Peace and Justice Post

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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Thousands of leaked U.S. military papers from Afghanistan contain evidence of possible war crimes that must be urgently investigated, the founder of the whistle-blowing website that published the papers said.

Julian Assange, who set up Wikileaks to expose perceived unethical behaviour by government and business, accused U.S. forces of covering up civilian deaths and said sections of the vast collection of secret papers supported such accusations.

His website has published 76,000 military reports covering the Afghan conflict between 2004 and 2010, and has promised to release thousands more in the coming weeks.

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Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced a measure that would green-light an Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. The resolution, H.Res. 1553 (in full below), provides explicit support for military strikes against Iran, stating that Congress supports Israel’s use of “all means necessary” against Iran “including the use of military force”. US military leaders have warned that strikes could be catastrophic to US national security interests and could engulf the Middle East in a “calamitous” regional war.

Nearly a third of House Republicans have signed onto the resolution, which has been publicly discussed and circulated by its lead sponsor, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), for months. The National Iranian American Council is leading calls to oppose the measure, urging those concerned to demand that House Republican Leader John Boehner denounce the resolution.

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The shocking rates of infant mortality and cancer in Iraqi city raise new questions about battle

By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent/UK, July 24, 2010

Getty Images

Children in Fallujah who suffer from birth defects which are thought to be linked to weapons used in attacks on the city by US Marines

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