what's happening

U.S. forces mass-murdering Iraqi civilian people in latest offensive

2007-06-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

From the World Socialist Web Site:

US military launches massive assault in Iraq

By Bill Van Auken
20 June 2007

Backed by armored columns and helicopter gunships, some 10,000 US troops have launched a massive assault on the [people of the] provincial capital of Baquba and other areas north and east of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

The operation, dubbed Arrowhead Ripper, is one of the largest since the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It is being portrayed as an offensive aimed at clearing Al Qaeda terrorists from Diyala province, which is said to have become a new stronghold for the group.

“The end state is to destroy the Al Qaeda influences in this province and eliminate their threat against the people,” Brig. Gen. John Benarek, deputy commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division, declared in a statement.

In reality, the attack is directed at crushing [popular] opposition to the US occupation in a region where the overwhelming majority of the population opposes the American presence and is therefore a center of resistance in which Al Qaeda plays a decidedly limited role.

In one of its first communiqués, the Pentagon claimed that a “quick-strike nighttime air assault” by the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division had included an assault by attack helicopters and ground forces which had “engaged and killed 22 anti-Iraqi forces in and around Baquba.”

“Anti-Iraqi forces” is the Orwellian term used by the American military command to describe any Iraqis who resist the US occupation of their country. How many have really been killed and the breakdown between resistance fighters and civilians is by no means clear.

The offensive follows the announcement last week that the buildup of US combat forces announced by President George W. Bush last January is complete, with an additional 30,000 troops deployed in the country.

The operation is the largest since US troops laid a murderous siege to the predominantly Sunni city of Fallujah in November 2004, killing thousands [of innocent civilian people], reducing most of its buildings to rubble and turning tens of thousands more into refugees.

Baquba, about 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, is roughly the same size as Fallujah — both had pre-war populations of over 300,000. Whether it will be subjected to similar devastation remains to be seen.

The siege of Baquba was joined with a series of other actions by US and allied forces in the southern suburbs of Baghdad as well as in the predominantly Shia south of the country.

In the Arab Jubour area south of the capital, an offensive began with a nighttime raid by American B-1 bombers, which dropped “precision-guided bombs” in heavily populated areas. [Pretty much guaranteed to murder innocent children.]

Meanwhile, further south in Maysan province, US and British forces launched attacks on Shia militiamen, who fought back with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The US-led forces called in air strikes, which left dozens dead. The action saw the most intense fighting between the occupation forces and the Mahdi Army since this militia loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr spearheaded a two-month uprising against the occupation in April 2004.

From each of these fronts in the US-led counteroffensive against the Iraqi resistance there emerged reports of atrocities, civilian deaths and sweeping house-to-house raids together with the roundup of many Iraqis as “security detainees.” Television broadcasts from Baquba included footage of long lines of blindfolded Iraqi males being held at gunpoint or herded into vehicles for transfer to one of the large US prison camps in the country.

According to one Iraqi press report, the US assault force brought in tanks to attack the Abudullah bin Mobark Mosque in the “teachers” area of Baquba Sunday afternoon. Eyewitnesses said the mosque had sustained heavy damage and that nearby houses were also struck, killing five civilians, including two women.

In regard to the fighting in the southern suburbs of Baghdad, the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) issued a press release denouncing the mass arrest of at least 20 people in the village of al-Ahmad al-Azzawi.

“The crime occurred when the occupation forces encircled the area and carried out a landing on rooftops; then [they were] breaking furniture and property, and killed a citizen (Hussein Mohamed Azzaoui) while [he was] sleeping in his bed,” the release said.

In southern Iraq, the Iraqi paper Az-Zaman reported that over 115 Iraqis were killed or injured in the clashes, including many civilians. Witnesses reported that at least 32 corpses from the town of Amarah, a focus of the fighting, were brought to the Shiite holy city of Najaf for burial on Monday, many of them women and children.

Meanwhile, in Amarah itself, the director of the local health department, Jamel Mohammed, confirmed receiving 16 bodies and taking in 37 wounded.

The chief of the province’s security council, Latif al Tamini, described the operation a “catastrophe,” declaring that occupation troops had fired indiscriminately.

“Many innocents were killed because in the summer people sleep on the roofs to avoid the heat,” Hamid Nouri, a clergyman loyal to Sadar in Amarah, told the media.

The spokesman for the British military declared that the operation “was conducted under the directive of [Prime Minister] al-Maliki and the government of Iraq. Iraqi special operations forces were very much in the lead.”

In reality, what has characterized all of these operations is the relatively minor role played by the Iraqi puppet forces, with foreign troops and airpower carrying out the bulk of the offensive.

Senior US military officers have warned that the offensive cannot sustain the suppression of the Iraqi resistance without the deployment of substantial Iraqi forces prepared to continue the crackdown. Yet, after over four years of US occupation, these forces do not exist.

Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who just completed a 22-month tour in Iraq directing the training and arming of Iraqi security forces, expressed the frustration of the Pentagon over the Iraqi forces, reporting that Iraqi units were being deployed with only 75 percent of the forces they had on paper because of desertions and absences, while one in six of the Iraqi police trained by the Americans have been killed, wounded or have deserted.

Asked by the media whether he anticipated that the next Iraqi units to be rotated into Baghdad would be even weaker and less able to conduct operations than those now deployed in the capital, he responded, “I’m absolutely convinced that’s exactly what we’ll see.”

While the Bush administration’s surge was billed as a campaign to provide security in Baghdad, the bulk of the newly deployed US troops have now been sent out of the capital. The failure to achieve security was made tragically apparent once again on Tuesday, when a massive truck bomb struck a Shia mosque, killing at least 78 people and wounding an estimated 200 more.

The attack on the Khillani mosque in Baghdad’s commercial district of Sinak came just two days after the occupation authorities lifted a four-day curfew imposed in the wake of the bombing of another Shia mosque in Samarra last week.

Press reports from the scene of the latest bombing indicated that local residents blamed the US occupation forces for the atrocity, many voicing the opinion that such attacks are allowed to take place as a means of sowing division between Iraq’s different religious and ethnic groups.

[Emphases added]

* * *

(Added note: Most unoccupied car-bomb and truck-bomb attacks against civilian people in Iraq are widely and probably correctly seen there as being American false-flag terror attacks, claimed invariably by the corporate media to be the work of warring Moslem sects, but actually carried out directly by U.S. forces and proxies.)

U.S. military dropping cluster bombs on civilian people in Iraq

2007-05-31T00:10:00.000-07:00

From ElectronicIraq.com:

The Shape of a Shadowy Air War in Iraq

by Nick Turse
TomDispatch.com
25 May 2007

Did the U.S. military use cluster bombs in Iraq in 2006 and then lie about it? Does the U.S. military keep the numbers of rockets and cannon rounds fired from its planes and helicopters secret because more Iraqi civilians have died due to their use than any other type of weaponry?

These are just two of the many unanswered questions related to the largely uncovered air war the U.S. military has been waging in Iraq.

What we do know is this: Since the major combat phase of the war ended in April 2003, the U.S. military has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of air-delivered cluster bombs in Iraq — the very type of weapon that Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls, "the single greatest risk civilians face with regard to a current weapon that is in use."

We also know that, according to expert opinion, rockets and cannon fire from U.S. aircraft may account for most U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths and that the Pentagon has restocked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these weapons in recent years.

Unfortunately, thanks to an utter lack of coverage by the mainstream media, what we don't know about the air war in Iraq so far outweighs what we do know that anything but the most minimal picture of the nature of destruction from the air in that country simply can't be painted. Instead, think of the story of U.S. air power in Iraq as a series of tiny splashes of lurid color on a largely blank canvas.

Cluster Bombs

Even among the least covered aspects of the air war in Iraq, the question of cluster-bomb (CBU) use remains especially shadowy. This is hardly surprising. After all, at a time when many nations are moving toward banning the use of cluster munitions — at a February 2007 conference in Oslo, Norway, 46 of 48 governments represented supported a declaration for a new international treaty and ban on the weapons by 2008 — the U.S. stands with China, Israel, Pakistan, and Russia in opposing new limits of any kind.

Little wonder. The U.S. military has a staggering arsenal of these weapons. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, the Army holds 88% of the Pentagon's CBU inventory — at least 638.3 million of the cluster bomblets that are stored inside each cluster munition; the Air Force and Navy, according to Department of Defense figures, have 22.2 million and 14.7 million of the bomblets, respectively. And even these numbers are considered undercounts by experts.

A cluster bomb bursts above the ground, releasing hundreds of smaller, deadly submunitions or "bomblets" that increase the weapon's kill radius causing, as Garlasco puts it, "indiscriminate effects." It's a weapon, he notes, that "cannot distinguish between a civilian and a soldier when employed because of its wide coverage area. If you're dropping the weapon and you blow your target up you're also hitting everything within a football field. So to use it in proximity to civilians is inviting a violation of the laws of armed conflict."

Worse yet, U.S. cluster munitions have a high failure rate. A sizeable number of dud bomblets fall to the ground and become de facto landmines which, Garlasco points out, are "already banned by most nations on this planet." Garlasco adds: "I don't see how any use of the current U.S. cluster bomb arsenal in proximity to civilian objects can be defended in any way as being legal or legitimate."

In an email message earlier this year, a U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) spokesman told this reporter that "there were no instances" of CBU usage in Iraq in 2006. But military documents suggest this might not be the case.

Last year, Titus Peachey of the Mennonite Central Committee — an organization that has studied the use of cluster munitions for more than 30 years — filed a Freedom of Information Act request concerning the U.S. military's use of cluster bombs in Iraq since "major combat operations" officially ended in that country. In their response, the Air Force confirmed that 63 CBU-87 cluster bombs were dropped in Iraq between May 1, 2003 and August 1, 2006. A CENTAF spokesman contacted for confirmation that none of these were dropped on or after January 1, 2006, offered no response. His superior officer, Lt. Col. Johnn Kennedy, the Deputy Director of CENTAF Public Affairs, similarly ignored this reporter's requests for clarification.

These 12,726 BLU-97 bomblets — each CBU-87 contains 202 BLU-97s or "Combined Effects Bombs" (CEBs) which have anti-personnel, anti-tank, and incendiary capabilities or "kill mechanisms" — dropped since May 2003 are, according to statistics provided by Human Rights Watch, in addition to almost two million cluster submunitions used by coalition forces in Iraq in March and April 2003.

Asked about CBU usage by the Air Force in Iraq in 2006, Ali al-Fadhily, an independent Iraqi journalist, commented: "The use of cluster bombs is a sure thing, but it was very difficult to prove because there were no international experts to document it." In the past, however, international experts have actually had a chance to examine some locations where a fraction of the bomblets that coalition forces used have landed.

On a 2004 research trip to Iraq, for instance, Titus Peachey visited numerous sites which had experienced such strikes. At a farm in northern Iraq, he was shown not only impact craters from exploded bomblets on a farmer's property but also unexploded bomblets, by a team from the Mines Advisory Group, a humanitarian organization devoted to landmine and bomb clearance. While "the de-miners expressed frustration that the farmer had planted his field before it had been cleared," Peachey explained that this was a common, if dangerous, practice in such situations. The U.S. used similar ordnance in Laos during the Vietnam War, he pointed out, noting:

"The villagers of Laos waited more than 20 years for clearance work to get started in their fields and villages. During that time they had no choice but to till soil that was filled with bombs. Otherwise they could not eat. In Iraq, the several visits that we made confirmed this very same dynamic. People could not afford to wait until clearance teams made their farms safe for cultivation. They had to take great risks in order to survive."

Evidence of these risks can be found in U.S. military documents. Case in point: a June 2005 internal memorandum from the U.S. Army's 42d Infantry Division which describes how a 15-year old Iraqi boy, working as a shepherd, "was leading the sheep through north Tikrit, near an ammo storage site, when he picked up a UXO [unexploded ordnance] from a cluster bomb. The UXO detonated and he was killed." Asked to pay $3,000 in compensation for the boy's life, the Army granted that his death was "a horrible loss for the claimant," his mother, but concluded that there was "insufficient evidence to indicate that US. Forces caused the death."

Iraqi documents also chronicle the effects of air-delivered cluster munitions. Take a September 2006 report by the Conservation Center of Environment & Reserves, an Iraqi non-governmental organization (NGO), examining alleged violations of the laws of war by U.S. forces during the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. According to its partial list of civilian deaths, at least 53 people were killed by air-launched cluster bombs in the city that April. An analysis of data collected by another Iraqi NGO, the Iraqi Health and Social Care Organization, showed that, between March and June 2006, of 193 war-injured casualties analyzed, 148 (77%) were the result of cluster munitions of unspecified type.

Air War, Iraq: 2006

While cluster bombs remain a point of contention, Air Force officials do acknowledge that U.S. military and coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of other types of bombs on targets in Iraq in 2006. This figure — 177 bombs in all — does not include guided missiles or unguided rockets fired, or cannon rounds expended; nor, according to a CENTAF spokesman, does it take into account the munitions used by some Marine Corps and other coalition fixed-wing aircraft or any Army or Marine Corps helicopter gunships; nor does it include munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many private security contractors flying their own missions in Iraq.

In statistics provided to me, CENTAF reported a total of 10,519 "close air support missions" in Iraq in 2006, during which its aircraft dropped those 177 bombs and fired 52 "Hellfire/Maverick missiles." The Guided Bomb Unit-12, a laser-guided bomb with a 500-pound general purpose warhead — 95 of which were reportedly dropped in 2006 — was the most frequently used bomb in Iraq last year, according to CENTAF. In addition, 67 satellite-guided, 500-pound GBU-38s and 15 2,000-pound GBU-31/32 munitions were also dropped on Iraqi targets in 2006, according to official U.S. figures. There is no independent way, however, to confirm the accuracy of this official count.

Rockets

Rockets, like the 2.75-inch Hydra-70 rocket which can be outfitted with various warheads and fired from either fixed-wing aircraft or most military helicopters, are conspicuously absent from the totals — so as not to "skew the tally and present an inaccurate picture of the air campaign," said a CENTAF spokesman mysteriously. If released, these figures might, however, prove impressive indeed.

According to a 2005 press release issued by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who helped secure a five-year, $900 million Hydra contract from the Army for General Dynamics, "the widely used Hydra-70 rocket… has seen extensive use in Afghanistan and Iraq… [and] has become the world's most widely used helicopter-launched weapon system." By this April, $502 million in orders for the Hydra-70 had been placed by the Army since the contract was awarded.

Cannon Rounds

The number of cannon rounds — essentially large caliber "bullets"— fired by CENTAF aircraft is also a closely guarded secret. The official reason given is that "special forces often use aircraft such as the AC-130" gunships, which fire cannon rounds, and "their missions and operations are classified, so therefore these figures are not released." However, an idea of the number of cannon rounds expended by CENTAF aircraft can be gleaned from a description of a single operation on January 28, 2007 when U.S. F-16s and A-10 Thunderbolts not only "dropped more than 3.5 tons of precision munitions," but also fired "1,200 rounds of 20mm and 1,100 rounds of 30mm cannon fire" in a five square mile area near the southern city of Najaf.

A sense of usage levels can also be gathered from a consideration of contracts awarded in recent years. Take the 20mm PGU-28 ammunition used by helicopters like the AH-1 Cobra and fixed-wing aircraft like the F-16. In 2001, the Department of Defense noted that it held approximately eight million PGU-28/B rounds in its inventory. In May 2003, the Army took steps to increase that arsenal by modifying an existing contract with General Dynamics to add 980,064 rounds of 20mm ammunition to 1.3 million rounds already delivered since December 2001.

In February 2004, General Dynamics was awarded an almost $11 million add-on to an already existing contract for an extra 427,000 cannon rounds for the AH-1 Cobra helicopter. In September 2006, General Dynamics was awarded a similar nearly $14 million add-on for yet more 20mm ammunition; and, in April 2007, $22 million for more of the same. That same month, the U.S. Army Sustainment Command issued a "sources sought notice," looking for more arms manufacturers willing to produce six million or more rounds of such ordnance with promises of an "estimated 400% option over 5 years."

Yet, repeated inquiries about cannon rounds fired in Iraq prompted a CENTAF spokesman to emphatically state in an email: "WE DO NOT REPORT CANNON ROUNDS." Lt. Col. Johnn Kennedy followed up, noting, "Glad to see you appreciate the tremendous efforts [my subordinate] has already expended on you. Trust me, it's probably much more significant than the relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds."

But the number of cannon rounds and rockets fired by U.S. aircraft is hardly an insignificant matter. According to Les Roberts, co-author of two surveys of mortality in Iraq published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, "Rocket and cannon fire could account for most coalition-attributed civilian deaths." He adds, "I find it disturbing that they will not release this [figure], but even more disturbing that they have not released such information to Congressmen who have requested it."

In 2004, Roberts himself witnessed the destruction caused by cannon fire in Baghdad's vast Shiite slum, Sadr City. He recalls again and again passing through 100-200 meter-wide areas of neighborhoods that had been raked by cannon rounds. "It wasn't one house that was beat up," he recalled. "It would be five, six, seven buildings in a row." Unlike bomb- and artillery-ravaged Ramadi and Fallujah, Roberts noted:

"There weren't whole buildings knocked down. There were just big swaths of many, many houses where every window was broken, where there were thousands of pockmarks from cannon fire; not little dents, but huge chunks the size of your fist out of the walls, and lamp-posts bent over because they lost their integrity from being hit so many times."

This portrait of devastation is echoed in the words of journalist Ali al-Fadhily, who told me that he had witnessed helicopter gunships in action, noting: "The destruction they caused was always immense and casualties so many. They simply destroy the target with every living soul inside. The smell of death comes with those machines."

While the destructive capacity of helicopter gunships has been well-documented and we have indications of the levels of ammunition available to the military, the actual scale of use is hard to pin down. Flight hours are, however, another indication. According to James Glantz of the New York Times, Army helicopters logged 240,000 flight hours in Iraq in 2005, 334,000 in 2006, and projections for 2007 suggest that the figure will reach 400,000. (And these numbers don't even include Marine Corps squadrons, heliborne missions by private security contractors, or those of the nascent Iraqi Air Force.)

Top Secret Information

While military press information officers continue to stonewall on the number of cannon rounds fired by helicopters ("We cannot comment on your inquiry due to operational security"), earlier this year Col. Robert A. Fitzgerald, the Marine Corps' head of aviation plans and policy, was quoted in National Defense Magazine on the subject. He claimed that, in 2006, "Marine rotary-wing aircraft flew more than 60,000 combat flight hours, and fixed-wing platforms completed 31,000. They dropped 80 tons of bombs and fired 80 missiles, 3,532 rockets and more than 2 million rounds of smaller ammunition." (When asked if Col. Fitzgerald's admission endangered "operational security," a military spokesman responded, "I cannot comment on the policies or release authority of a Marine colonel.")

While Col. Fitzgerald's statistics presumably also include operations in Afghanistan (where we know U.S. air power has been called upon ever more heavily), they do remind us that the minimalist figures regularly given out by CENTAF hardly offer an accurate picture of the air war in Iraq. When combined with the military's evasive non-answers, they are also a reminder of what a dearth of information is actually available on even seemingly innocuous matters relating to the air war in Iraq.

For example, from January through April, I posed questions to a Coalition Press Information Center media contact — one "SSG Wiley." After being rebuffed on the topic of munitions expenditure, I asked, in January, about the total number of "rotary-wing sorties" flown in 2006. The aptly-named Wiley responded that s/he "sent it out to the relevant directorates and [was] awaiting a response.... I will contact you as soon as I get something." That turned out, despite follow-up, to be never. Following a March 30th query regarding "the relevant directorates," s/he entreated me, by email, to drop my request for information. Facing the reportorial void, I asked if Wiley would at least provide his/her full name and title for attribution in this article. S/he has yet to respond.

The New Iraqi Air Force

Another little-talked about aspect of the air war is the modest emergence of a new Iraqi Air Force (IAF). Until the first Gulf War, the Iraqi military had a large air contingent, including hundreds of modern Russian and French combat aircraft. Today, apparently owing to U.S. reluctance to put powerful modern weaponry of any sort in Iraqi hands, the reconstituted IAF is a distinctly less impressive force. Instead of advanced fighters and bombers, they fly SAMA CH-2000 two-seat, single-engine prop airplanes, SB7L-360 Seeker reconnaissance aircraft, a handful of C-130 Hercules turbo-prop cargo planes, and Bell 206 Ranger, UH-1HP "Huey" and Russian Mi-17 helicopters based out of military installations in Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, and Taji.

Recently returning from a fact-finding mission in Iraq, undertaken in his capacity as an adjunct professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey called for sending more aircraft, including 150 helicopters, to the Iraqi security forces. In fact, the IAF recently did take delivery of newly refurbished helicopters at Taji Air Base, is scheduled to receive new aircraft at Kirkuk, and has contracted to add 28 new Mi-17 helicopters in the near future.

The IAF may even be conducting full-scale air strikes of its own sometime soon. As of April 1, 2007, five Iraqi Bell 206 Ranger pilots from its 12th Squadron had already logged more than 188 combat hours. In a recent Air Force Times article, Capt. Shane Werley, the chief American advisor to the IAF's 2d Squadron, asserted that pilots he was working with would, at an unspecified date, "be taking missions from the [Army's] 1st Cavalry [Division at Taji]…. The bottom line is we're getting these guys back in the fight."

The Scale of the Carnage

Just a few dogged reporters assigned to the air-power beat might, at least, have offered some sense of the human fall-out of this largely one-sided air war. Since this has not been the case, we must rely on the best available evidence. One valuable source is the national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, published last year in The Lancet which used well-established survey methods that have been proven accurate in conflict zones from Kosovo to the Congo. (Interviewers actually inspected death certificates in an overwhelming majority of the Iraqi households surveyed.)

Carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, it estimated 655,000 "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." The study also found that, from March 2003 through June 2006, 13% of violent deaths in Iraq were caused by coalition air strikes. If the 655,000 figure, including over 601,000 violent deaths, is accurate, this would equal approximately 78,133 Iraqis killed by bombs, missiles, rockets, or cannon rounds up to last June.

There are also indications that the air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. Figures provided by The Lancet study's authors suggest that 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age in that same period were due to coalition air strikes. These findings are echoed by Conservation Center of Environment & Reserves' statistics, indicating that no fewer [than] 25 of the 59 Iraqis on their partial list of those killed by air strikes during the April 2004 siege of Fallujah were children.

The Iraq Body Count Project (IBC), a group of researchers based in the United Kingdom who maintain a public database of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the war, carefully restricts itself to media-documented reports of civilian fatalities. While its figures are consequently much lower than The Lancet's — currently, its tally range stands at: 64,133–70,243 — an analysis of its media-limited data offers a glimpse of the human costs of the air war.

Statistics provided by the Iraq Body Count Project show that from 2003-2006, coalition air strikes, according to media sources alone (which, as we know, have covered the air war poorly), killed 3,615–4,083 people and left another 11,956–12,962 wounded. Last year, media reports listed between 169–200 Iraqis killed and 111–112 injured in 28 separate coalition air strikes, according to the IBC project. These numbers also appear to be on the rise. John Sloboda, the project's spokesperson and co-founder notes by email that, during 2006, the "vast majority" of lethal air strikes took place during the latter half of the year.

Asked about the assertion that the second half of 2006 was deadlier for Iraqis, due to U.S. air strikes, and the possible reasons for this, Lt. Col. Kennedy waxed eloquent: "War, by its very nature, has ebbs and flows, and we constantly review the application of airpower to best support the forces on the ground in theater. We view this as simply part of our contract to the warfighters. As we do not discuss operational aspects of missions, I'll decline further comment." But recently, Air Force Chief of Staff T. Michael Moseley did admit that he had "anecdotal evidence" suggesting "airpower is the most lethal of the components in wrapping up bad guys." He continued, "As far as numbers of people killed, as far as wrapping up bad guys and as far as delivering a kinetic effect, the air component — which also includes Marine and Navy air, by the way — is the most lethal of the components."

According to IBC's figures, during the first three months of 2007, U.S. air attacks had already killed more than half as many civilians as had died in all air strikes last year — some 95–107 deaths; and publicly available CENTAF statistics indeed do show a surge in close air-support missions in 2007. For example, between March 24 and March 30, 2006, CENTAF reported 366 close air support missions. In 2007, the number for the same dates skyrocketed to 437 — an almost 20% jump.

The Secret of Why the Air War Is So Secret

Unfortunately, media reports on the air war are so sparse, with reporting confined largely to reprinting U.S. military handouts and announcements of air strikes, that much of the air war in Iraq remains unknown — although the very fact of an occupying power regularly conducting air strikes in and near population centers should have raised a question or two. Echoing Ali al-Fadhily's comments about the dearth of international observers in Iraq, Garlasco of Human Rights Watch notes, "Because of the lack of security we've had no one on the ground for three years now, and so we have no way of knowing what's going on there." He adds, "It's a huge hole in all the human rights organizations' reporting."

But human rights organizations and other NGOs are just part of the story. Since the Bush administration's invasion, the American air war has been given remarkably short shrift in the media. Back in December 2004, Tom Engelhardt, writing at Tomdispatch, called attention to this glaring absence. Seymour Hersh's seminal piece on air power, "Up in the Air," published in the New Yorker in late 2005, briefly ushered in some mainstream attention to the subject. And articles by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who covered the American occupation of Iraq, before and after the Hersh piece, are among the smattering of pieces that have offered glimpses of the air campaign and its impact. To date, however, the mainstream media has not, to use the words of Lt. Col. Kennedy, engaged in a "relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds" fired — or any other aspect of the air war or its consequences for Iraqis.

Les Roberts especially laments just "how profoundly the press has failed us" when it comes to coverage of the war. "In the first couple of years of the war," he says, "our survey data suggest that there were more deaths from bombs dropped by our planes than there were deaths from roadside explosives and car bombs [detonated by insurgents]." The only group on the ground systematically collecting violent death data at the time, the NGO Coordinating Committee for Iraq, he notes, found the same thing. "If you had been reading the U.S. papers and watching the U.S. television news at the time," Roberts adds, "you would have gotten the impression that anti-coalition bombs were more numerous. That was not just wrong, it probably was wrong by a factor of ten!"

