Posts Tagged ‘war’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Sri Lanka Tamils ‘facing misery’

June 1, 2009

Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka, 23 May 2009

Huge numbers of civilians fled from the final battles

BBC News, June 1, 2009

A senior Sri Lankan Tamil political leader has urged the government to resettle civilians back to their homes as early as possible.

V Anandasangaree described conditions in camps for civilians displaced by the country’s war as “horrible”.

The head of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) said hundreds of thousands faced misery and hardship.

He said there were food, health and sanitation problems in camps set up for Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka.

Many people are having skin diseases as they didn’t get a chance to have a shower for days because of water shortage
V Anandasangaree
Tamil United Liberation Front

The United Nations says nearly 300,000 people have been displaced by recent fighting between government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels.

The civilians have been housed in various camps, most of them in Menik Farm, near the northern town of Vavuniya.

The Menik Farm camp site, which is described by the UN as the world’s largest displacement camp, houses around 220,000 people displaced by the fighting.

Health fears

Mr V Anandasangaree, the TULF leader, is one of the few remaining long-serving moderate Tamil political leaders in Sri Lanka. He has strongly supported the government’s stance against the rebels.

“From the reports I get from the people [in the camps] they are good in some areas and horrible in many,” Mr Anandasangaree told the BBC.

V Anandasangaree

V Anandasangaree has been a critic of the Tamil Tigers

“Health, water and sanitation situation is horrible. Many people are having skin diseases as they didn’t get a chance to have a shower for days because of water shortage.

“Pregnant mothers and newborn babies go through a harrowing time in the camps due to scorching heat,” he said.

The Sri Lankan government accepts that conditions in some of the camps are not ideal but says facilities have been improved in many other camps. It says more land is also being allocated to build new camps to decongest those already full.

The United Nations and other aid agencies have also demanded better access to the camps to carry out humanitarian work.

Sri Lanka’s government is wary of aid agencies and has complained that the agencies had helped the Tigers in the past.

Sri Lanka says it plans to resettle most of the refugees within six months.

Mr Anandasangaree, a well-known critic of the Tamil Tiger rebels, the LTTE, also faulted the government for viewing every Tamil civilian in the camps as a possible Tamil Tiger suspect.

Sri Lanka has said it needs time to weed out potential Tamil Tiger infiltrators hiding in the camps.

“The civilians risked their lives while fleeing from the LTTE-held areas as the rebels were shooting at them. If the government suspects such people as Tamil Tigers, then the entire population of the two districts – Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu – should be the suspects,” he said.

“Then the government will never solve the problem.”

Sri Lankan officials say they have been overwhelmed by the sudden arrival tens of thousands of civilians from rebel-controlled areas since the start of the Sri Lankan military’s final battle against Tamil Tigers a few weeks ago.

The government says it also requires help from the international community for post-war resettlement and reconstruction.

The TULF leader also challenged the official view that de-mining needs to be carried out before the resettlement of civilians can begin in the north.

“The theory that the area is heavily landmined cannot be accepted because I am in touch with a number of people. So, when I ask them they tell me where the landmines are placed. They are local people. According to them, 75% per cent of the area is not at all landmined,” the Tamil leader said.

Mr Anandasangaree said Sri Lankan security forces were doing a commendable job in carrying out relief work for the displaced civilians, but said that was not enough.

“The government cannot address the problem fully on its own because of the size of the displaced population.”

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Commentary, Sri Lanka, Uncategorized, war | Leave a Comment »

Christian Soldiers in Afghanistan

May 30, 2009

by Valerie Elverton Dixon | Sojourners.net, May 30, 2009

William Faulkner once said: “The past is not dead.  In fact, it’s not even past.”  We often think about time and history as a straight line leading from the past, running through the present, heading into the future. With this conceptualization, the past is past and gone.  However, there is another way to think about time.  Tree time.  When we cut down a tree, the rings of the stump are concentric circles of time. The first year exists at the center and each succeeding year surrounds it.

So it is with the meeting of Christianity and Islam on the battle fields of Afghanistan and Iraq.  The historical center of the present conflict is the history of the Crusades.  Many in the Muslim world consider the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as another Crusade.  The Crusades were wars between Christians and Muslims, Christians and Pagans, Christians and Christians over four centuries.  It was a tragic time when armies of the state fought to promote a religious cause.  Crusaders travelled far from home as warriors and pilgrims, warriors and penitents, warriors as walls to stall the spread of Islam.  They won and lost battles.  They destroyed and plundered and raped. They were sometimes brutally massacred when the Muslims won on a particular day.

This historical core has not passed from the consciousness of some observers.  Enter the U.S. military.  The military is full of Christians.  Many of these men and women consider themselves as fundamentalist and evangelical.  An important part of their religious commitment is to witness to Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and savior and to win souls to Christ.  At the same time, the U.S. military has a strict rule against proselytizing.  And so the warriors must walk a fine line between obligations to faith and country.

However, in my opinion, at least one soldier has been unfairly characterized in this discussion.  From what I can tell from the four minute video of a group of Christian soldiers in Afghanistan, army chaplain Captain Emmitt Furner gave them sound advice.  He reminded them of the army regulation and he reminded them that to witness to and for Jesus was more a walk than a talk. It is what we as Christians do that is important.  He said:  “You share the word in a smart manner: love, respect, consideration for their culture and their religion.  That’s what a Christian does is appreciation for other human beings.”  Another soldier in the group spoke of love and respect for the people they meet.

Some observers see Captain Furner’s advice as a sly way to spread the gospel, an element of a 21st century Crusade.  In my opinion, this interpretation is incorrect.  He gave his fellow soldiers the instruction to be living epistles that can be known and read by all (2 Corinthians 3:2).  It is an instruction that we who are not on the front lines in Afghanistan and in Iraq can use.

