the danger not just of combat stress but depression. ... Many people also feel alienated and isolated from their family."

___

After two Iraq stints 10 months apart, Maj. Jeff Hall wanted to be left alone.

He didn't think he had helped the Iraqis or accomplished anything.

Looking back, Hall remembers the day he realized something was terribly wrong. It was after his first tour, when his family was having dinner at a restaurant and his daughter, Tami, then about 12, refused to touch her steak because sour cream had gotten on it.

Hall began crying.

His family was stunned. So was he.

What Hall didn't reveal was his daughter's fussiness had revived memories of a very poor family in Iraq that would regularly pick up gas for cooking at a propane station he had guarded. Their two girls — close to his daughters' ages — were so emaciated their skin hung like loose cloth.

"I could just see the faces of the little girls," Hall says. "It triggered a feeling of sadness and anger."

But suicidal thoughts didn't surface until after Hall's second deployment, which was more aimless than the first. "It was like we were driving around until we got blown up," he says.

In the first few months, Hall's brigade lost more guys than the entire year in his first tour. One day a Humvee under his command ran over a massive bomb, killing two soldiers, seriously wounding another.

"I felt shame, absolute shame," Hall says. "I was suffering from guilt. We were having no results. I described it to the psychologist two years later ... It was like a complete loss of identity ... and how you think life is or should be."

His wife, Sheri, who had been encouraging her husband to get help, finally called his commander. That led to a civilian psychologist and a diagnosis of PTSD.

"I thought my career was over," Hall says. "I thought, 'What am I going to do?' At the same time, I had this feeling of 'Aha, there IS something wrong. I'm not making this up.'"

___

There's no way to know for sure how a soldier will react to multiple tours.

Some go to war four times and never have a problem. Others never leave the United States and develop PTSD.

Justin Taylor started having anxiety attacks on his third tour in Iraq.

"I couldn't breathe," the former Army sergeant says. "We had mortars coming in. I was shaking and (a friend) said, 'Dude, are you OK?' When I had to go on patrol, I started feeling it. I had to suppress it."

Back home, he began drinking heavily. When he got his marching orders for a fourth tour in 2007, he signed himself into a mental hospital. He later received an honorable discharge — without returning to Iraq.

Soldiers face repeated stresses that pile up, says Dr. Paul Ragan, an associate professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and a Navy psychiatrist for the Marines during Desert Storm.

"The bottom line is trauma is cumulative," he says. "It embeds itself in your brain and you can't shake it loose."

Military in-field surveys support the notion.

A 2009 report of Army troops in Afghanistan found the rate of psychological problems rose significantly with the number of deployments: 31 percent for three tours, more than double the rate of those with just one.

In Iraq, the survey found nearly 15 percent of Army troops who served two tours suffered from depression, anxiety or traumatic stress, more than double that of single tour. When it came to PTSD alone, the rate was almost 2.5 times higher for two deployments compared with one.

"We just don't know whether it's combat exposure, repeated separation from the family or (not enough) time off," says Lt. Col. Paul Bliese, director of the division of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. "All of those are reasonable explanations."

It's not just combat that's emotionally draining. It's also the separation from families.

"When you come home, it's not like everything is peachy keen," Ragan says. "You're trying to re-establish yourself with your family, then you're gone again. How many times can you do that?"

And yet, some troops want to return, says Broder, of The Soldiers Project. "The big motivation is to be with their band of brothers," she says.

Sam Rhodes, now a retired Army command sergeant major, was home about 40 days when he eagerly returned to Iraq a second time. "I felt that's where I needed to be," he says.

It was on his third tour when he collapsed — physically and mentally. He was diagnosed with PTSD.

The loss of seven soldiers in his brigade in a single month proved especially traumatic. "You think you've learned a lot in the previous deployments and you think 'I'm going to do a better job of getting my guys home,'" he says.

When Rhodes returned to Fort Benning, Ga., in 2005, he and his wife of 26 years divorced.

In hindsight, Rhodes, who has since remarried, believes he should have taken a break of a year or more between tours.

Many experts believe soldiers aren't home long enough — the military phrase is called dwell time — between tours. The Army study found it averaged 17 months, short of the two to three years considered optimal.

Ryan McNabb, a former Navy corpsman attached to the Marines, had four months between stints in Iraq — by choice. He volunteered for a regiment he felt would face less enemy fire than he saw on his first deployment.

On his second tour, McNabb worried constantly about family.

"Your mind is like, 'Hey, things are fine.' But no, they can't be fine," McNabb says. "You're thinking, 'I'm in Iraq, people are dying right and left.'"