With the military unwilling to tell the truth — or say anything at all, in most cases — and unable to provide the stability necessary for NGOs to operate, it falls to the mainstream media, even at this late stage of the conflict, to begin ferreting out substantive information on the air war. It seems, however, that until reporters begin bypassing official U.S. military pronouncements and locating Iraqi sources, we will remain largely in the dark with little knowledge of what can only be described as the secret U.S. air war in Iraq.

(Emphases added)

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. A shorter version of this piece appears in this week's Nation Magazine.

Copyright 2007 Nick Turse
TomDispatch.com

Corporate media spews propaganda as U.S. subversion of Iran escalates

2007-05-25T15:01:00.001-07:00

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Bush authorises covert CIA operations to destabilise Iran

By Peter Symonds
25 May 2007

An ABC News report on Tuesday provided further evidence that the Bush administration is actively engaged in a covert campaign of destabilisation aimed at “regime change” in Iran.

According to the American television network, Bush signed a formal “non-lethal presidential finding” earlier this year authorising “a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions”.

Based on information from unnamed former and current CIA officials, ABC News reported that Bush approved the plan “about the time that [Admiral William] Fallon took over [as head of the Pentagon’s Central Command]” — that is, about mid-March. It also stated that National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams both gave the green light for the operation.

The timing of the plan coincides with a steady stream of articles, prominently placed in the media, highlighting Tehran’s crackdown on women’s dress, arrest of dissidents, alleged nuclear weapons programs and support for anti-occupation militia operating inside neighbouring Iraq.

While it is impossible to know how many of these reports are direct CIA “plants,” they point to a concerted campaign of propaganda and disinformation. Whatever the impact inside Iran, such stories serve to poison public opinion in the US and internationally in preparation for a possible military strike.

ABC News was at pains to point out that “approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran”. Retired CIA official Bruce Riedel said that in the internal White House debate, “Vice President [Dick] Cheney helped to lead the side favouring a military strike but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides.”

These reassurances count for nothing. The US navy continues to maintain two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf, which have the capacity to mount a sustained air assault on Iran. During his visit to the Middle East earlier this month, Cheney pointedly declared on the deck of the USS John C. Stennis, just 150 miles off the Iranian coast, “We’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.”

The US fleet began extensive exercises in the Persian Gulf on Wednesday, in a move designed to intensify the pressure on Iran as a UN deadline passed for Tehran to shut down its uranium enrichment program. Bush has never withdrawn his menacing threat that “all options are on the table” — in other words, if diplomatic bullying and covert operations fail, the military option remains.

It would also be wrong to conclude that covert operations are confined to the CIA. According to a number of media reports, including detailed articles from veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the Pentagon and other US agencies have been actively targetting Iran since at least 2004. Unlike the CIA, which — formally at least — requires a presidential finding to mount “black” operations, the US military has, under Bush, increasingly engaged in its own covert activities, including the dispatch of special forces units inside Iran, without any congressional oversight.

There is nothing particularly secret about the Bush administration’s campaign for “regime change”. Last year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought and received $75 million for anti-Iranian propaganda broadcasts and to fund opposition groups inside and outside Iran. In 2005, the figure was just $10 million.

Rice also established an Iranian Affairs office last year, initially headed by Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president’s daughter, to coordinate policy and provide “pro-democracy funding” for opponents of the regime. The Boston Globe reported in January that a team of top officials from the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, Treasury and National Security Council, known as the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG), had been working for some time to strengthen military alliances against Iran, finance Iranian dissidents and undermine the country economically.

US backing for anti-Iranian militias

While the approved CIA activities may at present be “non-lethal,” the same cannot be said of all US activities inside Iran. In his article last November entitled “The Next Act: Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?”, Hersh provided evidence that the Pentagon was covertly supporting minority Kurdish, Azeri and Baluchi tribal groups as a means of undermining Tehran’s authority in northern and southeastern Iran. In particular, the US military was collaborating with Israel in backing a Kurdish armed group — the Party for Free Life — based in northern Iraq to foment opposition inside the Kurdish regions of Iran and to spy on “targets inside Iran of interest to the US”.

A series of ABC News reports last month stated that the US was actively backing Jundullah, an armed Baluchi group based in Pakistan, to carry out cross-border attacks inside Iran. It reported on April 3 that the militia had been “secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005”. The group was responsible for the bomb blasts in the southeastern city of Zahedran in February that killed 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Centre, told ABC News that Jundullah leader Abd el Malik Regi “used to fight with the Taliban. He’s part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist.” According to this week’s report, US officials deny any “direct funding” of Jundullah but “say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with US officials.” In other words, in its efforts to bring about “regime change” in Iran, the Bush administration is collaborating with Sunni extremists associated with the Taliban, which is the main target of the US “war on terror” in neighbouring Afghanistan.

In his most recent article, in February, entitled “The Redirection,” Hersh says the Bush administration has enlisted the support of the Saudi monarchy and other Sunni states such as Jordan in a bid to counter the influence of Shiite Iran across the Middle East. As the article points out, the US might not be “directly funding” groups like Jundullah and other Sunni extremist militia, but autocratic Saudi Arabia is able to secretly provide large amounts of money, as it did to Al Qaeda in the 1980s in the CIA’s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.

Hersh also highlighted the role of Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, a prominent neo-conservative who was an active participant in the Reagan administration’s illegal arming of the right-wing Nicaraguan contras through the covert sale of weapons to Iran in the 1980s. Abrams eventually pled guilty to lying under oath to cover up the Iran-contra scandal. His past crimes were no hindrance, however, to his appointment by Bush as deputy national security adviser with a special brief for “global democracy strategy” — that is, for undermining regimes targetted by the administration.

According to Hersh’s sources, Abrams has used his experiences to bypass congressional oversight of a series of clandestine operations, not only inside Iran, but directed against pro-Iranian groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. Access to funds appears to have been no problem, as a Pentagon consultant explained: “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions.” Other US officials pointed out that the billions of dollars unaccounted for during the first months of the US occupation of Iraq had been “a vehicle for such transactions”.

Iran reacts

Commenting to ABC News about Bush’s secret presidential finding, Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned: “I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran. And this covert action is now being escalated by the new US directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow.”

A senior US State Department official admitted to the Washington Post that the US was funding oppositionists, albeit indirectly. “We saw early on the problem we would pose if we tried to support them directly. We didn’t want to get them into hot water. That’s why we’re doing it through third countries,” he said.

Already the Iranian government has seized on the US campaign to justify its own political witch-hunt, including the roundup of political opponents as “spies” and “US agents”. US-based Human Rights Watch analyst Hadi Ghaemi told the Washington Post last month: “Dozens of Iranian activists are paying the price since the announcement of the $75 million and practically everyone who has been detained over the past year has been interrogated about receiving this money. They [the authorities] are obsessed with the perception that the US is fuelling a velvet revolution through this money.”

A broad range of activists have been detained and interrogated, including teachers, women’s rights campaigners, labour organisers, students, journalists and intellectuals. “When the US announces its support for civil society movements, it becomes a ready tool for the Iranian government to use against independent activists. It’s really been counterproductive,” Fariba Davoodi Mohajer, a women’s rights activist, told the newspaper.

Several visiting foreign academics and journalists have also been caught up in the security dragnet, including Radio Farda correspondent Parnaz Azima and Haleh Esfandiari, from Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Centre. Both hold dual US-Iranian citizenship and were visiting family members in Iran. Esfandiari, who has become something of a cause célèbre in American ruling circles, was formally detained on May 8, after being prevented from leaving the country, and has been accused of trying to foment a “soft revolution” and spying for the US and Israel.

While the Iranian regime has offered no evidence to justify its repressive measures, the outrage expressed by the Bush [regime] administration and congressional Democrats is completely hypocritical. Secretary of State Rice declared last week that Esfandiari should be released immediately, saying her case demonstrated that the Iranian regime “does not treat its people... very well.” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack dismissed Iranian accusations that the academic was seeking to overthrow the Iranian government as “poppycock” and “utter nonsense”.

Whether or not Esfandiari is involved, Rice’s perspective is certainly “regime change” in Tehran. Moreover, with the complicity of the Democrats, the Bush administration has arbitrarily detained without trial, and in many cases tortured, thousands of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and the US itself, including five Iranian officials seized from an Iranian liaison office in northern Iraq in January.

The campaign for “regime change” in Iran has nothing to do with defending “democracy” or the political rights of the Iranian population. Its sole purpose is to advance US strategic and economic interests. Iran not only contains huge reserves of oil and gas, it sits at the strategic crossroads of the resource-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East.

US and Iranian officials are due to meet next week in Baghdad to discuss the deteriorating security situation confronting American occupation forces in Iraq. The meeting is unlikely to ease the escalating tensions between the two countries.

(Emphases added)

See also:

Senator Psycho: John McCain and the Gates of Hell

Your tax dollars at work: funding terrorist groups

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Iran, U.S. hypocrisy & the crooked corporate media

Pirates, thieves and Emperors

Fake terrorism and fascist martial law: America's guaranteed future hell

2007-05-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

From the Centre for Research on Globalization:

US government fans homeland terrorism fear

Washington consensus plans for martial law, nuclear terror holocaust, behind closed doors

by Larry Chin
Global Research, May 15, 2007

The US government and Washington elites are aggressively ramping up their "war on terrorism" rhetoric and propaganda, stoking fear and paranoia in order to bolster their war agenda, and reinvigorate the mass public perception of new and growing "homegrown terrorism" threats to the US homeland.

The next phase of America’s war abroad (under the management of a post-Bush neocon/neoliberal consensus), and the deepening militarization of the US homeland towards a full police state, are well underway.

Who or what was behind the Fort Dix Six?

On May 8, 2007, six foreign-born Muslims were arrested during an attempt to purchase assault weapons, and accused of plotting a terror attack on Fort Dix (New Jersey), as well as an assault on a Pennsylvania Navy installation.

While evidence regarding this case continues to unfold, what is clear is that the FBI and US intelligence had been infiltrated and monitored over an extensive period, as early as January 2006. An unnamed "shadowy informer", likely an intelligence asset, is the key figure behind this operation and the arrest.

An objective analysis of the Fort Dix incident leads to questions about US military-intelligence involvement, and the use of the incident as a pretext:

"There is no doubt that the actions of the US military around the world are provoking a level of disgust and anger that could well produce misguided terrorist attacks within the US itself. Nonetheless, the various terrorist ‘plots’ exposed by the Bush administration have virtually without exception been characterized by a similar lack of any real preparation for violence combined with the central role of a covert informant/agent provocateur."

In each of these cases, the supposed conspiracy has been heavily publicized in a transparent bid to justify the ongoing military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and to create a climate of fear in order to suppress democratic rights in the US itself.

"The exposure of the latest alleged plot has coincided with an unprecedented political crisis for the administration. With the president’s standing in the polls falling to record lows and US military casualties in Iraq increasing as the quagmire in the occupied country deepens, the political motive for unveiling another supposed terrorist threat from within is abundantly clear."

The Fort Dix suspects allegedly came to the attention of authorities after one of them was fingered by a Circuit City store manager while requesting to dub a terrorism training videotape from VHS to DVD. This bungling is reminiscent of the actions of the so-called 9/11 hijackers (all of them guided US intelligence assets), and suggests low-level and amateurish "patsies", guided and set up by larger forces.

This foiled "spectacular" terror plot comes shortly after the bizarre Virginia Tech massacre (which, perhaps coincidentally, bears striking similarities to other "manchurian candidate" incidents such as the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley) successfully sparked fear across the country, and ignited new calls from citizens to "make our children safe".

The clear political beneficiary of both the Fort Dix and V Tech episodes are the same: Homeland Security.

The emerging "homegrown" threat

When asked if the Fort Dix arrests had any connection to Al-Qaeda, the Bush administration immediately stated that there is "no direct evidence of a foreign terrorist tie".

This telling break, from the administration’s known pattern (seizing every opportunity to attribute violence to "Al-Qaeda", "Islamo-fascists", etc.) suggests that the new and overriding "war on terrorism" imperative favored by the Washington neocon-neoliberal consensus involves the threat of "homegrown" terrorism.

According to FBI agent J.P. Weis, who announced the arrest of the Fort Dix suspects, "these homegrown terrorists can prove to be as dangerous as any known group, if not more so. They operate under the radar."

This rhetoric coincides with a larger effort on the part of elite policy shapers to manufacture, and sell, a nightmare scenario to an American public that is beginning to distrust its government, at the very moment that the real possibility of a resource-depleted post-Peak Oil American dystopia, the decline of the American empire, is beginning to hit home in earnest.

The "Preventive Defense Project": martial law and nuclear holocaust in the United States

In a series of closed-door sessions in Washington, a panel of high level government and military officials, security "experts" are constructing a homeland security plan that would include martial law and the suspension of civil liberties.

See:
Contigencies for nuclear terrorist attack: government working up plan to prevent chaos in wake of bombing of major city

Financed and organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program known as the "Preventative Defense Project", and led by the hawkish former Clinton administration defense secretary William Perry, and Harvard’s Ashton Carter (another Clinton defense department official), this panel of 41 "security experts", directors of US nuclear weapons labs, and Homeland Security officials operatives are constructing a "blueprint" for the scenario that "Al-Qaeda" or another terrorist group with nuclear weapons will strike the United States.

The panel has concluded that such a terror strike would cause catastrophic destruction and death, "cause a possible disintegration of government order", halt economic activity and unravel social order itself. The overriding objective of this panel, therefore, revolves around ways to maintain "order" and control the civilian populace.

In a workshop called "The Day After", panel declared that preventing such a terror strike (similar in size to a Hiroshima-style detonation) was no longer enough, and that the "collapse of government order was so great, that a contingency plan is needed.

In an example of breathless and hawkish speculation, Carter declared: "We have had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 and Katrina. But those are only glimpses. If one bomb goes off, there are likely to be more to follow. This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than as a single episode, has major consequences".

(The chaos of all three historical incidents cited by Carter were the result of government-orchestrated criminal aggression, two of them mass murders of the domestic US population. Carter, of course, did not acknowledge this.)

Another panelist was Fred Ikle, former defense department official during the Reagan-Bush Iran/Contra era, and author of a 2006 book, "Annihilation from Within". Ikle’s book, and his work on the panel, aggressively promotes the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of martial law.

Steven Fetter, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and one of the panelists, believes that "cities would empty and people would completely lose confidence in the ability of the government to protect them. You’d have nothing that resembles our current social order. I’m not sure any preparation can be sufficient to deal with that."

Like many others, Fetter pushes the unfounded assumption that the US government protects its citizens, ignoring the fact (exemplified by 9/11 and the "war on terrorism") that the civilian populace is under ongoing attack from the government itself.

It is no surprise that these policies are being hatched behind closed doors, by elites, and military-intelligence operatives and other "architects of reality", with no involvement from the citizenry. It is, however, yet another ominous sign of things to come.

Nothing has been done to undo the Patriot Act, or end such things as illegal domestic spying and surveillance of American citizens. Nothing will be.

The world’s elites, from the "Preventive Defense Project" to the Council on Foreign Relations and other intelligence "think tanks", are actively engineering future policies for a nightmare scenario (both the orchestration of scenario itself, as with 9/11, as well as in response to "disorder" and civilian unrest.

Real and fake terrorism: products of Washington

It is a fact that "Islamic terrorism" has always been a "homegrown" product.

"Al Qaeda" and "Militant Islam" are creations of, and guided assets still working at the behest of, Anglo-American intelligence (the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, etc.). Anglo-American involvement behind "terrorism", and the manufacture of the "war on terrorism", exhaustively documented in Michel Chossudovsky’s America's "War on Terrorism", Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, and other investigations, continue to be the focus of ongoing official cover-up. (See: Who is Osama bin Laden?, Al-Qaeda: the database)

As Michel Chossudovsky points out in "The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview":

"One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to ‘fabricate an enemy’. As anti-war sentiment grows and the political legitimacy the Bush Administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this illusive ‘outside enemy’ must be dispelled.

"Propaganda purports not only to drown the truth but also to ‘kill the evidence’ on how this ‘outside enemy’, namely Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was fabricated and transformed into ‘Enemy Number One’. The entire National Security doctrine centers on the existence of an ‘outside enemy’ which is threatening the Homeland."

It has been clear for months that the scandal-ridden Bush administration, collapsing under the weight of its own criminality, and plummeting public confidence and political support, is desperate to manufacture the appearance of progress, even triumph, in its waning months. In order to portray themselves as the Homeland’s premier "anti-terrorist" saviors, Bush and his functionaries must now attempt to sell their ability to solve to bogus problem with "terror" arrests and foiled plots, which have recently included the capture and execution of certain key Al-Qaeda" figures.

The official "Al-Qaeda" narrative itself is being given a makeover. "Al-Qaeda", "on the move", is being implanted into the Anglo-American empire’s new hot spots, the new targets of Western military-intelligence intervention, such as Iraq, Irbil (near Iran), Somalia and even Gaza.

In addition, with America’s Middle East war agenda derailing under Bush-Cheney management, new bipartisan political desperation to "restore order", shared by neocons and neoliberals alike, is resulting in a push towards a new and even more dangerous phase of the "war on terrorism", and an increased potential for new manufactured crises and "new 9/11s".

It is no surprise that most if not all of the so-called Democratic congressional opposition to the Bush administration uniformly embraces the "war on terrorism". In fact, evidenced by recent debates between Democratic presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, etc.), the Democrats advocate aggressive Homeland Security and renewed ("even better") "security" policies and improved ways to "kill terrorists", expand Bush’s world war, and militarily intervene in new areas of "national security" interest. Far from being genuine opponents of the Bush-Cheney agenda, the Democrats are fully complicit.

Gullible, paranoid and violent US citizenry

Lurid news coverage of the Fort Dix plot, the Virginia Tech massacre, and "war on terrorism" and a steady diet of "anti-terror" entertainment such as the television series 24, continue to spark panic and constant fear of "terrorism threats" among US citizens.

Reaction to the Fort Dix incident among the acquiescent and complacent populace has been uniformly paranoid, marked by saber-rattling and war-mongering. Some portions of the United States have been reverted quickly to the immediate post-9/11 mindset. A fear-struck populace is easily led.

The real threat remains the same

What the world must continue to take seriously is not a threatened strike by "terrorists", but the violent desperation of a stumbling New World Order that 1) compounds its criminal despair by continuing to commit terrorism and "run" terror groups to achieve its political purposes (the foremost being energy and resource conquest), 2) engage in terroristic provocations (foment backlash, or "blowback"), 3) wittingly and unwittingly creates new insurgencies and opposition from victimized populaces and occupied nations.

As it was on the morning of 9/11, all eyes must remain locked on the guilty parties in Washington — the political criminals who are "above the law", armed with the power to manipulate, control and exterminate broad sections of humanity, within the US homeland and abroad.

Larry Chin is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Larry Chin

American Genocide of the Iraqi People (3)

2007-05-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

The US war and occupation of Iraq — the murder of a society

Part three

By Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site
22 May 2007

This is the final part of a three-part series. Part one was posted May 19 and part two on May 21. Its purpose is to examine a series of recent reports establishing the immense scale of death, destruction and oppression that have been wrought by the US occupation of Iraq, now in its fifth year. Taken together, these reports confirm that US operations in Iraq have amounted to sociocide — the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.

The assault on higher education

Estimates of the number of university professors killed since 2003 range between 250 and 1,000. These educators have been targeted by Islamist militias because they are seen as proponents of secularism and a national identity that cuts across religious-ethnic divides.

Attacks on universities have also driven away students. The first two months of this year saw two bombing attacks on Al Mustansiriya University that claimed a total of 111 lives.

The entire higher educational system — once considered one of the best in the region — is in a state of collapse. Classes are being taught by untrained graduate students and undergraduates.

“Violence and lack of resources have undermined the education sector in Iraq,” Professor Fua’ad Abdel-Razak of Baghdad University told the IRIN news agency. “No student will graduate this year with sufficient competence to perform his or her job, and pupils will end the year with less than 60 percent of the knowledge that was supposed to be imparted to them.”

He added that medical graduates in particular are leaving the university without the knowledge or confidence to provide care. “There is a really huge difference between now and the times of Saddam Hussein, when medical graduates left college with the competence to treat any patient,” he said.

Destruction of the economy and growth of mass poverty

At the base of society, the Iraqi economy has ground to a halt. The official unemployment rate is reported by the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs to be 48 percent. However, when one adds the hundreds of thousands of former employees of now closed state enterprises, who still receive 40 percent of their old salaries, the figure climbs to 70 percent.

The inflation rate for 2006 climbed to 50 percent, the second highest in the world. Increased prices for basic necessities, including food, have dramatically affected the living standards for the vast majority of Iraqis. Within the space of just the last two years, the price of fuel has increased five-fold.

The report released in April by the UN aid mission in Iraq found that 54 percent of the population is barely surviving on less than US$1 a day, while 15 percent must endure extreme poverty, with less than 50 US cents a day. The Iraqi regime’s Central Statistical Bureau echoed these findings, saying that 43 percent of Iraqis suffer from “absolute poverty,” lacking the necessary food, clothing or shelter to survive.

The International Monetary Fund has estimated the country’s per capita Gross Domestic Product at $1,687, less than half the figure reported 25 years ago. Even oil production — the principal concern of the American occupiers — has yet to be restored to the severely depressed pre-invasion levels, with sabotage curtailing operations and much of what is produced apparently being stolen.

On top of the armed violence and sabotage, decisions imposed by the US occupation authorities have deepened the economic crisis and the agony it has created for millions of Iraqis. Driven by the profit interests of US-based corporations and the right-wing ideology of the US administration, the occupation regime headed by L. Paul Bremer launched the wholesale privatization and shutdown of 192 state-owned enterprises that employed half a million Iraqis.

The Washington Post noted recently that among these enterprises — all decreed hopelessly outmoded and inefficient by Bremer — was “a bus and truck factory south of Baghdad that had a modern assembly line, talented managers and skilled employees.” It added, “All but 75 of 10,000 employees had been laid off,” as the Iraqi government, previously its sole customer, has been barred from buying the vehicles.

Clearly, the aim was to eradicate the national economy, sell off whatever profitable sectors existed to US transnationals and, above all, clear the way for the US oil companies to seize control of the Iraqi oilfields.

Bremer also decreed an end to all tariffs aimed at protecting Iraqi agriculture, ostensibly for the purpose of making imported goods cheaper. The effect — and it is hard to believe that it was unintended — was to bankrupt Iraq’s small farms, where production was already hampered by continuous military attacks. Now, as the occupation enters its fifth year, the Iraqi agricultural sector has collapsed and the country is totally dependent upon imported food, which sells at prices that are beyond the reach of much of the population.

Finally, the US colonial administrator implemented a “flat tax” — the dream of the Republican right in the US itself — and issued decrees allowing foreign corporations to repatriate all profits and giving them equal rights with domestic producers in the Iraqi economy.

Blaming the Iraqis for US war crimes

Both Democrats and Republicans in Washington now find it politically expedient to place the blame for the catastrophe in Iraq on the Iraqi people themselves. They claim that US troops are caught in a sectarian civil war and complain that the Iraqi government has failed to act decisively in quelling the violence and transforming political, economic and social conditions.

This is all self-serving and hypocritical nonsense. First of all, the sectarian violence that exists in Iraq is entirely the responsibility of Washington — legally, politically and morally. The US is an occupying power and, under the Geneva Conventions, is obliged to guarantee the security of the occupied population. But thousands of Iraqis are killed or wounded and tens of thousands driven from their homes every week.

More fundamentally, the eruption of sectarian violence was directly stimulated by US policy. Like colonial conquerors before it, Washington sought to dominate Iraq with a policy of divide and rule. Having destroyed every national institution in the country, it sought to reconstitute political life along ethno-religious lines, giving a weight to the division between Sunnis and Shia that had never before existed in Iraq.

The US occupation authorities handed out political positions in the emerging Iraqi puppet regime along strictly sectarian lines. Tensions between Sunnis and Shia were whipped up and the Iraqi security forces were handed over to the militias of Shia religious parties.

Now, the US occupation has reached the point of trying to erect walls around Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, separating populations along ethnic lines in a practice that echoes brutal colonial counterinsurgency wars in a number of countries and, indeed, recalls the Nazis’ creation of the Warsaw ghetto.

Before the US invasion, Sunnis and Shia lived side-by-side in Baghdad and other cities, without friction and little concern over the religious background of their neighbors. Fully a third of marriages in Iraq were between the two communities. Now this ethno-religious identity is a matter of life and death for millions, forcing them to flee their homes and condemning them to summary executions at the hands of militias.

As for the demands that the Iraqi government meet “benchmarks,” this is strictly for political show. The fact remains that the regime headed by Nouri al-Maliki inside the US-controlled Green Zone is a largely powerless puppet, with the US continuing to exercise effective control over the country.

This reality was underscored last week with the release of a report by the leading British think tank, Chatham House, describing the Iraqi government as “largely irrelevant in terms of ordering social, economic and political life.” It added, in what is unquestionably a major understatement, that the country is on the “verge of becoming a failed state.”

The poisoning of the River Tigris

Among the most emblematic of the horrific stories coming out of Iraq is the transformation of the River Tigris, cited in the Bible as a tributary of the river flowing from the Garden of Eden and the historic lifeline of civilization in the region from ancient times. It has been turned into a stagnant and fetid waterway, hopelessly polluted by raw sewage, chemicals and toxic military waste produced by the US war and occupation.

While before the war the river supported fishermen, now it is virtually dead, with boats banned from the water and subject to hostile fire. Much of the river’s banks have also been turned into military no-go zones.

The river has also become a dump for corpses, which are pulled daily from the water, most of them bearing the marks of horrible torture. The IRIN news agency quoted an Iraqi Interior Ministry officer as saying that since January 2006, over 800 bodies have been pulled from one area of the river alone, where iron nets had been put in place to catch water lilies and garbage.

The impact of four years of US occupation upon the consciousness of the Iraqi people found at least partial reflection in the recent poll carried out in March by US, British and German news agencies. It found that fully 78 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US troops — up from 65 percent in 2005 — and 51 percent, a majority, support armed attacks on US military forces, compared to only 17 percent in 2004.