Dr. Valerie Elverton Dixon is an independent scholar who publishes lectures and essays at JustPeaceTheory.com. She received her Ph.D. in religion and society from Temple University and taught Christian ethics at United Theological Seminary and Andover Newton Theological School.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, USA, war | 1 Comment »

Obama’s AfPak war engulfs Pakistan’s Swat Valley

May 23, 2009
By James Cogan |wsws.org,  May23,  2009

A humanitarian catastrophe is taking place in areas of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP), as a result of the Obama administration’s expansion of the occupation of Afghanistan into the so-called “AfPak war”.

Over the past seven years, ethnic Pashtun Islamist movements in NWFP and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have lent assistance to the resistance being waged against the American-led forces in Afghanistan by the Pashtun-based Taliban, including by disrupting US and NATO supply routes through Pakistan.

On Washington’s insistence, the Pakistani government of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has ordered the military to embark on operations to crush the militants. In late April, Pakistani forces deployed into the Lower Dir and Buner districts of NWFP to drive out a small number who had moved into the area from their strongholds to the north, in the Swat Valley district.

Since May 8, the operation, which now involves up to 18,000 Pakistani troops, backed by air support and heavy artillery, has extended deep inside the Swat Valley. Over the past two weeks they have engaged in a series of battles against the vastly outnumbered and outgunned Islamist fighters.

There is virtually no independent reporting from the conflict zone. Most information coming out of Swat is sourced directly from the military, making its accuracy questionable.

What is clear, however, is that the assault into Buner, Lower Dir and the Swat Valley has rapidly degenerated into the savage collective punishment of entire Pashtun communities. Hundreds of thousands of terrified civilians have taken to the roads to get out of the conflict zone. By the beginning of this week, the United Nations had registered 1.45 million internally displaced persons.

The exodus from just these three districts is becoming the greatest displacement of civilians on the Indian subcontinent since the 1947 partition of the British Raj into India and Pakistan. Tens of thousands of people have found themselves in squalid refugee camps, without adequate food, water and sanitation. Peasant farmers have had to flee right at the time when they need to harvest their crops, setting the stage for severe food shortages and malnutrition later in the year.

A factor in the mass evacuation is the sheer brutality with which the Pakistani military waged an offensive in the nearby tribal agencies of Bajaur and Mohmand last year. Scores of towns and villages, including the major town of Loe Sam, were indiscriminately reduced to rubble in order to dislodge Taliban fighters. The government claims that over 1,500 militants were killed, while relief agencies estimate that over 500,000 people were forced from their homes. There is no estimate on the number of civilian deaths.

The depopulation of the Swat Valley is a conscious policy aimed at creating the best conditions for the military to slaughter the anti-government guerrillas there as well.

Reports indicate that a three-pronged offensive is underway to trap as many militants as possible in the central Swat city of Mingora. Army columns have pushed through Buner and Lower Dir and entered Swat from the south. Another column is moving through Swat from the north, while special forces units were dropped deep in the mountains to force Islamists out of the western Peochar Valley. In one bloody two-week battle for control of a mountain ridge known as Biny Baba Ziarat, the military claims to have slaughtered 150 Taliban, including boys no older than 14.

While the details are sketchy, the military has also waged significant battles to take control of a number of Swat towns, as well as the strategic bridges and roads linking Mingora with the outside world. It is already claiming that it has killed over 1,100 militants, at the cost of some 60 soldiers. Over recent days, troops have been fighting street-to-street battles in the town of Kanju, on the outskirts of Mingora proper.

An Al Jazeerah video shot on May 16 near Mingora showed helicopter gunships attacking highways and other targets; children playing among partially demolished homes; and the potholes caused by the controlled explosion of mines placed by militants on the roads.

The description of the situation in Mingora is reminiscent of Fallujah in November 2004, prior to the murderous US assault that destroyed the Iraqi city and left thousands dead.

Mingora previously had a population of some 250,000. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been told that as few as 10,000 people remain. The Pakistani government has provided a similar estimate, but declared those remaining are all “Taliban sympathisers,” in order to justify a massacre in advance.

HRW reported that Mingora has not had electricity since the offensive began, and hospitals and health facilities are not operating. Now, the army is cutting off food supplies. The city is believed to be defended by several thousand fighters, who have few heavy weapons and are being repeatedly pounded by air strikes and artillery bombardments.

Spelling out the intentions of the military, Major General Sajad Ghani told the Associated Press: “The noose is tightening around them. Their routes of escape have been cut off. It’s just a question of time before they are eliminated.”

The militants in Swat are followers of the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law. While TNSM has ideological affinities with both the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban led by Baitullah Mehsud, it is a local organisation. It gained support in the district as a backlash against both Islamabad’s support for the US invasion of Afghanistan and anger over the endemic poverty that faces the majority of people in what was once one of the country’s premier tourist locations and playgrounds for Pakistan’s rich.

TNSM’s leaders, cleric Sufi Mohammad and his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, used a network of FM radio stations to combine Islamist preaching with populist calls for wealth redistribution and denunciations of the Pakistani government’s neglect of the poor. After several years of fighting, the Pakistani government agreed to a ceasefire with TNSM in February which accepted that its version of Islamic law could be imposed in the Swat Valley.

Over the following weeks, the TNSM sought to expand its influence to the neighbouring district of Buner, which is located only 100 kilometres to the north of Islamabad. This led to exaggerated claims by the Obama administration and in Western newspapers that the Pakistani government had allowed the “Taliban” to grow so strong that they were threatening to take over the country’s capital. The purpose of the accusation was to pressure Zardari and Gilani into unleashing the military to crush the spread of Islamist influence.

The government has made clear that the offensive to destroy TNSM is only the first stage of a campaign of military violence on behalf of the Obama administration. The Pakistani ruling elite fears being denied the international financial assistance they need to stave off economic collapse. At present, the Pakistani state is being kept afloat by loans from the International Monetary Fund and aid from the US and Japan.

