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Good Morning!
Occupy Congress. January 17, 2012. (Screen capture from video by BergenInc)
“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
~ Howard Zinn
News and Opinion
Joint operations were suspended for a week or so and were resumed again on Thursday. Two Americans and three Afghans were killed on Saturday. Reuters calls one of those killed a NATO civilian soldier, so presumably he was one of the mercenaries and the other American was apparently enlisted.
5 Dead After Suspected Insider Attack in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan — Two days after joint operations between American and Afghan forces were said to be returning to normal, a pitched battle broke out between the two allies, killing five people, two Americans and three Afghans, Afghan officials said Sunday.
Details of what happened in the incident Saturday were scarce and contradictory, but both the governor and police chief of Wardak Province, just west of the capital Kabul, described a misunderstanding or argument leading to the incident, which occurred at a checkpoint of the Afghan National Army in the Said Abad district.
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An Afghan official, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to release details, said that a mortar shell had landed amid the American forces, killing a soldier and a civilian contractor and injuring several others. The Americans thought it came from the Afghan National Army checkpoint and attacked it, killing several of the soldiers there, he said.
The provincial police chief Abdul Qayoum Baqizoi said the fight broke out when an Afghan soldier among seven soldiers at the checkpoint opened fire on the Americans; in the ensuing gunbattle, three Afghan soldiers were killed, including the one who had first opened fire.
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In an apparently unrelated incident on Friday, Taliban insurgents attacked what NATO-led forces called a “security meeting” in Ghazni Province between American special operations troops and Afghans, and injured an Afghan civilian with machine gun fire. “The Afghan and coalition troops treated and stabilized the man at the location, and fought off the attack,” ISAF said in a statement Sunday.
US military deaths in Afghanistan hit 2,000
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — U.S. military deaths in the Afghan war have reached 2,000, a cold reminder of the human cost of an 11-year-old conflict that now garners little public interest at home as the United States prepares to withdraw most of its combat forces by the end of 2014.
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In addition to the 2,000 Americans killed since the Afghan war began on Oct. 7, 2001, at least 1,190 more coalition troops from other countries have also died, according to iCasualties.org, an independent organization that tracks the deaths.
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Tracking deaths of Afghan civilians is much more difficult. According to the U.N., 13,431 civilians were killed in the Afghan conflict between 2007, when the U.N. began keeping statistics, and the end of August. Going back to the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, most estimates put the number of Afghan civilian deaths in the war at more than 20,000.
Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan Foreign Minister: Drones Are Top Cause Of Anti-Americanism
The foreign minister of Pakistan told a gathering in New York on Thursday evening that the top cause of anti-Americanism in her country is the U.S. tactic of drone attacks.
"The use of unilateral strikes on Pakistani territory is illegal," said Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in an event at the Asia Society, according to the Agence France-Presse. "It is illegal and it is unlawful."
Calling U.S. Drone Strikes 'Surgical' Is Orwellian Propaganda
A moment's reflection is enough to understand why intellectually honest people should shun the loaded metaphor.
I've been told American drone strikes are "surgical" while attending Aspen Ideas Festival panels, interviewing delegates at the Democratic National Convention, and perusing reader emails after every time I write about the innocents killed and maimed in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
It is a triumph of propaganda.
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The phrase "surgical drone strike" is handy for naming U.S. actions without calling up images of dead, limb-torn innocents with flesh scorched from the missile that destroyed the home where they slept or burned up the car in which they rode. The New America Foundation, which systematically undercounts these innocents, says there have been at least 152 and many as 192 killed since 2004. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the civilian death figure at between 474 and 881 killed. Either way, would "surgical" strikes kill innocents on that scale in a region with just 2 percent of Pakistan's population? Using data that undercounts innocents killed, The New America Foundation reports that 85 percent of Pakistanis killed in drone strikes are "militants," while 15 percent are civilians or unknown. What do you think would happen to a surgeon that accidentally killed 15 in 100 patients? Would colleagues would call him "surgical" in his precision?
Why I'm Going to Pakistan: Under Scrutiny, the Drone Strike Policy Will Fall
It's Official Dogma in political Washington right now that you can't touch the Pakistan drone strike policy. "Wasting bad guys for free" is too popular, the story says; besides, Democrats have to have some military killing of foreigners that they're for, to give them political cover for the military killing of foreigners that they're against. Most Democrats want to get U.S. troops the hell out of Afghanistan (outside of Official Washington, most Republicans agree.) But, the story goes, these Democrats have to have an "alternative," and the "alternative" is drone strikes.
As a political matter, this story is true as far as it goes: it's true because people believe it to be true. But in order for this political story to continue to work, drone strikes have to continue to be a black box, about which you can claim "success," regardless of whether it is true. If people have to confront the actual reality of the Pakistan drone strike policy - the reality in which its impact is mostly about killing and terrorizing civilians and alienating Pakistani public opinion from the United States as opposed to the fairy tale in which it is all about wasting top-level "bad guys" - the political story will fall apart. A policy that does more harm than good isn't an alternative to anything.