Such a dramatic shift in public opinion is explicable only from the standpoint of the magnitude of the crimes that have been carried out against the Iraqi people, who have been subjected to a bloodbath and seen their society reduced to rubble.

These are world historic crimes, and those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American troops — and for the systematic destruction of an entire society — remain unpunished and occupy the leading positions of power within the US.

“Preemptive war” and the Nuremberg precedent

The government in Washington — both the Republican White House and the Democratic Congress — continues to embrace the doctrine of “preemptive war,” i.e., unprovoked aggression, as a principal instrument of US foreign policy. Both the US president and leading figures in the ostensible opposition party — the Democrats — regularly threaten to reprise this policy in an even more catastrophic form in a war against Iran.

A thorough criminal investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the Iraq war is an urgent political task confronting the American people. It is indispensable both for preventing new and even bloodier wars of aggression and for halting and reversing the unprecedented attacks on basic democratic rights within the US itself.

The handful of prosecutions that have been brought against junior enlisted personnel responsible for such horrors as the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmoudiya and the slaughter of her entire family, or the massacre perpetrated by Marines in Haditha, only underscores the reality that those who bear the ultimate responsibility not only for these individual atrocities but for the rape of an entire country enjoy continued impunity.

The premeditated destruction of an entire society carried out on the basis of lies and in pursuit of the financial and geo-strategic interests of America’s ruling elite constitutes a war crime of historic proportions, punishable under the same statutes and on the basis of the same principles as those used to condemn leading figures of Germany’s Third Reich at Nuremberg.

Those responsible for launching the war in Iraq consist not merely of the right-wing Republican cabal grouped around Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. They include also the Democrats who enabled this war, the heads of US energy conglomerates and finance houses that hoped to profit from it and the chiefs of the media monopolies that promoted it.

All of these layers, constituting the political establishment and financial aristocracy of the United States, are guilty of the same fundamental crime for which the Nazis were prosecuted nearly 60 years ago: the plotting and waging of a war of aggression. It is from this principal crime that all the multiple crimes and horrors inflicted upon the Iraqi people have flowed.

For these crimes to go unpunished and those responsible to continue acting with impunity would have fatal implications for the political, social and indeed moral life of the US and indeed the world. It would only render the next round of war crimes and atrocities that much easier and more inevitable.

The struggle against the war in Iraq must be waged on the basis of the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops, the implementation of a massive program of humanitarian and economic aid to the Iraqi people, and the prosecution of all those responsible for this war before an independent and international tribunal.

The six months since the US midterm elections have amply confirmed that none of these demands can be realized through the existing political parties or government institutions. As this is published, congressional Democrats, who gained the leadership of Congress as a result of the massive vote against the war last November, are holding closed-door meetings with their Republican counterparts and White House officials to work out a bill that will provide tens of billions of additional dollars to continue the bloodbath in Iraq.

Behind their ever more transparent posturing as opponents of the war, the Democrats have made it clear that they remain committed to the imperialist aims of the 2003 invasion and are determined to maintain tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq to realize those aims.

Ending the war and holding the war conspirators accountable — to prevent further and even more catastrophic acts of aggression — can be achieved only by means of a direct political struggle against both parties of war: the Democrats and Republicans. Workers, students and young people must fight for the building of an independent mass political movement of the working class based upon a socialist program that is directed against the American financial oligarchy in whose interests the war is being waged.

(Emphases added)

See Part 1 and Part 2

See also:

The U.S. military: homicidal psychopaths

Pentagon admits U.S. troops are mentally ill

American war crimes have caused a 150% rise in Iraqi infant mortality

A Tribute to Iraqi Children (video)

U.S. Army punishes man for following his conscience

The New Crusaders

British general admits Iraqi people are right to fight for independence

American torture stations in Iraq

The 2005 Haditha massacre

Bloody Wednesday

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children

American high-tech cruelty: new weapons of war for use against civilian people in Iraq — and America

War-criminal U.S. military may have already used neutron bombs in Iraq

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Iraqi Oil Belongs to the Iraqi People

Stealing Iraq's oil

Tweedle-dumb attacks Tweedle-D over war

Time magazine's cover-up of American state terrorism in Iraq

American War Crimes Caught on Video

Video of American Marines shooting unarmed civilian people

ABC "News" Undercounting Iraqi Dead

Iraqi Apocalypse

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

Our war on the Iraqi People

Are you paying for murder?

American Genocide of the Iraqi People (2)

2007-05-21T04:18:00.000-07:00

The US war and occupation of Iraq — the murder of a society

Part two

By Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site
21 May 2007

This is the second part of a three-part series. Part one was posted May 19. Its purpose is to examine a series of recent reports establishing the immense scale of death, destruction and oppression that have been wrought by the US occupation of Iraq, now in its fifth year. Taken together, these reports confirm that US operations in Iraq have amounted to sociocide — the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.

Desperate plight of Iraq’s children

Iraq’s Ministry of Health estimates that fully half of the country’s children suffer from some form of malnutrition. According to a recent study by UNICEF, 10 percent of Iraqi children under five are acutely malnourished, while another 20 percent are chronically malnourished.

With the heat of Iraq’s summer coming on, medical authorities fear a sharp rise in child deaths from dehydration, cholera and infections, and they warn that the shattered Iraqi medical system is virtually powerless to stop it.

The desperate plight of Iraqi children and their families was summed up by one Iraqi mother. “Last year I lost my daughter and my mother because of dehydration,” Zahra Muhammad, 35, told the UN news agency IRIN. She said that the family had been forced from their home last May.

“We couldn’t afford cooling systems in our tent. My daughter was only four years old and couldn’t stand the hard living conditions in addition to the very hot weather,” she continued. “I have two more children and they are already sick because of malnutrition. The doctors have told me that without proper cooling and drinkable water, I should expect serious consequences in the coming months. If I lose another child for lack of electricity and clean water, then I would prefer to die with them.”

As many as 260,000 children have died since the March 2003 invasion, according to one estimate reported by the British daily The Independent in January.

For those children who do live to see their fifth birthday, Iraq has become a hostile and often deadly environment.

Less than a third of Iraq’s children now attend school, compared to 100 percent attendance before the March 2003 invasion. The principal reason students are staying out of the classrooms is fear of the endemic violence that makes a trip to school a deadly risk their families are unwilling to take.

At the same time, the relentless killing has left countless thousands of Iraqi children orphans, who have become a new and tragic fixture of life in Baghdad and other major cities, sleeping and begging in the streets. As the UN’s IRIN news agency reports: “Thousands of homeless children throughout Iraq...survive by begging, stealing or scavenging garbage for food. Only four years ago, the vast majority of these children were living at home with their families.”

The desperate conditions confronting Iraqi children led a group of 100 prominent British physicians to address an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair in January expressing their extreme concern over the impact of the occupation.

“We are concerned that children are dying in Iraq for want of medical treatment. Sick or injured children, who could otherwise be treated by simple means, are left to die in their hundreds because they do not have access to basic medications or other resources. Children who have lost hands, feet and limbs are left without prostheses. Children with grave psychological distress are left untreated.”

There are fears that this last issue — the wholesale traumatization of an entire young generation — may have the most far-reaching and devastating effect upon Iraqi society. “Children in Iraq are seriously suffering psychologically with all the insecurity,” the Association of Psychologists of Iraq declared. Based on a survey of 1,000 school children, it found that 92 percent had learning impediments caused by the climate of violence and fear. “The only things they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the US occupation,” Maruan Abdullah, spokesman for the association told reporters.

The hellish conditions that have been imposed upon Iraqi children constitute a [U.S] war crime. As the occupying power, the United States is enjoined by the Geneva Conventions to ensure “preferential measures in regards to food, medical care and protection” in favor of children under 15 years, expectant mothers, and mothers of children under seven, and to “maintain all institutions devoted to the care and education of children.”

A catastrophic decline in the status of women

The US war and occupation have driven Iraqi women back generations, condemning millions to statutory second-class citizenship and nightmarish conditions in which they are virtually prisoners in their homes.

This development is closely bound up with the record rise in infant mortality and is just as vital an indicator of social progress — or retrogression. It was Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist, who wrote 155 years ago, in a passage cited by Marx and Engels: “Social progress and changes of a period are accompanied by the progress of women towards freedom, while the decay of the social system brings with it a reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by women.” He concluded: “Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress.”

A report released in April by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) on human rights in the country recorded 40 cases of “honor killings” of women over a three-month period in the governorates of Erbit, Duhok, Sulaimaniya and Salahuddin. These women were murdered by their own family members, in some cases burned alive, for alleged “immoral” conduct.

A report by the Iraqi news agency Awena indicates that this hideous practice is even more widespread. Basing itself on data obtained from the Duhok criminal court and the Duchok Azadi Hospital, Awena reported last January that in this governorate there were 289 burning cases resulting in 46 deaths of women in 2005, and 366 burning cases resulting in 66 deaths in 2006. Meanwhile, the Emergency Management Center in Erbil cited 576 burning cases resulting in 358 deaths in that governorate since 2003.

Also in Erbil, the UN report found that the number of reported rapes quadrupled between 2003 and 2006.

The Iraqi constitution, drafted under US supervision, declares Islam the official state religion and establishes that no law may be enacted that “contradicts the immutable rulings of Islam.” This principal sets the stage for the overturning of Iraq’s more liberal civil laws governing divorce, family property and child custody, substituting in their place sharia law, which denies women most rights.

Already, these principles are being imposed in the streets by armed militias of the Islamist parties, which have killed women for daring to hold professional positions as professors or doctors or to play a visible directing role in a business. Vigilantes have also forced the use of Islamic dress, including the hijab, or veil, backed by the threat of violence. Such groups in some areas have also demanded that women not leave their houses after midday, not drive automobiles or walk outside without a male relative.

A report issued by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq on the fourth anniversary of the US invasion declared: “Women of Iraq have gradually let go of most of their 20th century gains and privileges in the last 4 years of [U.S.] occupation. Iraq turned from a modern country of educated and working women into a divided land of Islamic and ethnic warlords who compete in canceling women from the social realm. Millions of women’s destinies are wasted between the destructive US war machine and different kinds of Islamic rule which have turned women into helpless black objects of no will or worth.”

The report cited growing violence against women, including gang rapes of female detainees and assaults on women by militias of other sects as an instrument of sectarian warfare. Kidnappings of women have also become rampant. A report issued by the group in March of last year found that the crime, virtually unknown under the regime of Saddam Hussein, claimed 2,000 female victims in the first three years after the US invasion, many of whom were raped or tortured. Such incidents, together with all other forms of violence, have escalated markedly over the last year.

Four women are on Iraq’s death row, waiting to be hanged, two of them imprisoned together with their young children.

The eradication of Iraq’s minorities

Also a telling sign of the social disintegration in Iraq is the status of minorities. A report issued this month by Minority Rights Group International warns that minority communities in Iraq are being systematically eradicated. It ranks Iraq as the second-worst country in the world in terms of the threat posed to minorities — better only than Somalia and worse than Darfur.

The report, entitled “Assimilation, Exodus, Eradication: Iraq’s Minority Communities Since 2003,” tracks the situation confronting Iraq’s Armenian and Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, Bahais, Faili Kurds, Jews, Mandaeans, Palestinians, Shabaks, Turkomans and Yazidis, who together make up 10 percent of the country’s total population.

“Iraq continues to see targeted killings of people from minority groups, including Christians, Yezidis and Mandaeans. Other minority groups in Iraq face daily violence, torture and political assimilation, which has led to an exodus of these communities from the country,” the report states. Last year, Iraq ranked the worst in the world. Its decline to the second worst is a reflection of the marked deterioration of the situation in Somalia, where a US-engineered intervention has unleashed rampant violence.

Some of Iraq’s minorities predate the Arabs in terms of their presence in the country, which dates back to ancient Mesopotamia. Now, victims of violence and intimidation, they are disappearing from Iraq, many killed and the rest fleeing into exile.

The report’s authors blame the US occupation for this disaster. They write: “Following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the coalition authorities established an Iraqi Governing Council in which membership was strictly apportioned along ethnic and sectarian lines. Political patronage ensured that whole ministries became dominated by officials from the minister’s own sect or group, and sectarian politics quickly became the defining feature of the new Iraqi state.” As a result, minority populations were excluded and subsequently repressed.

The decimation of Iraq’s medical professionals

The murderous violence in Iraq and the flight of millions of refugees have decimated the ranks of key professions who are indispensable for the maintenance of society.

The British non-governmental organization Medact, citing the official figures of the Iraqi Medical Association, reported in March of last year that 18,000 of Iraq’s 34,000 doctors have left the country. Another 2,000 have been murdered and at least 250 have been reported kidnapped.

In his article on the exodus of refugees from Iraq in the May 13 New York Times Magazine, Nir Rosen interviewed one such doctor, a family medicine specialist, who had fled to Damascus with her five children.

She left after her husband, a thoracic surgeon and a medical school professor, was dragged from his car by armed men, abducted and later found murdered. She told Rosen that when she asked the Iraqi police to investigate, they said, “He is a doctor, he has a degree and he is a Sunni, so he couldn’t stay in Iraq. That’s why he was killed.” Both the police and the Ministry of Health are controlled by Shiite Islamist factions. She was subsequently ordered by letter to leave her neighborhood.

The lack of trained medical staff, together with the shortage of basic supplies and the overwhelming burden of mass casualties, has left Iraq’s healthcare system in a shambles.

In an article published last October in the British Medical Journal, three doctors from the Diwaniyah College of Medicine in Iraq estimated that nearly half of the hundreds of thousands who have been killed since the 2003 US invasion could have survived if they had received adequate medical care.

“The reality is we cannot provide any treatment for many of the victims,” they wrote. “Emergency departments are staffed by doctors who do not have the proper experience or skills to manage emergency cases. Medical staff...admit that more than half of those killed could have been saved if trained and experienced staff were available.”

The article added: “Our experience has taught us that poor emergency medicine services are more disastrous than the disaster itself. But despite the daily violence that is crushing Iraq, the international medical community is doing little more than looking on.”

It is not just the international medical community. The state of the Iraqi healthcare system constitutes a US war crime. The Fourth Geneva Convention demands that an occupying power “[e]nsure the effective operation of medical services, including hospitals and public health programs, with special focus on preventing the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics, and allow medical personnel to carry out their duties.”

The Geneva Conventions also require that an occupying power guarantee the neutrality of hospitals, protecting them from attack and ensuring that all are able to seek medical care. Yet US occupation troops have repeatedly attacked hospitals. Moreover, militias have been given free rein in the medical facilities, often dragging away patients of other sects for execution.

The killing and kidnapping of doctors and their wholesale flight from the country are phenomena common to virtually every profession in Iraq. The Iraq Index, maintained by the Brookings Institution in Washington, estimates that 40 percent of Iraq’s “professional class,” including doctors, professors, pharmacists and other university-trained personnel, have left the country since 2003.

(Emphases added)

See Part 1 and Part 3

See also:

The U.S. military: homicidal psychopaths

Pentagon admits U.S. troops are mentally ill

American war crimes have caused a 150% rise in Iraqi infant mortality

A Tribute to Iraqi Children (video)

U.S. Army punishes man for following his conscience

The New Crusaders

British general admits Iraqi people are right to fight for independence

American torture stations in Iraq

The 2005 Haditha massacre

Bloody Wednesday

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children

American high-tech cruelty: new weapons of war for use against civilian people in Iraq — and America

War-criminal U.S. military may have already used neutron bombs in Iraq

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Iraqi Oil Belongs to the Iraqi People

Stealing Iraq's oil

Tweedle-dumb attacks Tweedle-D over war

Time magazine's cover-up of American state terrorism in Iraq

American War Crimes Caught on Video

Video of American Marines shooting unarmed civilian people

ABC "News" Undercounting Iraqi Dead

Iraqi Apocalypse

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

Our war on the Iraqi People

Are you paying for murder?

Unprecedented: former U.S. President blasts sitting U.S. President

2007-05-21T02:25:00.000-07:00

Bush administration "the worst in history"

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Former US President Jimmy Carter blasts Bush and Blair over Iraq

By Bill Van Auken
21 May 2007

In a pair of back-to-back interviews, former US President Jimmy Carter delivered a blistering critique of George W. Bush — declaring his administration the “worst administration in history” — and Tony Blair, describing the British prime minister’s support for US foreign policy “abominable.”

The harshness of the critique was virtually unprecedented for an ex-president commenting on the performance of a successor, not to mention a key US ally. It was all the more unusual since it was directed against a sitting president.

In an interview published Saturday in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Carter declared:

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.”

Carter, in particular, denounced the Bush administration’s adoption of a policy of “pre-emptive war.” He said, “We have a new policy now on war. We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered.” He described this as “a radical departure from all previous administration policies.”

Carter also condemned the administration’s Middle East policy. The former president was given the Nobel Peace Prize largely for negotiating the Camp David treaty between Egypt and Israel — a deal that served to isolate the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation. He was vilified by pro-Israeli circles for his recent book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

“For the first time since Israel was founded, we’ve had zero peace talks to try to bring a resolution of differences in the Middle East’” he said. “That’s a radical departure from the past.”

He also called the administration’s nuclear weapons policy a “radical departure,” charging it with having “abandoned or directly refuted every nuclear arms control agreement ever negotiated down through history.”

Turning to domestic policy, the former president denounced the Bush White House for having jettisoned “almost every previous administration’s policy on environmental quality,” including those of Republicans like Richard Nixon.

Carter, a devout Baptist, was particularly caustic in condemning the Bush administration’s cementing of ties with the religious right through the promotion of government-funded “faith-based” programs, a practice he described as “quite disturbing.”

Citing programs that have allowed churches to funnel taxpayers’ money exclusively to their own members, Carter charged the administration with violating the constitutional principle of separation of church and state. He declared that he had upheld this principle while in office, adding, “And so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one.”

In relation to Blair, Carter gave an interview to the British Broadcasting Corporation Saturday, as the British prime minister was in Baghdad and just after his farewell stop at the Bush White House. Asked to describe Blair’s support for Bush, the former president replied, “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient.”

He added, “I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.”

Carter suggested that had the Blair government not aligned itself with Washington in the Iraq war and instead opposed the invasion, the war might have been avoided or the occupation ended.

“I can’t say it would have made a definitive difference, but it would certainly have assuaged the problems that arose lately,” he said. “One of the defenses of the Bush administration, in the American public and on a worldwide basis — and it’s not been successful in my opinion — has been that, OK, we must be more correct in our actions than the world thinks because Great Britain is backing us.”

The national press largely buried their reports of Carter’s extraordinary statements. What clearly constituted major news justifying front-page coverage — a former president’s blunt denunciation of the Iraq war and the foreign and domestic policy of the current president — was treated as a second-rate item and relegated to the inside pages of both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Carter’s interviews came as part of a promotion campaign he is conducting for a new audio-book series entitled “Sunday Mornings in Plains,” which consists of recordings of weekly Bible lessons he delivered at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the sermons were given at the time of the US invasion of Iraq and that they “interrelate my condemnation and criticism of this unnecessary invasion with the ministry of Christ as the prince of peace.”

Whatever his religious beliefs, Carter as president was no pacifist and as president (1977-1981) presided over a number of policies that helped prepare the present wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. These included covert CIA support for Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, a venture in which Washington ultimately invested some $5 billion in money and arms — some of them funneled through Osama bin Laden — and that cost an estimated 1.5 million lives.

Likewise, after his support for the hated dictatorship of the Shah failed to prevent the Shah’s overthrow in the 1979 Iranian revolution, Carter proclaimed a new US militarist policy in the region aimed at maintaining US hegemony over its vast oil wealth.

Dubbed the Carter Doctrine, this policy decreed that an attempt by any other power to gain control of the oil resources of the Persian Gulf region would be “regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America” and that Washington would oppose it “by any means necessary, including military force.” To back up this threat, his administration established the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), consisting of some 200,000 US military personnel prepared for intervention in the Persian Gulf.

These preparations and the Carter Doctrine itself helped pave the way for the eruption of US militarism in a more aggressive and violent form in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 as well as in the present war threats against Iran.

In the final analysis, Carter’s denunciations of the Bush administration’s policies flow not from the Sunday sermons in Plains; rather, they reflect the extreme tensions and recriminations that are roiling the US ruling establishment as a result of the debacle that has been created by US policy in Iraq.

(Emphases added)

See also:

President Jimmy Carter Speaks Out on Israeli Apartheid

American Genocide of the Iraqi People

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

American Genocide of the Iraqi People

2007-05-19T03:13:00.000-07:00

The US war and occupation of Iraq — the murder of a society

Part one

By Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site
19 May 2007

While official politics and the media in the United States are focused largely on competing plans for salvaging the American occupation from the debacle it confronts in Iraq, little serious consideration is given to the historic catastrophe that has been inflicted upon Iraqi society itself.

Although no definitive figures can be given on the total number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the US war and occupation — including those killed in the invasion and subsequent armed violence and those whose lives have been cut short by disease and hunger, particularly among the young and old — every serious estimate places the excess death toll between several hundred thousands and one million human beings.

Iraq, once among the most advanced countries of the region, has been reduced, in terms of basic economic and social indices, to the level of the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

What is involved is the systematic destruction of an entire society through the unleashing of violence and criminality on a scale not seen since Hitler’s armies ravaged Europe in the Second World War.

American society itself is suffering deadly consequences from this war. The number of US soldiers killed in Iraq has topped 3,400, with every indication that the casualty rate is climbing as the Bush administration’s “surge” sends combat troops into the densely populated and overwhelmingly hostile neighborhoods of Baghdad.

Another 30,000 American military personnel have been wounded or injured, many of them grievously. Undoubtedly, hundreds of thousands more will suffer the psychological effects of having participated in a dirty colonial war.

The war’s daily drain on the US economy is estimated at over $300 million, with predictions that its total cost could top $2 trillion.

There is an even greater cost, however, in terms of the damage done by this criminal war to the political, social and, indeed, moral health of American society. The Iraq war — all of the tired propaganda about the “war on terrorism,” the struggle for “democracy” and the “liberation” of the Iraqi people notwithstanding — is a failed attempt by America’s financial elite to further enrich itself and secure its continued global hegemony through the naked theft of Iraq’s oil wealth.

Every section of the US political and corporate establishment, all branches and levels of government, both major political parties, and the mass media are all implicated in massive war crimes. Criminality on such a grand scale cannot go unpunished without grave implications for the future of the American people and, indeed, all of humanity.

Taken together, US operations in Iraq have amounted to sociocide — the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.

A series of recent reports have pointed to the scale of death, destruction and oppression that have been wrought by the US occupation, now in its fifth year.

An occupation army engaged in slaughter and abuse

First, as a telling indicator of the violence that the US occupation has unleashed against the Iraqi people, there is the report released by the Pentagon earlier this month on the mental state of American occupation troops. The document presents a chilling portrait of an army suffering from growing demoralization and mental and emotional dysfunction, which find expression, in part, in callous indifference, if not outright hatred, towards Iraq’s civilian population.

The survey found that a majority of troops believed that Iraqi civilians have no right to be treated “with dignity and respect,” and that approximately 10 percent of them admitted to having inflicted gratuitous violence on Iraqis in the form of beatings or destruction of personal property.

Perhaps the most significant finding was that 14 percent of US soldiers and Marines said they were directly responsible for the death of an “enemy combatant.” Given that some 170,000 US troops are currently in Iraq — and over 650,000 have been deployed there at one time or another since 2003 — this would indicate a massive death toll inflicted directly by US forces.

Many of these troops, of course, are in Iraq for second and third tours of duty, and the data does not account for incidents in which more than one person is killed, much less air strikes or artillery bombardments that can claim scores of victims. Nor does it include those killed by the tens of thousands of armed mercenary contractors, who are answerable neither to Iraqi law nor the military code of justice.

A further indication of the universal character of the deadly violence that has been inflicted upon the country came in the poll conducted earlier this year by ABC News, USA Today, the BBC and ARD German television, which found that fully 53 percent of Iraqis reported having a close friend or immediate relative either killed or wounded.

Along with the rising death toll has come a marked increase in the number of disappeared, which has far outstripped the horrors that this word came to symbolize in the worst years of dictatorship in countries like Argentina and Chile. Iraqi human rights organizations estimate that 15,000 or more Iraqis are missing, with between 40 and 60 more people joining the ranks of the disappeared daily — in other words, as many as 20,000 people on an annual basis.

Many, no doubt, have been exterminated by death squads, while others have joined the country’s burgeoning population of detainees, who are imprisoned without charges and subject to unlimited periods of pre-trial detention and often torture.

The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights reported in March that the regime was holding nearly 38,000 detainees and prisoners, while the US military admits to 19,000 detainees jailed in its two main detention camps — Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca. This total amounts to nearly six times the number of prisoners held by the Saddam Hussein regime before the US invasion to “liberate” the Iraqi people. No doubt, it will rise substantially as the US military’s “surge” continues to sweep up large numbers of Iraqi civilians.

The displacement and exile of millions of Iraqis

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of deaths that the occupation has inflicted upon the Iraqi population, an equally telling indicator of its catastrophic implications for Iraqi society is the massive population of refugees and internally displaced persons.

It is estimated that 2 million Iraqis have fled their homeland, the vast majority of them seeking refuge in Syria and Jordan. Another 1.9 million Iraqis have been reduced to the status of displaced persons inside the country.

In sum, fully 15 percent of the country’s population has been driven from their homes. The United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that between 40,000 and 50,000 more Iraqis are being displaced every week, many of them forced to sleep in tents or out in the open with no means of support.

“We left Baghdad because the situation is very difficult. We were threatened with death and they took our houses and also our shops,” a man who recently came with his family to Syria told UNHCR. “You see what the situation is there — just destruction and death.”

The United States, which unleashed this destruction and death, has since 2003 admitted only 701 Iraqi refugees. Syria is currently hosting some 1.2 million. Washington has sought to obscure this massive refugee crisis — let alone take any responsibility for it — because it is such a damning indictment of the social catastrophe it has created in Iraq.