Zardari told the British Sunday Times on May 17: “We’re going to go into Waziristan, all these regions, with army operations. Swat is just the start. It’s a larger war to fight.” He went on to appeal for $1 billion in emergency assistance aid. Thus far, the US and other powers have agreed to provide just $224 million.

The Pakistani Taliban strongholds in North and South Waziristan are of the greatest strategic concern to US occupation forces fighting in Afghanistan. Afghan fighters are known to use these tribal agencies, which are virtually outside the control of the Pakistani government, as safe havens and supply points.

The US military has launched repeated missile attacks on targets inside Waziristan using unmanned Predator drones. Illegal under international law, the strikes have resulted in the deaths of over 700 civilians but have only killed a handful of alleged Taliban leaders and had little impact on the cross-border movements of anti-occupation fighters.

A ground assault into Waziristan will see the Pakistani military in battle against the large Pashtun tribal forces loyal to Baitullah Mehsud and the Afghan Haqqani network. Periodic fighting since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan has resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 troops and unknown numbers of militants.

The Pakistani Taliban has responded to the threatened offensive with an ultimatum to the government that it has until May 25 to withdraw its troops from South Waziristan, end the Predator attacks and allow traffic in and out unchecked. Reports suggest Islamist fighters are strengthening defensive positions in anticipation of a military attack.

Fear of an offensive has triggered the beginnings of another mass civilian exodus. Several thousand Pashtun tribal families have arrived over recent days to take refuge in NWFP towns such as Tank, to the south of Waziristan. Officials cited by the Dawn newspaper on May 20 reported that 5,000 tents have been sent to the area in preparation for the influx of over 200,000 civilians.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Human rights, imperialism, Pakistan, US policy, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »

It’s Time for the President To Get Real on Afghanistan

May 23, 2009

by Janet Weil | CommonDreams.org, May 21, 2009

There’s an old adage, “Show me what you spend your money on, and I will tell you your values.”

President Obama’s request for a “speedy” congressional vote on $92.4 billion more in supplemental war funds to pay for more troops, more drone bombing, and more carnage in Afghanistan, has inadvertently shown his values in practice: war over diplomacy, and wishful thinking over clear-eyed realism.

It’s time to get real on the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. Military engagement there since October 2001 has yielded neither the capture of Osama bin Laden, the political defeat of the Taliban, nor the improvement of life for Afghans, especially Afghan women.

This war has cost U.S. citizens, thus far, over $172.9 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. The fiscal year 2009 budget deficit is now projected to be $1.75 trillion. Since it is borrowed money, the taxpayers — and our children — will have to pay it back. This will be a burden on the U.S. economy for decades. Meanwhile, military corporations such as DynCorp, Triple Canopy and Halliburton are raking in profits.

Moving from the cost in money to the cost in blood, this military misadventure has claimed the lives of nearly 700 U.S. servicemembers. Former NFL player Pat Tillman, used as a Pentagon poster boy until killed by “friendly” fire, is perhaps the only name of the dead of this war that Americans remember.

Nameless to us – but their deaths never to be forgotten or forgiven by their families – are thousands of Afghan civilian casualties. Under Obama’s policies, many more young Americans, and Afghan civilians, will die, for no gain.

Obama received a polite “no” from European leaders to his request that NATO forces take more of the combat load in Afghanistan. Large protests in France and Germany marked the 60th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was created to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union.

There is no Soviet Union any longer, Europe is economically powerful and peaceful, and Afghanistan is a long, long way from the North Atlantic.

There are alternatives, far more affordable and rational, than accelerating the military option in one of the poorest and most war-torn countries on earth. The U.S. could halt its military operations, especially the hated drone attacks in the Afghan-Pakistani border areas, and help organize a peace assembly led by widely respected Afghans, both men and women leaders. The U.S. also has the ability to launch a regional diplomatic effort, including Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, and Central Asian states.

The American people are tired of war and sick of seeing their tax dollars go to bail out bankers and keep military contractors in the black. Afghanistan is not “the right war,” it’s a sinkhole for our lives and tax dollars and could be a disaster for the Obama presidency, which began with such optimism. Diplomacy, a drawdown of military involvement, and an exit strategy with a timeline — that’s the realistic path to freedom from endless war and debt. This course of action would show the values that most Americans support.

Janet Weil is a CODEPINK staff member and member of United for Peace and Justice. Her nephew is preparing to be deployed to Afghanistan in November.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, US policy, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »

The March of Folly, Continued

May 22, 2009

Norman Solomon  | The Huffington Post, May 22, 2009

To understand what’s up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. The March of Folly, by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things — how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession — and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names.

What happens among policymakers is a “process of self-hypnosis,” Tuchman writes. After recounting examples from the Trojan War to the British moves against rebellious American colonists, she devotes the closing chapters of The March of Folly to the long arc of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The parallels with the current escalation of the war in Afghanistan are more than uncanny; they speak of deeply rooted patterns.

With clarity facing backward, President Obama can make many wise comments about international affairs while proceeding with actual policies largely unfettered by the wisdom. From the outset of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Tuchman observes, vital lessons were “stated” but “not learned.”

As with John Kennedy — another young president whose administration “came into office equipped with brain power” and “more pragmatism than ideology” — Obama’s policy adrenalin is now surging to engorge something called counterinsurgency.

“Although the doctrine emphasized political measures, counterinsurgency in practice was military,” Tuchman writes, an observation that applies all too well to the emerging Obama enthusiasm for counterinsurgency. And “counterinsurgency in operation did not live up to the high-minded zeal of the theory. All the talk was of ‘winning the allegiance’ of the people to their government, but a government for which allegiance had to be won by outsiders was not a good gamble.”

