Peace and Justice Post

by Sheldon Richman, The Future of  Freedom Foundation, Aug 10, 2010

Thanks to Wikileaks and heroic leakers inside the military, we now know the U.S. government has killed many more innocent Afghan civilians than we were aware of heretofore. We also know that American military and intelligence personnel roam Afghanistan assassinating suspected bad guys. Sometimes they kill people they later acknowledge weren’t bad guys at all. “Bad guys,” like “Taliban,” is implicitly defined as anyone who resists the U.S. occupation force and the corrupt puppet government it keeps in power.

What other atrocities are our misleaders and misrepresentatives committing in our name?

Let’s get something straight: to be an enemy of American occupation, bombing, and “nation building” is not the same thing as being an enemy of America or its people. It’s time Americans understood that. When you invade another country and people there object, even forcibly, they are not aggressors. You are. To understand this, imagine our being invaded by a foreign military force. Would resistance be aggression?

The U.S. government goes to appalling lengths to deny this truth. It is about to try before a military commission a young Canadian, Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was taken into custody in Afghanistan eight years ago when he was 15 years old. The charge? War crimes, among them “murder in violation of the rules of war,” which lawyer Chase Madar calls “a newly minted war crime novel to the history of armed conflict.”

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By Daniella Cheslow in Jerusalem, The Independent/UK, Aug 9, 2010

by Robert Naiman, CommonDreams.org, Aug 11, 2010

By Vilani Peiris, wsws.org, Aug 11, 2010

With monsoonal rains continuing, the worst flooding in Pakistan in 80 years is still spreading. Pakistani relief organisations and government agencies are stretched to the limit. Yet despite urgent appeals from the UN and other aid organisations, the level of international aid is pitiful, even measured against the limited assistance donated in other recent disasters.

According to the UN, more than 14 million people, including 6 million children, have been affected by flooding which has ravaged parts of all four provinces in Pakistan. In appealing for further international aid, UN officials pointed out that the number of people affected exceeds the combined total for the 2004 Asian tsunami, the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and this year’s earthquake in Haiti.

The death toll at nearly 1,700 is still comparatively low. However, many deaths are likely to be unrecorded. Large areas of the country have been cut off by landslides, washed away road and bridges and flooding. The Swat Valley in the worst affected province—Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North West Frontier Province)—is cut off, trapping an estimated 500,000 people. Most have received no relief supplies, except small quantities being transported into the areas by foot or donkey.

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Listen to Ron Paul deliver these remarks here.

Last week the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report on the effect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that confirmed what critics of our foreign policy have been saying for years:  the killing of civilians, although unintentional, angers other civilians and prompts them to seek revenge.  This should be self-evident.

The Central Intelligence Agency has long acknowledged and analyzed the concept of blowback in our foreign policy.  It still amazes me that so many think that attacks against our soldiers occupying hostile foreign lands are motivated by hatred toward our system of government at home or by the religion of the attackers.  In fact, most of the anger towards us is rooted in reactions towards seeing their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and other loved ones being killed by a foreign army.  No matter our intentions, the violence of our militarism in foreign lands causes those residents to seek revenge if innocents are killed.  One does not have to be Muslim to react this way, just human.

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