February 9, 2010
US occupation forces in Afghanistan
Thousands of Afghan civilians have began fleeing their homes before a threatened US military offensive against Taliban fighters.
International Red Crescent aid workers in the southern Afghanistan city of Marjah, Helmand province, reported that US warplanes had dropped leaflets on the area warning people to leave or be killed.
The Taliban has inflicted a huge number of casualties on the US-led occupation forces in Marjah.
Commander of more than 55,000 foreign fighters in Afghanistan US General Stanley McChrystal claimed that the leaflets were directed at Taliban militants.
Hee added that the offensive against the city, which has a population of 80,000, was intended to “re-establish security.”
Red Crescent spokesman Bijan Farnoudi warned that the Afghanistan government did not seem prepared to deal with an exodus of refugees and revealed that medical posts in the province were already recording an increase in the number of patients with bullet or shrapnel wounds.
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Tags: Afghan civilians, Afghanistan, Helmand province, Taliban, US military
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February 9, 2010
Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA’s “secret” battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — that is, pilot-less drones — shoot missiles (18 of them in a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and then the news comes in: a certain number of al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders or suspected Arab or Uzbek or Afghan “militants” have died. The numbers are often remarkably precise. Sometimes they are attributed to U.S. sources, sometimes to the Pakistanis; sometimes, it’s hard to tell where the information comes from. In the Pakistani press, on the other hand, the numbers that come back are usually of civilian dead. They, too, tend to be precise.
Don’t let that precision fool you. Here’s the reality: There are no reporters on the ground and none of these figures can be taken as accurate. Let’s just consider the CIA side of things. Any information that comes from American sources (i.e. the CIA) has to be looked at with great wariness. As a start, the CIA’s history is one of deception. There’s no reason to take anything its sources say at face value. They will report just what they think it’s in their interest to report — and the ongoing “success” of their drone strikes is distinctly in their interest.
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Tags: "Operation Breakfast", CIA's "secret" battlefied, CIA’s escalating drone war, Combodia, Pakistan, pilot-less drones, Pratap Chatterjee, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Vietnam
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February 7, 2010
By William Blum, Foreign Policy Journal, Feb 7, 2010
It’s a good thing the Haitian government did virtually nothing to help its people following the earthquake; otherwise it would have been condemned as “socialist” by Fox News, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and other right-thinking Americans.
The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States — twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally.
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Tags: Aristide kidnaped by US and exiled, Bill Clinton and Aristide, George W. Bush and Aristide, Haiti, United States, William Blum
Posted in Commentary, crime, imperialism, Uncategorized, US policy, USA | Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2010
Laura Flanders, The Nation, Feb 3, 2010
Who says the president is failing to show leadership? In one area at least, there’s no sign of flag or falter. If anything, the administration’s only becoming more forthright. Sad to say, that area is military build-up.
Last year, the White House made a big deal of cutting a weapons program — the F-22 fighter jet — and the cuts conveniently obscured the growth in spending on unmanned aircraft or drones (the weapons that Pakistanis say killed a record 123 civilians in twelve attacks last month; 41 for every alleged Al Qaeda operative.)
This year, the president dispensed with the window dressing. No big deal about cuts — except on the domestic side. While the administration’s record $3.8 trillion budget cuts or freezes spending on domestic programs, it requests $708.3 billion for war. That’s $14.8 billion more than we’re spending now.
The total includes $548.9 billion for “regular” war, plus $159.3 billion for special spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oh yes, the administration’s also asking Congress to increase spending on new nuclear weapons by more than $7 billion dollars over the next five years — despite that peace prize-winning pledge to cut the US arsenal and seek a nuclear weapons-free world.
The quote of the day comes from the CEO of a military contractor-funded policy group called the Lexington Institute. Loren Thompson tells Tuesday’s New York Times, “The defense industry is pleased but bemused… It’s been telling itself for years that when the Democrats got control it would be bad news for weapons programs. But the spending keeps going on.”
Take that you Nobel committee!
And to think some whiners complain about Democrats suffering from a lack of direction.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.
Tags: $3.8 trillion budget, $708.3 billion for war, defense industry, drones killed Pakistani civilians, Laura Flanders, President Barack Obama, spending on new nuclear weapons, unmanned aircraft or drones, weapons
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February 7, 2010
Victims trapped in the rubble after a suicide bombing at the opening of a school for girls in the northwestern Pakistani town of Dir last week
THE discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.
Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.