Now, as during the escalation of the Vietnam War — despite all the front-paged articles and news bulletins emphasizing line items for civic aid from Washington — the spending for U.S. warfare in Afghanistan is overwhelmingly military.

Perhaps overeager to assume that the context of bombing campaigns ordered by President Obama is humanitarian purpose, many Americans of antiwar inclinations have yet to come to terms with central realities of the war effort — for instance, the destructive trajectory of the budgeting for the war, which spends 10 dollars toward destruction for every dollar spent on humanitarian programs.

From the top of the current administration — as the U.S. troop deployments in Afghanistan continue to rise along with the American air-strike rates — there is consistent messaging about the need to “stay the course,” even while bypassing such tainted phrases.

The dynamic that Tuchman describes as operative in the first years of the 1960s, while the Vietnam War gained momentum, is no less relevant today: “For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,’ an academic disguise for ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts.'” Along the way, cognitive dissonance “causes alternatives to be ‘deselected since even thinking about them entails conflicts.'”

Such a psycho-political process inside the White House has no use for the report from the Congressional Progressive Caucus that came out of the caucus’s six-part forum on Capitol Hill this spring, “Afghanistan: A Road Map for Progress.”

Souped up and devouring fuel, the war train cannot slow down for the Progressive Caucus report’s recommendation that “an 80-20 ratio (political-military) should be the formula for funding our efforts in the region with oversight by a special inspector general to ensure compliance.” Or that “U.S. troop presence in the region must be oriented toward training and support roles for Afghan security forces and not for U.S.-led counterinsurgency efforts.”

Or that “the immediate cessation of drone attacks should be required.” Or that “all aid dollars should be required to have a majority percentage of dollars tied or guaranteed to local Afghan institutions and organizations, to ensure countrywide job mapping, assessment and workforce development process to directly benefit the Afghan people.”

The policymakers who are gunning the war train can’t be bothered with such ideas. After all, if the solution is — rhetoric aside — assumed to be largely military, why dilute the potency of the solution? Especially when, as we’re repeatedly made to understand, there’s so much at stake.

During the mid-1960s, while American troops poured into Vietnam, “enormity of the stakes was the new self-hypnosis,” Tuchman comments. She quotes the wisdom — conventional and self-evident — of New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, who wrote in 1966 that U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam would bring “political, psychological and military catastrophe,” signaling that the United States “had decided to abdicate as a great power.”

Many Americans are eager to think of our nation as supremely civilized even in warfare; the conceits of noble self-restraint have been trumpeted by many a president even while the Pentagon’s carnage apparatus kept spinning into overdrive. “Limited war is not nicer or kinder or more just than all-out war, as its proponents would have it,” Tuchman notes. “It kills with the same finality.”

For a president, with so much military power under his command, frustrations call for more of the same. The seductive allure of counterinsurgency is apt to heighten the appeal of “warnography” for the commander in chief; whatever the earlier resolve to maintain restraint, the ineffectiveness of more violence invites still more — in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

“The American mentality counted on superior might,” Tuchman commented, “but a tank cannot disperse wasps.” In Vietnam, the independent journalist Michael Herr wrote, the U.S. military’s violent capacities were awesome: “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”

And that is true, routinely, of a war-making administration.

The grim and ultimately unhinged process that Barbara Tuchman charts is in evidence with President Obama and his approach to the Afghan war: “In its first stage, mental standstill fixes the principles and boundaries governing a political problem. In the second stage, when dissonances and failing function begin to appear, the initial principles rigidify. This is the period when, if wisdom were operative, re-examination and re-thinking and a change of course are possible, but they are rare as rubies in a backyard. Rigidifying leads to increase of investment and the need to protect egos; policy founded upon error multiplies, never retreats. The greater the investment and the more involved in it the sponsor’s ego, the more unacceptable is disengagement.”

A week ago, one out of seven members of the House of Representatives voted against a supplemental appropriations bill providing $81.3 billion to the Pentagon, mainly for warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. An opponent of the funding, Congressman John Conyers, pointed out that “the president has not challenged our most pervasive and dangerous national hubris: the foolhardy belief that we can erect the foundations of civil society through the judicious use of our many high-tech instruments of violence.”

Conyers continued: “That belief, promoted by the previous administration in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, assumes that the United States possesses the capacity and also has a duty to determine the fate of nations in the greater Middle East.

“I oppose this supplemental war funding bill because I believe that we are not bound by such a duty. In fact, I believe the policies of empire are counterproductive in our struggle against the forces of radical religious extremism. For example, U.S. strikes from unmanned Predator Drones and other aircraft produced 64 percent of all civilian deaths caused by the U.S., NATO and Afghan forces in 2008. Just this week, U.S. air strikes took another 100 lives, according to Afghan officials on the ground. If it is our goal to strengthen the average Afghan or Pakistani citizen and to weaken the radicals that threaten stability in the region, bombing villages is clearly counterproductive. For every family broken apart by an incident of ‘collateral damage,’ seeds of hate and enmity are sown against our nation. . . .

“Should we support this measure, we risk dooming our nation to a fate similar to Sisyphus and his boulder: to being trapped in a stalemate of unending frustration and misery, as our mistakes inevitably lead us to the same failed outcomes. Let us step back; let us remember the mistakes and heartbreak of our recent misadventures in the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad. If we honor the ties that bind us to one another, we cannot in good faith send our fellow citizens on this errand of folly. It is still not too late to turn away from this path.”

Norman Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy.”

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Commentary, imperialism, US policy, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »

Sri Lanka: Urgent Need for Human Rights Protection in Sri Lanka, Says Amnesty International

May 19, 2009

Dire Humanitarian Crisis Unfolding in Sri Lanka as Government-Rebel Conflict Ends, Says Human Rights Group

Contact: AIUSA media office, 202-544-0200 x302, lspann@aiusa.org

Amnesty International, May 18, 2009

(Washington) — As the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) reaches its final hours and the humanitarian crisis unfolds, Amnesty International is calling for key steps to be adopted to ensure civilians and captured fighters are protected.