The vast flow of internal refugees has created increasingly desperate and volatile conditions in the country’s south, where an estimated 700,000 have fled, joining some 200,000 locally displaced people within Najaf, Kerbala and Basra provinces. Local governments and relief agencies are overwhelmed, unable to provide this vast population with housing, food or medical care. The central government in Baghdad has proven unable and unwilling to provide basic support.

“There are dozens of families arriving every day at camps for the displaced, causing a lack of essential needs such as food and health care,” Ali Fakhouri, a spokesman for the Najaf provincial council told IRIN, the news agency of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in March. “The past two months were the worst for those families. For security reasons, the delivery of aid has decreased considerably and because of a lack of medicines in the region’s hospitals and inaccessibility to hospitals, children are more vulnerable to diseases. Diarrhea is common among children in the displaced groups in the south.”

Iraq’s record rise in infant mortality

Perhaps most startling of the recent reports is that issued by the children’s advocacy group Save the Children documenting worldwide trends in infant mortality rates, universally accepted as one of the most fundamental indices of social progress.

According to this report, Iraq recorded a staggering 150 percent increase in the rate of infant deaths between 1990 and 2005. In raw figures, 122,000 Iraqi children died in 2005, half of them newborn babies. The rate was 125 deaths of children under five for every 1,000 live births, compared to 50 in 1990. According to the Iraqi health ministry, conditions have only worsened since, with the ratio climbing to 130 deaths for every 1,000 births in 2006.

The years selected by Save the Children in conducting its international survey had particular relevance for Iraq, beginning in 1990 with the initiation of the punishing US-backed economic sanctions and ending in 2005, two years after the invasion. As with most of the essential indices of social devastation in Iraq, the infant mortality figures reflect both the country’s relentless economic strangulation — punctuated by periodic military attacks — over the course of more than a decade, and the violent destruction of the invasion and occupation which followed.

The vast rise in infant mortality in Iraq is unprecedented. Even sub-Saharan African countries that have suffered the worst ravages of AIDS have not approached such a terrible retrogression.

No doubt a significant share of these infant deaths can be attributed to US military operations. Virtually every air strike and bombardment carried out against populated areas claims children among their victims.

Far more important, however, is the overall disintegration of Iraq’s water, electricity and sewage systems, as well as its healthcare network, which together have created conditions in which the principal killers of children — diarrhea, malnutrition and preventable diseases like typhoid and hepatitis — go unchecked and untreated.

The United Nations has reported a stunning 70 percent increase in diarrhea among Iraqi children just since January 2006, with the highest rates in Anbar province, a center of resistance to the occupation that has been continuously under siege by US forces. Fully 60 percent of the people in the province have access only to polluted river water for drinking.

Less than a third of the population nationwide has access to clean drinking water, and just 19 percent have a functioning sewage system. Both the water and sewage systems were damaged heavily by US bombardments in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion. After toppling the Iraqi government, US forces did nothing to stop looters from stripping water treatment and pumping stations of essential equipment. “Reconstruction” here, as elsewhere, has proven catastrophically inadequate.

On average, Iraqis receive only eight hours of electricity a day, with even worse conditions in Baghdad, where most of the capital’s seven million people get only six hours or less of service daily.

(Emphases added)

Continued in Part 2 and Part 3

See also:

A Tribute to Iraqi Children (video)

American war crimes have caused a 150% rise in Iraqi infant mortality

Pentagon admits U.S. troops are mentally ill

The U.S. military: homicidal psychopaths

American War Crimes Caught on Video

Video of American Marines shooting unarmed civilian people

The 2005 Haditha massacre

Bloody Wednesday

U.S. Army punishes man for following his conscience

The New Crusaders

British general admits Iraqi people are right to fight for independence

American torture stations in Iraq

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children

American high-tech cruelty: new weapons of war for use against civilian people in Iraq — and America

War-criminal U.S. military may have already used neutron bombs in Iraq

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Iraqi Oil Belongs to the Iraqi People

Stealing Iraq's oil

Tweedle-dumb attacks Tweedle-D over war

Time magazine's cover-up of American state terrorism in Iraq

ABC "News" Undercounting Iraqi Dead

Iraqi Apocalypse

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

Our war on the Iraqi People

Are you paying for murder?

Global warming is accelerating

2007-05-19T00:12:00.000-07:00

From Countercurrents.org:

Earth’s Natural Defenses Against Climate Change ‘Beginning To Fail’

By Michael McCarthy
19 May, 2007
The Independent

The earth’s ability to soak up the gases causing global warming is beginning to fail because of rising temperatures, in a long-feared sign of “positive feedback,” new research reveals today.

Climate change itself is weakening one of the principal “sinks” absorbing carbon dioxide — the Southern Ocean around Antarctica — a new study has found.

As a result, atmospheric CO2 levels may rise faster and bring about rising temperatures more quickly than previously anticipated. Stabilizing the CO2 level, which must be done to bring the warming under control, is likely to become much more difficult, even if the world community agrees to do it.

The news may give added urgency to the meeting in three weeks’ time between the G8 group of rich nations and the leading developing countries led by China, at Heiligendamm in Germany, when an attempt will be made to put together the framework of a new world climate treaty to succeed the current Kyoto protocol.

“This is a timely warning in advance of Heiligendamm and the G8 that the climate clock is beginning to tick faster,” said the leading environmentalist Tom Burke, visiting professor at Imperial College London.

The shift that has been detected in a four-year study by researchers from the University of East Anglia, the British Antarctic Survey and the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, published in the journal Science, is one of the most ominous in the development of climate change. It implies a breach in the planet’s own defenses against global warming.

Human society has hugely benefited from the earth’s natural carbon absorption facility, which means oceans and forests take up roughly half of the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, in the so-called carbon cycle. What is left in the atmosphere is known as the “airborne fraction”.

If sinks weakened, the airborne fraction would be likely to get bigger. Although supercomputer models of the climate have for some time predicted the weakening of the ocean and terrestrial sinks, no example of it happening has actually been detected — until now.

Now the research team has found the vast Southern Ocean, which is the earth’s biggest carbon sink, accounting for about 15 per cent of the total absorption potential, has become effectively CO2-saturated.

The level of the gas it is absorbing has remained static since 1981 — but in that time the amount emitted has grown by 40 per cent, so it has stopped keeping pace and much more CO2 is left over to trap the sun’s heat.

The effect — revealed by scrutinizing observations of atmospheric CO2 from 40 stations around the world, is thought to have been caused by an increase in ocean wind speeds. Stormier weather and stronger waves are churning up the sea and bringing natural CO2 stored there closer to the surface — which reduces the ability of the surface to absorb the gas from the air.

The increased winds are believed to be caused by altered atmospheric temperature regimes produced by two separate processes — the depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica by chlorofluorocarbon gases from aerosol spray cans (now phased out), and global warming.

It is thus a positive feedback — an effect of climate change which itself makes climate change worse.

Some researchers fear that feedbacks may make global warming happen much faster, and harder to control, than generally appreciated. The pessimism of scientists such as James Lovelock is largely based on the fact that most feedbacks in the earth’s system are likely to work against us.

“This is the first unequivocal detection of a carbon sink weakening because of recent climate change,” said the lead author of the study, Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia. “This is serious. Whenever the world has greatly warmed in the past, the weakening of CO2 sinks has contributed to it.”

Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said: “Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the world’s oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the 500 gigatons [millions of tons] of carbon emitted by humans. The possibility that in a warmer world the Southern Ocean is weakening is a cause for concern.”

The Government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said: “We have quite a large number of positive feedbacks to worry about, and this appears to be another one. But the seriousness of it would depend on if it was affecting the whole ocean, or merely the Southern Ocean.”

In recent years it has become clear that the rate at which CO2 was accumulating is itself increasing. The level currently stands at about 382 parts per million by volume (ppm), up from 315 ppm in 1958.

In the past decade the rate has jumped from about 1.6ppm annually to well above 2ppm — a fact which, as The Independent reported in October 2004, may well signal that the earth’s absorption ability is shrinking.

Asked if this rate increase could now be linked to weakening sinks, Dr Le Quéré said: “I think we are just at the border of detecting that.” She added: “All the carbon cycle experts have their eyes on it.”

(Emphases added)

Saturations of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink due to recent climate change, Le Quéré et al, published this week in Science

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

See also:

White House cover-up of global warming data

Global warming, dying oceans, crooked politicians

Barack Obama: Just Another Double-Dealing Democrat

2007-05-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

From Countercurrents.org:

Should We Want A Black President?

By Margaret Kimberley
17 May, 2007
Black Agenda Report

Is Barack Obama more worthy of Black "loyalty than any other Democrat?" The answer is no — Black America should not "purchase a lemon" just because the "seller looks like us."

Obama has mastered the fine arts of bullshitology, while avoiding issues of core concern to African Americans in order to make white people feel comfortable. Although no worse than Hillary Clinton, Obama is no better either, on war, health care, the economy, mass incarceration or affirmative action. Why should Black America vote for a man who proclaims "there is no Black America?"

When Colin Powell considered running for president, the question on everyone's mind was whether or not he could win. In other words, would white people who said they liked him really vote for him? Powell eventually decided to shoot for a high profile gig with the next Republican administration, and the question remained unanswered.

Unlike Powell, Senator Barack Obama has entered a presidential race. He is the candidate with all the buzz, and he has raised a ton of money. Hillary Clinton thought that being the boss's wife would be enough to waltz into the nomination. All she had to do was bask in the Clintonian after-glow and presto, instant oval office residency.

Sadly for her, she shares her husband's politics of meaninglessness but none of his personal charisma. She can't get away with fence straddling, triangulating, or insulting the party base. Along comes Obama, a living reincarnation of Clintonian political charm straight from the glory days. Now that Hillary has been out Clintoned, she looks less like a sure thing.

Is Obama more worthy of Black loyalty than any other Democrat?

Obama has mastered the art of political bullshitology, and proven campaign fund-raising prowess. He does look like a contender. The likelihood of white people voting for him is still open to question, but that may not be the most important question. Black Americans will again support the Democratic nominee, but is Obama more worthy of that loyalty than any other Democrat?

If he is a winner, it will be in large part because he is willing to throw black people under the bus. He proved as much in his overrated speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention. "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America." Of course there is a black America, and most of us don't want to pretend otherwise.

Obama's 2004 speech does not mention racism, not even to say something bland such as, racism is bad. Obama sells color blindness in a country that is all about the color spectrum. It makes no sense for black America to embrace this obvious canard. Will we purchase a lemon if the seller looks like us?

If Obama wants to channel Bill Cosby he must know that it comes with a price

When Obama says that the best way to end poverty is to keep teenage girls from having babies, he is insulting us all. If he wants to channel Bill Cosby he must know that it comes with a price. Our support is not his birthright. If he can't bring himself to talk about the loss of high paying union jobs and the deliberate destruction of black public schools, he must know that he can't expect unqualified support.

Obama doesn't just represent the dangers of being proud when one of our own gets what the system tells us is the brass ring. He is also the culmination of the dumbing down, and selling out of the Democratic party.

In every election Democrats' choices are worse and worse. Authentic Democrats can't raise money or are ignored or destroyed by the corporate media. Just ask Howard Dean. The Democratic party's insistence on selling out and not standing up for an ideology of any kind has all but destroyed the likelihood of having a decent presidential nominee in the foreseeable future.

The eventual nominee will in fact stay the course in Iraq. Hillary has openly said that she will keep troops there. Corporate Democrat chicanery causes apathy, fatigue, and finally acceptance of phony progressives like Obama. True progressives will legitimately conclude that compromised Democrats are as good as we are able to get.

While legitimate, those low expectations are very dangerous. Black Americans would be more likely to call Hillary out when she acts against our interests. Obama would get a pass from the "aren't you proud to have a black president" crowd. He encompasses the worst of all possible worlds, a corporate beholden Democrat who won't even be put on the spot by the party's most loyal and most insightful constituency. In a spirit of charity, it could be said that Obama is no worse than Hillary Clinton. The expression "damning with faint praise" comes to mind.

If Obama is the party choice, it will be because he makes white people feel comfortable

Every four years progressives wring their hands and vote for a Democrat they don't really like. Obama would just be the latest manifestation of that sad quadrennial spectacle. If he is the party choice, it will be because he makes white people feel comfortable, and by definition that means not addressing the interests of black people.

Does it make sense to want a black president? Will we feel better seeing a black president even if he can't find the right time to leave Iraq, institute single payer health care, end mass incarceration, or fight for affirmative action? In the future, we will again see a black presidential candidate claiming that there is no black America. If we adhere to the belief that a black face in a high place is always good, that throwaway line in a speech might just take on a more ominous meaning.

(Emphases added)

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley' maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com.

The U.S. vs. Democracy in Latin America

2007-05-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

From Information Clearing House and Venezuelanalysis.com:

Setting the Stage for Turmoil in Caracas:

Washington’s New Imperial Strategy In Venezuela

By Chris Carlson
Sunday, May 13, 2007

First used in Serbia in 2000, Washington has now perfected a new imperial strategy to maintain its supremacy around the globe. Whereas military invasions and installing dictatorships have traditionally been the way to control foreign populations and keep them out of the way of business, the U.S. government has now developed a new strategy that is not so messy or brutal, and much sleeker; so sleek, in fact, that it’s almost invisible.

It was so invisible in Serbia that no one seemed to notice in 2000 when a regime was toppled, the country was opened to massive privatization, and huge public-sector industries, businesses, and natural resources fell into the hands of U.S. and multinational corporations. Likewise, few have noticed as countries in the former Soviet-bloc have recently been victims of the same strategy, with the exact same results.

Nations that do not give in to the demands of the empire and the expansion of global capitalism are targeted by an undercover, well-designed plan to change the political situation in the country, and open it up to corporate investors. U.S.-supported groups inside the country overthrow the president, making it seem like there is no outside intervention. And now, Washington has turned toward its new biggest threat: Latin America, and more specifically, Venezuela.

The Rise of the New World Order

During the second half of the twentieth century, capitalists in the first world began to saturate domestic opportunities for investment and growth. Big business reached a point where possibilities for expansion within national borders were mostly exhausted, and the only option for growth was to look for new opportunities abroad. Growing corporate conglomerates looked to expand their operations throughout the world, investing, privatizing, and buying up everything they could get their hands on. National capital was looking to go international, and by the end of the century, capitalism had become truly global.

"Get big, or get eaten," was their new philosophy, and they decided to get big by eating whole nations. With the help of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, economies everywhere were opened up to privatization. The phone systems, electrical grids, water systems, and natural resources were bought up by wealthy capitalists in countries around the world. Free-market capitalism now ruled the day; a paradise for international capital as the world’s wealth became more and more concentrated in their hands.[1]

Some nations, however, were determined to not be eaten. Privatization was an unpopular idea among populations that had developed the crazy idea that their natural resources belonged to them, and not foreign corporations. Resistance developed in several areas of the world, and some nations would not consent to the logic of global capitalism. Washington, however, was determined to open the world up to corporate expansion. They would oblige those countries that didn’t comply, either by force or by cunning.

The Case of Yugoslavia: A Model for Regime Change

It was in Yugoslavia, and more specifically, in Serbia, where Washington’s new strategy would really take shape for the first time. From here they would carry it on to other countries in an attempt to repeat the tremendous success of the Serbian experience. And it’s not hard to see why. After the toppling of the Milosevic regime allowed for mass privatization, all that remained of the formerly socialist country, including some of Europe’s largest reserves of natural resources, soon fell into the hands of U.S. and international investors.

The strategy is a sophisticated one. With the intention of ousting an undesirable regime, the U.S. government dedicates itself to strengthening and uniting opposition to the government. This includes funding opposition political parties, and creating non-governmental organizations dedicated to toppling the regime in power.

On top of this, the U.S. might contract political consultants and polling agencies to help their favored candidate win at the ballot box. But in the event they cannot win the election, fake polls cast doubt on the official electoral results, and the opposition claims fraud. Massive protests and media attention put pressure on the regime to step down, or to give in to opposition demands.[2]

As implausible as it might sound, it was exactly this strategy that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. After the war in Kosovo and NATO bombing had failed to produce regime change, the United States worked to strengthen Milosevic’s internal opponents by uniting them behind one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, and pumping about $40 million into his election campaign.[3]

U.S.-funded NGO’s and electoral consultants helped create a propaganda campaign surrounding the elections, and worked behind the scenes to help organize mass resistance to the Milosevic regime.[4] U.S.-trained “election helpers” were deployed around the country on election day to monitor results. The U.S. even provided young activists with thousands of cans of spray paint and campaign stickers to cover the country with anti-Milosevic slogans.[5]

According to official results of the first round elections, neither candidate had won a majority of the vote, and so it would require a second round run-off. But U.S. consultants published their own “exit polls,” giving Kostunica a huge victory and Milosevic refused to recognize them.[6] The opposition claimed fraud and U.S.-backed groups staged acts of non-violent [and violent] resistance to put pressure on the government. Armed groups stormed the Federal Assembly and the state television headquarters.[7] Massive protests and rebellion forced Milosevic to step down. There would be no second round election, and Washington’s candidate Vojislav Kostunica took power. The strategy had worked.

But why had the U.S. targeted Serbia, and, even more specifically, the small province of Kosovo? The answer goes back to the Reagan administration and a 1984 secret document on “US Policy towards Yugoslavia.” A censored version was revealed in 1990, advocating “expanded efforts to promote a ‘quiet revolution’ to overthrow Communist government and parties.”[8]

The US government had worked on dismantling and dividing socialist Yugoslavia for years, supporting any and all [so-called] independence movements [actually they were fascist Croatians and Albanian heroin-smuggling terrorists] within the individual provinces, including the 1999 military intervention to help the province of Kosovo break away [actually, the U.S. stole the ancient Serbian province of Kosovo from the Serbian people — then it built a U.S. military base in Kosovo called, bizarrely, "Camp Bondsteel"].

What was once a relative economic success under the famous Josip Tito, the socialist economy, based on socially-owned, worker-controlled companies, did not allow for foreign investment or US capital. This was a mortal sin in modern global capitalism. As Michael Parenti put it:

“Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It was — and what's left of it, still is — charting an independent course not in keeping with the New World Order.”[9]

Breaking up the country into smaller, dependent states and destroying their public-sector economy was the ultimate goal, and Milosevic, an admirer of socialist Tito, was the only thing standing in their way.

The rewards for their work were substantial. Once Milosevic was gone, one of the first actions taken by the new government was to repeal the 1997 privatization law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors.[10]

In 2004 the UN Mission in Kosovo announced the privatization of 500 enterprises, and U.S. corporations were the big winners. Phillip Morris bought up a $580 million tobacco factory, U.S. Steel got a $250 million deal on a steel producer, Coca-Cola grabbed a bottled water producer for $21 million, and the list goes on.[11]

In addition, western investors now had access to what the New York Times called the “war’s glittering prize,” the second largest coal reserves in Europe and large reserves of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and, even petroleum.[12] And the real gem was located in the province of Kosovo; the huge Trepca mine complex, valued at over $5 billion, now open to the highest bidder.[13]

The success of the strategy in Serbia was an important lesson for the Washington policy makers. They would repeat it several more times throughout Eastern Europe in places like Georgia (2003), the Ukraine (2004), Kyrgyzstan (2005), and Belarus (unsuccessfully in 2001).

In what became known as the “Color Revolutions,” each U.S.-aided movement would remove a regime in exchange for one more favorable to the “free-market” policies promoted by Washington.[14] The preferred strategy for regime change became this new sort of non-violent [and violent] resistance, and now the empire turned its gaze on South America, where a new threat to global capitalism had suddenly emerged.

The Problem of Venezuela

If the Trepca mine in Kosovo was the jackpot of the Serbian intervention, in Venezuela it is the state-owned oil company, PDVSA.

Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world, possibly passing Saudi Arabia in total reserves if all extra-heavy crude deposits are included. And it is PDVSA that dominates in Venezuela with a total monopoly over the nation’s oil resources. With a production capacity of 3.3 billion barrels per day, and a $65 billion yearly revenue, the company also possesses a network of more than 13,000 gas stations in the United States, including several refineries in both the U.S. and Europe, making it the second largest company in all of Latin America.[15]

You can be sure that corporate investors would love to get their hands on PDVSA, along with other public sector companies in Venezuela. In fact, they were doing just that throughout the 1990’s. By 1998, multinational corporations had already bought up the national phone company, the largest electricity company, and PDVSA was going through what they called an “opening” to international capital; a prettier way of saying privatization.[16] [Which, in turn, is a prettier way of saying THEFT.]

But that same year, Hugo Chavez was elected president on an anti-imperialist platform, and the auctioning-off of Venezuela came to an abrupt halt.

In fact, Hugo Chavez has become a real problem for the corporate imperialists and their servants in Washington. Not only has he stopped privatization, but he is reversing it by re-nationalizing all that was once privatized. The privatization of the state oil company is now prohibited by law, and his government has taken complete control of it, using it to finance the country’s development.

But what is even more worrying for Washington and their corporate sponsors is how this trend is spreading through Latin America. The Chavez government has built close ties to many of his neighbors, and many are following in his footsteps. Countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are taking greater control of their gas and oil reserves, leaving less room for the huge corporations that hoped to one day own them.

And so, just as they did in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and others, Washington has deployed its forces in Venezuela with the intention of getting rid of the Chavez menace. After trying many things over the years, including a short-lived coup, electoral manipulation, and mass protests, Washington has not been able to topple the popular leader. But they haven’t given up. To the contrary, they’ve actually just continued to increase their level of involvement.

Repeating the East European experience in Venezuela

The new imperial strategy includes something called “American Corners.” These “corners” are small offices set up by Washington throughout the target country that basically serve as mini-embassies. It is not completely clear what exactly these “corners” do, but inside you will find an array of information about the United States, including study abroad opportunities, English classes, and pro-U.S. propaganda. On top of this, the mini-embassies also organize events, trainings, and lectures for young students.

Interestingly, they seem to be very abundant in countries that Washington seeks to destabilize.

The former Yugoslav countries have a total of 22 American Corners, including 7 in Serbia. The Ukraine has 24, Belarus 11, Russia 30, even Iraq, with 11. By far the highest concentration of the “corners” is in Eastern Europe, where Washington has focused its destabilization efforts in recent years.[17]

There are at least 4 “American Corners” in Venezuela, the most for any Latin American country, and the U.S. also finances literally hundreds of organizations throughout the country, to the tune of more than $5 million a year.[18] Together, these U.S.-funded organizations are working to implant the Eastern European experience in Venezuela. As reported by Reuters, the Venezuelan opposition is already learning the Serbian tactics to overthrow a regime from a retired U.S. army colonel named Robert Helvey.

“Helvey, who has taught young activists in Myanmar and Serbian students who helped topple the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, is giving courses on non-violent opposition tactics this week at an east Caracas university,” said the article. “Neither Helvey nor the organizers of the Caracas seminar would give details of exactly what opposition tactics were being taught. But in his work in Serbia before Milosevic’s fall, Helvey briefed students on ways to organize a strike and on how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime,” reported Reuters.[19]

And more recently, in the university city of Mérida, history professor from Texas, Neil Foley, hosted an event sponsored by the U.S. embassy and the Venezuelan-American Center (Cevam), not an official “American Corner” but serving the same purpose. Foley, who has also spoken in various “American Corners” in Serbia, gave speeches in both Bolivia and Venezuela on “American values.”[20]

I attended one of Foley’s speeches and, as expected, it was a complete pro-U.S. propaganda campaign imposed upon the university students.

The professor gave exactly the message that the U.S. Embassy had paid him to give, speaking wonders about American society and “American democracy.” According to Foley, the United States solves all of its problems by tolerance for others and an all-inclusive “dialogue,” between opposing parties. And sending a clear hint to the Venezuelan students, Foley implied that any government that does not live up to these standards “must be overthrown.”[21]

All of these efforts come together into a nationwide campaign to unite, strengthen, and mobilize opposition to the democratically elected Chavez government. The ultimate goal, of course, is to destabilize the government by organizing and directing opposition groups to commit acts of peaceful [and violent] resistance and mass protests.

Just like they did in 2002, when the Venezuelan opposition groups staged massive protests that turned violent, and eventually led to the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government, the U.S.-financed campaign seeks to destabilize the government in any way they can, perhaps provoking violence for which they will later blame the government.[22]

Now nearly every element of the strategy used in Serbia and other Eastern European countries has been implemented in Venezuela as Washington directs and controls the campaign of the Venezuelan opposition. The same “electoral consultants” that were used in Serbia, the Washington-based Penn, Schoen and Berland, have also been used in Venezuela to publish fake exit polls in an effort to cast doubt on Venezuelan elections.

This strategy of electoral manipulation was used during the 2004 recall referendum when the U.S.-funded NGO Sumate and the Penn, Schoen and Berland firm released false exit polls claiming that Chavez had lost the referendum. They did the same thing before the 2006 elections, claiming that Chavez’ opponent “clearly has the momentum.”[23] Both in 2004 and 2006 the fake polls would give credence to the opposition’s claims of fraud with the hope of producing massive protests against the government. The strategy mostly failed, but it did cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Chavez government and weakened its image internationally.

The destabilization attempts are taking form in a concrete way in the coming weeks in the form of huge anti-government protests in Caracas to reject the government’s actions against the private TV channel RCTV. Opposition groups have organized around the government decision, claiming that it steps on their “freedom of expression” [sounds like blog trolls], and have organized a series of large protests in the capital leading up to a massive march on May 27th, the day RCTV’s broadcast license expires.

All the private media have played a role in advertising and calling on viewers to attend the march to protest the government. All expectations are that there will be a huge turnout by both pro-government and anti-government groups, and the government has already warned of the possibility that violence could be used during the march in an attempt to blame the government and destabilize the regime.

In the last few days, government intelligence found five sniper rifles in the hands of opposition groups as well as 144 Molotov cocktails in what appears to be evidence that there are plans for some sort of violence.[24]

It was exactly this kind of protest in 2002 that led to dozens of deaths, hundreds wounded, and the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government.

Private media channels like RCTV manipulated video footage to blame deaths on Chavez supporters, and condemned the government for human rights abuses. So this time government officials have called on pro-government activists to monitor the opposition protests with photos and video on May 27th and May 28th in order to avoid a situation similar to the 2002 coup.