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Now there is a new level of effort in the United States to open the black box of the drone strike policy and reveal to Americans the injustice that has been hidden inside the box. A report this week has given an unprecedented amount of mainstream media attention to impact on civilians of the drone strike policy. Next week I will join 34 other Americans in visiting Pakistan, meeting with the families of victims of US drone strikes, participating in a peace march against the drone strikes, and delivering a petition to US and Pakistani officials from Americans, calling for the drone strike policy to end.
Petition: End US Drone Strikes in Pakistan
Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman is traveling to Pakistan as part of a peace delegation to protest U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. He will deliver this petition from Americans to the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan and also to Pakistani officials in opposition to U.S. drone strikes.
Petition can be signed at this link.
Richard Olson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan:
We urge you to do everything in your power to end U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan; to bring the drone strike policy into compliance with international and U.S. law; to permanently end all "signature strikes" against unknown persons; to permanently end all "secondary strikes," particularly those that target and endanger civilian rescuers, in grave violation of international law; to address questions about civilian casualties from drone strikes publicly and in detail; and to compensate civilian drone strike victims and their families.
Back in Iraq.
U.S. Troops Deployed in Iraq Again
A unit of U.S. Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq and more U.S. soldiers may soon be on their way, according to a New York Times report on the impact the civil war in neighboring Syria is having on Iraq's "fragile society and fledgling democracy."
Buried in the 15th paragraph of the report in Tuesday's Times was the news that "Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions" and that a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers has already been deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with intelligence.
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"God willing, we will be arming Iraq with weapons to be able to shoot down those planes," said Witwit, perhaps foreshadowing an all-out war between Iraq and Turkey, a war that would likely draw the United States into the conflict, since Turkey is a NATO ally. The potential for the United States to be caught in a web of conflicting alliances was noted by long-time leftwing dissident and antiwar activist Tom Hayden. Writing for thenation.com, Hayden noted the U.S. support of the insurgency in Syria, where the Obama administration has shipped weapons to Sunni rebels, and President Obama's repeated calls for the removal of the government of Bashar al-Assad, a demand the President repeated in his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday.
US soldier who refused to go back to Iraq arrested on return from Canada
The War Resisters Support Campaign said on its website that Rivera’s partner and four children crossed the border separately as “Kimberly did not want her children to have to see her detained by the U.S. military, as this would be traumatic for them.”
“During a Federal Court hearing in Toronto on Monday, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued that Kimberly would not be detained when she crossed the border,” the War Resisters statement said.
“… Just as the Rivera family’s lawyer argued in court and as was predicted by her Canadian supporters, Kimberly was detained immediately upon crossing the border into the United States of America,” it added. “Kimberly now awaits punishment for refusing to return to Iraq, a conflict which Kimberly and Canada determined was wrong.”
War resisters group decries deportation of U.S. soldier
Marciniec said the fact that she was separated from her children and had to leave Canada before a decision was made is "a terrible injustice, especially since the majority of Canadians support permanent resident status for conscientious objectors to the Iraq War and Parliament has twice voted directing our government to stop deporting these war resisters."
The WRSP says that after the Second World War, the Nuremberg Tribunal resulted in international law that every soldier must follow. This includes the duty to refuse certain orders and to not be part of wars of aggression or war crimes like the murder of civilians and the detention of non-combatants without cause, both of which took place in Iraq.
"The government of Canada has told us that we, as individuals on the field of battle, have no right or ability to distinguish between a moral act and an immoral one," Chuck Wiley, an Iraq War veteran who served 17 years in the U.S. military and, like Kimberly Rivera, sought asylum in Canada, said in the statement. "This is directly contrary to Nuremberg Principle four."
Amnesty International had asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper to allow Rivera to remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. And Archbishop Desmond Tutu had also urged the government to stop the deportation.
Currently
Bankers Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work
Here’s an idea for improving the regulation of banks: Treat them more like restaurants.
One of the great things about eating out in New York, where I work, is that you can go to the local health department’s website and get inspection information for each of the city’s 24,000 restaurants. So, for example, if you want to look up whether A+ Thai Place in Manhattan had rats during its last inspection, you can. (It did.) Eateries also must conspicuously post the grade they got (A+ Thai received a “C”) so every customer who walks in can see.
With banks, you can’t get report cards like this from regulators. And heaven forbid a U.S. lender ever wants to disclose its own supervisory rating to outsiders. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has long said that is confidential information, the release of which can lead to criminal charges.
[...]
Examination ratings are just the kind of information that should be publicly available about every bank. So let’s eliminate the secrecy. It damages our economy, undermines investor confidence and gives financial institutions too much leeway to go astray.
Regulators haven’t shown themselves to be any better than the markets are when it comes to uncovering big problems at federally insured banks. We might as well make all their examination findings open records. That way, the public can see when the regulators are failing at their jobs. Depositors can make fully informed choices about where to keep their money. And banks will be under much greater pressure to fix their problems.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Libya Attack Casts Unwanted Spotlight on CIA and Blackwater Role in Syria by leveymg
GAZ COOMBES - BOMBS
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