“The Sri Lankan government must ensure that its forces fully respect international law, including all provisions relating to protecting civilians from the effect of hostilities,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director. “The government should accept the surrender of any LTTE fighter who wants to surrender and treat humanely LTTE fighters who have laid down their arms. In turn, the LTTE must also protect civilians and any Sri Lankan soldier they take prisoner.”

There are more than 200,000 displaced people, including approximately 80,000 children, who need relief but also protection from abuses in Sri Lanka.

Amnesty International calls on the Sri Lankan government:

*To allow full access to national and international humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to all those in need and facilitate their operations.

*To allow immediate and unfettered access to national and international independent observers to monitor the situation and provide a safeguard against human rights violations, including torture or other ill-treatment, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances.

*To take measures to protect displaced people, including putting in place immediately a proper registration process, as a key safeguard against abuses such as enforced disappearances.

“In addition, the international community must require the prompt deployment of international monitors to be stationed in critical locations, including registration and screening points, displacement camps and places of detention,” said Zarifi.

Amnesty International is supporting the convening of a special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council to sustain attention to the evolving situation in Sri Lanka and is calling for the United Nations to immediately establish an international commission of inquiry.

“The commission should investigate allegations of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by all warring parties in the course of the conflict and make recommendations on the best way to ensure full accountability,” said Zarifi.

Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 2.2 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.

For more information, please visit: http://www.amnestyusa.org

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Human rights, Sri Lanka | Leave a Comment »

The AfPak Blues: Corpses of Kids By the Truckload

May 14, 2009

By Richard Neville | Counterpunch, May 12, 2009

Millions of warm hearted, fair minded humans live in America, though few are part of the military. If they were, perhaps the carnage could be kept under control. To Americans with a conscience I say – get a grip on what’s going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reign in the White House. To Australians – pull your head out of the keg, ignore the heartwarming hype about “building infrastructure” – we’re part of a pitiless war machine.

It started as a revenge for 9/11, easy as shooting quails in a barrel. “Kill the bastards” screamed Murdoch’s pet Aussie ranter in the New York Post, “a gunshot between the eyes … blow their countries into basketball courts”. And we did. In Afghanistan, the US bombed anything that wasn’t a US franchise, which was … everything: wedding parties, funerals, family compounds, villages, the Al Jazeera office …

Back in January 2002, Marc Herold told ABC radio that a “realistic’ estimate of civilian deaths since the invasion was 5000. Every year since, the slaughter continued.

In 2008, according to the New York Times, American led coalition forces killed 828 civilians, mostly “in airstrikes and raids on villages, which are often conducted at night”.

A few days ago, these same gutless idiots operating in the Western province of Farah, allegedly killed over 100 civilians and are trying to blame it on the Taliban. “No that’s not true” said an MP from the area, Mujammad Naeem Farahi, “and I am someone who supports the American presence”. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates promises to “make amends”. Look at the images. This isn’t flushing out militants. It’s a killing field.

And the murders continue in Pakistan, often hatched and executed from Creech Air Force base in Nevada, where the silent drones glide into the skies every few minutes armed to the teeth.

So far, the “success rate” of drone assassins is abysmal. Two percent of the targeted “bad guys” are killed, and the rest of the dead – 98 percent – are innocent civilians. Today families in Swat are caught in the crossfire. Imran Khan has asked, “what country bombs its own people?” A country caught between a weak leader and an hysterical overlord. The US enforced battle “started without warning and their shells smashed our houses and wounded so many people,” a fleeing resident told the UK Telegraph,”it was needless. The Taliban had already gone.” Mohammed Aurangzeb, a former ruler of Swat says: “Far more people have been killed by the army than by the Taliban during military operations.”

Kathy Kelly, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, asks: “Can we see a pattern in the way that the U.S. government sells or markets yet another war strategy in an area of the world where the U.S. wants to dominate other people’s precious resources and control or develop transportation routes?” You bet we can.

And so Prime Minister Rudd, Defence Chief, Angus Houston and the mainstream media, will you continue to lecture us on the “noble cause” in AfPak? Will you conjure Tobruk, summon up the ANZACS, defend the valor of drone assassinations? Will you dare to cast a glance at the butchered children. No, not the sanitised images in our nursery-maid media, but the true life horrors – corpses of kids by the truckload.

Will the pilots get punished? They’ll get medals. The bereaved might get a fistful of dollars. The odious Taliban will get new recruits.

Aussie soldiers have unwittingly killed their share of innocents. Now our Special Operations Task Group is reportedly carrying out hunt & kill missions that are proudly linked to the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program. This was a lawless torture and execution squad that targeted civilians and is remembered as “the most indiscriminate and massive program of political murder since the Nazi death camps of world war two.” From 1968 to Aug 72, about 26,369 South Viietnamese civilians were slaughted. All for what?

In the past month, 438 bombs have been dropped on Afghanistan, and the tally keeps rising. Hillary Clinton expresses “sincere regret” at the 100 plus deaths, while Obama turns up the heat. This is a war of shame and sadness, a war that reveals what hollow humans we have become, a war that reflects the insatiable appetite of the West for conquest, killing and self delusion. Yet we still think we are the good guys.

Richard Neville lives in Australia, the land that formed him. In the Sixties he raised hell in London and published Oz. He can be reached through his websites, http://www.homepagedaily.com/ and http://www.richardneville.com.au/

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Human rights, imperialism, Pakistan, Peace Movement, Uncategorized, US policy, USA, war crimes, War Criminals | Leave a Comment »

In the Name of Mothers Around the World

May 8, 2009

By Jodie Evans | The Women’s Media Center, May 8, 2009

The author, co-founder of the grass-roots peace and justice movement CODEPINK and board member of the Women’s Media Center, calls on us to honor Mother’s Day as it was originally intended—by the abolitionist, feminist and pacifist Julia Ward Howe.