If it had not been for huge pro-government protests after Chavez had been overthrown in 2002, Washington’s strategy might have already gotten rid of the popular president. But the strategy failed, and so the empire keeps trying.

Just as they did in the Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia and others, the strategy requires getting a large number of people into the streets to protest against the government. Regardless of whether the government is popularly-supported or not, or democratically-elected or not, opposition groups attempt to impose their will on the government by putting on the pressure.

What most protesters probably do not know is that they are simply pawns in a larger strategy to open up the world to “free-market” global capitalism and corporate-dominated privatizations. While huge multinational corporations carve up the world among themselves, small nations like Serbia and Venezuela are simply unfortunate obstacles to their objectives.

In the worldwide scramble to see who will get bigger and who will get eaten, the fact that some countries would prefer not to be eaten simply doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats in Washington.

Chris Carlson is a freelance journalist and activist living in Venezuela. See his personal blog at www.gringoinvenezuela.com

See also:
The BBC vs. Venezuelan Democracy

Notes:

[1] To read more about how the World Bank and IMF force privatization on poor countries, Third World Traveler has a large section devoted to the topic.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/IMF_WB/IMF_WB.html

[2] Michael Barker has a 4 part series of articles on Znet that explain this strategy in further detail.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10987

[3] Michael A. Cohen and Maria Figueroa Küpçü, Privatizing Foreign Policy, World Policy Journal, Volume xXII, No 3, Fall 2005
http://worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj05-3/cohen.html

[4] Chulia, Sreeram. Democratisation, Colour Revolutions and the Role of the NGO’s: Catalysts or Saboteurs?, Global Research, December 25, 2005, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20051225&articleId=1638

[5] Michael Dobbs, ‘US advice guided Milosevic opposition: political consultants helped Yugoslav opposition topple authoritarian leader’, The Washington Post, 11 December 2000, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A18395-2000Dec3¬Found=true

[6] Ian Traynor explains how opposition “exit polls” have been strategically used to weaken or overthrow regimes in Eastern Europe in his November 2004 article in The Guardian. “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html

[7] Chris Marsden, “How the West organised Milosevic's downfall,” World Socialist Web Site, 13 October 2000, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/yugo-o13_prn.shtml

[8] Finley, Brooke. “Remembering Yugoslavia: Managed News and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” from the book Censored 2005, Project Censored, Seven Stories Press, 2004.

[9] Michael Parenti, The Media and Their Atrocities, You Are Being Lied To, pg. 53 , The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2001

[10] Neil Clark, “The Spoils of Another War – NATO’s Kosovo Privatizations,” Znet, September 21, 2004, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6275

[11] Elise Hugus, “Eight Years After NATO’s “Humanitarian War” – Serbia’s new “third way”, Z Magazine, April 2007, Volume 20 Number 4, http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Apr2007/hugus0407.html

[12] Hedges, C., "Kosovo War's Glittering Prize Rests Underground," New York Times, 08/08/98

[13] Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Global Research February 19, 2002, Covert Action Quarterly, Spring 1996-06-18, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MIC20020219&articleId=370

[14] Jonathan Mowat, “Coup d’État in Disguise: Washingtons’s New World Order “Democratization” Template,” Global Research, February 9, 2005, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOW502A.html

[15] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petróleos_de_Venezuela

[16] Steve Ellner, The Politics of Privatization, NACLA Report on the Americas, 30 April 1998, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/170.html

[17] http://veszprem.americancorner.hu/htmls/american_corners_worldwide1.html

[18] Jim McIlroy & Coral Wynter, “Eva Golinger: Washington's 'three fronts of attack' on Venezuela,” Green Left Weekly, 17 November 2006, http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/691/35882

[19] Pascal Fletcher, ”US democracy expert teaches Venezuelan opposition,” Reuters, April 30, 2003, http://www.burmalibrary.org/TinKyi/archives/2003-05/msg00000.html

[20] On the web page of the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia it shows that Neil Foley gave a speech in La Paz, Bolivia for “U.S. Culture Week” the week before he was in Venezuela. http://www.megalink.com/USEMBLAPAZ/english/Pressrel2007En/0404-USweek-eng.pdf

[21] From my personal notes of Mr. Foley’s speech at the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela on April 16, 2007

[22] For the best, most detailed, account in English of the 2002 coup, read Gregory Wilpert’s recent article, “The 47-Hour Coup That Changed Everything,” www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2018

[23] See my previous article “Coup d’État in Venezuela: Made in the U.S.A. – The U.S.-designed Plan to Overthrow Hugo Chavez in the Days Following the Election,” Venezuelanalysis.com, November 22, 2006 www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1884

[24] President Chavez announced that his intelligence had infiltrated opposition groups and found a man belonging to an opposition group with 5 sniper rifles with silencers and scopes. “Chávez anuncia incautación armas vinculadas a complot en su contra,” Milenio.com, May 6th, 2007, http://www.milenio.com/index.php/2007/05/05/65937/
Also, police in Los Teques, near Caracas, found 144 Molotov cocktails all ready to be used to “take them out to the street next week with the intention of disturbing the public order and for direct confrontation with authorities,” Prensa Latina, May 9, 2007, http://www.prensalatina.com.mx/article.asp?ID=%7BEEAA37C7-DE27-48EB-A23B-CDC19EAD2ADA%7D)

U.S. Army punishes man for following his conscience

2007-05-15T05:10:00.000-07:00

From the May 2007 Greenfuse:

From Baghdad to the Brig

by Heather Wokusch

Agustin Aguayo might not be a household name, but his struggle pierces the core of the US anti-war movement.

Aguayo, a 35-year-old Mexican-American from Los Angeles, joined the Army in 2003 yet soon realized he couldn't take part in violence. He applied for conscientious objector (CO) status in February 2004 but was sent to Iraq anyway, where he refused to load his weapon even while on guard duty and patrols.

Aguayo explained: "I was determined that I would not hurt/injure others in any way, no matter what the consequences." He added, "I actually believe that this action of not loading my weapon kept me sane. It brought me great sadness to know some soldiers I knew had shot at people, and some soldiers I knew were hurt by the actions of others. It was so absurd."

The Army rejected Aguayo's bid for CO discharge during his year in Iraq, so he filed a habeas corpus after returning to a base in Germany, stating: "My conscientious objection applies to all forms and aspects of the war. An Officer once explained to me how in his view the Army was like a huge machine made of many parts that all work together to achieve the desired outcome. I know this is true. If the desired outcome is killing, I cannot be part of the 'machine'."

Aguayo said he still carried guilt from his 2004-2005 deployment, where he was expected to "patch-up, treat and help countless soldiers for 'sick call' in order to facilitate their prompt return to combatant duties." He maintains, "I helped them get physically better and be able to go out and do the very thing I am against — kill. This is something my conscience will not allow me to do."

The habeas corpus was denied in August 2006, and a week later, Aguayo was ordered back to Iraq.

Risking court martial and imprisonment, Aguayo went AWOL (absent without leave) on Sept. 1, 2006, surrendering to Military Police the next day. Rather than facing legal action, however, Aguayo was told he would be sent to Iraq even if it meant carrying him on the plane forcibly.

That's when Aguayo fled to California. But less than a month later, he once again turned himself in, stating, "I have come to believe that it is wrong to destroy life, that it is wrong to use war, that it is immoral, and I can no longer go down that path."

Aguayo was promptly sent back to Germany and thrown in the brig.

The saga of Agustin Aguayo has critical and wide-reaching implications. His change of heart regarding military service is mirrored in a growing anti-war sentiment across the US. And his legal woes set a precedent for other troops facing similar conflicts about deployment.

As Aguayo's wife Helga observed after his court martial, "Fear is what motivates the Army. Fear was the prosecution's recurring theme. I know they fear others will follow."

In early March 2007, Aguayo was convicted of desertion and missing movement. He was reduced to the lowest rank possible, stripped of pay and benefits and sentenced to eight months.

With good conduct time, Aguayo was released last week, but he's still not free. According to Helga, who has tirelessly defended "Augie" during his ordeal: "He's under the custody of his rear-detachment unit in Germany, the same people that threatened using handcuffs and shackles to take him by force onto the plane. The same people that told me in front of our daughters that he could be put to death because he was a deserter. The circumstances are not ideal, to say the least."

"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistance or violent co-annihilation... If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."

— Martin Luther King, Jr.
1967

She adds, "We still do not know when they will release him under administrative, voluntary or involuntary leave. We have to wait to see if the Commanding General will approve it, and even it if is approved he will still be in the military for the next 12-24 months active duty. Essentially, he is still property of the Army and since he is still in the Army, he has to obey Army Regulations. During this time he could potentially be charged with anything else and I always fear they will try to redeploy him to Iraq."

As for Aguayo, he has no regrets. He looks back on his imprisonment as "a special time of reflection" and believes that in refusing to redeploy to Iraq, "I was finally true to myself."

Aguayo insists, "It would have been devastating for me to go against my conscience. There comes a moment in one's life when one realizes which are the morals one will do anything for, and nothing can change after this experience. We all have a conscience, it is part of what makes us human, it's a beautiful gift. Unfortunately, over time we don't listen to this inner voice, we abuse it and we lose our humanity."

From Baghdad to the brig, Agustin Aguayo has been a powerful symbol for the anti-war movement. His three-year fight against the war "machine" is a lesson for us all.

U.S. Air Force brutally murders another 40 Afghan civilian people

2007-05-11T00:48:00.000-07:00

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Afghanistan: 40 civilians killed in US strike

By Joe Kay
11 May 2007

At least 40 Afghan civilians were killed in air strikes on Tuesday [May 8], adding to the mounting death toll from the escalation of US operations in the country.

The latest incident occurred in the Sangin district of the southern province of Helmand, the scene of stepped-up US and NATO attacks in recent months.

Earlier reports put the civilian death toll at 21, according to the governor of Helmand, Assadullah Wafa. Reuters reported the larger figure on Thursday, citing eyewitness accounts.

As usual, the US initially claimed that all of those killed were Taliban fighters. This latest incident, however, appears to have followed a pattern repeated in other areas recently. According to military spokesman, US forces came under attack while patrolling in the area, and one US soldier died in the fighting. The embattled patrol responded by calling in air support, which carried out indiscriminate bombing raids, including on local villages.

Major William Mitchell, a spokesman for the US-led coalition troops in Afghanistan, claimed [lied] Wednesday, “We don’t have any report of civilian casualties.” Sergeant Dean Welch, a US spokesman at the Bagram Air Force base, acknowledged there were such reports, but said they were not “confirmed.”

A report in the Toronto Globe and Mail on Thursday refutes these claims, however, noting that after the incident local villagers brought their wounded and dead to a nearby military base to protest the killings.

“A grim tally emerged as angry villagers brought their injured and dead to Forward Operating Base Robinson, an outpost shared by Canadian, British, and US troops,” Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith reported from Sangin District. “There were seven women, three men and two children among the dead; five women, five men and 15 children were injured.”

The newspaper interviewed one of the survivors, a 13-year-old boy named Rahmatullah. In addition to a wounded uncle, four of his other relatives were killed, he said, but he dragged two of his brothers alive from the mud rubble of a house. “The people who bombed us are bad guys,” Rahmatullah said. “They should attack the Taliban, not us.” The villagers who were killed belonged to tribes generally considered hostile to the Taliban.

Some residents rejected statements by Governor Wafa and the US military that there were Taliban in the area, and that they hid in civilian homes to use the civilians as shields. “There were no Taliban in our area,” one resident of Sangin told Reuters by phone.

The recent killings are part of a broader US-led offensive to recapture parts of the country not under the control of the puppet regime of Hamid Karzai in Kabul. In January, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, with the support of both the Democrats and Republicans in the US, announced an increase in the US-military presence to prepare for a “spring offensive.”

On Wednesday, the military announced that about 4,500 troops from the 101st Airborne Division would be sent to Afghanistan to maintain the current troop strength at least through 2008. There are currently about 25,000 US troops in Afghanistan, including two combat brigades, in addition to troops from Britain, Poland and other countries.

The deaths Tuesday come on the heels of several other attacks that have killed scores of civilians. At the end of April, air strikes in the western Herat Province killed at least 50, while other attacks in the south have killed dozens, including one incident, also at the end of April, in which 13 civilians were killed.

Near Jalalabad in the east, 6 Afghans were killed during a raid in April, while 19 civilians were killed and 50 wounded when US marines went on a killing spree in March.

All of these incidents are combining to sharply increase popular opposition to the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan. Each of the killings has been followed by large protests, sometimes lasting for days, demanding the withdrawal of US and other military forces.

Growing concern within the Afghan government that popular opposition could undermine the Karzai government was on display Tuesday, when the upper house of the parliament voted for a military cease-fire and negotiations with the Taliban.

Meanwhile, a US Army brigade commander issued a cynical apology for the deaths of the 19 civilians near Jalalabad in March. Colonel John Nicholson said he was “deeply, deeply ashamed” by the incident, and said the military was issuing payments of US$2,000 as “essentially a symbol of our sympathy to them” and “a way of expressing our genuine condolences over the incident occurring.”

Haji Lawania, who was injured and had two relatives killed by the Marines, expressed what was no doubt the reaction of many of those involved, saying, “We don’t want their money and apologies. If somebody loses one of his family members, an apology won’t bring him back.”

(Emphases added)

See also:

Latest American massacres of civilian people in Afghanistan

Highway massacre sparks anti-US protests in Afghanistan

America's war on civilian people

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

Pentagon admits U.S. troops are mentally ill

2007-05-10T01:20:00.000-07:00

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Pentagon survey exposes deep demoralization of US occupation troops

Support for torture, routine abuse of Iraqi civilians

By Kate Randall
9 May 2007

With the US war in Iraq in its fifth year, more than a third of the American soldiers deployed there condone the torture of captured Iraqis.

When torture could result in coerced information, 36 percent of army soldiers and 39 percent of marines support it. These numbers rise when torture is seen as preventing the death of a fellow soldier — 44 percent for marines and 41 percent for soldiers.

These chilling statistics are presented in a Pentagon report on the mental health of US troops deployed in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The Mental Health Advisory Team (MHAT) report surveyed 1,320 soldiers and 447 marines between August and October 2006. While the survey data was issued internally last November 17, it was not made public until last Friday, a month after Defense Secretary Robert Gates extended tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan from 12 months to 15 months.

The study exposes the deteriorating behavioral health status of US troops — including depression, anxiety, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), marital problems and suicide. These mental health and personal problems are shown to directly influence the attitudes US soldiers hold toward the Iraqi population — resulting in increasing levels of terror and brutality meted out to civilians.

Asked whether “all non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” less than half of soldiers agreed. Close to a third of all soldiers reported they had insulted or cursed at non-combatants in their presence. Twelve percent of marines and 9 percent of army soldiers said they had unnecessarily damaged or destroyed Iraqi property; 7 percent of marines and 9 percent of soldiers said they had physically hit or kicked civilians.

Taken together, these figures reveal literally hundreds of thousands of incidents in which US troops have abused Iraqi civilians, humiliating and beating them, destroying their homes and inflicting outright torture.

There can be no doubt that the self-reporting of such sadistic and illegal activity substantially underestimates the real scope of the violence and cruelty that the American occupation is inflicting upon the population of Iraq. The report goes a long ways toward explaining the broad popular support in Iraq for armed resistance to US forces.

That the majority of some 170,000 American troops now deployed in Iraq believe that Iraqi men, women and children have no right to be treated “with dignity and respect” means that the American occupation force sees the entire population as its enemy and treats it accordingly.

The longer and more often troops are deployed — and whether or not they are engaged in day-to-day combat — are direct determinants of increased levels of severe mental health problems among soldiers and a corresponding hostility toward the population. This has ominous implications in light of the Bush administration’s “surge” plan now underway, in which an additional 30,000 US troops have been ordered to Iraq, many of them for a second or third tour of duty.

The Baghdad operation is sending more troops out into neighborhoods where they face an increasingly hostile population. Almost every soldier interviewed by the MHAT survey in 2006 reported being shot at by snipers, and more than three quarters reported being in situations where they thought they could be seriously injured or killed. This can only be increasing under the “surge,” with corresponding violence against civilians.

Interviews from the MHAT study give an indication of the brutality soldiers are witnessing and participating in as part of the war of occupation. Some typical comments:

* “A friend was liquefied in the driver’s position on a tank, and I saw everything.”

* “Working to clean out body parts from a blown-up tank.”

* “My best friend lost his legs in an IED incident.”

* “I had to police up my friends off the ground because they got blown up.”

* “Seeing, smelling, touching dead, blown-up people.”

More than 60 percent of soldiers in the study knew someone seriously injured or killed, and more than 50 percent had a member of their own unit become a casualty. Fourteen percent said they were “directly responsible for the death of an enemy combatant.”

Compounding the acute pressures of these combat-related horrors are anxieties soldiers experience due to the uncertainty of whether they will leave Iraq before being killed, or will return for another tour of duty after their leave. Or as one soldier put it, “Fear that I might not see my wife again, like my fallen comrade.”

Forty percent of OIF soldiers reported being concerned about an uncertain re-deployment date, up 5 percent from soldiers surveyed in the 2004-2006 period. Many soldiers learn of extensions of their 12-month tours from their husbands or wives, who are informed by garrison leaders. Families are thrown into disarray when spouses and children expecting their fathers or mothers to return learn that they are not coming home. Not unexpectedly, 25 percent of soldiers reported some type of marital problem, and 20 percent were currently undergoing divorce.

A study published in the May 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology also showed that the reports of emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of children have doubled among military families since deployments began. The victims are typically age four or younger, and the abuser is usually the parent left at home.

The MHAT cites 72 confirmed US soldier suicides in Iraq since the beginning of the war. The majority of these deaths involved single, white, male, junior enlisted soldiers, and all those documented showed the cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Statistics from the US Army indicate that a total of 84 active, reserve and National Guard soldiers killed themselves in 2005 (the latest year from which data is available), up from 50 deaths in 2001. Those figures do not include suicides of recently discharged veterans.

The MHAT report notes that the systems used to monitor suicide attempts — the Army Suicide Event Report (ASER), and the Suicide Prevention Committee — are inadequate and have not been proven reliable in the Iraq combat environment.

Not atypical is the case of Spc. David Ramsey, who committed suicide last September 7 after returning from Iraq. Last August, while serving as a hospital nurse in Mosul, he wrote a suicide note, loaded an M-16 and prepared to shoot himself. Instead of going through with it, however, he paged an officer in his unit. After pledging not to kill himself, he was evacuated to Landstuhl, Germany, and eventually sent home.

Two weeks after his arrival at the Fort Lewis army base, he killed himself while on home leave at his parents’ home in nearby Spanaway, Washington. The Madigan Army Medical Center claim they were unaware of his near-suicide attempt in Iraq, and his parents say the army never informed them of it.

Findings from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) Land Combat Study show that mental health problems of soldiers returning from Iraq do not “re-set” before they are re-deployed. According to the MHAT study, 21 percent of soldiers deployed to Iraq a second time screened positive for mental health problems (anxiety, depression or PTSD) compared to 9 percent of first-time deployers from the same Basic Training unit.

One of the key recommendations of the MHAT study is to extend the interval between troop deployments to 18-36 months, or decrease deployment length to allow for additional time following a one-year combat tour. It also recommends that soldiers and marines experiencing high levels of combat receive one month of in-theater recovery time for every three months of combat duty.

It notes that during World War II, entire units were withdrawn from the front lines for months at a time for rest. In Iraq, however, there is no front line for US troops. The entire country is seen as a combat zone, precisely because the American military has been sent to invade and occupy a sovereign country and impose US domination against the will of its people.

The MHAT recommendations, which were presented last November to Gen. George W. Casey, then the senior American commander in Iraq, as well as to Defense Secretary Gates and other Bush administration officials, were kept from the public because they collided with White House plans to sustain elevated troop levels required for the Baghdad “surge.” In April, Gates announced that the army was increasing combat tours to 15 months, rather than the traditional one-year tour.

Nonetheless, the release of the report now signals a warning from within the military command itself that the kind of deployments required by the Iraqi war and occupation pose the real threat of “breaking” the American army in a way not seen since the disastrous defeat it suffered in Vietnam.

What is revealed in the social attitudes, breakdown in mental health and growing social instability of the American military forces is the rampant demoralization that has characterized every imperialist army engaged in a losing attempt to subdue an occupied population. Support for torture, ostensibly as a means of extracting information, but in reality to exact retribution, is emblematic of this kind of disintegration of military morale.

This trend has been displayed most graphically in the well-publicized atrocities perpetrated against civilians, such as the massacre by US marines in November 2005 of as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis, including 7 women and 3 children in Haditha; or the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and 3 members of her family in Mahmoudiya in March 2006 by members of the army’s 101st Airborne Division.

What the Mental Health Advisory Team’s report exposes is that such sadistic behavior on the part of the US troops in Iraq is not an aberration, but an intrinsic feature of colonialist war. The brutality of the military operation is taking a tragic toll on the mental health of the occupying troops, with even more catastrophic consequences for the civilian population.

(Emphases added)

See also:

The U.S. military: homicidal psychopaths

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

American torture stations in Iraq

The 2005 Haditha massacre

American war crimes have caused a 150% rise in Iraqi infant mortality

A Tribute to Iraqi Children (video)

The New Crusaders

British general admits Iraqi people are right to fight for independence

Bloody Wednesday

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children

American high-tech cruelty: new weapons of war for use against civilian people in Iraq — and America

War-criminal U.S. military may have already used neutron bombs in Iraq

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Iraqi Oil Belongs to the Iraqi People

Stealing Iraq's oil

Tweedle-dumb attacks Tweedle-D over war

Time magazine's cover-up of American state terrorism in Iraq

American War Crimes Caught on Video

Video of American Marines shooting unarmed civilian people

ABC "News" Undercounting Iraqi Dead

Iraqi Apocalypse

Our war on the Iraqi People

Are you paying for murder?

American war crimes have caused a 150% rise in Iraqi infant mortality

2007-05-09T04:46:00.000-07:00

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Iraqi infant mortality soars by 150 percent — a damning revelation of US war crimes

By Bill Van Auken
9 May 2007

The infant mortality rate in Iraq has increased by a shocking 150 percent since 1990 — the highest such increase recorded for any country in the world — according to an annual report issued by the child advocacy group, Save the Children.

According to the report, in 2005, the last year for which reliable data is available, one in eight Iraqi children — 122,000 in all — died before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of these deaths were recorded among new-born infants, with pneumonia and diarrhea claiming the greatest toll among Iraqi babies.

The infant mortality rate has long been considered one of the key measures of societal progress and wellbeing. The astounding figures recorded in Iraq are an accurate reflection of the social devastation wrought both by the US invasion of 2003 and more than a decade of US-backed economic sanctions that preceded it.

“Conservative estimates place increases in infant mortality following the 2003 invasion of Iraq at 37 percent,” according to the Save the Children report. The implications of such a change — in the space of just two years — are staggering. Given the steady escalation of the armed conflict in Iraq and the continued deterioration of social conditions for masses of people in the country, the rate of increase in infant and child deaths was no doubt even greater over the course of 2006.

The report blamed the horrific decline in infant and child health since the invasion on the steadily worsening living conditions for the Iraqi population as a whole, including “electricity shortages, insufficient clean water, deteriorating health services and soaring inflation.”

This overall destruction of basic social infrastructure unleashed by the US invasion and occupation has been translated into a horrendous decline in child health. “Only 35 percent of Iraqi children are fully immunized, and more than one-fifth (21 percent) are severely or moderately stunted” as a result of malnutrition, the study found.

The statistics compiled by Save the Children indicate that in 1990 the mortality rate for children under five in Iraq stood at 50 for every 1,000 live births — among the best outcomes reported for the entire Arab world at the time. In 2005, the figure was 125 per 1,000 live births — roughly equivalent to the figures recorded in countries like Malawi, Mauritania, Uganda and Haiti.

While some countries — all with one exception in Africa — have higher death rates than Iraq, none came even near the rate of increase in infant mortality recorded by the US-occupied country (Botswana came closest, with a 107 percent rise, while still recording a slightly lower rate of 120 deaths per 1,000 live births).

The destruction of the conditions and very lives of Iraqi children began well before US troops invaded the country in 2003. The 1990-1991 Gulf War saw more than 90,000 tons of US bombs and missiles dropped on Iraq, smashing much of its essential infrastructure, including power plants and water and sanitation systems and creating the conditions for a public health disaster.

The war was followed by a decade of punishing sanctions that deprived Iraqi children and the population as a whole of essential medical supplies and adequate nutrition. Even chlorine, needed to purify water, was embargoed, depriving infants and small children of a clean water supply and condemning many to death.

US-backed sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children

It was during this period that the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that an additional half a million Iraqi children had died between 1991 and 1998 as a result of the sanctions.

In 1998, the coordinator of United Nation humanitarian operations in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest calling the sanctions a form of “genocide” and “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.” Halliday said at the time, “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, confronted in a television interview with the UN estimate of 500,000 children having died as a result of the US-backed sanctions, famously answered, “We think the price is worth it.”

The rise in infant mortality rates represents the starkest manifestation of the murderous impact that US aggression upon Iraq and its children over a protracted period. But there are many other indications that for those who survive, conditions of life have become increasingly unbearable.

According to figures reported by the Iraqi government, some 900,000 children have been left orphans by the carnage that has swept Iraq since the US invasion of 2003. It is estimated that at the present levels of violence, some 400 children are left orphaned every day in the country.

The Iraqi Ministry of Education, meanwhile, estimates that barely 30 percent the country’s 3.5 million elementary school children are attending classes, a sharp decline from 75 percent last year. A study sponsored by the World Health Organization in the Iraqi city of Mosul, found fully 30 percent of school children surveyed suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.

Significantly, the other country that is presently occupied by the US military and remains the scene of a bitter counterinsurgency war — Afghanistan — ranks as the second worst in the world in terms of its infant mortality rate, with 257 deaths for every 1,000 live births. In other words, more than one out of four Afghan children dies before the age of five. On average, every Afghan mother sees two of her children die as infants, while one in six women die in childbirth.

