By Dave Lindorff, Couterpunch, Oct 20, 2009
The horrors of the US Agent Orange campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors of the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it used much more extensively, and in more urban, populated areas, in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.
How many civilians have been killed in the U.S. drone war in Pakistan? The number could be as high as 320 innocents, according to an analysis released today by the New America Foundation. That’s about a third of the 1,000 or so people slain in the robotic aircraft attacks since 2006.
Reliable information from the drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas is incredibly hard to come by. The government not only keeps news organizations out, it also blocks aid groups, like Doctors Without Borders. So analysts are forces to rely only press reports, which are themselves relying on second-hand accounts. The result: wildly different estimates of who has died in the attacks. In April, the News of Pakistan claimed that Predator and Reaper attacks had only killed 14 militants; the rest were bystanders. Last month, the Long War Journal estimated that about 10 percent of the casualties were civilian. The New America study, lead by long-time terrorism researcher Peter Bergen, comes down somewhere in between.
From CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser
WASHINGTON (CNN) – A slight majority of Americans think that the war in Afghanistan is turning into another Vietnam, according to a new national poll which also indicates that nearly six in 10 oppose sending more U.S. troops to the conflict.
Fifty-two percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say the eight year long conflict has turned into a situation like the U.S. faced in the Vietnam War, with 46 percent disagreeing.
According to the poll, 59 percent of people questioned opposed sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan with 39 percent in favor. Of the 59 percent opposed, 28 percent want Washington to withdraw all U.S troops, 21 percent are calling for a partial American pullout, and 8 percent say the number of troops should remain the same.
“Has Afghanistan turned into Barack Obama’s Vietnam? Most Americans think so, and that may be one reason why they oppose sending more U.S. troops to that country,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Older Americans are most likely to see parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam – possibly because they remember the Vietnam War, rather than reading about it in textbooks.”
President Barack Obama and his top military, national security and foreign policy advisers are conducting an intensive strategic review of the U.S. military presence in the war-torn country. The president is weighing a suggestion by the top American military commander in Afghanistan to increase force levels by as many as 40,000 troops.
More than two-thirds of people polled say it’s unlikely Afghanistan will have stable government in the next few years. And that was before Monday’s release of a United Nations report alleging widespread fraud in the recent Afghanistan elections. According to the survey, around two-thirds also feel that its unlikely that without American assistance, the Afghan military and police will be able to keep their country safe and secure or prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan as a base of operations for planning attacks against the U.S.
The poll indicates that six in 10 Americans feel it’s necessary to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States. And a similar number say the conflict in Afghanistan is part of the war against terrorism which began with the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
“That’s probably the reason why Afghanistan is still more popular than the war in Iraq,” Say Holland. “Many Americans make the connection between 9/11 and Afghanistan, and the public recognizes that there is little chance that the Afghan government can deal with terrorists on its own.”
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted Friday through Sunday, with 1,038 adult Americans questioned by telephone.
The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
NPR, October 18, 2009
As Pakistan mounts a major ground offensive against al-Qaida and Taliban militants, hundreds of thousands of Pakistani refugees remain in dire need of emergency relief. That’s the take-away from a report, expected later this month, from the humanitarian advocacy group Refugees International. The group’s findings are described as being highly critical of U.S. policy in Pakistan. Host Liane Hansen speaks with Patrick Duplat of Refugees International on the group’s recent trip to Pakistan.
Yesterday, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik angrily insisted, as his government so often has in recent months, that there are absolutely no Blackwater forces operating inside the country, nor have there ever been.
The claims have long been scoffed at by Pakistani journalists, noting that retired CIA officials have been very open with the fact that they were using Blackwater security at an air base they have been using inside Pakistan to launch drone attacks.
What’s more, locals in the Pakistani city of Peshawar have been complaining for months about rude mercenaries in Blackwater uniforms roaming the streets of University Town with assault rifles. The organization, which has since changed its name to Xe, has been providing security to an American company there, completely openly.
The Pakistani government isn’t alone in these claims, as the US embassy in Pakistan has likewise denied that there is a single Blackwater agent in all of Pakistan. They’ve even gone so far as to get a Pakistani newspaper to censor an article to the contrary, claiming it was an incitement against America.
So how do the US and Pakistani governments explain the discrepancy between their claims of no Blackwater employees being there and all the Blackwater employees operating in plain sight? In short they don’t. Pakistani media are condemned as “conspiracy theorists” when they report on Blackwater’s presence, accused of “endangering Americans” or supporting extremism. When it makes the Western press, it is simply ignored.
By Dave Lindorff, Counterpunch, Oct 16 – 19, 2009
On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined “Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart disease and hairy-cell leukemia.
John Pilger, New Statesman, Oct 15, 2009
Obama, the man of peace, is planning another war to add to his impressive record
Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.
Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran – which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.
At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon. In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”, secret assassinations and torture continue.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations . . . nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.
Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador andParaguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.
Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.
Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”
The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”. Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.
Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the “breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open”. When Obama was elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”
The US is expected to announce a significant surge of up to 45,000 extra troops for Afghanistan after Gordon Brown said that 500 more British troops would be sent to the country.