Women know that war is SO over. We know it in our hearts, in our guts, in our wombs. We know that the madness in Iraq and Afghanistan has to end, that we cannot keep sending our children to kill the children of mothers across the globe. Last month at an appearance in Turkey, President Obama himself said “…sometimes I think that if you just put the mothers in charge for a while, that things would get resolved.”

Mother’s Day pledge by Noo Dal Molin

It is nearly 140 years since Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother’s Day Proclamation, a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco–Prussian War. It flowed from her feminist belief that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.  Every year since CODEPINK began in 2002, we have worked to remind the public and media that Mother’s Day isn’t really about Hallmark and Teleflora, but was a call for women to gather in “the great and general interests of peace.” Howe knew then what we know now.  It will take women’s leadership to undermine what have become the USA’s greatest exports: Violence, Weapons and War.

This year we knew those who could attend our 24-hour weekend vigil outside the White House would be smaller than before, given the fiscal crunch we are all feeling.  We created a project so those who wanted could add to the activities.  In the past we have done an aerial image of thousands of bodies spelling Mother’s Say No To War photographed from the Washington Monument with the White House in the background.  But this year we put out a call for people to knit pink and green squares that we would sew together to read “We will not raise our children to kill another mother’s child” and place across the White House fence. Thousands of pink and green knitted squares have been filling the basement of the CODEPINK house in D.C.  They arrive with stories of how they were knitted with love, passion and conviction, with photos of the joys shared in knitting circles around the world.  The surprise has been that more women than ever want to participate, more women want to join together in community and engage in conversation.

They want answers. What they hear in the media makes no sense.  Why are we leaving more soldiers and private mercenaries in Iraq and not getting out on the date promised?  Why are we moving soldiers to Afghanistan when our military has told us there is no military solution?  How can we end the violence and protect the women? How can we turn our back on the women and children in Gaza?  Why is the military budget larger than under Bush (and that’s not counting another supplemental on Iraq and Afghanistan tacked on)? Why are we spending so much money on destruction, when Obama himself said in his inaugural address, “people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy”?

Women are fired up to gather together and expose the emptiness of the continued push for more weapons and more money for war.

We hope that our gathering on Mother’s Day will plant the seeds of new energy and new coalitions we will need to affect a world drunk on war.  It falls on us to bring peace to the table, to push our way to the table and not let up. Women know that instead of sending our young people overseas as soldiers, we need to send troops of doctors, teachers, business leaders, economists, farmers and peacekeepers who can build the economic structures for security to take root.

During our Mother’s Day weekend in DC, we will celebrate our sisterhood with song and poetry and fun, peace-building children’s activities, but we will also share our pain and grief by hearing the stories of women whose lives have been shattered by war—both women from war zones and mothers of American soldiers. When we bear witness to one another’s stories, we create a deeper, more compassionate foundation from which we can work together for peace.

Even if you can’t join us in D.C., you can send a rose to honor a mother whose life has been profoundly affected by war.  On Mother’s Day we will deliver the roses to the mothers and tie others to the fence outside the White House as a memorial to the dead and a moving call for peace.

However you spend your Mother’s Day, remember those women who have relentlessly stood for our rights in the past and know that we can bring peace. But first we MUST see it as possible and put our hoe in the ground.

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Human rights, Iraq, Peace Movement, US policy, War Criminals | Leave a Comment »

When peace means war

May 8, 2009

Lee Sustar looks at the U.S. war drive taking shape in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Socialist Worker, May 8, 2009

President Barack Obama with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai (Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai (Pete Souza)

WHILE BARACK Obama stage-managed a Washington meeting with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan to discuss regional peace, the U.S. was escalating the war in both countries–and civilian deaths and a mass refugee crisis were the result.

As Obama met with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai May 7, mourners in Afghanistan had barely buried an estimated 120 people killed the day before–the latest in a series of killings by civilians in that country by U.S. and NATO occupation forces.

And by the time Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari arrived in Washington, an estimated 200,000 people had fled the Swat Valley after the U.S. pressured the Pakistani military into breaking a ceasefire with elements of the Taliban. Government officials in Pakistan fear the total number of refugees from Swat could reach 500,000–in addition to an estimated 500,000 Pakistanis who have already fled other war-torn areas near the border with Afghanistan.

The suffering of the Swat refugees is directly due to U.S. policy, which pressured Pakistan to overturn a three-month truce with the Taliban. The government blames the breakdown of the truce on the Taliban for its attempt to seize the town of Buner, but the Pakistani military was already on the offensive (and the U.S. had been carrying out periodic air strikes on Pakistani territory using Predator drones).

Bad as the situation has been, it’s likely to get worse. U.S officials have rebranded the occupation of Afghanistan, which dates from the “war on terror” begun in 2001, as the “Af-Pak” war–a regional campaign to crush the Taliban, whose resistance is an obstacle to U.S. domination.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

OVERSEEING THE policy is special envoy Richard Holbrooke, the egomaniac veteran diplomat who used U.S.- and NATO-backed ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to broker the 1995 Balkans peace deal. He’s out to do the same thing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, pushing a divide-and-conquer strategy that involves trying to buy off “good” Taliban elements, while waging an all-out war to crush the rest.

Holbrooke’s intervention has led directly to heightened conflict on both sides of the border.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. is casting doubts on whether Karzai should run again for president, crippling his already minimal ability to act as a broker among Afghanistan’s warlords. To prop himself up, Karzai chose as his running mate Mohammad Fahim, a warlord notorious for human rights abuses and reputedly a big player in the opium trade. Karzai’s weakness, in turn, has encouraged the Taliban to resist the planned escalation of 25,000 U.S. troops.