According to the Save the Children study, 40 percent of Afghan children are malnourished and less than half have access to safe water. The report also notes that, while “1 child in 100,000 in the United States dies of pneumonia each year, roughly 1 in 15” dies of the disease in Afghanistan.

On a world scale, Save the Children reports, “Every year, more than 10 million children die before they reach the age of 5, most from preventable causes and almost all in poor countries.” It adds that while infant global infant mortality rates had improved in previous decades, “rates of progress are slowing and in many countries, child death rates are getting worse.”

The organization insists that available and low-cost solutions could easily prevent 6 million of these deaths annually. These include, “skilled care at childbirth, breastfeeding, measles immunization, oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea and medical care for pneumonia.” But for many of the most impoverished countries, and for many others in the most oppressed layers of society elsewhere, these elementary forms of health care and education are not provided.

The statistics included in the report also indicate that the problems of infant mortality reflect the worldwide growth of social inequality, which is literally killing millions of children every year.

“A child in the poorest fifth of a population is more than twice as likely to die compared to a child from the richest fifth,” the study finds. “Eliminating health-care inequities — and bringing mortality rates among the poorest 80 percent of the population down to those prevailing among the richest 20 percent — would prevent about 4 million of the 10 million deaths each year.”

In addition to the growing impact of social inequality within each country, the gap between the wealthiest and most impoverished countries has also continued to widen. While in 1990, the child mortality rate for sub-Saharan Africa was 20 times higher than for the industrialized countries, by 2005, the rate was 28 times as high, the study said.

(Emphases added)

See also:

A Tribute to Iraqi Children

Iraqi Apocalypse

Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children

The U.S. military: homicidal psychopaths

American torture stations in Iraq

The 2005 Haditha massacre

Bloody Wednesday

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

American high-tech cruelty: new weapons of war for use against civilian people in Iraq — and America

War-criminal U.S. military may have already used neutron bombs in Iraq

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Tweedle-dumb attacks Tweedle-D over war

Time magazine's cover-up of American state terrorism in Iraq

American War Crimes Caught on Video

Video of American Marines shooting unarmed civilian people

ABC "News" Undercounting Iraqi Dead

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

Our war on the Iraqi People

Are you paying for murder?

Latest American massacres of civilian people in Afghanistan

2007-05-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

From the World Socialist Web Site:

US massacres of civilians spark protests in Afghanistan

By Joe Kay
5 May 2007

Bombing raids by US-led NATO forces in western Afghanistan last week killed at least 50 civilians and perhaps over 100, reports from Afghan government officials and human rights organizations have confirmed.

The aerial bombings took place on April 28 and 29 in the Shindand District of the western province of Herat. According to a statement by the US military, 136 “Taliban fighters” were killed in two separate bombing raids, but this claim provoked immediate anger and skepticism on the part of local residents, who insist that there are no Taliban in the region.

Earlier this week, thousands gathered to protest the killings and denounce the US-backed government of Hamid Karzai. At least 20 were wounded when Afghan police opened fire on the demonstrators.

In recent days, reports have emerged from the province itself about the nature of the bombings. Ghalum Nabi Hakak, the Herat representative of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, told the Washington Post on Wednesday night:

“So far the people have buried 45 bodies, and they are still taking out more. Yesterday they buried 12 children,” he said. “The exact number of dead is not clear, but the people are very angry.”

Those who visited the area said that by mid-week villagers were still attempting to dig out bodies from collapsed mud houses destroyed in the NATO raids on two villages.

Reports differ on the number of people killed and displaced by the bombings. One resident said that more than 100 people had been killed, and all were civilians. Many more were injured. Adrian Edwards, spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, said a separate investigation found 49 civilians killed and over 900 families displaced. Farzana Ahmadi, a spokeswoman for the governor of Herat, said that 100 houses were destroyed and 1,600 people rendered homeless.

Ahmadi said that a report prepared by local officials concluded that “some women and children were drowned in the river, and it was maybe in the heat of the moment that the children and people wanted to escape and jumped into the water.”

While the exact nature of the events leading up to the bombings is unclear, it is known that US special forces were in the area conducting operations. The US military claims that these forces met some resistance, but there is no independent confirmation of these claims. NATO air support was called in, and the villages were bombed.

In response to this latest massacre, NATO military and Bush administration spokesmen repeated the same rationales given for every atrocity. General Dan McNeill, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Forces, declared that “only firing insurgents were targeted.”

White House spokesman Tony Snow tried to pin the blame for the deaths on Afghans, saying on Thursday that the Taliban was “deliberately placing [civilians] in harm’s way.”

The nature of US operations in the western region of Afghanistan, which borders Iran, is unknown. Most military actions in the past have concentrated on the south, near the border with Pakistan, where the Taliban has the most support. Local residents insist that there are no members of the Taliban in the area. It is possible that the US is seeking to establish a firmer grip on western Afghanistan in preparation for any planned operations against Iran.

The killings in western Afghanistan took place amid a broader “spring offensive” by US and NATO forces that has led to the deaths of scores of people throughout the country. On Friday, Janan Gulzai, a provincial assembly member, said that at least 13 civilians were killed in a NATO bombing raid in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday night. Gulzai told Reuters, “I saw all the victims are civilians.”

These civilians were apparently killed in a similar manner as those in Herat province. NATO warplanes were summoned after ground forces came under fire. The planes bombed the area indiscriminately, destroying three automobiles containing the 13 people killed.

An ongoing British-led NATO offensive in the south this week has killed at least 75, all described by the NATO forces as “Taliban.”

These incidents follow two separate killing sprees by US forces near the eastern city of Jalalabad. Six were killed during a raid on April 29, including one woman and one child. In March, US marines went on a rampage in the same area that left 12 civilians dead and 35 more injured.

It is difficult to derive any objective measure of the toll on the Afghan population from operations by US and NATO forces in recent months. Media coverage of events outside of the capital of Kabul is based largely on statements by US and NATO military commanders. An AP account found that 151 civilians have been killed this year, including 51 blamed on US and NATO forces (not including the recent reports from Herat). However this tally is based on figures provided by NATO and the Karzai government, and both have an obvious interest in underreporting civilian casualties.

Mounting civilian casualties have, however, led to a sharp increase in popular opposition to the occupation and the Karzai government.

The most recent killings in Jalalabad have led to several days of protests involving thousands of people, including many Afghan students.

The AFP quoted one student attending a protest on Wednesday asking, “Why are they [Karzai and Bush] not accounting for the blood of innocent people who are being killed by the Americans on our soil?”

Another declared, “The Americans have invaded our country. They have made themselves the owners and us their slaves.”

Opposition to the government is growing, and is not confined to supporters of the Taliban. Demonstrations over the past week, including protests by hundreds of people on Friday, have clearly shaken the unstable puppet regime in Kabul, prompting Karzai to issue statements denouncing the civilian deaths. One of the principal demands of the protests has been for Karzai’s resignation.

Karzai insisted on Wednesday that his government can “no longer accept” civilian causalities. “The intention may be very good to fight terrorism, sometimes mistakes are made, but five years on, it is very difficult for us to continue to accept civilian casualties,” he said. “It’s not understandable anymore.”

Karzai warned of “serious consequences for all” if the violence against civilians is not curtailed. Certainly he counts himself among those who might face these serious consequences.

In comments to the AFP, veteran Afghan journalist and commentator Ikhpolwak Safi noted, “When civilians die — obviously not for good reason — and it is linked to [Karzai’s] government, it will turn people against him. Dropping bombs on villages because one individual attacked them is not a wise thing to do. This is what the foreign troops have been doing.”

(Emphases added)

See also:

America's war on civilian people

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

A conversation with Nick Bravo

2007-05-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

Hey Nicholas!

A few days ago you left a message on various blogs asking anonymous people to meet with you physically at Sacred Grounds. I'm not willing to do that but I am willing to meet with you intellectually and psychically here on this blog, in this thread dedicated solely to that purpose.

I would like this to be a conversation between just you and me, with no other commenters. I'll ask others not to comment, and I'll delete any comments that are not from Nick Bravo as soon as I find them.

* * *

Nick, in one of your YouTube videos you say that I am "just the most vile, vicious, despicable human being that [you] have ever come across on the blogs."

I don't think that's true. Why did you say that?

The New Crusaders

2007-05-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

From Information Clearing House:

The Crusaders

“The Christian Taliban is Running the Department of Defense”

By Robert Koehler

05/03/07 "ICH" -- -- Sixteen words may be all that stand right now between the apparatus of government and the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare. And those words are starting to give.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”

When George Bush, in the wake of 9/11, puffed himself into Richard the Lionheart and declared he would lead the country in a “crusade” against terrorism — you know, crusade, as in slaughter of Muslim infidels — turns out . . . oh, how awkward (if you’re on White House spin duty) . . . he may have been speaking literally.

What’s certain, in any case, is that a lot of people in high and low places within the Bush administration — and in particular, the military — heard him literally, and regard the war on terror as a religious war:

“The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him,” a lieutenant colonel, according to a BBC reporter, said to his troops on the eve of the destruction of that undefended city in post-election 2004.

“I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jerry Boykin notoriously boasted a few years back, speaking of a Muslim warlord in Somalia. And by the way, George Bush is “in the White House because God put him there.”

And, of course, just the other day, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, who conducted the first official investigation into Pat Tillman’s death, opined that Tillman’s family is only pestering the Army for the, ahem, truth about how he died because their loved one, a non-believer with no heavenly reward to reap, is now “worm dirt.”

Until I read the newly published “With God on Their Side” (St. Martin’s Press), Michael Weinstein’s disturbing account of anti-Semitism at the U.S. Air Force Academy, I shrugged off each of these remarks, and so much more, as isolated, almost comically intolerant noises out of True Believer Land. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do . . .

Now my blood runs cold. Weinstein, a 1977 graduate of the Academy and former assistant general counsel in the Reagan administration, and a lifelong Republican, has devoted the last several years of his life to battling what he has come to regard as a fundamentalist takeover of the Academy, turning it, in effect, into a taxpayer-supported Evangelical institution.

He charges that the separation of church and state is rapidly vanishing at the school, which routinely promotes sectarian religious events, tolerates the proselytizing of uniquely vulnerable new recruits and, basically, conflates evangelical interests and the national interest.

If you think this is just a fight over some abstract principle, with ramifications only for atheist, Jewish, Buddhist and other cadets who may be “offended” by fundamentalist God talk, I urge you to check out Weinstein’s book or website. He documents a chilling phenomenon:

The whole U.S. military, up and down the chain of command, is coming to be dominated by members of a small, characteristically intolerant sliver of Christianity who truly regard themselves as Christian soldiers, on a God-appointed mission to harvest souls and battle evil.

Weinstein, whose family tradition of national service is pretty impressive, does not do battle lightly with those who now run his alma mater. One of his sons is a recent graduate of the Air Force Academy and the other is still a cadet there. The fact that both of them endured anti-Semitic harassment initially spurred him to take action. But this goes deeper than disrespect for other faiths. The attitude he has encountered in his attempt to hold the institution, and the rest of the military, accountable smacks of a coup: “The Christian Taliban is running the Department of Defense,” he told me. “It inundates everything.”

Can you imagine a contingent of religious zealots, with their contempt for secular values (and such manifestations of secular order as the U.S. Constitution) — and with their zest for holy war — in control of the most potent fighting force and weaponry in human history? Is this possible?

Well, said Weinstein, consider the 523rd Fighter Squadron, based at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M., which calls itself The Crusaders, and whose emblem consists of a sword, four crosses and a medieval knight’s helmet. Check ‘em out at globalsecurity.org, which reports that the payload on the F-16s they fly consists of “a wide variety of conventional, precision guided and nuclear weapons.”

And listen once again to Commander-in-Chief Bush, speaking in 2003 to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

If this is a religious war — a “clash of civilizations,” waged by competing agents of God’s will — victory may be indistinguishable from Armageddon. God help the human race.

(emphases added)

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer.

British general admits Iraqi people are right to fight for independence

2007-05-04T05:37:00.000-07:00

From BBC News:

Insurgents 'right to take on US'

Insurgents in Iraq are right to try to force US troops out of the country, a former British army commander has said.

Gen Sir Michael Rose also told the BBC's Newsnight programme that the US and the UK must "admit defeat" and stop fighting "a hopeless war" in Iraq.

Iraqi insurgents would not give in, he said. "I don't excuse them for some of the terrible things they do, but I do understand why they are resisting."

The total number of UK troops killed in operations in Iraq stands at 147.

'Admit defeat'

Sir Michael has written a book drawing similarities between the tactics of insurgents and George Washington's men in America's War of Independence.

He told Newsnight: "As Lord Chatham said, when he was speaking on the British presence in North America, he said 'if I was an American, as I am an Englishman, as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms'.

"The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way."

He said it was time to bring troops home.

"It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved."

This meant the UK government would have to admit defeat, he added.

"The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened," the ex-Bosnia UN chief said.

"The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened.

"The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq."

State of Disunion

2007-05-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

From Information Clearing House:

President Bush: In an Emergency State Of The Union Speech To Congress (satire)

President Jimmy Carter Speaks Out on Israeli Apartheid

2007-05-01T21:04:00.000-07:00

From Brasscheck TV:

Jimmy Carter on Israel

"Former President Jimmy Carter talks frankly about how Israel treats Palestinians and how discussion of this issue has been effectively removed from public debate in the US."

The controlled demolition of the World Trade Center

2007-04-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

From 911revisited.com:

September 11 Revisited

Were explosives used to bring down the buildings?

Archived 9/11 News Footage & Expert Analysis

"When I first set out to make this video it was only going to be so I could show my family & friends the biggest question I have surrounding 9/11. Ever since I decided to upload it, I have been contacted by victims' families, firefighters & police officers (that were there on 9/11), military, doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, and others thanking me for making it." ...

Best Regards,
Dustin Mugford
Creator of "September 11th Revisited"

"One of the most valuable contributions to the 9/11 video library to date. September 11 Revisited is a powerful documentary."

— 911truth.org

The IMF/World Bank scam

2007-04-29T07:05:00.000-07:00

From Countercurrents.org:

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty In The World

By Michael Parenti
24 April, 2007

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses — much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers.

As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny.

The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.

The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.

U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.

The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.

A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.

Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.

But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.

They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.

So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings — which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.

Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown?

Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.

In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?

No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?

The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.

In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.

The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world — and want to own it all — are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.

(emphases added)

Michael Parenti's recent books include Democracy For The Few, 8th Ed., The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

Nick Bravo impersonating my name

2007-04-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

This is just to let Humboldt bloggers and their readers know that Nick Bravo has impersonated my name in a comment on another blog, and he may continue to do so on the various blogs he visits.

Bravo left his fake comment in the "Shut Her Up!" post on Fred's blog, and Fred has deleted the comment.

On March 16 somebody impersonated my name for a comment on the Buhne Tribune, and this too may have been Bravo. He posted a comment under his own name right after the impersonated comment, six minutes later.

Bravo may have impersonated my name in other comments which I haven't found yet.

For those who don't know who Nick Bravo is, he's a mentally disturbed blog troll, well known among Humboldt County bloggers. Here's a sampling of comments he has left on this blog so far:

"Civillians make great target practice." ...
"Ooooh lookie! A 4 year old girl holding a kitten! READY! AIM! FIRE!"

— Nick Bravo
[comment link]

"I'm writing a screenplay. It opens with the brutal slaughter of a classroom full of pre-schoolers."

— Nick Bravo
[comment link]

"I love FUCKING with people who willfully wallow in their own fecal matter."

— Nick Bravo
projecting again
[comment link]

"Gawd I LOVE fucking with you!"

— Nick Bravo
[comment link]

"*Nick enters HR's tiny mind and witnesses HR's most private fantsies*
"Wow HR! You really want you and your mother to re-enact the abu-garhib pictures???
"Get help!
"Love you long time!"

— Nick Bravo
[comment link]

This was followed by another of his many creepy anonymous comments:

"LOVE YOU LOVE YOU LOOOOOOOOOOOONG TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!!!!"

Nick Bravo's original name was "Ryan Fenster" and he's from Nebraska. He's into Satanic occultism, has a fetish for animal sacrifice, is pro-military and patriotic.

I think he really needs to be institutionalized, for public safety.

American torture stations in Iraq

2007-04-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from the World Socialist Web Site:

Torture exposed in new US-Iraqi “security stations”

By Jerry White
24 April 2007

The brutal methods being employed by US forces and the Iraqi military in the current “surge” of US military operations in Baghdad were laid bare by an article that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times.

Entitled, “Three suspects talk after Iraqi soldiers do dirty work,” the piece details the torture of Sunni prisoners at one of the new American-Iraqi “security stations” set up in the capital city as part of the US plan to crush popular resistance to the occupation of Iraq. ...

Recently, [U.S.-backed] Iraqi soldiers picked up a detainee who was later beaten — Mustafa Subhi Jassam — after seeing him loitering around a main patrol route twice in one day. Two other suspects were picked up separately.

After being subjected to torture for “most of the night,” Jassam — described as a thin young man wearing a blue and red warm-up outfit — was handed over to the Americans, where he led them to a safe houses where insurgents stored weapons and improvised explosive devices and planned attacks against US forces. The US officer in charge of the station, Captain Darren Fowler, praised the Iraqi soldiers for their “very good work.”

"...the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two, the Iraqis said.” The Times article continued, “The stripes on the detainee’s back, which appeared to be the product of a whipping with electrical cables, were later shown briefly to a photographer, who was not allowed to take a picture.”

The article was accompanied by a photograph of a blindfolded prisoner, bent on his knees between two soldiers — it is not clear whether they are American or Iraqi — with what appears to be broken electrical wire on the floor. The caption reads, “This suspected insurgent cooperated after Iraqi soldiers beat a fellow detainee, an Iraqi Army officer said.”

Speaking through an interpreter Captain Bassim Hassan, the Iraqi officer in charge told the reporter, “I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession. ...

"I beat Mustafa in front of the others. We tell him we’re going to string him up” — demonstrating with his arms spread wide — “and, I make the others see him.” ...

It is well known that leading officials in the Bush administration, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, encouraged US commanders to disregard the Geneva Convention, and that the torture revealed in Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg.

The report from Ghazaliya makes clear that the US is now also outsourcing torture to the military forces of the US-backed regime in Baghdad in order to maintain “plausible deniability” of direct US military participation in torture.

At the very least, US military commanders have given their Iraqi counterparts a green light to use these methods to extract information and terrorize the local population in areas where the insurgents have widespread support. ...

"The detainees are deathly afraid of being sent to the Iraqi justice system, because this is the kind of thing they do. But this is their culture,’” [the hypocritical] Fowler said.

One of the key reasons for the US invasion of Iraq — long cited by the Bush administration, the Democratic apologists for the invasion and the news media — was that Saddam Hussein was torturing his own people. Now, US military commanders justify the use of these barbaric methods on an even greater scale by blaming Iraqi “culture.”

The truth is that, as the US military and political debacle in Iraq grows, US military commanders are relying more and more on the traditional methods of counter-insurgency — such as those used by the French in Algeria, the British in Malaysia, the US in Vietnam and Central America — to round up, torture and assassinate political opponents, in order to secure US control over the oil rich nation.

In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, Israeli-Arab Knesset member Talab al-Sanai revealed that US officers joined Israeli army units in the West Bank city of Jenin in late 2003 or early 2004 for the purpose of learning Israeli methods and techniques of repressing civilians, which the Americans, he said, later applied in Iraq.

“It took Israel 37 years to develop and perfect these barbaric methods of repression and humiliation,” al-Sanai observed. “Surprisingly, the Americans surpassed and outmatched the Israelis in their savagery in less than two years.”

Since the surge began more than 5,000 Iraqi citizens have been arrested, bringing the total number of Iraqis detained — according to US military figures — to 18,000. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the US military commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David Petraeus is making plans to hold up to 40,000 Iraqis in coming months.

Most will be held indefinitely to collect intelligence about local networks and terrorist or insurgent activity, the magazine notes. Others will be transferred to the Iraqis, where they are subject to the US puppet regime’s notorious justice system, which has left tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens imprisoned without charges, tortured with electric drills, and murdered.

The 2005 Haditha massacre

2007-04-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from the World Socialist Web Site:

Haditha massacre report: US commanders see killing Iraqi civilians as “cost of doing business”

By David Walsh
24 April 2007

An unpublished report commissioned by the US military on the massacre carried out in the Iraqi town of Haditha by American marines in November 2005 is an unintended indictment of the entire war and occupation.

In its Saturday edition, the Washington Post published an article on Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell’s report, including excerpts from the document, a copy of which the newspaper had obtained. Bargewell makes clear that indifference to the fate of Iraqi civilians is pervasive in the military high command.

On November 19, 2005, a roadside bomb struck an American Humvee near Haditha, in western Iraq, killing one of the marines on board. In response, according to eyewitnesses and local officials, the US forces went on a rampage, killing as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis in their houses, including seven women and three children. ...

Bargewell concluded that the Marine Corps chain of command ignored “obvious” signs of “serious misconduct” in Haditha. The Post reports that the general “found that officers may have willfully ignored reports of the civilian deaths to protect themselves and their units from blame.” ...

The general went on, in the most damning portion of the report cited by the Post, to underline the hostility and contempt felt by the American military command for the Iraqi population.

“All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics,” Bargewell commented. “Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get ‘the job done’ no matter what it takes.” ...

His investigation found that Marines and officers present that day immediately reported numerous civilian deaths to superiors but that the reports were ‘untimely, inaccurate and incomplete’ — failures he attributed to ‘inattention and negligence, in certain cases willful negligence.’”

No one asked any further questions, the general remarked, “despite gruesome photographs circulating among junior Marines that showed that women and children had been killed in their beds." ...

Time magazine reporters obtained an Iraqi journalism student’s videotape of the victims, still in their nightclothes when they were killed.

“The scenes from inside the houses show that the walls and ceilings are pockmarked with shrapnel, bullet holes and blood,” commented Democracy Now! ...

Bargewell’s report confirms the resistance on the part of the division, battalion and regimental commanders to any investigation of the incident.

In its lengthy piece on the killings, Time provided some of the grisly details. The marines broke into a number of houses in Haditha and killed men, women and children in cold blood.

Two children, 9 and 8, only survived in the first house 150 yards from the blast because adults shielded them from the American bullets and died in the process.

In a second house, the marines broke down the door and threw in a grenade, blowing up a propane tank in the kitchen. They began firing and killed eight residents — Including the owner, his wife, the owner’s sister, a 2-year-old son and three young daughters.

In a third house, the US troops allegedly gathered four sons of the owner and killed them inside a closet. ...

The San Diego Union-Tribune writes that — according to a Naval Criminal Investigative Service report — [Sgt. Sanick P.] Dela Cruz told investigators that before approaching the houses in Haditha, [Staff Sgt. Frank D.] Wuterich first shot five Iraqi civilians, “some with their hands above their heads, who were lined up outside a taxi they had been riding in. ...

“Dela Cruz also said, according to the report, that Wuterich asked him to say the men were trying to escape before they were shot, which Wuterich denies.

"Dela Cruz allegedly told investigators that he fired rounds into the dead bodies and later urinated on one of them.”

(emphases added)

See also:

The U.S. military: homicidal psychopaths

Video of American Marines shooting unarmed civilian people

Bloody Wednesday

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children

9-11, Oil, and the Real "Axis of Evil"

Tweedle-dumb attacks Tweedle-D over war

Time magazine's cover-up of American state terrorism in Iraq

American War Crimes Caught on Video

A Tribute to Iraqi Children

ABC "News" Undercounting Iraqi Dead

Iraqi Apocalypse

Your tax dollars at work: torture and genocide

Our war on the Iraqi People

Are you paying for murder?

The BBC vs. Venezuelan democracy

2007-04-25T04:38:00.000-07:00

From Countercurrents.org and Chimes of Freedom blog:

BBC = Blair's Broadcasting Corporation

By Rory Winter

In the Blue-Pill Matrix world, the BBC is a news service which disseminates an impartial view of daily events. In the real world, it is nothing more than a shameless and servile tool of the British capitalist state and, in recent months, a mouthpiece for Tony Blair's neocon, very-British form of fascism.

This message has to be repeated over and over until the public out there are disabused of the lies perpetuated by the BBC that it is a benign teller of truths. If it tells the truth then it is very much a western capitalist, Blue-Pill version meant to accomodate the views of Britain's ruling elites. It is very much a minority truth, totally out-of-step with the vast majority of Brits who do not support its warmongering propaganda.

Far from being the benign, somewhat avuncular, cricket-loving animal it is so often portrayed as, the BBC is a very nasty, well-organised, international mouthpiece for genocide and the repression of true democracy. In other words, it remains true-to-form, a remnant of Britain's imperial past; a remnant which was taken over sixty years ago to serve the old imperialists' successor, the United States.

Hence the BBC line is more or less Washington, DC's line. A line which will change according to whoever might be occupying the White House at any given time. And when it comes to British affairs, you can be sure that there is a hotline between 10 Downing Street and the BBC Newsdesk. You and I are simply at the receiving end of this news-by-diktat.

Today, the BBC's vitriol is reserved for Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution. The BBC is giving extensive coverage to a protest that took place in Caracas over the Venezuelan government's refusal to renew the broadcasting licence of right-wing Radio Caracas TV (RCTV).

RCTV played a significant anti-Chávist role during the failed 2002 coup when it deliberately broadcast misinformation about what was going on.

During the April 2002 coup attempt RCTV was one of the main protagonists in the organization and execution of the coup. It was the first to broadcast the false claim that Chavez supporters were shooting at opposition demonstrators, which then served as a justification for high level generals to declare their disobedience to the government, also on RCTV.

RCTV then had exclusive interviews with coup plotters and the talk show host Napoleon Bravo read Chavez’s supposed resignation letter on RCTV. Later it turned out that the letter was never signed by Chavez and that he had actually not resigned at all, but had been taken into custody.

When the coup began to falter and thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in support of Chavez, RCTV refused to provide any news coverage of the developments and switched from 24-hour news coverage to the broadcasting of old cartoons and movies instead.