Returning to North Carolina in 2006, he found comfort in booze. McNabb transferred to Italy, where he met his wife, Mandy. He later stopped drinking, but couldn't control his anger.

Once when his wife couldn't quiet their crying 8-month old son, he pulled the rearview mirror off their speeding car and smashed the global positioning system, shattering the windshield.

Others noticed McNabb's troubles, but he was slow to acknowledge them.

"When you're talking about PTSD, you don't want to admit it to anyone or it's, 'Oh, yeah, I got a little.'"

Finally, his brother, Brock, an Army veteran of two Iraq tours, referred him to a center run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, where a counselor, a Vietnam veteran, helped.

McNabb, now 29, works as an outreach coordinator for a Vet Center in suburban Chicago. While Iraq is fresh in his memory, he's not eager to share war stories.

"It's like a drink. It makes you feel good right now," he says, "but in the long run, what's it going to do?"

___

The much-publicized suicides linked to PTSD are very real. But so are stories of those who find ways to survive.

Jeff Hall took the pistol from his head and put it down. He eventually found help in an intensive three-week treatment program at Walter Reed he attended with his wife.

"It gave me hope that there was a chance I could heal," he says.

Hall is now creating the resilience campus at Fort Riley, Kan. The program will help soldiers and their families rebound from multiple tours and deal with the stresses of war and everyday life.

Still, he does not consider himself cured of PTSD.

"I don't believe that you get over it," he says. "I think you learn not to let it control you. You learn to control it."

Sam Rhodes, the retired command sergeant major, has written a book about his own experiences, "Changing the Military Culture of Silence." He travels the country, talking to military and civilian audiences to demystify PTSD.

"I tell people, 'Look, I'm going to have PTSD the rest of my life,'" he says. "Only a normal person can go to war and see the things we have and feel what we have when we come back. If you're rock hard and have no feeling of loss or anything, that's what's abnormal."

Joe Callan, now 31, has always been rock hard. Growing up in rough neighborhoods and on a Navajo reservation exposed him to some harsh realities of life that were magnified thousands of times over in Iraq. He saw friends die, endured IED blasts and in one three-month period, faced almost daily mortar attacks.

His survival strategy was hang tough, be tough.

"I always ran at the problem. If we were getting shot at, I'd run at the bullets. If you shoot back more than they're shooting at you, you'll win," he says.

Callan says he was told after his second tour that he probably had a stress disorder. He shrugged it off.

He ended his 11-year stint in the Marines two years ago, and it was then his life unraveled in a familiar pattern: Depression. Insomnia. Anger.

Callan credits his wife, Katy, their three kids and other family with helping him recover. Callan has been in and out of counseling; he has little time for that kind of stuff.

"I have to suck it up," he says, "because people are depending on me."

He has found renewed purpose in a job: He's now an organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War. Soon, he hopes, this war will be over.

"I just want to have a small farm," he says, "hang out with my family, grow vegetables and be left alone. I just don't want to be a part of it anymore."
On the Net:

    * The Real Warriors Campaign: http://www.realwarriors.net

[LightCaster]

Review confirms PTSD, other syndromes in Gulf vets

Maggie Fox
Health and Science Editor
Reuters
Fri Apr 9, 2010 12:19pm EDT

(Reuters) - Studies confirm that Gulf War veterans suffer disproportionately from post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric illnesses as well as vague symptoms often classified as Gulf War Syndrome, a panel of experts reported on Friday.

The Institute of Medicine panel said better studies are needed to characterize a clear pattern of distress and other symptoms among veterans of the conflicts in the Gulf region that started in 1990 and continue today.

"It is clear that a significant portion of the soldiers deployed to the Gulf War have experienced troubling constellations of symptoms that are difficult to categorize," said Stephen Hauser, chairman of the department of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.

The committee declined to say that there was any such thing as Gulf War Syndrome but did note many veterans had "multisymptom illness."

"Unfortunately, symptoms that cannot be easily quantified are sometimes incorrectly dismissed as insignificant and receive inadequate attention and funding by the medical and scientific establishment," Hauser added in a statement.

"Veterans who continue to suffer from these symptoms deserve the very best that modern science and medicine can offer to speed the development of effective treatments, cures, and -- we hope -- prevention."

Hauser and the rest of the panel reviewed 400 studies in-depth for their report and concluded that in many cases there was tantalizing evidence, but just not enough data to back it up.

BOWEL, SLEEP DISTURBANCES

They found many reports of "seemingly related symptoms, including persistent fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, memory problems, headache, bodily pains, disturbances of sleep, as well as other physical and emotional problems."

But doctors struggle to categorize as they have no known cause, no diagnostic biomarkers and no way to find traces in tissue.

Studies showed sufficient evidence that veterans suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and substance abuse, particularly alcohol abuse and gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome.

There is also clear evidence of "multisymptom illness" among U.S., British and Australian veterans but not enough evidence to show what may have caused it.

"It is beyond dispute, however, that the prevalence of symptoms such as headaches, joint pain, and difficulty concentrating, is higher in veterans deployed to the Gulf War theater than the others," the report reads.

The experts, including epidemiologists who study patterns of disease, neurologists and psychiatrists, found limited but suggestive evidence that Gulf War veterans have higher rates of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease -- a crippling, progressive and fatal nerve disease.

Veterans also appear to risk fibromyalgia and chronic widespread pain, sexual difficulties and deaths from car accidents.

Inadequate evidence could be found of links to cancer, blood disease, hormone imbalances, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, birth defects, pregnancy or fertility problems.

Better studies are needed to follow veterans long-term and catalog their illnesses. "A second branch of inquiry is also important," the report added.

"It consists of a renewed research effort to identify and treat multisymptom illness in Gulf War veterans."

[LightCaster]

Veteran of "Collateral Murder" Company Speaks Out

Sarah Lazare
Common Dreams.org
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:12 EDT

Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the "Collateral Murder" Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty.


"A lot of my friends are in that video," says Stieber. "After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are."


Stieber deployed to Baghdad with Bravo Company 2-16, whose members were involved in the incident captured in Wikileaks' "Collateral Murder" video, which has made international headlines by depicting a July 2007 shooting incident outside of Baghdad in which over a dozen people, including two Reuters employees, were killed. Although he was not present at the scene of the video, he knows those who were involved and is familiar with the environment. Stieber, who now works to promote peace and alternatives to war, is speaking publicly about his time in Iraq and the incident captured in this video.


"If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like," says Stieber. "If you don't like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war."

_____________________________________________________________________

Alternatives to war? Alternative to this slaughter (in Iraq where over 1.300.000 innocent people are coldblooded murdered, and over 100.000 in Afghanistan)?

I will tell you what is the alternative to it. Get the Fvck Out from foreign countries that you are invaded back to the US and STAY THERE!

[Xill]

Veteran of "Collateral Murder" Company Speaks Out

Sarah Lazare
Common Dreams.org
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:12 EDT

Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the "Collateral Murder" Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty.


"A lot of my friends are in that video," says Stieber. "After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are."


Stieber deployed to Baghdad with Bravo Company 2-16, whose members were involved in the incident captured in Wikileaks' "Collateral Murder" video, which has made international headlines by depicting a July 2007 shooting incident outside of Baghdad in which over a dozen people, including two Reuters employees, were killed. Although he was not present at the scene of the video, he knows those who were involved and is familiar with the environment. Stieber, who now works to promote peace and alternatives to war, is speaking publicly about his time in Iraq and the incident captured in this video.


"If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like," says Stieber. "If you don't like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war."

_____________________________________________________________________

Alternatives to war? Alternative to this slaughter (in Iraq where over 1.300.000 innocent people are coldblooded murdered, and over 100.000 in Afghanistan)?

I will tell you what is the alternative to it. Get the Fvck Out from foreign countries that you are invaded back to the US and STAY THERE!

I feel really bad about this, it's the Vietnam War once more; Except all the pictures of dead children are being censored by the mainstream media.

Vietnam war: They got the military brainwashing to a level where people would murder without remorse
Iraq war: They've pushed the formula further and applied the brainwashing to the mainstream media, so now even the population does not feel remorse about the crimes of it's own country.

If a few hundred/thousand people went in the metro stations of all major American cities, every day, with giant billboards of dead children pictures (like they did in the Vietnam war), the war would be stopped. You have to bombard the public with images of the real horror if you want them to wake up.

[LightCaster]

You have to bombard the public with images of the real horror if you want them to wake up.

That was never problem here. In this thread you will find pages and pages of it posted. For those of you who have no time to search trough all of it here is an small part of it.

[LightCaster]

The 'Obama doctrine': kill, don't detain
George Bush left a big problem in the shape of Guantánamo. The solution? Don't capture bad guys, assassinate by drone

Asim Qureshi
uruknet.info

Some CIA officials want to extend the controversial drone campaign to include tribal areas in Pakistan.

April 11, 2010

In 2001, Charles Krauthammer first coined the phrase "Bush Doctrine", which would later become associated most significantly with the legal anomaly known as pre-emptive strike. Understanding the doctrine with hindsight could lead to a further understanding of the legacy that the former administration left – the choice to place concerns of national security over even the most entrenched norms of due process and the rule of law. It is, indeed, this doctrine that united people across the world in their condemnation of Guantánamo Bay.