In Pakistan, Holbrooke has decided to bypass Zardari, a weak and corrupt politician, by publicly opening a channel of communication with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has close connections with Islamist political parties in areas where the Taliban and its allies are strong. Here, too, the aim is to deepen the turmoil in Pakistani politics, where a mass democracy movement recently forced Zardari to reinstate Supreme Court justices ousted by the previous military ruler, Pervez Musharraf.

To justify the increasingly aggressive U.S. intervention in Pakistani politics, the Obama administration raises the specter of a Taliban takeover of the Pakistani state and nuclear-armed jihad. But this is extremely unlikely, given that the Taliban is primarily based among the Pashtun people who live on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The real difficulty for the U.S. is that the Pakistani state is ambivalent about fighting the Taliban, because of deep connections between Islamist militants and the Pakistani armed forces and security services that date from the 1980s.

Back then, U.S.- and Pakistani-backed Afghani resistance groups, along with money and volunteers like Osama bin Laden, fought a successful war against the former USSR’s occupation that ended in 1989. In a bid to end the turmoil and civil war that followed, Pakistan backed the Taliban’s seizure of power.

In 2001, the U.S. turned the September 11 attacks into an opportunity to seize control of Afghanistan, a strategic crossroads between Central and South Asia and a pressure point for both Russia and China.

Since then, Afghanistan has been dominated by corrupt and brutal warlords, which allowed the once unpopular Taliban to make a military and political comeback. Ironically, the Taliban, which all but eradicated the cultivation of opium poppies in the 1990s, can now tap the opium trade for income. But U.S.-backed warlords are even more involved in the drug trade.

Further complicating matters for the U.S. is the Pakistani military. Assigned by Washington the role of guarantor of stability in Afghanistan, the Pakistani military has been unable or unwilling to deliver. And if Pakistan’s armed forces are reluctant to do Obama’s bidding, it’s not only because of its long-term interests in Afghanistan, but because Pakistan’s generals are wary of the growing economic and military ties between the U.S. and Pakistan’s historic rival, India.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

OBAMA’S SOLUTION to this crisis is the “Afghanistan surge,” a troop buildup modeled on the last phase of George W. Bush’s policy in Iraq, where the Pentagon quieted much of the insurgency by putting it on the U.S. payroll and granting it local political power.

In Iraq, that plan is fraying badly because of the unwillingness of the central government to come to terms with its former enemies. In Afghanistan, such an effort is even more problematic, given the Taliban’s ethnic and social roots. But Washington will pursue this aim anyway, as journalist Pepe Escboar writes:

What matters for the Pentagon is that the minute any sectarian outfit or bandit gang decides to collude with the Pentagon, it’s not “Taliban” anymore; it magically morphs into a “Concerned Local Citizens” outfit. By the same token, any form of resistance to foreign interference or Predator hell from above bombing is inevitably branded “Taliban.”

So far, Afghanistan’s image as the “good” war fought in response to 9/11 has given Obama sufficient political cover for a troop buildup. Obama claims that the escalation is about “making sure that al-Qaeda cannot attack the U.S. homeland, and U.S. interests and our allies” or “project violence against” U.S. citizens.

Obama added more recently: “We want to respect [Pakistan’s] sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”

But more than a few U.S. foreign policy experts dismiss the notion that today’s weak and scattered al-Qaeda can muster a serious threat against the U.S., and reject the idea that the Taliban has any agenda beyond taking power in its home region. That raises the question of just what the Afghanistan war is really about. John Mueller, a professor at Ohio State University and author of a book critical of what he calls the “terrorism industry,” wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs:

If Obama’s national security justification for his war in Afghanistan comes to seem as spurious as Bush’s national security justification for his war in Iraq, he, like Bush, will increasingly have only the humanitarian argument to fall back on. And that is likely to be a weak reed.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Commentary, crime, Human rights, imperialism, Pakistan, US policy | Leave a Comment »

No to War, No to NATO

April 2, 2009

by Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation, March 31, 2009

With President Obama announcing his new strategy for US/NATO escalation in Afghanistan, the April 3-4 NATO Summit in Baden-Baden and Kehl, Germany, and in Strasbourg, France, takes on added urgency — as will the demonstrations by thousands of protestors from over 20 European countries and the US.

Member states will attempt to use the summit as an occasion to celebrate the alliance’s 60th anniversary, France’s return to NATO, and perhaps offer a new “Strategic Concept” as an interventionist force around the world. Activists will articulate an alternative vision focused on securing global peace and confronting domestic challenges at home, including a call for the dissolution of NATO.

Beginning April 1, a diverse coalition of activists will participate in training camps, demonstrations, conferences, workshops, and non-violent blockades. At a moment when international cooperation on economic and human security interests is needed more than ever, the protestors view a US-led, expansionist NATO as destabilizing and dangerous. What was originally designed as a defense alliance against the Warsaw Pact has taken on a very different post-Cold War, global interventionist role.

Activists see a NATO with bases on every continent; a military force that organizers say accounts for more than 75 percent of global military expenditures and drains resources that might otherwise address needs like education, job creation, and poverty; “out of area” operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Mediterranean Sea, and a training mission in Iraq; a destabilizing presence pushing a “missile defense” system, ignoring international law, expanding to Russia’s doorstep, and maintaining a first-strike option — all fueling a renewed arms race. (Recently, popular opposition to the proposed Czech-based radar system for US missile defense was a key factor in bringing down the ruling government there. Peace activist Jan Tamas led a hunger strike that galvanized opposition and he will be speaking at the “counter summit” in Strasbourg.)