(Venezuelanalysis.com, 3 January 2007)

Of course, the BBC report doesn't mention any of the above. In its news release on the Net it presents the demonstration as a popular uprising of "thousands" countered only by a pro-Chávist demonstration of "hundreds." Well, anyone who has been on an anti-government march in Britain will know how good the BBC is at misreporting numbers so I, for one, will reserve my judgement on the BBC's 'hundreds' v. 'thousands' in Caracas.

The report was then carried on BBC News 24 which is satellite broadcast all over the planet. That report conspicuously omitted any mention of a counter-demo and concentrated, instead, on what appeared through the magic of the editor's cutting-room to look like the beginnings of an anti-Chávist uprising. All in the BBC's dreams.

Now, imagine the failed coup had taken place not in Caracas but -- as in my own dreams -- in London. Not against Chávez but Blair and not with RCTV but the BBC. How would Tinpot Tony feel about renewing the BBC's licence?

In fact, the comparison is not far wide of the mark. The BBC, under Greg Dyke's directorship, did challenge Blair about his serial WMD lies which legitimised the invasion of Iraq. For having dared to do so, Dyke 'resigned' (he had no choice) and was replaced with one of Blair's toadies, Michael Grade. Ever since that time the BBC has been reduced to playing the part of the neocons' whoring mouthpiece.

All that took place in the Red-Pill world which the BBC is prohibited from reporting. Unlike the BBC's reactionary bosses who would find themselves out of work in an anti-capitalist revolution, Greg Dyke commented significantly on his 'resignation' that, being financially independent, he hadn't taken the director's job for the money. You can be sure that no British government will ever make a mistake like that again!

Meantime, spare a thought for all the poor souls who continue to languish in the BBC's dark satanic mills, their consciences compromised by a state not very different to the Soviet Union against which it used to rail so self-righteously during an earlier Cold War.

Senator Psycho: John McCain and the Gates of Hell

2007-04-25T02:05:00.000-07:00

From Countercurrents.org:

Running On Inferno’s Platform

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
23 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org

"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"
(Abandon all hope, you who enter here)

Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy; ‘Inferno’

There is an inordinate frenzy to occupy the White House in 2009. Perhaps Mr. Bush’s overreach and abuse of Executive powers has inspired candidates; or it may simply be the idea of rescuing the United States from her various dilemmas. What is undeniable is that while some candidates may be sincere in their aspirations, others simply want a chance to kill in our name.

Twitching fingers ready to commit genocide, one presidential candidate had even been practicing how to commit mass murder to a tune.

Senator John McCain (R, Arizona) while on a campaign in N. Carolina, was videoed singing “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys “Barbara Ann”.

To this ‘hero’ of the Vietnam War, the White House means not only prolonging the Iraq war and the death of more Americans and slaughter of Iraqis, which he has strongly endorsed, but also the genocide of innocent Iranians.

Given that he is lagging behind in fundraising, it comes as no surprise that he should target Iran, lie about Iran’s aspirations to destroy Israel, and hope to receive AIPAC’s blessings and be bank-rolled by them. No doubt, in spite of inciting mass murder, the mainstream media will boost his popularity with the backing of AIPAC, and he will be the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican elections — the war hero who learned nothing from Vietnam and the killing massacre that went on there.

It is up to us, the American people to evaluate our standing at home and in the world. Have we reached the ‘point of no return’, the gates of hell described by Dante, where the likes of McCain will lead our future to more lies and bloodshed?

Not only has our country been run amok by the current Administration, but those who look to step into their shoes are planning to take us to far darker places. McCain is not only a United States Senator who represents the people of Arizona, but he is a high profile representative of the United States. What message are we giving to the world when presidential candidates walk around telling the world that America will “bomb, bomb, bomb” whomever they don’t like?

A man like McCain is not fit to hold political office. He is not above the law, and if he has disgraced the United States and his office, he should be asked to resign.

If we continue on a self-destruct path of maintaining not only double-standards, but starting wars and occupations, we will find that we have indeed failed the inferno test. Should we fail to act now, then we are deserving of the fate that awaits us tomorrow through the politicians that will lead us to hell.

"Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My maker was divine authority,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things were made,
And I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, ye who enter here."

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is a USC graduate. She majored in International Relations. She is an independent researcher and peace activist.

Bloody Wednesday

2007-04-25T00:41:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from Countercurrents.org:

U.S. Blamed For 'Bloody Wednesday'

By Ali al-Fadhily
25 April, 2007
Inter Press Service

BAGHDAD, Apr 23 (IPS) – Iraqis blame the U.S. occupation for the failure of two parallel security plans drawn up by U.S. forces and Iraqi troops that failed dramatically with the bombings last week that killed more than 300 people in Baghdad. ...

"A car bomb went off in Sadriyah neighbourhood in the city centre causing death to over 200 people," Mahmood Abdulla from the Russafa Police Directorate in Baghdad told IPS. "It is not certain that the car was driven by a suicide person, in fact most of us believe it was parked there since early morning." ...

U.S. leaders and Iraqi government officials again accused "terrorists and the Saddamists" of the bombing. But many people around Baghdad are blaming the occupation forces and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.

"I noticed that security officers did not carry out any site investigation," a former police officer who lives in a neighbouring area told IPS on condition of anonymity. "I have also noticed that no such crime has been solved since the first days of the occupation."

The officer said that "huge crimes like the Samarra shrine explosions (at the al-Askari Shia mosque in Samarra, 90km north of Baghdad in February last year) that led to increasing sectarian dispute, and many other crimes, remain unsolved." ...

(emphases added)

The U.S. military: homicidal psychopaths

2007-04-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

From Counterpunch.org:

Why I Oppose the US War on Terror: an ex-Marine Sergeant Speaks Out

by Chris White
October 23, 2002

The more I juxtapose logical world opinion with the Bush administration's actions in the war on terror, I realize one overwhelming theme: hypocrisy.

No one in any of the branches of government runs a physical risk to themselves by entering a war with Iraq, and we can bet that none of their family members are at risk, either. That is, until the next "terrorist" attack. I put "terrorist" in quotes because its definition is subjective, and I myself used to be in the Marine Corps, part of the most powerful "terrorist" organization on the planet: the U.S. government.

Of course, we never call our operations "terrorism" because every operation is considered legitimate to us. When found guilty by the World Court for violence in Nicaragua, we ignore the decision. Too bad the nations we hurt can't just ignore what we do to them. When the planet condemns us for killing between 2,500 – 4,000 people in Panama, we're too busy planning the next invasion of a country that can't fight back.

I oppose this war as a U.S. citizen, a veteran, and a doctoral student in history. While my military experience is what first made me skeptical about our government's motives in the developing world, it wasn't until I went to college and began reading hundreds of books and thousands of articles that I was able to truly grasp the profundity of our leadership's contempt for the freedoms they claim to protect.

As a rule, we have worked hard to prevent the rise of democracy in the developing world, all the while claiming legitimacy as "the world's police force" because of our so-called "democratic" values.

The hypocrisy is astounding. When one investigates our complicity in death squads, torture, massacres, rape, and mass destruction, one realizes that freedom often threatens the current power structure in this country.

I used to consider those incidents as anomalistic in comparison to the "protection" we offered the planet at seemingly no charge. But then I joined the Marines, and I realized why I had believed in the government: they were experts in manipulation.

Barely out of high school, the Corps broke us down and built us up in order to shape us into machines, willing to defend the ideals of the power elites in Washington and corporate America.

Just look at the companies, which are funding political campaigns, and benefiting from war: weapons producers, technologies, food, clothing, munitions, oil, pharmaceuticals, etc. U.S. interventions since WWII have not been done in the name of the world's people (although that is always the claim), but for the preservation of concentrated power.

The fact that they have been carried out against the tenets of international law (i.e. the rights of non-intervention and self-determination), in itself deflates their validity.

If the U.S. government were held to the FBI's official definition of terrorism ("the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives"), their list of victims since WWII alone would include:

Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Mexico, Chile, Granada, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Zaire, Namibia, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Iran, South Africa, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Cambodia, Libya, Israel, Palestine, China, Afghanistan, Sudan, Indonesia, East Timor, Turkey, Angola, and Somalia.

In boot camp, deceit and manipulation accompany the necessity to motivate troops to murder on command. You can't take civilians from the street, give them machine guns, and expect them to kill without question in a democratic society; therefore people must be indoctrinated to do so.

This fact alone should sound off alarms in our collective American brain.

If the cause of war is justified, then why do we have to be put through boot camp?

If you answer that we have to be trained in killing skills, well, then why is most of boot camp not focused on combat training? Why are privates shown videos of U.S. military massacres while playing Metallica in the background, thus causing us to scream with the joy of the killer instinct as brown bodies are obliterated?

Why do privates answer every command with an enthusiastic, "kill!!" instead of, "yes, sir!!" like it is in the movies?

Why do we sing cadences like these?:

"Throw some candy in the school yard,
watch the children gather round.
Load a belt in your M-60,
mow them little bastards down!!"

and

"We're gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn,
gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn!!"

These chants are meant to motivate the troops; they enjoy it, salivate from it, and get off on it. If one repeats these hundreds of times, one eventually begins to accept them as paradigmatically valid.

The demonization of the enemy is crucial to wartime planners, and the above examples of motivation techniques are relevant to the present. Before carrying out a security exercise in Qatar, my unit went through Muslim "indoctrination" classes.

The level of racism was unbelievable. Muslims were referred to as "Ahmed", "towelheads", "ragheads" and "terrorists". We were told that most Muslim males were homosexual, and that their hygiene was so primitive that we shouldn't even shake their hands.

The object was demonization through feminization and dehumanization, so as to make it easier for us to pull the trigger when ordered to. But Qatar is our ally, so imagine the language being used today in these indoctrination courses about Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iraqi population has suffered countless U.S.-supported atrocities over the past eleven years [since 1991]. Not only were between 100,000 and 200,000 people killed in 1991, but the bombing has continued ever since then, and sanctions have led to the deaths of possibly 1 million people, in a nation of 17 million.

Former UNSCOM execs assert that they destroyed 95-98% of Saddam's weapons by 1998, and that a nuclear weapons capability is extremely unlikely due to their devastated economy. According to this morning's New York Times, the U.S. reasons that Saddam's gassing of his own people and his hatred of the U.S. are what warrant our harder stance toward Iraq in comparison to North Korea. While we pursue diplomacy with North Korea (which has admitted to having nukes), we prefer to invade Iraq, who we claim is only looking for nukes.

Have we forgotten the 1994 Congressional report revealing that we supplied Saddam with biological and chemical weapons during the 1980s?

Although U.S. casualties will be lower than that of Iraq, let's not forget the danger we are placing squarely on the shoulders of U.S. troops, who have been indoctrinated as I was. Funny how the people who are least likely to go to war are the ones working the hardest to convince others to fight it for them.

(some emphases added)

Chris White is an ex-Marine and current doctoral student in history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence.

GOP insider counters official 9-11 story

2007-04-19T06:56:00.000-07:00

From PrisonPlanet.com:

Former Bush Speechwriter Hints at 9/11 Inside Job

Says Neo-Cons would have created a false flag to justify war had it not been for WTC attack, questions official story

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, April 13, 2007

A GOP insider, former Bush speechwriter and close friend of the Bush family writes in his new book that before 9/11, the Neo-Cons in control of the Bush administration were eager to seize upon a manufactured provocation to go to war — just as LBJ had done with the Gulf Of Tonkin in 1965, and questions the official 9/11 story.

Victor Gold is a veteran GOP campaign operative who worked closely with George H.W. Bush on his presidential campaign and also co-wrote his autobiography. He was also tasked with writing the profiles for Dick and Lynn Cheney for the official Inauguration program in 2001.

In his new book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Neo-Cons and Holy Rollers Destroyed the GOP, Gold slams the current administration and exposes their zeal for creating a pretext for a war that was planned many years in advance.

Gold confirms that war in Iraq was decided upon from day one, and that a fake pretext was readied and anticipated before 9/11 happened. Though Gold still pins the blame on Al-Qaeda, in acknowledging the fact that the Bush administration would have staged a false flag attack anyway had it not been for 9/11, he is one small step away from intimating that the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were an inside job.

"There would be regime change in Iraq," writes Gold, "All that the Neo-Con war hawks, in the Bush administration and out, needed to bring it about was an excuse to invade. Looking back a half-decade and knowing what we now know, who could doubt that if al Qaeda hadn't obliged the Neo-Cons with 9/11, the Kristolites would have torn a page out of history and, with Rupert Murdoch playing the role of William Randolph Hearst, given us a reprise of the sinking of the Maine?"

William Randolph Hearst was the founder of Hearst Publishing, which today owns Popular Mechanics, the government's foremost mouthpiece for selling the official 9/11 story. Look in the encyclopedia and Hearst is the very definition of yellow journalism. He colluded with the McKinley government to manufacture and propagate through his chain of newspapers, the hoax that the Spanish had sunk the USS Maine in 1898, an event that provided the catalyst for the Spanish-American war.

"Had it not been for 9/11, the Bush White House, determined to go to war, would no doubt have seized on some synthetic provocation, on the order of the one LBJ used to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965," Gold writes.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, where US warships were apparently attacked by North Vietnamese PT Boats, an incident that kicked off US involvement in the Vietnam war, was a staged event that never actually took place. Declassified LBJ presidential tapes discuss how to spin the non-event to escalate it as justification for air strikes and the NSA faked intelligence data to make it appear as if two US ships had been lost.

According to the ZTalk blog, in his book Gold also, "Takes pains to point out the holes in the official line (of 9/11) and has some acerbic comments about Israel's peculiar responses."

For Gold, a lifetime Bush family friend and a GOP darling, to go turncoat and detail how the Neo-Cons were feverishly preparing for a false flag event to justify their pre-planned war, while questioning the official 9/11 story, is a resounding slap in the face to those who claim that 9/11 couldn't have been an inside job because whistleblowers would foil the conspiracy.

Hundreds of experts and professionals in all sectors of government, the military, science and industry have blown the whistle, but whenever they attempt to garner media attention, they are harangued as anti-American traitors by loudmouth TV shills who are on the payroll of the very criminals that carried out 9/11.

It took insiders like E. Howard Hunt nearly 50 years to spill the beans on the fact that Kennedy was killed by the government, and yet we already have a plethora of respected individuals sounding the clarion call about 9/11 being an inside job, and in the very least – as in the case of Victor Gold, slamming the fairy tale that is upheld as the government's official story.

American media deception: Israel and Palestine

2007-04-17T04:49:00.000-07:00

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: Media & the Israel-Palestine Conflict

From video.google.com:

"Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"This pivotal documentary [from 2003] exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites -- oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others -- work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported." [...and distorted, and often not reported at all.]

The No-Gun-Ri massacre

2007-04-16T04:24:00.000-07:00

"On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming."

— Edward L. Daily
U.S. Army machine-gunner
at No Gun Ri, Korea

"The hell with all those people! Let's get rid of all of 'em!"

— U.S. Army Capt. Melbourne C. Chandler
heavy-weapons company commander
after speaking by radio with superior officers

"We just annihilated them."

— Norman Tinkler
U.S. Army machine-gunner
at No Gun Ri

The No-Gun-Ri and Mylai massacres were not isolated incidents. They were, and are, classic examples of U.S. military tactics. The only thing unusual about them is that they were widely publicized.

The U.S. military has ALWAYS had a policy of cruelly murdering civilian people in cold blood. Genocide and ruthless state terrorism are the standard way America wages war.

Since the internet came along, however, the U.S. military's policy of murdering civilian people has become impossible to hide.

From Press TV:

No Gun Ri intentional US slaughter
Sat, 14 Apr 2007

South Korea says it found a high-level document showing the US army had a policy of shooting civilians in the country, especially at the infamous No Gun Ri massacre.

It has been reported for six years that the US military slaughter of war refugees at No Gun Ri was "not deliberate".

The document, a letter from the US ambassador in South Korea to the State Department in Washington, is dated the day in 1950 when US troops began the No Gun Ri shootings, in which survivors say hundreds, mostly women and children, were killed.

Deliberately attacking noncombatants is a war crime.

Exclusion of the embassy letter from the Army's 2001 investigative report is the most significant among numerous omissions of documents and testimony pointing to a policy of firing on refugee groups — undisclosed evidence uncovered by AP archival research and Freedom of Information Act requests.

South Korean petitioners say hundreds more refugees died later in 1950 as a result of the US practice. The Seoul government is investigating one such large-scale killing, of refugees stranded on a beach, newly confirmed via US archives.

No Gun Ri survivors, who call the Army's 2001 investigation a "whitewash," are demanding a reopened investigation, compensation and a US apology.

Harvard historian Sahr Conway-Lanz first disclosed the existence of Ambassador John H. Muccio's 1950 letter in a scholarly article and a 2006 book, "Collateral Damage". He uncovered the declassified document at the US National Archives.

When asked last year, the Pentagon didn't address the central question of whether US investigators had seen the document before issuing their No Gun Ri report. Ex-army secretary Louis Caldera suggested that army researchers may have missed it.

After South Korea asked for more information, however, the Pentagon acknowledged to the Seoul government that it examined Muccio's letter in 2000 but dismissed it. It did so because the letter "outlined a proposed policy," not an approved one, army spokesman Paul Boyce said.

But Muccio's message to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk declares unambiguously that "decisions made" at a high-level US-South Korean meeting in Taegu, South Korea, on July 25, 1950, included a policy to shoot approaching refugees. The reason: American commanders feared that disguised North Korean enemy troops were infiltrating their lines via refugee groups.

"If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot," the ambassador told Rusk, cautioning that these shootings might cause "repercussions in the United States."

However, No Gun Ri survivors said US soldiers first forced them from nearby villages on July 25, 1950, and then stopped them in front of US lines the next day, when they were attacked without warning by aircraft as hundreds sat atop a railroad embankment near No Gun Ri, a village in central South Korea.

Troops of the 7th US Cavalry Regiment followed with ground fire as survivors took shelter in twin underpasses of a concrete railroad bridge.

Told of the Pentagon's rationale for excluding the Muccio letter from its investigative report, No Gun Ri expert Yi Mahn-yol, retired head of Seoul's National Institute of Korean History, suggested the letter was suppressed because it was "disadvantageous" to the Pentagon's case.

"If they set it aside as nothing significant, we can say that it was an intentional exclusion," he said.

Conway-Lanz called the Pentagon's explanation "thoroughly unconvincing."

"The Muccio letter in plain English says, 'Decisions were made,'" the historian noted.

The killings remained hidden from history until a report in 1999 cited a dozen ex-soldiers who corroborated the Korean survivors' accounts, prompting the Pentagon to open its inquiry after years of dismissing the allegations.

The American veterans' estimates of dead ranged from under 100 to "hundreds." Korean survivors say they believe about 400 were killed. Korean authorities have verified the identities of at least 163 dead or missing.

The No Gun Ri survivors issued a statement. "We cannot accept the US Defense Department's false explanation and are indignant over the repeated lies by the US Defense Department," it said.

No Gun Ri, where no evidence emerged of enemy infiltrators, was not the only such incident. As 1950 wore on, US commanders repeatedly ordered refugees shot, according to declassified documents.

More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking US officers tell troops that refugees are "fair game," for example, and order them to "shoot all refugees coming across river" — were found in the investigators' own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army's 300-page public report.

(emphases added)

See also:

The Bridge at No Gun Ri
A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War
By Charles J. Hanley, San-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza

This book is by the authors of the original 1999 Associated Press report.

A New Look at the Korean War
by John H. Kim
"The U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about three million Korean civilians — both South Koreans and North Koreans — at many locations throughout Korea, including Masan, Sachon, Tanyang, Iksan, Changyong, Wegwan, Ducksung, Sinchun, Wonsan, Pyongyang, etc.

"Several hundreds of civilian refugees were blown apart when the U.S. Army blew up Wegwan and Ducksung bridges in S. Korea. ..."

Korea Truth Commission / International Action Center
"Since September of 1999, evidences of more than 160 instances of US-led military attacks on more than 2.5 million Korean non-combatants (Washington Post, June 13, 2000) during the Korean War have surfaced. Hundreds of thousands of children, women, and elderly people are believed to have been massacred as a result of orders from the top U.S. military leadership."

The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951
A Nonconformist History of Our Times
by I. F. Stone
Monthly Review Press, 1952; ASIN 0-316-81770-8

America's war on civilian people

2007-04-15T00:13:00.000-07:00

When even mainstream, pro-government, pro-military newspapers like the Washington Post are forced to report American war crimes, you know the crimes must be pervasive, vastly more than what is reported.

And American taxpayers are making it all possible.

Excerpts from the Washington Post:

Excessive Force By Marines Alleged
Afghan Report on Killings of Civilians Is Called Consistent With U.S. Findings

By Ann Scott Tyson and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 14, 2007

A platoon of elite Marine Special Operations troops reacted with "excessive force" after an ambush in Afghanistan last month, opening fire on pedestrians and civilian vehicles along a 10-mile stretch of road and killing [murdering] 12 people -- including a 4-year-old girl, a 1-year-old boy and three elderly villagers -- an investigation by an Afghan human rights commission alleges.

The investigation, based on dozens of eyewitness interviews, found that Marines in a convoy of Humvees continued shooting at at least six locations along the road, miles beyond the site where they were ambushed by a suicide bomber in a van. They fired at stationary vehicles, passersby and others who were "exclusively civilian in nature" and had made "no kind of provocative or threatening behavior," according to a draft report of the investigation obtained by The Washington Post.

In addition to the 12 Afghans killed [murdered], including at least two women, 35 were wounded, and one Marine was injured by shrapnel.

U.S. officials familiar with the report by the constitutionally mandated Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission said its findings are "troubling" and consistent with the U.S. military's preliminary investigation, which led this week to the opening of a criminal investigation into the March 4 shootings in Afghanistan's eastern Nangahar Province.

Together, the reports contain "more than sufficient evidence of wrongdoing" by the Marines, said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chairman of the House panel that oversees U.S. Special Operations forces. "There is very troubling information in those reports that must be investigated," said Smith, who was briefed Thursday by Maj. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik, head of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command.

"All available evidence and reports suggest that the . . . response at the very least employed excessive force against civilians as it was almost certainly disproportionate to any threat faced," according to the human rights group's report, which also alleges that other U.S. forces later arrived and cleaned up evidence of the shootings while denying Afghan police access. ...

The allegations contained in the commission's report indicate that the Marines opened fire on civilians in the vicinity of the suicide bomb, but then also killed [murdered] six more and wounded at least 25 others in taxis, in buses and on foot along several miles of road as the convoy headed away from the scene toward Jalalabad.

One witness told investigators that his car was stopped about 45 yards from the convoy. "Suddenly they opened fire on my car and shot more than 240 bullets," the witness said. "I myself jumped out the car and got injured, but my father, friend and my nephew were killed in the car." Another witness said a woman was shot in front of her house. ...

The counterattack [slaughter] has some parallels to the alleged shootings of civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2005. Marines were charged with unpremeditated murder after they allegedly gunned down a group of college students who were ordered out of their car immediately after a bomb went off.

The Marines then allegedly raided two homes and killed [murdered] two dozen civilians...

(emphases added)

* * *

"allegedly", "allegedly", "allegedly"... Yeah, as long as U.S. military war criminals keep cleaning up and hiding evidence of their bloody war crimes, papers like the Washington Post can keep using words like "allegedly" to soften up the reports of their crimes.

A glimpse into U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

2007-04-14T00:24:00.000-07:00

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Civilian compensation claims: a glimpse into US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

By Peter Symonds
14 April 2007

Hundreds of legal claims filed by civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan against the US military, which were released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Wednesday, provide a small glimpse into the tragedies inflicted by US occupying forces in these two countries.

While the activities of suicide bombers and death squads feature prominently in the US and international media, the death and destruction wrought by the daily activities of US troops is virtually blacked out.

As ACLU executive director Anthony Romero explained in a press release:

“Since US troops first set foot in Afghanistan in 2001, the Defense Department has gone to unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human costs of war.”

The Pentagon only released details of the compensation claims after the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request in June 2006. The 496 cases — 479 from Iraq and 17 from Afghanistan — cover just a tiny fraction of the civilian casualties caused by US forces.

Most victims and their families are either too terrified or do not know how to file claims, which, in any event, only cover “non-combat” incidents and must be submitted in English. After analysing the data, the ACLU concluded, “there are additional documents being withheld”. It “is pressing the Defense Department to disclose them all”.

Over a third of the submitted claims — 198 — were denied on the grounds of “combat exclusion” — that the incident arose “from action by an enemy or resulted directly or indirectly from an act of the armed forces of the United States in combat”. Others were rejected for “lack of evidence” or “lack of proof of US involvement”. In addition, about 10 percent were rejected on the basis that the incidents, including some corroborated by eyewitnesses, had not been reported in the US military’s own “SIGACT” (significant action) database.

Of the 496 claims, only 164 resulted in cash payments to surviving family members. In about half those cases, the US accepted responsibility for the death of a civilian and offered “a compensation payment”. In the remainder, the Pentagon issued “condolence” payments — discretionary payments limited to $US2,500 and offered “as an expression of sympathy” but “without reference to fault”. In total, $32 million had been handed out in blood money — a derisory sum compared to the immense suffering the US occupations have caused.

[Added note: So that's $32 million worth of slaughter of innocent people the U.S. military-government actually admits to. The amount of war crime it will never admit to would equate to hundreds of billions of dollars of compensatory payments.

But of course all the money in the world could not possibly make up for the sadistic evil the perverted U.S. military – and American taxpayers – have inflicted on the innocent civilian people of Iraq and Afghanistan.]

The documents (http://www.aclu.org/natsec/foia/log.html) provide a chilling record of hundreds of civilians — men, women and children — who have been killed or maimed in shootings and bombings, and the devastating impact on their family and friends. The onus is on the victims to prove their claim. The legal responses reveal the same callous indifference to Iraqis and Afghans as that displayed by the US forces involved in the incidents. Many are simply pro forma rejections. There is no indication of disciplinary action against those responsible for the deaths.

Because of the narrow ambit of the Foreign Claims Act to “non-combat” incidents, many files relate to shootings at roadblocks or checkpoints — 92 — or at vehicles that are perceived as “threatening” to US convoys — 42.