The ambitious desire to close Guantánamo hailed the coming of a new era, a feeling implicitly recognised by the Nobel peace prize that President Obama received. Unfortunately, what we witnessed was a false dawn. The lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees with whom I am in touch in the US speak of their dismay as they prepare for Obama to do the one thing they never expected – to send the detainees back to the military commissions – a decision that will lose Obama all support he once had within the human rights community.

Worse still, a completely new trend has emerged that, in many ways, is more dangerous than the trends under Bush. Extrajudicial killings and targeted assassinations will soon become the main point of contention that Obama's administration will need to justify. Although Bush was known for his support for such policies, the extensive use of drones under Obama have taken the death count well beyond anything that has been seen before.

Harold Koh, the legal adviser to the US state department, explained the justifications behind unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) when addressing the American Society of International Law's annual meeting on 25 March 2010:

"It is the considered view of this administration … that targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war … As recent events have shown, al-Qaida has not abandoned its intent to attack the United States, and indeed continues to attack us. Thus, in this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks … This administration has carefully reviewed the rules governing targeting operations to ensure that these operations are conducted consistently with law of war principles …
"Some have argued that the use of lethal force against specific individuals fails to provide adequate process and thus constitutes unlawful extrajudicial killing. But a state that is engaged in armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force. Our procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust, and advanced technologies have helped to make our targeting even more precise. In my experience, the principles of distinction and proportionality that the United States applies are not just recited at meeting. They are implemented rigorously throughout the planning and execution of lethal operations to ensure that such operations are conducted in accordance with all applicable law."

The legal justifications put forward by Koh are reminiscent of the arguments that were used by John Yoo and others in their bid to lend legitimacy to unlawful practices such as rendition, arbitrary detention and torture. The main cause for concern from Koh's statements is the implication that protective jurisdiction to which the US feels it is entitled in order to carry out operations anywhere in the world still continues under Obama. The laws of war do not allow for the targeting of individuals outside of the conflict zone, and yet we now find that extrajudicial killings are taking place in countries as far apart as Yemen, the Horn of Africa and Pakistan. From a legal and moral perspective, the rationale provided by the State Department is bankrupt and only reinforces the stereotype that the US has very little concern for its own principles.

Despite the legalities of what is being conducted, the actuality of extrajudicial killings, especially through UAVs is frightening. The recent revelations by WikiLeaks on the killing of civilians by US Apache helicopters in Iraq has strongly highlighted the opportunities for misuse surrounding targeting from the air. In the Iraq case, there were soldiers who were supposed to be using the equipment to identify so-called combatants, and yet they still managed to catastrophically target the wrong people. This situation is made even worse in the case of UAVs, where the operators are far removed from the reality of the conflict and rely on digital images to see what is taking place on the ground.

Conservative estimates from thinktanks such as the New American Foundation claim that civilian causalities from drone attacks are around one in three, although this figure is disputed by the Pakistani authorities. According to Pakistani official statistics, every month an average of 58 civilians were killed during 2009. Of the 44 Predator drone attacks that year, only five targets were correctly identified; the result was over 700 civilian casualties.

Regardless of the figures used, the case that extrajudicial killings are justified is extremely weak, and the number of civilian casualties is far too high to justify their continued use.

A further twist to the Obama Doctrine is the breaking of a taboo that the Bush administration balked at – the concept of treating US citizens outside of the US constitutional process. During the Bush era, the treatment of detainees such as John Walker Lindh, Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla showed reluctance by officials to treat their own nationals in the way it had all those of other nationalities (by, for instance, sending them to Guantánamo Bay and other secret prisons). The policy of discrimination reserved for US citizens showed that there was a line the US was not willing to cross.

At least, today, we can strike discrimination off the list of grievances against the current president. The National Security Council of the US has now given specific permission to the CIA to target certain US citizens as part of counter-terrorism operations. Specifically, Anwar al-Awlaki has been singled out for such treatment, as it has been claimed that he was directly involved in the planning of the Major Hasan Nidal killings and the Christmas Day bomber attacks. Indeed, it is claims such as this that bring the entire concept of targeted assassinations into question. The US would like us to believe that we should simply trust that they have the relevant evidence and information to justify such a killing, without bringing the individual to account before a court.