Elsa Rassbach, a US citizen and filmmaker who has lived much of the time in Berlin since the mid-1990s, is a member of the International Coordinating Committee that is planning many of the activities of this broad coalition. She said that the need to respond to the occasion of NATO’s 60th anniversary has brought “a lot of different strands” together to collaborate since last June. “For example,” she said, “in the German peace movement — not only the large peace organizations and some Members of the German Parliament, but also smaller groups concerned about military bases used to conduct US/NATO wars, people concerned about atomic weapons…the social movements — the fact that militarization is costing too much. German youth and people concerned with soldier resistance and conscientious objector issues…. We’re bringing disparate movements and organizations together — both large and small — for the NATO action.”

Participants will include national and international groups representing the peace, human rights and anti-globalization movements, as well as students and youth groups. Also represented are trade unions, parliamentary Left and Green parties, and Attac. In all, 600 organizations from 33 countries — including Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, Georgia, Brazil, Guinea, the Philippines and Turkey — have endorsed the campaign’s “No to War, No to NATO” appeal.

US participants include United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), Code Pink, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW), Peace Action, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and others.

Perhaps no issue will be more prominent at the Summit and the protests than the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan. EU and NATO troops and resources are key to President Obama’s new plan for escalation, and most Europeans are strongly opposed to the war (though many favor humanitarian aid, reconstruction projects, etc.) In Germany, for example, surveys suggest opposition as high as 70 percent.

Andreas Speck, member of the International Coordination Committee, and also the War Resisters’ International which is participating in non-violent, civil disobedience, said: “This Summit is really important to NATO for taking its next step in becoming a global intervention force — obviously, NATO’s operation in Afghanistan will be an important topic. We want to show that Afghanistan is no better than Iraq — it’s a war that is not justified and we are completely opposed to this military operation.”

Rassbach agreed. “We want Americans to understand that the reason this opposition to NATO is emerging is that NATO — originally supposed to be a defensive alliance — is being converted into a very aggressive force to intervene around the world, and Afghanistan is a prime example,” she said. “Afghanistan is a key test for the ‘out of area’ intervention concept.”

The current schedule calls for: a camp near Strasbourg April 1-5; a conference on NATO and Human Rights on April 1; a hearing on the War in Afghanistan in Karlsruhe, Germany on April 2; a congress/counter summit of leading intellectuals, activists, and representatives of European political parties in Strasbourg on April 3 and April 5; actions in Baden-Baden on April 3 in conjunction with German Chancellor Merkel’s dinner for the heads of state; and also on the morning of April 4 in Strasbourg when a photo-op is scheduled at the pedestrian bridge Passerelle des deux Rives, and the NATO Summit begins in the Palais De La Musique Et Des Congres; the climactic international demonstration in Strasbourg on the afternoon of April 4.

The organizing challenges are enormous.

Just for the civil disobedience coalition — “Block NATO“, which is smaller than the broader coalition — Speck said there will be thousands of people coming in from Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Britain “and a few other countries.”

“It’s a big challenge for us in terms of communication — during the actions, the trainings, and the conference” he said. “Because we will need translation for a lot of these things.”

The coalition has also reached out to the French police to let them know they will be protesting non-violently. They will meet with them on the morning of April 1.

“We fear that the police will not act non-violently against us, so we want them to know that there’s no threat from our side,” Speck said. “The problem is we never know what the police will do and also if they will use agent provocateurs to create the images that they want.”

Perhaps even more pressing is the proposed route for the larger demonstration. The French authorities have relegated it to the outskirts far from the cordoned off Strasbourg city center where the Summit will be held. (The security within the city is extreme and controversial. The French court is currently hearing complaints from residents who are already being asked by police to take down peace flags hanging from their balconies, and who will be forced to wear badges during the summit to move about the city.) Under French law, there are no opportunities to appeal the demonstration route but organizers continue to press their case.

“Nobody’s demanding that we demonstrate very close to the Summit, just something reasonably close,” Speck said. “My fear is that if it’s very far out then people will not accept this…. And maybe that’s what [the authorities] want — a confrontation. Because then you have people upset, trying to make their way to the center of the city, and that will give the police the opportunity to provoke some violent confrontation. I hope that’s not going to happen, we don’t want this to happen.”

(Speck said people in the US can help by writing the French Embassy and speaking out against this infringement on the human right to freedom of expression and assembly.)

Of course, there will be no such negotiations regarding time and place for acts of civil disobedience. “The aim is… to effectively blockade the NATO summit venue basically with our bodies… And to obstruct the functioning of the summit by cutting off the leaders from the infrastructure that they need. There will be no material-blockades or actions which, for example, attack the police.”

Joanne Landy, co-director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracyin the US, said these events and the fervor surrounding them are something the US should be paying attention to. “NATO is very much part and parcel to how the US tries to marshal other countries to do some of the heavy-lifting for an imperial policy,” she said. “This imperial policy is catastrophic for us…. it completely distorts our resources, and it’s just fundamentally the wrong relationship to have with the rest of the world. I would like to have a world in which we could actually be in solidarity with labor movements and women’s movements and so forth. But right now whatever the US does is suspect and for good reason. So you really need a very different foreign policy all together in which the military wouldn’t play the role that it does now, and where the US could really support the needs of ordinary people everywhere.”

“American activists can see this anti-NATO protest as how Europe is protesting the Afghanistan War,” Rassbach said. “But it’s also more than that. It’s against all the military costs and the military bases in Europe and NATO’s nuclear first-strike policy that includes the proposed missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Cold War is over, so why should NATO continue?”

There is another important achievement here that the American peace movement is working towards as well.

“For many people it’s new to work in such a broad coalition,” Speck said. “Sometimes there is quite a bit of tension in the international committee. But on the other hand, everyone wants to work together, with our differences, to counter what NATO is doing, what the EU is doing, and all the militarization that we see going on…. That’s what our work in diverse movements is about, to deal with the differences. We want to create a much more diverse and democratic society so we need to learn to live with these kinds of differences.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Commentary, Peace Movement, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »