The fighting in Afghanistan this week has resulted in the deaths of Canadian Colonel Geoff Parker, 42, of Oakville, Ontario, and U.S. Colonel John McHugh, 46, of W. Caldwell, New Jersey. It also claimed the lives of Lieutenant Colonels Paul Bartz, 43, of Waterloo, Wis., and Thomas Belkofer, 44, of Perrysburg, Ohio. Other fatalities were Staff Sgt. Richard Tieman, 28, of Waynesboro, Pa., and Specialist Joshua Tomlinson, 24, of Dubberly, La.
The four officers were killed in Kabul, The New York Times reported May 21, when “A suicide bomber in a minibus drove into their convoy (of armored sports utility vehicles), killing the four officers, two other American servicemen and 12 Afghan civilians in a passing bus.” The total number of U.S. service member deaths since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan eight years ago now stands at 1,064. The number of contractors killed in the fighting has been put at around 300. And in 2008 alone it is estimated that nearly 4,000 Afghan civilians perished.
This writer deeply regrets each and every one of those deaths, especially those of the 12 innocent Afghan civilians this week. They likely would all be alive today if President George W. Bush had not chosen to invade a country that never attacked America and which the U.S. oil industry has long coveted for a pipeline route. They would be alive if President Barack Obama had withdrawn U.S. troops. Instead, he has escalated the conflict and increased “defense” spending to a record $708 billion for fiscal 2011—a step which will only make the U.S. military-industrial complex(MIC) more powerful. For those associated with MIC, however, “defense” spending means jobs and prosperity.
And that one of the most highly decorated soldiers of all time says that “war is a racket” …
Given that FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, constitutional law expert professor Jonathan Turley, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and the Washington Post have all said that U.S. government officials “were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power” …
This is a step in the right direction, but being that Iraq is still occupied by the U.S. Military, Blackwater, NATO, etc., the people of Iraq have a long road ahead of them..
Iraq will help victims of the 2007 shooting of civilians in Baghdad to file a U.S. lawsuit against employees of security firm Blackwater, an incident that turned a spotlight on the United States’ use of private contractors in war zones.
Last week, a U.S. judge threw out charges against five guards accused of killing 14 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad traffic circle, saying the defendants’ constitutional rights had been violated.
Iraq called that decision “unacceptable and unjust” and, as well as supporting a lawsuit brought by Iraqis wounded in the shooting and families of those killed, it will ask the U.S. Justice Department to review the criminal case, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said on Sunday.
“The government will facilitate a lawsuit from Iraqi citizens to sue the guards and the company in a U.S. court,” he said.
Iraq said Friday that it will file a lawsuit against five Blackwater security guards cleared of manslaughter charges in the 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians, an act a government official called murder.
The Iraqi government also will ask the U.S. Justice Department to appeal a federal judge’s “unfair and unacceptable” dismissal of the charges Thursday, spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.
An Iraqi man wounded in the 2007 incident also voiced his anger Friday, saying U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina’s dismissal of the charges showed “disregard for Iraqi blood.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding an untold number of people in secretively maintained detention facilities all over the United States, according to a report set to be published next year in The Nation.
Many of the sites are unmarked and unlisted, going unnoticed in office parks and commercial zones, according to reporter Jacqueline Stevens. The so-called ICE “subfield offices” are mainly used to house prisoners in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards applied to ICE and even military prisoners.
At a subfield office known as B-18, located near a Los Angeles federal building, ICE keeps immigrant prisoners in “a barely converted storage facility.”
We are fighting illegal preemptive wars against three countries. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. The resulting wars have caused well over 1,000,000 casualties. Preemptive war is illegal according to the Nuremberg Charter, and the United Nations charter. These wars are destabilizing the entire Middle East, and causing anti-American sentiment throughout the world.
In America, the Constitution is being forgotten with the passage of bills like the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act. Americans are forced to wonder if their conversations are being monitored through the use of illegal wiretapping. The freedom of the press, and the right to peacefully assemble is being discarded.