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Tags: American soldiers, bombing, CIA retaliation, covert war in Pakistan, multiple drone attack, Obama, Pakistan, US drone airstrikes in Pakistan, US troops were in Pakistan
Posted in Commentary, Pakistan, President Barack Obama, Uncategorized, US policy, USA, war | Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2010
Dahr Jamail, author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports on how the U.S. military has used anthropologists and other social scientists to further the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Report
(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: The U.S. Army, Hayley Austin)
A core tenet of the Obama administration’s plans for “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan is an increased reliance on counterinsurgency.
As previously reported on this web site, the US military has sent shock troops – anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists – with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, who also donned helmets and flak jackets. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. The program is currently comprised of approximately 400 employees, and is actively seeking new recruits.
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Tags: American scholars, Dahr Jamail, David Price, Human Terrain System (HTS), Iraq and Afghanistan wars, militarization of anthropology, scholars with the troops, US military
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February 7, 2010
by Humaira Shahid and Ritu Sharma, The Boston Globe, Feb 6, 2010
Eight years ago, Nasreen (not her real name) walked into the office of the Daily Khabrain newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan, and demanded justice. She stripped off her clothes, revealing a black and blue body covered with wounds and cigarette burns. She’d been gang raped. With tears in her eyes, she said, “My husband hired three men and got me raped in front of him because I was tired of his abuse and demanded the divorce that Islam gave me a right to. He didn’t even respect me as the mother of his children. . .. I just want justice in the name of God.”
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Tags: abuse of wmen, acid attacks and torture, forced marriages, global violence against women, honor killings, Humaira Shahid, Pakistan, Ritu Sharma
Posted in Commentary, crime, Human rights, Pakistan, torture, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
February 5, 2010
Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play.
Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear program and impose the “crippling” sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war.
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Tags: Iran, Patrick J. Buchanan, President Obama, United States
Posted in Commentary, Iran, President Barack Obama, Uncategorized, US policy, USA | Leave a Comment »
February 5, 2010
Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 27 January 2010
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| One of the ways the prejudiced Oslo “process” has survived is through the creation of a Palestinian Authority upon which tens of thousands depend for their livelihood. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) |
The 1993 Oslo agreement did not only usher in a new era of Palestinian-Israeli relations but has had a much more lasting effect in transforming the very language through which these relations have been governed internationally and the way the Palestinian leadership viewed them. Not only was the Palestinian vocabulary of liberation, end of colonialism, resistance, fighting racism, ending Israeli violence and theft of the land, independence, the right of return, justice and international law supplanted by new terms like negotiations, agreements, compromise, pragmatism, security assurances, moderation and recognition, all of which had been part of Israel’s vocabulary before Oslo and remain so, but also Oslo instituted itself as the language of peace that ipso facto delegitimizes any attempt to resist it as one that supports war, and dismisses all opponents of its surrender of Palestinian rights as opponents of peace. Making the language of surrender of rights the language of peace has also been part of Israel’s strategy before and after Oslo, and is also the language of US imperial power, in which Arabs and Muslims were instructed by US President Barack Obama in his speech in Cairo last June.
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Tags: Israel, Joseph Massad, Palestinian rights, Palestinian-Israeli relations, peace, PLO, US General Keith Dayton
Posted in Commentary, Gaza, Human rights, Palestine, Uncategorized, US policy, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »
February 5, 2010
George S. Hishmeh, Al Arabiya News Channel, Feb 5, 2010
Much as the world has responded marvelously and generously to calls to help Haitians after their devastating earthquake last month. The opposite has been true about the impoverished Palestinians in Gaza Strip who have been under an increasingly tighter siege since the Israeli blitz a little over a year ago.
The Obama administration has committed $300 million to help rebuild the heavily demolished area, now home to more than 1.5 million Palestinians, many of them refugees from nearby towns in what is now Israel. The United Nations has also raised $4.5 billion, but to date, neither the American nor the U.N. funds have been spent there because of the tight Israeli blockade which is also enforced by the Egyptians on their border with the once Israeli-occupied strip.
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Tags: blockade of Gaza, George S. Hishmeh, Israel, Palestinians in Gaza, Richard Goldstone report
Posted in Gaza, Uncategorized, war, war crimes, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »
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Haiti, Aristide, and Ideology
February 7, 2010By William Blum, Foreign Policy Journal, Feb 7, 2010
It’s a good thing the Haitian government did virtually nothing to help its people following the earthquake; otherwise it would have been condemned as “socialist” by Fox News, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and other right-thinking Americans.
The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States — twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally.
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Tags: Aristide kidnaped by US and exiled, Bill Clinton and Aristide, George W. Bush and Aristide, Haiti, United States, William Blum
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