In a bid to quell public anger, Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was forced to issue a public apology last Saturday over the killing of more than 70 civilians in a recent air strike on a village near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The air strike was part of the proxy war being fought by Pakistan on behalf of Washington to suppress Islamist militants fighting against the US-led occupation inside neighbouring Afghanistan.
An interview with historian Howard Zinn
In 2008 Rethinking Schools and the Washington, D.C.-based education nonprofit Teaching for Change joined together to form the Zinn Education Project, dedicated to promoting the teaching of a people’s history in middle and high schools throughout the United States. The Zinn Education Project recently launched a new website, www.zinnedproject.org, that features over 75 downloadable teaching articles, drawn mostly from the archives of Rethinking Schools magazine, and hundreds of teaching resource recommendations: books, curricula, and audiovisual materials.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell quickly repudiated comments from one of the Defense Department’s undersecretaries today, insisting that attack Iran at any time is “always an option.”
The latest comments came in response to Undersecretary Flournoy’s claims earlier this morning that a military attack against Iran was “off the table in the near term” and that the Obama Administration was focusing on “engagement and pressure.”
The US has been threatening to attack Iran for years, but those threats have gotten increasingly direct since President Obama took office last year.
Meanwhile Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated his nation’s outrage at the Obama Administration’s threat to launch a nuclear first strike against Iran. Earlier this month, President Obama announced that the US would never launch a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear power, but then quickly noted that Iran was explicitly excluded from this pledge.
Morning Star Online, April 20, 2010
The military agreement between the United States and Colombia has caused outcry in Latin America. Many governments suspect that the US is trying to cement its military hegemony in the region and maintain its ability to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries.
The State Department says that the deal is all about security within Colombia and does not affect other countries, but Pentagon documents show that the US has far wider and more ominous objectives.
An US air force budget justification Bill, sent to Congress last year, states that Palanquero airbase in Colombia “provides an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout south America.”
Full spectrum operations is Pentagon jargon for dominating the battle space on land, sea, air and space and can include the use of nuclear weapons.
Keith Jones, wsws.org, April 20, 2010
Recent days have seen a spate of developments that point to the danger of a new military conflagration in the Middle East.
Israel has warned Syria that it will face an Israeli attack if Hezbollah, the Shiite-based Lebanese militia, fires Scud missiles at Israel, the London Times reported Sunday. The newspaper cites an unnamed Israeli cabinet minister as saying, “We’ll return Syria to the Stone Age by crippling its power stations, ports, fuel storage and every bit of strategic infrastructure if Hezbollah dare to launch ballistic missiles against us.”
by Deepa Kumar, CommonDreams.org, April 19, 2010
The events of September 11 laid the basis for the emergence of a vicious form of Islamophobia that facilitated the U.S. goals of empire building in the 21st century. This form of Islamophobia focused on the enemy “out there” against which the U.S. supposedly had to go to war to protect itself, from Afghanistan to Iraq.
As George Bush famously put it, “We’re fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them here.” Or as he stated in his West Point speech in 2002, “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats.” In short, an endless “war on terror” on the enemy beyond U.S. borders was now justified, according to Bush.
Morning Star Online, April 18, 2010
DESTRUCTION: An Afghan police man stands guard outside the damaged wall of the police headquarters in Kandahar south of Kabul. The Taliban has said it wants to hold peace talks.
Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar has said that he and his followers are willing to hold “sincere and honest” peace talks with Western political leaders.
In an interview with the Sunday Times conducted deep inside territory held by Afghan resistance forces, two men whom the newspaper identified as members of the Taliban’s ruling council said that Mr Omar was not vying to rule Afghanistan.
The Quetta shura scholars said that the Islamist umbrella group was fighting for three objectives – the expulsion of foreign military forces, the restoration of Islamic law and security for the Afghan people.
The men said that Mr Omar was prepared to engage in “sincere and honest” talks to realise this.
One man who introduced himself as Mullah Abdul Rashid declared that the Taliban’s supreme leader was “no longer interested in being involved in politics or government.
“All the holy warriors seek is to expel the foreigners, these invaders, from our country and then to repair the country’s constitution,” he said.
“We are not interested in running the country as long as these things are achieved.”
Reviewing the five years in which the Taliban governed Afghanistan before it was ousted by a US-led invasion force in 2001 the men declared that it had been a mistake for the Islamist movement to immerse itself in politics.
Mr Rashid said: “We didn’t have the capability to govern the country and we were surprised by how things went – we lacked people with either experience or technical expertise in government.
“Now all we’re doing is driving the invader out,” he said.
Mr Rashid vowed to “leave politics to civil society and return to our religious schools” when this had been achieved.
Last week a resistance faction led by former Afghan prime minister Gulbadin Hekmatyar sent a three-member team to Kabul for talks with the Karzai regime, Afghan MPs and Nato officials.
The Hizb-e-Islami delegation declared that it was fighting to expel foreign troops and was not seeking government positions after the war.
US President Barack Obama’s administration is currently considering whether to drop its opposition to direct talks with the Taliban.
Two Dutch soldiers were killed on Saturday by a roadside bomb in Uruzgan province, where the Netherlands has deployed some 1,800 soldiers and support staff.
The troops are due to pull out in August.
By William Blum, ZNet, April 17, 2010
When did it begin, all this “We take your [call/problem/question] very seriously”? With answering-machine hell? As you wait endlessly, the company or government agency assures you that they take seriously whatever reason you’re calling. What a kind and thoughtful world we live in.
The BBC reported last month that doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the United States during its fierce onslaughts of 2004 and subsequently, which left much of the city in ruins. “It was like an earthquake,” a local engineer who was running for a national assembly seat told the Washington Post in 2005. “After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was Fallujah.” Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.
by: Michael Gass, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis, April 15, 2010
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: GrungeTextures, Tech. Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock / U.S. Army)
On August 19, 1953, pro-Shah supporters in Iran staged a coup on the Iranian government that was planned, organized and supported by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British Intelligence. Iranians lived under the brutal rule of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi for the next 25 years until the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Though the CIA-led coup in Iran was the first time the agency overthrew a democratically elected government, it wasn’t to be the last. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala. In 1963, the CIA orchestrated the coup in Iraq that eventually brought Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist Party to power. In 1973, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected leader of Chile. In every case, those who were helped into power instituted regimes of terror and violence. These regimes prompted bloody revolutions, or worse, US-led invasions. Either way, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed due to US foreign policy.
Peace and Justice Post 
Demonizing Iran: US Media Continue Beating War Drums
April 22, 2010by Dave Lindorff, CommonDreams.org, April 22, 2010
Just yesterday, the New York Times had a lead story about Israeli planning to possibly “go it alone” in an attack on Iran if the US were not to “succeed” in its diplomatic efforts to get Iran to “stop” it’s alleged attempts to develop a nuclear weapon capability.
Aside from the fact that there is no hard evidence that Iran is trying to make a nuclear bomb or even to refine uranium to obtain nuclear-grade material, the paper ignored one crucial point: Israel cannot “go it alone” in any strike on Iran, since its key weapons–F15 and F-16 fighter-bombers–are supplied to it, and kept flying, thanks to the equipment and spare parts provided by the United States. Indeed the entire Israeli military machine is largely financed and armed by the US.
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Tags:Dave Lindorff, Iran, Iran's offer to the U.S., Israel, United States
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