On March 27, 2006, for example, US troops opened fire on a taxi, killing the driver and leaving a young man unconscious, blind and paralysed. His father asked for compensation to assist his son’s wife and small child to survive. The claim was rejected as being a “combat incident” but with no explanation.

It concluded with a standard phrase: “I am sorry for your son’s injuries, and I wish you well in a Free Iraq.”

Virtually any activity is regarded as “threatening”. A 16-year-old schoolboy was shot dead on February 8, 2005 while walking near an American base. A sniper in a watchtower apparently thought the boy’s school bag looked like a dangerous object. The claim was dismissed due to “lack of evidence” and “loss resulting from combat operations”.

On February 13, 2006, US soldiers shot dead a fisherman on his boat on the Tigris river. He had held up his fish and shouted “Fish, Fish” to show he meant no harm and was killed as he bent down to turn off the motor. His cousin was paid $3,500 for the boat, which drifted away and was lost, but nothing for the death of his relative, which was judged to arise from “combat activities”.

Others have been killed in crossfire between US and insurgent forces. A father’s claim for the death of his son, shot at the front door of the house on April 13, 2005, was denied for “combat exemption”. Another father’s claim for the death of his son, an Iraqi soldier returning on leave, in Ad Duluyiah on March 19, 2006, was rejected for lack of a corroborating SIGACT report. The claimant submitted eyewitness accounts, a death certificate and legal opinion. In another case, a man was paid $500 in condolence payments for the death of his brother, shot at the gate of his house during combat activities.

A number of claims relate to random shootings by US soldiers after an incident or roadside bombing. Seven of the 17 cases in Afghanistan arose out of a traffic accident on May 29, 2006 when a US heavy truck ploughed into several cars in Kabul. US soldiers fired into an angry crowd that gathered, killing and injuring civilians. Among those shot dead were a 13-year-old selling pizzas from a street cart, a student returning from school, and a man carrying parts from a mechanic shop. Each of the seven claims were settled for between $US4,000 and $7,000.

In Iraq, shooting bystanders appears to be a common US military response to roadside bombings. On the January 12, 2006, US soldiers fired randomly, killing an 11-year-old boy, after a roadside bomb detonated next to their convoy near Samarra. His father, an impoverished farmer, claimed compensation, but was rejected for “lack of evidence” and “combat exclusion”, although eyewitness statements and a death certificate were provided.

A particularly horrific incident involved the slaughter of a family on March 3, 2004 in Dibig village. US troops opened fire on a house, killing four people including the claimant’s father, mother and brother, and injuring another 40, including the claimant. The mother was shot dead while sleeping and the father after he took the family’s AK-47 and stepped outside. US soldiers also killed the family’s flock of sheep, leaving the claimant without a livelihood.

In a carefully worded finding, the US military declared that the soldiers, “may have been shooting at another house”. While their activity was “not wrongful”, it appeared “to have been conducted negligently”. Compensation of $11,200 was granted.

The files unearthed by the ACLU are just the tip of the iceberg. The US-led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have created a nightmarish existence for the local population — living in constant fear, even in conducting everyday activities, and confronting appalling social conditions. In Iraq, the murderous activities of American forces have been compounded by a sectarian civil war between Shiite and Sunni militias, which the US war is directly responsible for inciting.

The Pentagon has systematically suppressed any information about the impact of the war. It has refused to keep lists of civilian casualties, censors the reports of journalists embedded with its troops, and routinely rejects any evidence of atrocities published in the media.

According to the UN envoy to Iraq, Gianni Magazzeni, some 34,452 people were killed during 2006. However, the figure, which is based on data from Iraq’s health ministry, hospitals and mortuaries, is likely to be an underestimate.

The most comprehensive study was conducted last year by a team of Iraqi physicians under the direction of epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University using a standard survey method. The study published in October in the British medical journal, the Lancet, found that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 655,000 Iraqis. Of those, 31 percent, or 186,000, were attributed directly to coalition forces — that is, the American military or its allies killed these Iraqis.

The ACLU files start to put a human face to these statistics.

(emphases added)

Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children

2007-04-12T03:16:00.000-07:00

Innocent Iraqi child with skull ripped open –
murdered by the U.S. military and American taxpayers

Excerpts from the World Socialist Web Site:

US raid on mosque leads to massacre in Baghdad

By Bill Van Auken
12 April 2007

Scores of people were left killed or wounded and bodies littered the streets of two crowded urban neighborhoods in central Baghdad following a major battle between US occupation forces and city residents Tuesday.

The fighting erupted in the predominantly Sunni Fadhil and Sheikh Omar neighborhoods after what appeared to be deliberate provocation by US-backed Iraqi troops.

According to residents of the area reached by the New York Times, the battle erupted early Tuesday morning after the US and Iraqi puppet forces cordoned off an area and began house-to-houses searches.

“The Iraqi Army raided a mosque and killed two men in front of other worshipers at the early morning prayers,” the Times reported. It quoted Qais Ahhmed, a laborer who lives close to the mosque, as saying that one of those executed was the muezzin, the person chosen to lead the call to prayer.

“Then the locals took their guns and went out to fight the Iraqi Army and the police in reaction to these executions,” Ahmed added.

It was at that point that US troops joined the battle, calling in helicopter gunships to launch air strikes on the neighborhood.

The episode, which has all the earmarks of a deliberate provocation aimed at drawing out opponents of the American occupation in order to slaughter them, provides a revealing glimpse into the reality of the so-called “surge” ordered by the Bush administration.

Touted by the White House and the Pentagon as an effort to provide “security” for the residents of Baghdad, the escalation of some 30,000 more troops is, in reality, a last-ditch effort to drown the growing popular resistance to US domination in blood.

The Sunni-dominated Muslim Scholars Association issued a statement condemning the killing of civilians — including women and children — in the operation.

“The association condemns this horrible crime carried out by occupiers and the government,” the statement said. It continued, “The civilians of this district call for the free world and human rights organizations to stop this massacre that does not differentiate between men and women and children. They call for relief and for help with their injuries.”

According to various reports, the number of civilians killed in the operation numbered in the dozens, with many more wounded. US-Iraqi military forces prevented ambulances from entering the area, leaving those injured without care. It was also reported that an elementary school was struck during the fighting, with a rocket killing a six-year-old child.

Imprisoning the population

As details of the carnage in Baghdad emerged, a British newspaper published an account of documents spelling out the Pentagon’s plans for a draconian counterinsurgency crackdown that would turn much of the Iraqi capital into a virtual prison.

The Independent’s veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reported Wednesday that the “operation will seal off vast areas of the city, enclosing whole neighborhoods behind barricades and allowing only Iraqis with newly issued ID cards to enter.”

As Fisk points out, this strategy has a long and inauspicious history in the attempts to suppress anti-colonial struggles from Algeria to Vietnam. In Vietnam, the US military attempted something similar with its ill-fated “strategic hamlet” program.

Fisk reports that the strategy was developed by the new US commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, during a six-month course at the Army’s command and general staff college in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Among those involved in drawing up the plans were reportedly “at least four senior Israeli officers.”

The strategy calls for mass arrests of men of military age, Fisk reports. Indeed, part of the US troop surge is made up of 2,200 military policemen sent to Iraq to guard the burgeoning population of detainees.

After neighborhoods have been cleansed of potential resistance fighters, they are to be walled off and “gated,” with only occupants bearing American-issued ID cards allowed in and out. Meanwhile, US and Iraqi puppet troops will establish fortified “support bases” inside these sealed off areas, conducting regular patrols. “Civilians may find themselves inside a ‘controlled population’ prison,” Fisk writes. ...

International Red Cross: suffering of Iraqis “unbearable”

The horrific conditions inflicted upon the Iraqi people by the US war and occupation found fresh confirmation in a stinging report issued Wednesday by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which effectively dismissed the Bush administration’s hollow claims about “progress” in Iraq.

“The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable,” ICRC director of operations Pierre Kraehenbuehl told the media in releasing the report. “Their lives and dignity are continuously under threat.” ...

“The conflict in Iraq is inflicting immense suffering on the entire population,” the ICRC report states. “Civilians bear the brunt of the relentless violence and the extremely poor security conditions that are disrupting the lives and livelihoods of millions.

“Every day, dozens of people are killed and many more wounded. The plight of Iraqi civilians is a daily reminder of the fact that there has long been a failure to respect their lives and dignity.”

In addition to the daily slaughter that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands, while turning millions more into refugees, the ICRC report cites the destruction of the country’s health care system and basic infrastructure, creating a humanitarian disaster.

“Health-care facilities are stretched to the limit as they struggle to cope with mass casualties day-in, day-out,” the report states, adding, “Many sick and injured people do not go to hospital because it’s too dangerous...” The ICRC reports that fully half the country’s doctors have already fled into exile.

The Red Cross report cites growing food shortages and an increase in malnutrition. It warns that the country’s “vastly inadequate water, sewage and electricity infrastructure is presenting a risk to public health ... Water is often contaminated owing to the poor repair of sewage and water-supply networks and the discharge of untreated sewage into rivers, which are the main source of drinking water.”

[Added note: This causes widespread dysentery, which has been a major killer of children under 5 years-old in Iraq since the U.S. and British Air Forces first started bombing Iraqi water purification plants in 1991.]

The report also confirms that the US occupation is resulting in the massive detention of Iraqis without charges.

“Tens of thousands of people are currently being detained by the Iraqi authorities and the multinational [mainly U.S.] forces in Iraq. Many families remain without news of relatives who went missing...”

The ICRC estimates that the number of Iraqis arrested and interned by the US occupation forces has increased by 40 percent since early 2006. ...

(emphases and one section title added)

American high-tech cruelty

2007-04-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

New weapons of war for use against civilian people in Iraq — and America.

From Uruknet.info:

Star Wars in Iraq

Is The U.S. using new experimental "Tactical High Energy Laser" weapons in Iraq?

A new investigative report by Maurizio Torrealta and Sigfrido Ranucci, RaiNews 24 (Italy)

(Note: minor mistake in video – after the ending it repeats from near the beginning again. So there are two copies of the video in one download, but the first copy is complete.)

According to official Pentagon sources, military vehicles equipped with this laser device have been used in Afghanistan to explode mines. According to two reliable military information sites – Defense Tech and Defense Industry Daily – at least three such vehicles are being used in Iraq as well and some people report having seen them.

Transcription of video:

Majid Al Ghezali: "They used incredible weapons."

Patrick Dillon: "Experimental weapons?"

Majid Al Ghezali: "Yes… Yes, I think. They shoot the bus. We saw the bus like a cloth, like a wet cloth. It seemed like a Volkswagen, a big bus like a Volkswagen."

This testimony was reported to American filmmaker Patrick Dillon a few weeks after the battle for the airport (April 2003) . The person interviewed, Majid al Ghezali, is a well-known and respected man in Baghdad, who is the first violinist in the city orchestra.

In addition to describing the battle, Majid al Ghezali wanted to show Patrick Dillon the site near the airport where this mysterious weapon was used, along with the traces of fused metal still visible, and the irregularly sized ditches where the cadavers were buried before they were exhumed.

We sought out Majid al Ghezali to hear more details of his story. We met up with him in Amman and he pointed out some inexplicable peculiarities on the bodies of the victims of the battle for the airport.

Majid Al Ghezali: "Just the head was burnt. In the other parts of the body there wasn’t anything."

Al Ghezali reported that he had seen three passengers in a car, all dead, with their faces and teeth burnt, their clothes intact, and no sign of projectiles.

Majid Al Ghezali: "There wasn’t any bullet. I saw their teeth, just the teeth, and they had no eyes, all of them, there was nothing on their bodies."

There were other inexplicable aspects: the terrain where the battle took place was dug up by the American military and replaced with other fresh earth; the bodies that were not hit by projectiles had shrunk to just slightly more than one meter in height.

Majid Al Ghezali: "Except the ones killed by the bullets, most of them became very small. I mean… like that… Something like that."

When we asked Majid what weapon he imagined had been used, he said that he had reached the conclusion that it must have been a laser weapon.

Majid Al Ghezali: "One year later we heard that they used an update technology, a unique one, like lasers."

We found another disturbing document on the use of mysterious weapons in Iraq, which referred to episodes that took place almost at the same time as those described by Majid al Ghezali.

Saad al Falluji: "They were 26 in the bus. About 20 of them had no head, the head had been cut, some of them had no arms or no legs. The only unwounded was the driver and really I don’t know how he reach our hospital, because one arm was on his side, one head just beside him. It was a very strange and horrible situation.

"In the roof of the car there were parts of the body: intestines, brains, all parts of the body. It was a very very very miserable situation."

Geert Van Moorter (medical doctor working in Iraq during and after the war, as a volunteer for the Belgian NGO Medical Aid for the Third World): "Do you have idea with what kind of weapon the attacked the bus?"

Saad al Falluji: "We don’t know with what kind of weapon they hit this bus."

Doctor #2: "It seems to be a new weapon."

Saad al Falluji: "Yes, a new weapon."

Doctor #2: "They are trying to do experiments on our civilians. Nobody could identify the type of this weapon."

We went to Belgium to find the filmmaker of this sequence, Geert Van Moorter, a doctor working as a volunteer in Iraq.

Geert Van Moorter: "This footage is taken at the General Teaching Hospital in Hilla, which is about 100 Km from Baghdad, and close to the historical site of Babylon. There I talked with the colleague doctor Saad al Falluji, which is the chief surgeon in that hospital.

"Doctor al Falluji said me that the survivors that he operated said him that they did not hear any noise, so there was no explosion to hear, no metal fragments or shrapnels or bullets in their bodies, so they themselves were thinking of some strange kind of weapon which they did not know."

Let’s hear Dr. Saad el Falluji’s story about this in more detail.

Saad al Falluji: "This bus was very crowded, they were going from Hilla to Kifil, to find their families, but before they had arrived at the American checkpoint the villagers said to them 'return back! return back!' When the bus tried to return back it was shot by the checkpoint."

Geert Van Moorter: "No gunshot wounds?"

Saad al Falluji: "No, no, I don’t know what it was. We are here 10 surgeons and we couldn’t decide which was the weapon that hit this car."

Geert Van Moorter: "But inside the bodies you did not discover ordinary bullets?"

Saad al Falluji: "We didn’t find bullets, but most of the passengers were dead, so they took them immediately to the refrigerator and we couldn’t dissect and see, but in those who were alive we didn’t find any kind of bullet. We didn’t find bullets in their bodies."

Doctor #2: "Something cutting organs, cutting limbs, attacking the abdomen, attacking the neck and goes out."

Dr. Falluji also ended up speaking about a laser weapon....

Saad al Falluji: "I don’t think that the bombing, or the cluster bombs, or the laser weapons can bring democracy to our country."

As in any war, the war in Iraq, left us a dreadful gallery of horror – images of mutilations that not even doctors can explain. The witnesses referred to laser weapons, arms with mysterious effects. We do not know what kind of weapons could produce such terrible effects.

We tried to learn more about it, by asking for interviews to members of companies manufacturing laser and microwave weapons. Yet, the US Defense Department prevented any information from being released to us. They also did not answer – up to the time the film was edited – the questions we had sent them in order to know weather or not experimental weapons had been tested in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We then reviewed the Pentagon’s media conferences released before the II Gulf War. Willingness to test new weapons emerged from the words of both the Defense Secretary and General Meyers. The questions from the media on direct energy and microwave weapons produced a certain amount of embarrassment.

American journalist: "Mr. Secretary, can I ask you a question about some of the technology that you're developing to fight the war on terrorists, specifically directed energy and high-powered microwave technology? Do you — when do you envision that you can weaponize that type of technology?"

Donald Rumsfeld: "Goodness, it is in — for the most part, the kinds of things you're talking about are in varying early stages."
To the general: "Do you want to — do you have anything you would add?"

General Myers: "I don't think I would add much. It's — I think they are in early stages and probably not ready for employment at this point."

Donald Rumsfeld: "In the normal order of things, when you invest in research and development and begin a developmental project, you don't have any intention or expectations that one would use it.

"On the other hand, the real world intervenes from time to time, and you reach in there and take something out that is still in a developmental stage, and you might use it. So the — your question's not answerable. It is — depends on what happens in the future and how well things move along the track and whether or not someone feels it's appropriate to reach into a development stage and see if something might be useful, as was the case with the unmanned aerial vehicles."

American journalist: "But you sound like you're willing to experiment with it."

General Myers: "Yeah, I think that's the point. And I think — and it's — and we have, I think, from the beginning of this conflict — I think General Franks has been very open to looking at new things, if there are new things available, and has been willing to put them into the fight, even before they've been fully wrung out. And I think that's — not referring to these particular cases of directed energy or high-powered microwaves, but sure. And we will continue to do that."

But what is meant by directed-energy and microwave weapons? We went to ask retired colonel John Alexander, former program director in one of the most important military research laboratories in the United States, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Retired Colonel John B. Alexander: "The research and the concepts for directed energy weapons go back many decades. What is happening is that the technology has now advanced sufficiently that now we are starting to see these weapons becoming real.

"There are several types of directed energy weapons and basically what they do is they’re known as 'speed of light' because they shoot electrons very fast over very long distances. Lasers of course are in the light range, then there are microwave weapons that are operating at other frequencies, but basically they’re beam weapons, which is nothing physical that goes out, because they move electrons, while the kinetic weapons shoot big bullets to go out and physically hit and destroy something. These work because the energy is deposed on the target and causes some effect."

These images document one of the THEL tests. THEL stands for Tactical High Energy Laser. In the sequence, you can see the laser beam hit and destroy missiles and mortar rounds as they are about to hit the objective.

In this other test we see the laser beam identify and destroy two missiles at the same time.

"They don’t make any noise and they are invisible?"

Retired Colonel John B. Alexander: "Some are visible, some are just outside… You have, you know, in the infrared range… What’s emerging now are laser weapons where the effect is that of the laser. They can be all burners, in what we call High Energy Lasers, because with the concentrated energy you can literally drill holes, you know, in the target."

Former Pentagon analyst William Arkin, who presently works as a journalist for the Washington Post, also confirms this revolutionary change from kinetic weapons to energy weapons.

William Arkin: "For thousands of years, the way in which you have killed someone is you have hit them with a sword, a sphere, an arrow, a bullet, a bomb. It’s kinetic, you’re killing them by hitting them.

"And now, all of the sudden, out of nowhere, you have a completely new physical principle being applied in killing people, in which they don’t know that they’re being killed because their skin and body is being heated by high-power microwaves or they are being hit by a laser that would have an instantaneous effect."

There are other types of weapons made with lasers, such as the device we can see in this sequence. The target is not hit by a projectile, but rather by an impulse of energy that manages to bore through the armor of an armored car.

Excluding acoustic weapons, for the moment, the only sign of the use of energy weapons in a war scenario is a laser device known as Zeus. According to official Pentagon sources, military vehicles equipped with this laser device have been used in Afghanistan to explode mines. According to two reliable military information sites – Defense Tech and Defense Industry Daily – at least three such vehicles are being used in Iraq as well and some people report having seen them.

Geert Van Moorter: "When you showed me the picture of what you described that is a laser weapon, it reminded me that I was talking with some American soldiers, in August 2003, and there was some kind of box on their tank with a blue light like this.

"I recall it very well not because they said me what it was used for, but because I was teasing a translator, which was an Iraqi female, by telling her 'look, with this kind of thing they can look through and see somebody without clothes.' That’s why I remind it, but I have seen for sure this kind of thing on that tank."

William Arkin is one of the American experts who follows the Pentagon activity most closely. So what does Arkin think about the possibility of the use of directed energy weapons in battle in Iraq?

William Arkin: "You know, there’s even some possibility that high power microwaves have been used experimentally. I think that the panic about IEDs, about Improvised Explosives Devices, has been so bad that if these things are sitting in the lab, I’m sure that they want to get them to Iraq to see whether they are effective. So I can imagine that there could be some, what we call, 'black' use of these weapons, but not in any significant way, and certainly not in such a way that one would conclude that they’ve had any impact."

But let’s look at the Pentagon budget figures to see how important the outlay is for directed energy weapons.

William Arkin: "Right now you have about $50 million a year being spent for non-lethal weapons, you have about another $200 million or so being spent on High Power Microwaves, Active Denial type Systems, you’ve got probably another $100-200 million being spent on 'secret', 'black' laser programs, and then you have the big lasers, the High Energy Lasers of the Air force and the other Tactical Lasers.

"So probably, when you add all of that up, you know the United States are probably spending $1⁄2 billion a year right now on directed energy weapons. This is a significant amount of money; this is the size of the Defense Budget of some countries in Europe."

People might think that energy weapons only pose a danger for the countries involved in a military conflict, but that’s not the case. One particular weapon called the Active Denial System – better known as the pain ray – has been built specifically for use in maintaining public order. Given its claim to be non-lethal and the suffering it produces, this weapon could become a very controversial one.

Retired Colonel John B. Alexander: "The Active Denial System is a Millimetre Wave System, operates at about 93 GHz. It sends out a beam for a very long distance, and what’s important about it is that when it hits the skin it penetrates only a very slight, for a few millimetres under the skin and it it’s the pain receptors and causes, you know, people to be adverse to the pain.

"It hurts, it hurts a lot.

"The tests that had been run they were to go for 3 seconds, each individual was given a kill switch and nobody made 3 seconds. The answer to the pain is extremely rapid, and you don’t have to do it very long, I mean, it gets your attention instantly."

To understand the consequences this new weapon could have for human rights we went to the Empire State Building in Manhattan, home of the offices of Human Rights Watch, one of the most important human rights organizations.

Marc Garlasco: "We can see the effects of a gun very easily and understand them, but when you cannot see the effect of a weapon because it is not visible and because the science is not very well understood because technology is so new, then it becomes a grieve concern that enrages the states for potential human rights violations and abuses.

"And that is something that we have to understand about the Active Denial System, that it exists to create pain and is very different in most other non-lethal weapons where the desire is either to immobilize someone or make it so that they cannot walk in the area.

"With the Active Denial System the main desire is pain, and we have to be very careful because in international law is very clear that devices created solely for the creation of pain can eventually lead to torture and are therefore illegal, and it’s very critical that the United States does a careful legal review of the Active Denial System and is open with their findings. To date they have not been open."

William Arkin: "Some people say 'ooh acoustic weapons, or High Power Microwave weapons, the Active Denial System, we can use it for crowd control…'

"What crowd control? What does that mean?

"It pretends that anyone in the crowd is eighteen years old, and male and in good health, and we’re just going to shoot these microwaves or shoot these acoustic weapons on this crowd, and it’s going to be carefully calibrated at a power level, in the intensity and at a range to affect all these eighteen years old men in the crowd.

"Well, what crowd is made up of just eighteen years old men?

"Look at the Intifada, look at any riot in Iraq today: children, women, pregnant women, old people, and so the effect… the effect that you would need in order to have an impact on a healthy male, you target, would be too much for a child or a pregnant woman or an old person."

Marc Garlasco: "There’s been a lot of discussion also about the potential for eye damage. They have done some tests on the skin to show that is not harmful, but where is the eye test? And there are concerns raised by scientists about potential harm to the eyes. And we also have concerns about the effects to children, to the infirm, to the elderly… Why are they not producing the data? Why are they not sharing it with us?"

As for the use of the pain ray in the field of war, the military review Defense Industry Daily reports that three Sheriff vehicles were ordered at a price of about 31 million dollars, and that approval has been requested for another 14 vehicles by Brigadier General James Haggin, chief of staff of the multinational forces in Iraq.

Retired Colonel John B. Alexander: "In my view the next global conflict has already begun and we don’t have an understanding of what that conflict looks like. Because of the issues of terrorism for instance the adversaries are going to be I think mixed in with civilian populations. We need weapons that allow us to be able to sort, minimize what they call "collateral casualties". I think the battlefields are going to be in urban areas."

William Arkin: "If you look at the Active Denial System, or the High Power Microwaves, or the LRAD, the acoustic weapon, what you see is enthusiasm for those are being displayed by the US Northern Command, which is the homeland defense command of the United States, or other counterterrorism organizations, which are looking at them like 'oh well, maybe, in some special circumstances we can take these secret weapons, boutique weapons, you know, we have only 10 or 20 of them somewhere in a secret place and if we need them we can pull them out and use them in this kind of specialty warfare.'

"So ironically, even though the Americans would probably think 'oh yeah, special new weapon, it would make sense because Iraq is such a mess and maybe we can do something to turn that corner in some way with the use of this weapon,' the truth is that the only real way in which they, the military, sees the prospects for the deployment of these is in their domestic use.

"And you know quite well… that if the United States adopts these weapons for their domestic defense… Nato and Italy are not far behind…"

War-criminal U.S. military may have already used neutron bombs in Iraq

2007-04-10T02:06:00.000-07:00

From Uruknet.info:

US accused of using neutron bombs

April 8, 2007

The former commander of Iraq’s Republican Guard has accused the US of using non-conventional weapons in its war against the Middle East country.

Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi told Al Jazeera that US forces used neutron and phosphorus bombs during their assault on Baghdad airport before the April 9 [2003] capture of the Iraqi capital.

Al-Rawi is one of the most wanted associates of Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, still on the run.

“The enemy used neutron and phosphorus weapons against Baghdad airport... there were bodies burnt to their bones,” he said.

The bombs annihilated soldiers but left the buildings and infrastructure at the airport intact, he added.

A neutron bomb is a thermonuclear weapon that produces minimal blast and heat but releases large amounts of lethal radiation that can penetrate armour and is especially destructive to human tissue.

About 2,000 elite Republican Guard troops “fought until they were martyred”, according to al-Rawi.

He said the Iraqi military command was surprised by the speed of the US land offensive, expecting air bombardment to last much longer.

“We had not expected the enemy to launch its land offensive from the very first or second day. We expected the air raids to last at least a month,” he said. “The land offensive came at the same time as the air offensive. That was a situation we did not expect,” he told Al Jazeera.

Al-Rawi, who carries a $1m bounty on his head, was also the jack of clubs on the deck of cards of 55 most wanted Iraqis distributed by the Pentagon before the invasion in 2003.