Executive Power within the United States is being expanded to the point of near-dictatorship, and accountability for the actions of the Executive, and other members of Government is non-existent.
A constant state of fear is the norm.
Billions upon billions are being spent on the previously mentioned wars, and things that are needed for the people are being forgotten about.
Soldiers are dying, are being subjected to multiple tours of duty, are being exposed to depleted uranium and chemical weapons, are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, are committing suicide at an astounding rate, are being fed propaganda in order to murder innocents, and are having their families destroyed.
On August 21, District Court Judge Gladys Kessler granted the habeas corpus petition of Mohammed al-Adahi, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo who was 39 years old when he was seized on a bus in Pakistan. I described the broad outline of al-Adahi’s story in my book The Guantánamo Files as follows:
Married with two children, al-Adahi had never left the Yemen until August 2001, when he took a vacation from the oil company where he had worked for 21 years to accompany his sister to meet her husband…. As he told his tribunal, “In Muslim society, a woman does not travel by herself.” After flying to Karachi, they traveled to Kandahar, where his brother-in-law was living. Al-Adahi stayed in Afghanistan for a month, “to ease his sister’s transition to life in Afghanistan,” and then made his way back to Pakistan, where he was arrested by soldiers while traveling on a bus. “They were capturing everybody with Arabic features,” he said. “I gave them my passport and that shows that I’m an Arab. They said, ‘why don’t you follow us, we need you at the Center.’ From that point on they brought us over here.”
In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I have analyzed US and NATO geopolitical strategy since the fall of the Soviet Union, in expanding the American empire and preventing the rise of new powers, containing Russia and China. This Part examines the implications of this strategy in recent years; following the emergence of a New Cold War, as well as analyzing the war in Georgia, the attempts and methods of regime change in Iran, the coup in Honduras, the expansion of the Afghan-Pakistan war theatre, and spread of conflict in Central Africa. These processes of a New Cold War and major regional wars and conflicts take the world closer to a New World War. Peace can only be possible if the tools and engines of empires are dismantled.
Eastern Europe: Forefront of the New Cold War
In 2002, the Guardian reported that, “The US military build-up in the former Soviet republics of central Asia is raising fears in Moscow that Washington is exploiting the Afghan war to establish a permanent, armed foothold in the region.” Further, “The swift construction of US military bases is also likely to ring alarm bells in Beijing.”[1]
The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a massive military spending bill to defray annual expenses, fund operations in Afghanistan, and pay for the troop withdrawal from Iraq.
Lawmakers voted 395 to 34 for the 636.3-billion-dollar package, which does not include monies for President Barack Obama’s recently announced decision to send 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan in a bid to turn that conflict around.
At least 120 Houthis have lost lives and 44 others sustained injuries as US fighter jets took part in air strikes in the northwestern Yemeni province of Sa’ada.
“The US air force perpetrated an appalling massacre against citizens in the north of Yemen as it launched air raids on various populated areas, markets, refugee camps and villages along with Saudi warplanes,” the northern Yemen-based Houthi Shia fighters said.
They added, “The savage crime committed by the US air force shows the real face of the United States. It cancels out much touted American claims of human rights protection, promotion of freedoms of citizens as well as democracy.” Read the rest of this entry »
Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally. Read the rest of this entry »
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them. — Patrick Henry
As stated by Patrick Henry with conviction and passion, a democratic government will not last if its operations and policies are not visible to its public. The foundation of our democratic republic is supposed to be based on an open and accountable government. Transparency is what enables accountability.
For several decades post 1945, under the guise of the Cold War, with the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and an aggressive foreign policy based on overt and covert intervention abroad, the seeds of excessive secrecy were planted, aggressively nurtured, and taken to heights not imaginable in our founding fathers’ vision of transparent and accountable government. Although the Watergate Scandal brought a short-lived wave of awakening, and to a certain degree defiance, by getting Americans to question the extent of and the real need for governmental secrecy, the subsequent political movements were eventually halted with no real action ever taken, thanks to a Congress unwilling to truly exercise its oversight authority over the intelligence community. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Brian 
