POWDERKEG IN A MATCH FACTORY

10 comments

Posted on 13th May 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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It’s good to see our humanitarian interventions in Libya and Syria are yielding such good results. Maybe we can match the tremendous success we’ve achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m sure the Iranians can’t wait for our arrival.

At least 15 people, including three children, were killed and another 30 injured when a car bomb exploded in crowded area outside a hospital in Benghazi, Libya

Over thirty people were killed and 100 injured when several explosions struck a city in southern Turkey, near the border with Syria, Turkish media reported quoting officials.

WAS ENDING THE DRAFT A MISTAKE?

59 comments

Posted on 10th May 2013 by Zarathustra in Economy

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I have always been opposed to conscription, thinking it a form of servitude.  I graduated from high school in 1975, the same year the Vietnam War finally ended.  I was issued a draft card, but there was no lottery and had been none since 1973.  My form of juvenile protest was to write the phone numbers of friends all over it.  My high school years were also the time of Watergate, and I really thought Nixon would re-escalate the war in order to create the military emergency that might save his presidency.  I’m glad I was wrong about that, but if it were 1973/4 again, I would still think it a reasonable possibility.  

While I remain opposed to a military draft, I think of it in the context of a fairly “normal,” civilized country…not the lawless, global hegemon that the United States has degenerated into.  For our times, this guy may be right.  We desperately need a new antiwar movement in this country.  Millenials, repeat after me, “HELL NO, I WON’T GO!”

THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013 05:00 PM PDT

Without conscription war has become an abstraction, enabling a new “era of persistent conflict”

BY 

Was ending the draft a mistake?
U.S. Army helicopters pour machine gun fire into tree line to cover the advance of South Vietnamese ground troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp near the Cambodian border, in March 1965 during the Vietnam War.(Credit: AP/Horst Faas)

Few probably recall the name Dwight Elliott Stone. But even if his name has faded from the national memory, the man remains historically significant. That’s because on June 30, 1973, the 24-year-old plumber’s apprentice became the last American forced into the armed services before the military draft expired.

Though next month’s 40-year anniversary of the end of conscription will likely be as forgotten as Stone, it shouldn’t be. In operations across the globe, the all-volunteer military has been employed by policymakers to birth what Gen. George Casey recently called the “era of persistent conflict.” Four decades later, we therefore have an obligation to ask: How much of the public’s complicity in that epochal shift is a result of the end of the draft?

There is, of course, no definitive answer to such a complex question. However, a look back at some lost history shows that today’s public acquiescence to militarism was exactly what the government wanted when it ended the draft.

That loaded term — “militarism” — was, in fact, a prominent part of the 1970 report by President Nixon’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force. In its findings, the panel worried about “a cycle of anti-militarism” in a nation then questioning America’s increasingly martial posture.

Noting that “the draft is a major source of antagonism” toward the growing military-industrial complex, the report praised the fact that “an all-volunteer force offers an obvious opportunity to curb the growth of anti-militaristic sentiment.”

Nixon’s commission did devote some empty rhetoric to downplaying “the fear of increased military aggressiveness or reduced civilian concern” about military actions in the event of an all-volunteer force. But the report’s political conclusions were clear: By disconnecting most Americans from the blood-and-guts consequences of war, the end of the draft would “decrease dissent stemming from conscription” and “close one of the channels” of antiwar organizing.

Today, such conclusions read like prophecy. Though polls showed that many Americans opposed the Iraq War, that invasion and occupation was historically unprecedented in length and yet never generated the kind of mass protest that earlier, shorter wars evoked. Same thing for the Afghanistan War. Same thing for all the forward deployments to far-flung bases and one-off missions.

The pattern suggests that in the absence of conscription, dissent — if it exists at all — becomes a low-grade affair (an email, a petition, etc.) but not the kind of serious movement required to compel military policy changes. Why? Because as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, without a draft “wars remain an abstraction — a distant and unpleasant series of news items that does not affect (most people) personally.”

The danger, says West Point’s Lance Betros, is that Americans then “reflexively move towards a military solution before they will try all the other elements of national power.”

That reality has prompted some lawmakers in recent years to propose reinstating the draft. They argue it is the only way to compel Americans to truly care about the foreign policy and national security decisions of their government.

Well-meaning people can certainly disagree about whether a modern-day draft is a good idea or not (and it may not be). But 40 years into the all-volunteer experiment, it is clear that ending conscription was as much about giving citizens the liberty to abstain from as about quashing popular opposition to martial decisions. By design, it weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces, a connection that is the only proven safeguard against unbridled militarism.

 

David SirotaDavid Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover,” “The Uprising” and “Back to Our Future.” E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

JEREMY SCAHILL’S DIRTY WORK

4 comments

Posted on 2nd May 2013 by ecliptix543 in Politics |Social Issues

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Dammit. More books I have to go buy and read. If I were 20 years younger, this would all be so much easier since I wouldn’t be able to read.

http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2013/04/29/jeremy-scahills-dirty-work/

Jeremy Scahill’s ‘Dirty’ Work

Kelley Vlahos on the explosive charges in reporter’s new book

Jeremy Scahill’s new book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, is sort of like approaching a dark cavity in an old tree. How many of us would instinctively cry out, “I don’t want to look – there will be creepy crawly things in there and I’m better off not knowing!”

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Life is filled with shadowy, foreboding places, but the majority of Americans are conditioned to the look the other way, so much so that they defend their ignorance with great vigor, especially when it comes to national security and war. This kind of blind trust in the government has been confused with patriotism — especially after 9/11 — which has allowed all manner of creepy crawly things to multiply and wreak havoc while most of our heads are simply turned elsewhere.

Luckily, reporter Scahill has cared to look, and poke at and examine, all with smaller resources and prestige than his peers in the corporate media, but then again, most corporate media reporters are flat-out restrained from peeking into the dark hollow of the Global War on Terror, much less interested in writing about it. Beginning with Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army in 2008, Scahill has used his perch at The Nation Institute to shine a light inside the hole, and show us that whatever abomination lurks inside is, in reality, much worse than we had even imagined.

Read at your own risk, but Dirty Wars does all that and more. After years of researching, Scahill is nothing but thorough in his examination of the war within the war – whether it be the covert assassination squads rampaging across countries most Americans couldn’t find on a map, the “the black site” torture chambers in Afghanistan and Iraq, or today’s signature drone strikes that wipe out insurgents and children alike without warrant or jury. All have been condoned and expedited by an executive branch authority that has metastasized in unilateral power since the Twin Towers fell in 2001. But willful ignorance helped it along: those in power had an interest in keeping it secret (or were kept out of the loop entirely), while the powerless kept quiet, mostly because they were afraid to look.

“This book tells the story of the expansion of covert US wars, the abuse of executive privilege and state secrets, the embrace of unaccountable elite military units that answer only to the White House,” Scahill begins. Five hundred and twenty pages later, he concludes simply with a question all Americans must “painfully” ask, “how does a war like this end?”

* * *

The recent events in Boston offer the simplest, but not the most encouraging answer: “not easily.” After nearly 12 years of continuous war in which the full extent of American activities are now being revealed by serious independent journalists like Scahill, only the true partisans, kool-aid drinkers and of course, those with a stake in maintaining the fiction, would deny the vicious cycle from which there appears no ready respite.

From Elmirza Khozhugov, ex-brother-in-law of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in an e-mail about Tamerlan’s most recent behavior to The New York Times last week: “He was looking for connections between the wars in the Middle East and oppression of Muslim population around the globe.”

Perhaps it’s premature to assume the motives of Tsarneav, who died in a firefight with police, and his younger brother, who was captured and is in custody on a litany of federal criminal charges. But members of congress and the rightwing punditry already feel informed enough to have declared the brothers “radicalized,” and are calling their alleged crimes a “new element” in the ongoing struggle against those (Islamist extremists) who hate us for our freedom and “way of life.”

Iraqi with Guard: cerdit AFP/Getty

Iraqi with Guard: cerdit AFP/Getty

Let us stand back a moment, and without making excuses for anyone who blows up innocent people congregating on crowded street corners in broad daylight, take a closer look at two of the most explosive themes in Dirty Wars: 1.) The White House gave explicit permission to the military to spy, assassinate and torture with official cover — wherever it wanted in the world, whenever it wanted, and 2.) The military established an elaborate system of hidden torture chambers in which untold numbers of mostly innocent Muslims suffered during the height of these hyper-aggressive counter-terror operations.

