October 16, 2011| News | John Glaser

The estimable Angela Keaton crystallized the war in her last post (below). The war becomes difficult for the establishment to talk about when it is presented as it is by the video of injured Iraqi children. They can’t inject their technocratic policy-wonkery, and even nationalistic themes and Exceptionalist rhetoric is grossly misplaced.

Such is the power of video, so I thought I’d post some others from the Afghan war to the same effect. For context, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have seen a sharp rise in 2011.

In a US airstrike in July, 14 civilians were killed, 8 of them children. In May, US soldiers killed a 12 year old Afghan girl in a night raid. In March, nine Afghan boys collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan were annihilated by US airstrikes. US-supported Afghan militias have recently beat children, hammered nails into the feet of a young boy, and gang raped another 13 year old boy. In February of last year, a US night raid killed a teenage girl and two pregnant women. In September of last year, NATO attack helicopters bombed seven civilians, four of them children. A UN report last year found that almost 350 Afghan children were killed in 2009 alone. 

In another video, from back in 2008, the Guardian covers various incidents of atrocities against Afghanistan civilians by coalition forces. It doesn’t allow embedding, so click the link to see it. Here’s a quote from one of the people interviewed the the video’s corresponding article:

“We were walking, I was holding my grandson’s hand, then there was a loud noise and everything went white. When I opened my eyes, everybody was screaming. I was lying metres from where I had been, I was still holding my grandson’s hand but the rest of him was gone. I looked around and saw pieces of bodies everywhere. I couldn’t make out which part was which.”

And yet all Barack Obama and his minions in Congress can talk about regarding the Afghan war is the extraordinary service of American soldiers, lies about Afghan security, and arbitrary dates which we are misleadingly told will see an American withdrawal. The useless, aimless, lie of a war continues unabated, without any attention paid to children like Grana.

(photo via AFP)

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October 16, 2011| News, Week in Review | Angela Keaton

Antiwar.com’s Week in Review | October 16, 2011

IN THIS ISSUE

  • An Iranian assassination plot?
  • No good news from Afghanistan
  • NTC abusing prisoners, fighting resistance
  • Israeli prisoner swap and "price tag" attacks
  • Assorted news from the empire
  • What’s new at the blog?
  • Originals
  • Antiwar Radio
  • Events

Continue

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October 15, 2011| Iraq, Media, News | Angela Keaton

Today’s APNews Break featured the welcome news that US drops keeping troops in Iraq.

Reporters Lara Jakes and Rebecca Santana however managed to suck the joy from the long awaited announcement by possibly the most tasteless paragraph to come over the wire since Clinton era intern shenanigans.

The decision ends months of hand-wringing by U.S. officials over whether to stick to a Dec. 31 withdrawal deadline that was set in 2008 or negotiate a new security agreement to ensure that gains made and more than 4,400 American military lives lost since March 2003 do not go to waste. [Emphasis mine.]

Yes, that’s right. The American youth sacrificed for the inhumane, illegal and unconstitutional occupation of Iraq are mere veggie fried rice left overs that shan’t go to waste in the mighty victory over the Iraqi people.

Jakes and Santana note that, “Iraqis are still angry over incidents such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or Haditha, when U.S. troops killed Iraqi civilians in Anbar province, and want American troops subject to Iraqi law.”

One couldn’t imagine why.

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October 14, 2011| CIA, News, Sibel Edmonds, Torture | Angela Keaton

From Boiling Frogs:

Leading scholars and human rights groups from a range of fields — including psychology, medicine, law, military, and intelligence — have joined together in spearheading a broad-based effort to annul and delegitimize the American Psychological Association’s deeply flawed 2005 Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (the PENS Report). In a joint declaration the coalition states:

Despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations, the PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists play a critical role in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective.” With this stance, the APA, the largest association of psychologists worldwide, became the sole major professional healthcare organization to support practices contrary to the international human rights standards that ought to be the benchmark against which professional codes of ethics are judged- the “do no Harm” standard.

Further, the coalition points out the inherent bias in the Presidential Task Force membership, where six of the nine voting members were on the payroll of the U.S. military and/or intelligence agencies, and five having served in chains of command accused of prisoner abuses. The group cites other significant conflicts of interest by the Task Force’s unacknowledged participants, such as the spouse of a Guantánamo intelligence psychologist and several high-level lobbyists for the Department of Defense, and direct funding for psychologists by the CIA.

The Coalition has launched a petition calling for the annulment of the APA’s PENS Report as part of their joint effort to remove psychologists from torture and abusive interrogations.

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October 14, 2011| News | Jason Ditz

If you thought the DC “assassination plot” sounded improbable before, wait until you hear how the whole ridiculous story ties into Iran’s Quds Force.

Detailing the connection of a “notorious Iranian militant,” the Washington Post is only too willing to take the allegations at face value, spelling out with a straight face one of the most preposterous narratives imaginable.

It goes like this: Quds Force Commander Abdul Shahlai, who is a real whiz with assassinations, decided to use Mexican drug cartels (for some inscrutable reason) to either kidnap or knock off the Saudi Ambassador.

But Shahlai didn’t know any drug cartels. So he called up his cousin, a whiskey-swilling failed used car salesman from Texas. Why, you ask? A direct quote from Wapo says:

U.S. officials say that Shahlai hoped that Arbabsiar, by virtue of his time in Texas, might be able to get in touch with Mexican drug traffickers

That’s right ladies and gentlemen: the case for Iran’s Quds Force being behind this “plot” rests on the assumption that a highly organized military force that is supposedly at the forefront of the assassination game called somebody’s bumbling cousin who lived in Texas, to see if he happened to know any Mexican drug cartels, because Texas is close to Mexico.

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October 14, 2011| News | John Glaser

I’m going to repost a large portion of Antiwar.com columnist Ivan Eland on US interventions in Uganda against the LRA during the Bush administration. It went horribly wrong back then, directly resulting in runaway LRA forces expanding into other villages and murdering even more civilians. I wonder how much worse it could end up this time, what with actual troops on the ground.

Ivan Eland:

The Pentagon’s new Africa Command bureaucracy, which was created largely to defend oil produced on the West African coast (itself a dubious objective), has already branched out to fight “the war on terror” elsewhere in Africa – with disastrous results.

Typically, around the world, the United States needlessly makes enemies by training indigenous militaries to fight terrorist groups that didn’t focus their attacks on U.S. targets.  As a superpower, the U.S. hates “instability,” no matter how far from U.S. territory or interests it develops. Thus, the U.S. military has been training the Ugandan military in counterterrorism.

For more than a generation, the Ugandan military has been fighting a brutal Christian terrorist organization – the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) – which originally wanted to overthrow the Ugandan government but now slaughters and maims people (for example, by cutting off their lips) in the name of fighting for the ten commandments.  Five years ago, the Ugandan army drove the L.R.A. into the remote Garamba National Park in the Congo, which is on the border of Uganda and Sudan.

Recently, the Ugandan military asked for the Bush administration’s help in going into the Congo after these Christian terrorists (which I will deem “Christianists”).  According to the New York Times, then-President George W. Bush, ironically an aggressively oriented Christian himself, approved U.S. military assistance to the Ugandan military to wipe out his violent religious brethren.  The U.S. military helped plan and finance the Ugandan cross-border operation in cooperation with the Congolese government.  Unfortunately, the operation was bungled badly and as many as 900 innocent civilians paid the price with their lives.  Many more were maimed, raped, and had their villages razed.

The botched U.S.-assisted Ugandan and Congolese invasion of the park allowed the L.R.A. Christianists escape routes and then did not guard nearby Congolese villages.  In response to the invasion, the Christianists went on a crusade, brutally sacking village after village in northeastern Congo.   The Christianists burned villages, heinously murdered innocent Congolese civilians, and raped many women.  The Christian terrorists even tried to twist off the heads of small children and kidnapped older children to fight in the L.R.A.’s conscripted (slave) army.  Even worse, the Christianist forces have split up and remain on the rampage.

If the definition of terrorism is killing innocent civilians for political gain, the Christian L.R.A. are clearly terrorists.  But what about the Bush administration’s actions?  The L.R.A. had been driven to a remote national park full of impenetrable swamps.   President Bush then approved assisting and financing an eradication operation that had no direct relevance to U.S. national security interests and had substantial downside potential if the Ugandan and Congolese militaries – not renown for their competence – made a mess of the operation.  Human rights organizations have heaped scorn on the operation as needlessly poking a hornet’s nest.

Even though President Bush didn’t intend to assist a foreign military incursion that resulted in substantial civilian deaths, isn’t he morally culpable for those deaths because he recklessly aided an operation unneeded to ensure U.S. security and with the tremendous risk of incompetent militaries generating a violent backlash from the Chrisianists with a botched operation?

Read the whole column here.

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