Peace and Justice Post

By John Nichols, The Nation, July 27, 2010

Wikileaks revelations regarding the extent of US operations and problems in Pakistan raise the question: Shouldn’t Congress check-and-balance the administration’s inclination to expand the Afghanistan imbroglio across the border and into Afghanistan?

Congressmen Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Ron Paul, R-Texas, think so.

They have proposed House Concurrent Resolution 301, “Directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove the United States Armed Forces from Pakistan.”

The measure, which is expected to be voted on Tuesday, is a bold response to a burgeoning crisis. Kucinich says it “aims to cause the United States to withdraw from Pakistan. Now, it’s not generally known that we have at least 124 Special Forces troops on the ground inside Pakistan. It is absolutely urgent that we take a stand to stop spreading war in Pakistan. To nip in the bud the U.S. ground presence.”

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Former US military analyst leaked documents in 1971 revealing how the American public was misled about the Vietnam war

Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian/UK, July 27, 2010

Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst who compared the Afghanistan war logs with his leaking of the 1971 ‘Pentagon Papers’. Photograph: Stephen Hird/ReutersDaniel Ellsberg, a former US military analyst, has described the disclosure of the Afghan war logs as on the scale of his leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971 revealing how the US public was misled about the Vietnam war.”An outrageous escalation of the war is taking place,” he said. “Look at these cables and see if they give anybody the occasion to say the answer is ‘resources”. He added: “After $300bn and 10 years, the Taliban is stronger than they have ever been … We are recruiting for them.”

However, the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on Afghanistan – top secret papers relating to policy – had yet to be leaked, he said.

People could read the logs to discover what they now need to ask, such as what their money was being spent on, he said. They would have an effect on public opinion, but the question, Ellsberg said, was how they would influence the US and UK governments.

He compared them to the document leaked in 2003 by the GCHQ officer, Katharine Gun, which revealed how the US asked Britain to spy on neutral countries at the UN before the invasion of Iraq. The disclosure influenced the attitude of the neutral countries who refused to vote for the invasion.

By Alex Lantier, wsws.org, July 27, 2010

On Sunday, the WikiLeaks web site posted 91,731 American military documents on the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009. The release was timed to coincide with articles on these revelations in the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, all of which had received the documents several weeks ago.

The documents make clear that the occupation of Afghanistan is a filthy imperialist war. Popular resistance and protest demonstrations are drowned in blood, US death squads operate at will under a media blackout, and Washington and NATO collaborate with a narrow elite of corrupt warlords and Afghan officers.

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Morning Star Online, July 25, 2010

David Leigh, The Guardian/UK, July 25, 2010

An Afghan girl lies on a hospital bed in Helmand after being injured in an airstrike by coalition forces in June 2007. Photograph: Abdul Qodus/Reuters

Shum Khan, a man both deaf and unable to speak, lived in the remote border hamlet of Malekshay, 7,000ft up in the mountains. When a heavily armed squad from the CIA barrelled into his village in March 2007, the war logs record that he “ran at the sight of the approaching coalition forces … out of fear and confusion”.

The secret CIA paramilitaries, (the euphemism here is OGA, for “other government agency”) shouted at him to stop. Khan could not hear them. He carried on running. So they shot him, saying they were entitled to do so under the carefully graded “escalation of force” provisions of the US rules of engagement.

Khan was wounded but survived. The Americans’ error was explained to them by village elders, so they fetched out what they term “solatia”, or compensation. The classified intelligence report ends briskly: “Solatia was made in the form of supplies and the Element mission progressed”.

Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called “blue on white” events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.

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By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa Al-Omrani,  Inter-Press Service News,

CAIRO, Jul 26, 2010 (IPS) – Almost two months since Egypt announced it would reopen its Rafah border terminal with the Gaza Strip, operation of the crossing remains sorely limited.

“Rafah has only been opened to passengers and some medical supplies,” Hatem el-Buluk, journalist and resident of Al-Arish, located some 40 kilometres west of Rafah, told IPS. “Everything else, including food and construction materials, must enter the strip via Israeli-controlled border crossings.”

On Jun. 1, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced that Rafah — the strip’s only border crossing not shared with Israel — would be opened to humanitarian aid “indefinitely”. The surprise announcement came one day after Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish activists aboard a ship bringing humanitarian aid to the besieged coastal enclave.

Hitherto, Egypt had refused to open the crossing until Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which has governed the strip since 2007, signed on to a “reconciliation” agreement with the U.S.-backed Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.

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Following up on reports emerging over the weekend, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office is confirming that a NATO attack in Sangin District of the Helmand Province struck a houseload of civilians hiding from a nearby battle, and that at least 52 civilians were killed.

The Karzai government has promised an investigation into the killings of the civilians, which were said to have included a large number of women and children, a number of wounded civilians were also reported in the tiny village.

NATO had previously denied that any such incident had occurred, claiming their own preliminary investigation turned up no indication of any civilian casualties in Sangin. This is largely in keeping with other cases of large scale civilian deaths, however, as NATO generally has denied them when the details first come to light, and only claims then later, if at all.

The civilian deaths will likely draw renewed attention to new commander Gen. David Petraeus’ plans to significantly tone down restrictions on the rules of engagement designed to prevent large scale killings of civilians. It will be difficult, havng just killed 52 civilians, for NATO to argue that the rules are too strict for them.

Bill Van Auken, wsws.com, July 27, 2010

The tens of thousands of documents posted online by WikiLeaks Sunday have provided a detailed and searing indictment of a criminal colonial war that the Obama administration has made its own.

In its sheer volume—92,000 documents, 200,000 pages—the so-called Afghan War Diary makes an incontrovertible case that for nearly nine years the US military has conducted a campaign of terror and deadly violence against the Afghan people.

Consisting of battlefield reports written by US soldiers and officers, the documents record the deaths of civilians resulting from air strikes on their homes and the killing of Afghans on motorcycles and in cars and buses by trigger-happy troops manning roadblocks.

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Declan Walsh, The Guardian/UK, July 26, 2010

The site of a suicide bomb which was followed by civilian deaths as US marines escaped. Photograph: Noorullah/EPA

Brevity is the hallmark of military reporting, but even by those standards the description of one disastrous event is remarkably short: “The patrol returned to base.”

It started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the city of Jalalabad.

The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.

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