Fuse that with 10 years of extra-judicial drone strikes. Would it be so hard to imagine where these “new elements” of terror — the freshly minted martyrs and the al Qaeda-affiliated groups in Yemen, Pakistan, North Africa and beyond – were coming from?

“I think we’re living in a world where we are not going to be immune to the payback for some of the things that we’ve done. And unless—unless we, as a society, completely re-imagine what an actual national security policy would look like, one that recognizes the dignity of other people around the world or the rights of people to practice their religion or determine their form of government, unless we’re willing to re-imagine how we approach the world, we’re doomed to have a repeat of a 9/11-type attack or something that’s smaller-scale but constant,” Scahill noted in a recent interview with Democracy Now!

* * *

“Iraq,” Scahill wrote in Dirty Wars, “would serve as a laboratory for creating a new kill/capture machine, centered on JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), run by (Gen. Stanley) McChrystal and accountable to no one but a small group of White House and Pentagon insiders.”

With sources cultivated over years, Scahill is able to piece together a timeline in which McChrystal, a career special forces officer with extraordinary “stomach and stamina for the fight,” as well as one of the Pentagon’s “fellow travelers in the great crusade against Islam,” is paired with a messianic White House that with a roll of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s ball point pen, was able facilitate not only JSOC’s new lead in all counter-terror operations, but its ability to operate “and hit targets” outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

What happens, as richly told in the book, is what could only be described in biblical terms: something like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, searching, seeking and vanquishing for the ultimate cleansing of the world.

JSOC was built up in Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct surveillance, interrogations and killing, parallel to (and often sidelining) the CIA and the conventional military, but without the congressional oversight that bound those other institutions. Soon, thanks to the Bush White House, JSOC was independently establishing “liaison offices” across the Middle East for the manhunt, no permission necessary.

“In many ways it was the definitive vision of the type of wars Rumsfeld and Cheney had longed for: no accountability, maximum secrecy and total flexibility,” wrote Scahill. Rumsfeld had declared “the entire world is ‘the battlespace,’” and President George W. Bush gushed, “JSOC is awesome.” As if ripped from the failed Vietnam playbook, Bush pressed his commanders “on how many people they killed on any given day,” Scahill wrote. “The conventional generals would often balk at the question, but the answer from the JSOC crew was unequivocal.” At one point, Mike Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence chief for Task Force 121, the joint command running the counter-terror war, was asked the question. He replied, “thousands” of Iraqis, “I don’t even know how many.”

Over the years, Task Force 121 (and its many incarnations) has gotten little press. When McChrystal was appointed head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2009, Esquire magazine raised a number of questions about his responsibility for the torture and abuse allegations raised against Task Force 121 in Iraq, otherwise known as Camp NAMA (Nasty-ass Military Area). But not surprisingly, the mainstream media ignored it. Lucky for us, Scahill kept like a dog with a bone on this story, and is able to offer it up in Dirty Wars, in stomach-turning detail.

A prisoner in Iraq, held at gunpoint by US soldiers. Credit: AP

A prisoner in Iraq, held at gunpoint by US soldiers. Credit: AP

“The world knew about Guantanamo, and would soon know the name Abu Ghraib… but almost no one ever talked about Camp NAMA,” he wrote. Using “torture techniques, built up on the demands from Rumsfeld, Cheney and their posses for more results in interrogations,” the motto, “as advertised in posters throughout the camp, was “no blood no foul,” or as one Department of Defense official told Scahill, “if you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute you for it.” But that apparently left for a lot of gray area in between.

People taken to the camp were not given the rights of prisoners of war, they were “off the grid.” The Red Cross was denied access. According to a scathing report by Human Rights Watch, which was aided by whistleblower interrogators at the time, prisoners were subjected to “beatings, exposure to extreme cold, threats of death, humiliation, and various forms of psychological abuse or torture.” Outside military officials who tried to investigate the activities of the prison were rebuffed, as well as congressional inquiries.

Inside, there were CIA, DIA (defense intelligence agency), all operating under JSOC’s command, which seemed to “have some sort of an express elevator” straight to Secretary Rumsfeld’s office in Washington.

At Camp NAMA there was a “Soft Room” for cooperative and high-ranking detainees, and Blue and Red Rooms for medium–intensity interrogations. “The Black Room was preserved from its days as a torture chamber under Saddam, and, for good measure, the task force kept the meat hooks that hung from the ceiling during the Iraqi dictator’s reign of terror in place for their use … it was here that JSOC would perform its harshest interrogations.”

According to Scahill the JSOC interrogators were being trained in reverse SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) techniques — meaning, they were schooled in using all the awful methods our soldiers train to endure if captured by the enemy. “Inside the Black room, the full-spectrum of SERE tactics were unleashed on detainees, along with a slew of medieval freestyle techniques…the interrogators there often incorporated extremely loud music, strobe lights, beatings, environmental and temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, twenty-four hour interrogation sessions, water and stress positions, and personal, often sexual humiliation. The forced nudity of prisoners was not uncommon. Almost any act was permissible against the detainees as long as it complied with the “No Blood, No Foul” motto. But eventually, even blood was okay.”

One former prisoner, the son of Saddam Hussein’s bodyguard, recalled being punched in the spine until he fainted and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Others described “heinous acts committed against them” including sodomy with foreign objects, “forcing water up their rectums and using extreme dietary manipulation.” Members of the task force “would beat prisoners with rifle butts and spit in their face.” In one case, recalled by a lieutenant in the Air Force who had come to JSOC as an interrogator in early September 2003, a detainee was brought to a bus stop, under the assumption he was being released. It was a mind game — “moments later they snatched him again and returned him to NAMA.” He was hooded, his clothes ripped off and he was shackled, where he was forced to stand for 12 hours, said witness Steven Kleinman. “The guards were not to respond to any requests for help.”

The examples wear on brutally for pages in Dirty Wars, so much that one finds themselves asking, “is this my country?” and, where was John McCain, the go-to moral compass against torture, having endured his own imprisonment in Vietnam 40 years earlier? Our indignant sanctimony over the torture of our own POWs rings a bit tinny and false now as we turn a blind eye to what happened in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan.

And what happened, really? Military intelligence officers later admitted to the Red Cross that somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of “the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” In a classified military report in 2003, authors warned that, “the task force’s abuse of detainees combined with the mass arrests of Iraqis gave the impression that the United States and its allies were acting like ‘gratuitous enemies’ of the Iraqi people.”

But wrongdoing was handled in-house and culpability minimal. Attempts to get further at the truth were stymied. Whistleblowers were blackballed. The abuses continued, and in different ways, including plans in 2004 by General David Petraeus and retired U.S Col James Steele to “Salvadorize Iraq” by building Shiite special operation forces that eventually turned into death squads and interrogation facilities that transformed into torture chambers (recently revealed in a Guardian expose and documentary).

Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill

As a result, Al Qaeda, led by Abu Masab al Zarqawi, bloomed and flourished in Iraq and contributed to the ensuing civil war. “Although General Petraeus would be credited years later with ‘winning’ the Iraq War through a troop ‘surge,’ he had also, along with Zarqawi, helped to destroy Iraq and create a sectarian bloodbath that would live on well past the U.S occupation,” charges Scahill.

Dirty Wars doesn’t dwell on Iraq – Scahill takes full advantage of his field reporting in Somalia to turn over the rocks there, as well as the real story behind the drone deaths of American Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son in 2011 (including interviews with family), and the hunt for al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Today, the Global War on Terror has been institutionalized by the Obama White House, “using drone, cruise missile and Special Ops raids,” in “a mission to kill its way to victory,” Scahill writes. “Future U.S presidents – Republican or Democratic – will inherit a streamlined process for assassinating enemies of America, perceived or real. They will inherit an executive branch with sweeping powers, rationalized under the banner of national security.”

Scahill surmises that, “no one can scientifically predict the future consequences” of the aforementioned activities. “But, from my experience in several undeclared war zones across the globe, it seems clear that the United States is helping to breed a new generation of enemies in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world.”

Last week’s timing on the release of Dirty Wars – along with its accompanying award-winning documentary of the same name – serves as a opportune counterbalance to the prevailing narrative, that what happened in Boston was some unprovoked attack in the “struggle” against terror, which ignores America’s own role in that struggle all along.

There is no excusing the pain and fear the suspects in the case inflicted on Boston that day, but to deny reality is to simply perpetuate the cycle. Thanks to Scahill’s willingness to reach into dark places, we have one more tool with which to try and reverse it.

Follow Vlahos on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos

IS ONE HUMAN LIFE WORTH MORE THAN ANOTHER?

56 comments

Posted on 16th April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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I’d like to first say that yesterday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon were an evil cowardly act. No human being deserves to die or be mutilated  by a bomb purposely planted to kill and injure innocent people. My prayers go out to all the victims and their families. I hope they catch the perpetrator of this brutal murder and inflict the maximum penalty of death on him. Every human being on this planet deserves to be treated with respect and people who murder other human beings need to be punished.

What really bothers me is the egocentric self importance this country, its media, and its politicians place upon a tragedy that occurs in one of our cities versus tragedies of equal or greater scale that are occuring every day due to our foreign interventionism. Last night, my local news spent 20 minutes of the 30 minute broadcast on the Boston bombings. They played the same footage over and over again. The talking heads from the MSM just blather on with theories and suppositions based upon nothing. Their biases regarding gun owners, foreigners, Tea Partiers, and political beliefs immediately show through. Whatever particular agenda they favor is used to flavor their “impartial” reporting.

The country is now in a tizzy. The government is coming to the rescue. There will be calls for more security and safety measures. Obama will use this incident to push his gun control agenda, even though a gun wasn’t used. The death of an 8 year old will be the rallying cry for the statists to take more of your liberties and freedoms away. The politicians will use this incident to spend more of your money on police, cameras, DHS armored vehicles, SWAT teams, listening surveillance, and predator drones. How many billions have we spent since 9/11 on these agencies? Did they stop this bombing? Will spending another $10 billion stop some crazy person from dropping a homemade pipe bomb in a trash can? Will more cameras and drones keep someone from walking into a crowded mall and throwing a few hand grenades or mowing people down with an AK-47? Will a background check stop a determined terrorist? The calls for government to do more will be echoing on TV screens for the coming weeks. The passive sheep-like populace will shake their heads and mistakenly believe that government will protect them. There will always be bad guys who do bad stuff. Life is always a tragedy that ends in death.

On the same day that 3 people died and 140 were injured in Boston, there were 31 innocent Iraqi human beings that were brutally murdered by bombs in three cities, with over 200 others injured. Did you see 20 minutes on your local news cast about this tragedy? Did you even know it happened? The United States of America invaded Iraq and freed them from their dictator, according to the storyline. We left victorious a couple years ago. The neo-cons declare that we helped the Iraqi people by giving them a democracy. Meanwhile, bombs go off on a weekly basis killing innocent human beings in that country. The MSM and the people of the U.S. don’t give a crap about the 31 Iraqis blown to smithereens. They are just Muslim collateral damage in our eyes. No one is shedding tears in this country for the families and victims of  murderous thugs. Are their lives less important than the 3 Americans killed yesterday? Is a Muslim life worth less than a white American’s life? Would any lives have been lost yesterday in Iraq or Boston if the United States did not choose to fight “pre-emptive” wars in foreign lands?

The MSM is focusing on the aspect of the Boston bombing that will have the biggest emotional impact on the most people. This is how you can most easily achieve the goals of your agenda. They are all focusing on the death of the 8 year old child. The death of a young child is always a terrible tragedy. One week ago American war planes murdered 11 young children in Afghanistan, and wounded 6 women. Did your local news station spend 20 minutes on this story? Where are the human interest stories about the tragedy for the families of these children? Is the life of a white 8 year old American child worth more than the lives of 11 brown skinned Muslim Afghan children? If the U.S. was not still fighting an unwinnable war 11 years after starting it, would these 11 children have died? We are supposedly withdrawing our troops next year. Do you think the families of these children wished we had left last year?

There are so many dimensions to the Boston bombing. The personal tragedies are the most important. The tragedy of our citizens losing more freedoms and liberties when the government further turns the U.S. into a police state will happen without a peep from the sheep. The tragedy of allowing the MSM to use their propaganda machine to mislead the public as to the true reason for the bombing will continue. Lastly, the egocentric view of the people in this country keeps us blinded to the death and destruction caused by our actions throughout the world. For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.

I believe that all human life has worth. Do you?

    

Iraq deadly bombings hit Nasariyah, Kirkuk and Baghdad

At least 31 people have been killed and more than 200 others wounded in a series of early-morning explosions in cities across Iraq, officials say.

Attacks were reported in Baghdad, as well as Tuz Khurmatu and Kirkuk in the north and Nasariyah in the south.

The co-ordinated attacks occurred during the morning rush hour and mainly involved car bombs.

The violence comes ahead of Iraq’s provincial elections on 20 April, the first in the country since 2010.

Monday’s attacks were particularly broad in scope, with several cities hit, including Fallujah, Tikrit, Samarra and Hilla.

The explosions were caused by 20 cars packed with explosives and three roadside bombs, AFP news agency reported.

Three car bombs went off minutes apart in Tuz Khurmatu, killing six people and wounding more than 60, AFP said.

Simultaneous blasts

A number of attacks were also reported in Baghdad.

In one incident, two car bombs claimed two lives and wounded 17 at a checkpoint at the heavily guarded airport, Reuters reported.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, nine people were killed when six car bombs went off simultaneously, police said.

Kirkuk resident: “What have those innocent people done to deserve this?”

Three of the bombs exploded in Kirkuk’s city centre – one in an Arab district, one in a Kurdish area, and a third in a Turkomen district, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

Other blasts were reported elsewhere in the city, which is home to a mix of ethnic groups with competing claims.

Elsewhere, gunmen armed with pistols fitted with silencers shot and killed a police officer while he was driving his car in the town of Tarmiyah, 30 miles (50 km) north of Baghdad, AP said.

No group has admitted carrying out Monday’s attacks.

But they come at a time when tensions are high between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia, amid claims by the majority Sunni Muslim communities that they are being marginalised by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Shia-led government.

Sunni Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda have attempted to destabilise the government by stepping up attacks, mainly on Shia but also Sunni targets this year.

Although violence has decreased in Iraq since the peak of the insurgency in 2006 and 2007, bombings are still common.

 

Afghan children killed in ‘NATO airstrike’
 

President Hamid Karzai denounces reported death of 11 children by NATO forces in Kunar province and orders inquiry.

Last Modified: 08 Apr 2013 07:42

At least 11 children have reportedly been killed in a NATO airstrike in Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan.

The children were killed during a joint Afghan-NATO operation against Taliban fighters in the Shigal district of restive Kunar province bordering Pakistan late on Saturday, according to Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

Karzai ”strongly condemned the ISAF air strike in Kunar that killed 11 children”, in a statement issued by his office.

“The president, while condemning the use of civilians as shields by the Taliban, denounced any kind of operations that cause civilian deaths,” the statement said.

The president has also ordered a government investigation into the killings.

There were conflicting figures of the death toll, but Karzai’s office later said 11 people were killed – all of them children – and six women were wounded.

Wasifullah Wasifi, the spokesman for the Kunar governor, confirmed the attack to Al Jazeera.

“We confirm a raid done by Afghanistan’s intelligence service in the district of Shigal. In this raid, the security forces killed 20 Taliban in which 10 of them are very senior Taliban members,” he told Al Jazeera.

The interior ministry said in a statement the attack by coalition forces killed six Taliban including two senior commanders.

Civilian deaths

A spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed the strike and said the coalition was gathering information to determine what happened.

Al Jazeera’s Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from the capital, Kabul, said that joint forces entered houses in Shigal village in the early hours of Sunday and carried out raids in addition to the air strikes.

“Al Jazeera has contacted NATO. We were told by a spokesperson that they were aware of the operation and that they have heard of some civilians who may have been injured in this strike,” our correspondent said.

Captain Luca Carniel, an ISAF spokesman, said ISAF had provided air support during the operation, but he said there had been no ISAF troops on the ground. The air strike had been requested by coalition forces, not their Afghan allies, he said.

Civilian deaths have been one of the most contentious issues in the 11-year campaign against Taliban fighters, provoking harsh criticism from the Afghan president and angry public protests.

After an air strike killed 10 civilians, mostly women and children, in February, Karzai banned Afghan security forces from calling in NATO air strikes.

The latest strike came a day after at least five Americans, including a young female diplomat, were killed in two Taliban attacks in the country’s east and south.

A suicide car bomber struck a NATO convoy in the southern province of Zabul on Saturday, killing three US soldiers and two civilians, one of whom was a female US diplomat.

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

22 comments

Posted on 19th March 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

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