The assumption that trust should be extended to a government that has involved itself in innumerable unlawful and unconscionable practices since the start of the war on terror is too much to ask. Whatever goodwill the US government had after 9/11 was destroyed by the way in which it prosecuted its wars. Further, the hope that came with the election of Barack Obama has faded as his policies have indicated nothing more than a reconfiguration of the basic tenet of the Bush Doctrine – that the US's national security interests supersede any consideration of due process or the rule of law. The only difference – witness the rising civilian body count from drone attacks – being that Obama's doctrine is even more deadly.

[ImmortalTRUTH]

  I am so sad.. The iraqi people,the afghan people. When all of this is over i will go there and help people. I promise...

[LightCaster]

I am so sad.. The iraqi people,the afghan people. When all of this is over i will go there and help people. I promise...

First we need to make them to stop with this horror. Focus on things that you can do now to wake up your family, friends everybody around you.

[ImmortalTRUTH]

Yes. i agree. I will redouble my efforts..

[LightCaster]

Yes. i agree. I will redouble my efforts..

Thank you, we all are doing what we can. This NWO-Nazi war machine must be stopped, before it becomes to late for all of us.

[LightCaster]

Seventy civilians among 136 killed in Pakistan airstrikes

uruknet.info

April 11, 2010

Islamabad - Seventy civilians were reportedly among 136 people killed in airstrikes over the weekend in Pakistan's tribal region near Afghan border, officials and locals said on Sunday.

The strikes were carried out in the Orakzai district, where government forces are conducting an offensive to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban hideouts, and in the neighbouring district of Khyber.

A spokesman of the paramilitary Frontier Corps force, Major Fazalur Rehman said 12 militants died and six were injured Sunday in a clash with troops in the Orakzai villages of Kangra and Saam.

'Following the fighting, army helicopters targeted the terrorists' three hideouts. Casualties are not known,' Rehman added.

The fighting came a day after intense clashes in the Baizot area of Orakzai that left 54 militants dead.

'Around 100 terrorists who had come from the nearby district of Khyber tried to capture an important checkpoint but our troops repulsed the raid,' said a local official, Riaz Masood.

Hundreds of Taliban and al-Ciaeda fighters have fled to the neighbouring Khyber district following the offensive in Orakzai that started in late March and has killed more than 350 rebels, according to official data.

Most of the retreating militants are taking shelter in Khyber district's remote Tirah valley where jet planes pounded a residential area on Saturday afternoon when a meeting of the tribal elders from the Koki Khel tribe was taking place.

The Koki Khel tribe is believed to have allied itself with pro- Taliban cleric Mangal Bagh, whose men have carried out suicide bombings and raids on security forces over the last two years.

Intelligence agents and officials of the local civilian government said that more than 70 people died and around 50 were injured in the air strike in Sra Vila village in Tira valley. Most were civilians.

'The jet fighters first bombarded a cluster of six houses and when the people gathered to pull the dead and injured from the rubble the plans targeted the place once more,' said a local government official, who asked not to be named.

'It must have been a bad intelligence and the security forces must have thought that the militants were holding a meeting, which was not the case,' said the official.

Pakistan's English-language Dawn newspaper quoted health officials as saying that women and children were among the injured taken to hospitals in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province.

The newspaper also cited tribal elders from Koki Khel as condemning the bombing. They claimed most of the dead were non- combatant tribesmen.

The operations have put Taliban an al-Ciaeda militants under pressure and reduced the number of their bases from where they once freely carried out cross-border-raids on international forces in Afghanistan.

[LightCaster]

Italy NGO denounces Afghan detentions, says it's targeted because it treats all victims

Sun Apr 11, 12:18 PM
By The Associated Press

ROME - The head of Italian aid group Emergency denounced the detentions of three of its hospital workers in Afghanistan and said Sunday the group was targeted because the hospital treats Taliban fighters along with civilians.

Emergency founder Gino Strada said 40 per cent of the people treated at his hospital in Helmand province are children, a sign that NATO forces are harming civilians in the effort to dislodge the Taliban.

"It becomes difficult (for international forces) to say that dangerous terrorists were bombed," he told Sky TG24. "Children were bombed."

Strada charged that a "preventive war" had been launched by Afghan and international forces "to remove an uncomfortable witness before launching a military offensive in the region."

Three Italian Emergency workers were detained Saturday as part of an investigation into an alleged plot to kill the governor of Helmand province, Afghan officials said. They were among nine people held after suicide bomb vests, hand grenades, pistols and explosives were discovered in the storeroom of an Emergency hospital in Helmand's capital, Lashkar Gah.

Emergency has denied involvement.

Emergency has had a tense relationship with local authorities in violence-wracked Helmand, due in part to its policy of treating all patients. Emergency has provided health services in Afghanistan since 1999.