By James Kirkup and Andrew Hough, Telegraph.co.uk, Oct 14, 2009
President Barack Obama’s administration is understood to have told the British government that it could announce, as early as next week, the substantial increase to its 65,000 troops already serving there.
The decision from Mr Obama comes after he considered a request from General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, to send tens of thousands of extra American troops to the country.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said: “I don’t want to put words in the mouths of the Americans but I am fairly confident of the way it is going to come out.”
An announcement next week could coincide with a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, due next Thursday and Friday.
Peace and Justice Post 
Time and again, US backs Israel
October 21, 2009Washington will attempt to keep the resolution on Goldstone report out of the UN Security Council
Imagine that heavily-armed neighbourhood thieves break into your house, steal your property and shoot a family member. Naturally, you would call law enforcement. You know the names of the criminals and expect the police to arrest them. But what if the police hear the murderers’ names, look embarrassed, shrug their shoulders, say ‘sorry, can’t help you,’ and simply walk away?
Imagine that you complain to the chief of police, who is sympathetic at first, but quickly shoos you away when you told him who the perpetrators are. Imagine that the courts, government and international bodies were all determined to protect your attackers even if this meant throwing you to the wolves. You would think the world had gone howling mad, wouldn’t you?
Surely, nobody on earth has immunity from justice. Encouraged by the lack of come-back, imagine that the villains return again and again while all purported defenders of justice continue to turn a blind eye. What would you do? What could you do?
The above scenario may sound outrageous but this has been the essential plight of the Palestinian people for over six decades. They have been forced to remain silent while their lands have been robbed, their olive groves destroyed, their dignity trampled on, their homes demolished or bombed, their freedom to travel denied, their children locked-up and their lives imperiled.
Yet each time they have sought justice or recompense through recognised international legal channels, the door has been firmly barred. And when in utter frustration they have attempted to take justice into their own hands — which, by the way, international law deems their right as a people under occupation — they have been labelled ‘terrorist’.
Time and again, they have cried out to the international community for help to no avail. That isn’t to say that the majority of the world’s nations approve of Israel’s actions. If it was up to the UN General Assembly Israel would have received its come-uppance a long time ago and there would be a state called Palestine in existence today.
But, unfortunately, the UN’s power rests in the hands of a few major powers that hold a power of veto. Shamefully, one veto-holder in particular, the US, is committed to protecting Israel’s interests unconditionally, irrespective of the rights or wrongs, and bludgeons its allies to support its stance.
I’m sure you already know about the dozens of non-binding UN Resolutions upholding Palestinian rights that Israel has studiously ignored along with the judgment of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which characterised Israel’s apartheid ‘fence’ illegal. And you are probably aware that Britain has been tipping-off alleged Israeli war criminals concerning their imminent arrest should they land on British soil.
It seems to me shocking that the very countries that place themselves on a pedestal of human rights and wag their fingers at others for not coming up to scratch, behave like the three not-so-wise monkeys when Israel is involved.
Still not convinced? Last Friday, the UN Human Rights Council voted to affirm a Gaza war crimes report compiled by their own investigators, led by a self-ascribed Zionist and Israel-supporter South African judge Richard Goldstone. The resolution was overwhelmingly approved with 25 in favour, six against and 11 abstentions.
Only two permanent members of the UN Security Council voted ‘yes’ — China and Russia. It goes without saying that the US voted against, while Britain and France chose the road of cowardice by not registering any vote only to be condemned by Israel for not voting against.
By logical progression, the draft resolution calling upon “all concerned parties including United Nations bodies” to ensure the implementation of recommendations in the report, should now be endorsed by the Security Council. Those recommendations include the referral of Israel and Hamas to the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the event the parties fail to conduct open and credible investigation within a six-month period.
To the ears of any fair-minded person, this procedure will surely sound fair and reasonable. Both the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas have welcomed the endorsement, but, predictably, Israel once again cries foul. It calls the resolution terrorist-supporting and threatens to bury the peace process. And we thought it was already dead and buried!
Tragically, the Goldstone report is destined to be buried too. Washington will attempt to keep the resolution out of the Security Council, failing which, if push comes to shove, the US will use its veto.
But all is not lost. The report has placed Israel’s crimes under a magnifying glass and Israelis are debating on the worldwide wind of change that is slowly eroding their de facto immunity status. Moreover, if the US is forced to wave its power of veto, thus negating the value of a serious investigation, it will face the loss of any smidgeon of credibility it still retains as an honest broker in the conflict.
Such a move would also embarrass Nobel’s latest peace prize recipient President Barack Obama. Indeed, following America’s ‘nay’ vote on Friday, the President of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights Michael Ratner called the peace prize winner’s “protection of a state that has committed war crimes” an “abomination”. Bravo to that!
Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She can be contacted at lheard@gulfnews.com. Some comments may be considered for publication.
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Tags:Gaza war crimes report, Goldstone report, Israel, Israel's apartheid ‘fence', Michael Ratner, peace prize recipient Obama, UN's power and major powers, United States
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