Category: Afghanistan

Killing an “Amazing Number” of People

April 13, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Stanley_A_McChrystal_Quote ISAF commander Stanley McChrystal, who was promoted to his current lofty post by the Peace Prize President after running Cheney’s death squads in Iraq, made a surprisingly candid admission a few weeks ago. Speaking about NATO troops firing from passing convoys and checkpoints, which has resulted in 30 dead and 80 wounded, he said:

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

This admission came on the eve of several other revelations of indiscriminate civilian slaughterings on the part of “the finest military in the history of the world“. Here is a brief and partial catalog of recent revelations:

Night Raid on Family Celebration, Gardez, Afghanistan, Feb 12, 2010
5 dead, including pregnant women.

Gardez_Victims

Bibi Saleha, Gulalai, Bibi Shirin and Haji Sharabuddin’s two sons, Dawood and Saranwal Zahir were all killed in the Special Forces attack.
Shirin and Saleha were both pregnant, according to their mother, and Gulalai was 18 years old.

ISAF and NATO spokespeople at first lied about what happened, while special forces operatives were digging bullets out of walls and possibly even the bodies of the dead women in order to cover their bloody tracks, and then smeared the journalist Jerome Starkey who broke the story. NATO spokespeople tried to pin the murders of the women on their also-murdered male relatives. More here.

According to interviews with relatives and family friends, according to the NYT:

…a large number of people had gathered for a party in honor of the birth of a grandson of the owner of the house, Hajji Sharaf Udin. After most had gone to sleep, the police commander, Mr. Udin’s son, Mohammed Daoud, went out to investigate the arrival of armed men and was shot fatally.

When a second son, Mohammed Zahir, went out to talk to the Americans because he spoke some English, he too was shot and killed. The three women — Mr. Udin’s 19-year-old granddaughter, Gulalai; his 37-year-old daughter, Saleha, the mother of 10 children; and his daughter-in-law, Shirin, the mother of six — were all gunned down when they tried to help the victims, these witnesses claimed.

Helicopter Attack, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, February 21, 2010
27 civilians dead, 12 wounded.

helicopters

A Special Forces helicopter air strike killed as many at 27 civilians, according to the NYT:

Military video appeared to show the victims were civilians, and no weapons were recovered from them. “What I saw on that video would not have led me to pull the trigger,” one NATO official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with his department’s rules. “It was one of the worst things I’ve seen in a while.”

Press release from the Afghan President here, which claims that the dead included 4 women and a child, and that twelve additional people were wounded.

Afghan_Bus_Shooting

Bus Shooting, Kandahar, Afghanistan, April 5 2010
5 dead, 18 wounded.

From the NYT: “American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar…, killing as many as five civilians and wounding 18…”

From DN: “According to witnesses, US forces opened fire on a passenger bus just as the bus began pulling over to the side of the road to allow another military convoy to pass. Another eighteen civilians were wounded.”

You can find more news updates on Afghanistan here.

…and while I’m at it, here is a nice roundup of quotes showing how many troops take great pride in the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, and that it is nothing new to the 9-year running U.S. War of Terror.

Meanwhile, the ACLU has obtained documents through a Freedom of Information request showing 800 formal complaints by the families of civilians killed by the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

7th Anniversary of a Supreme International Crime

March 25, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

The current Iraq War, which has now dragged on into its 7th year, was justified by the U.S. government and mainstream news media on the basis of a series of demonstrable lies either made up or extracted by torture from people accused of terrorism by the Bush Administration.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands (perhaps a million) of people have been killed in the course of what the International Tribunal at Nuremberg would have considered “the supreme international crime“.

The 7th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion was commemorated this Saturday by modest popular protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington D.C.  I attended and documented the Los Angeles event in the following video:

The L.A. march was organized by the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition and was led by disabled Vietnam Veteran Ron Kovic (author of “Born on the 4th of July“), who was accompanied by a color guard of terror war veterans carrying the flags of war profiteering corporations.

And here is a nice essay on the anniversary by Andy Worthington.

“Personhood” and the 14th Amendment

March 4, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Welcome to the relaunch of The World’s Got Problems. We have been dark for a few weeks but of course the darkness of the world’s problems continues unabated.  So in this inaugural post of the relaunch, I will take a step back and look at certain recent developments as they relate to what I find to be an underlying problem – the dominant political culture’s selective and variable application of the 14th Amendment and the concept of “personhood”.
WGP_Person_2

Three Fifths of a Person

The United States, at its best, is a political order based on Enlightenment principles of human rights and liberty. But compromises were made at the very beginning, most notoriously by writing slavery into the Constitution. In Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 a distinction is made between “free Persons” and “other Persons”:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

The “other persons” were of course the population of black slaves, not so distant ancestors of the current President’s wife and children, who counted as 3/5ths of a “free Person” for the sake of determining appropriate levels of taxation and representation in the House.

After the Civil War, this “3/5th Compromise” was rendered moot by the 13th Amendment’s abolition of chattel slavery, while the 14th Amendment superseded Acricle 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution and guaranteed “due process” and “equal protection” to every “person”.

Corporate Personhood

What is good enough for a freed slave is good enough for a corporation, apparently – within only a couple of decades, “equal protection” began to be applied to non-human “legal persons”.  In 1886, before hearing arguments for Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, Chief Justice Morrison Waite asserted from the bench:

“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment…applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

Although this “obiter dictum” was not officially part of the Court’s decision, court reporter (and former railway president) Bancroft Davis included it in his summary – and it has served as faux precedent ever since.  From Mother Jones:

After Santa Clara, federal judges began granting more and more rights to nonliving “persons.” In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Pennsylvania Coal Co. was entitled to “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment because a state law, designed to keep houses from collapsing as mining companies tunneled under them, limited how much coal it could extract. In 1967 and 1978, businesses prevailed in Supreme Court cases citing the search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment as protection against fire and workplace safety inspections.

Corporate lawyers have also taken a shine to the First Amendment. In 1978, the Supreme Court agreed with corporations claiming that the state could not limit their political spending in an antitax campaign. Almost two decades later, a federal appellate court struck down a Vermont law requiring that milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be so labeled. Dairy producers had a First Amendment right “not to speak,” the court said. In California, Nike invoked the First Amendment to fight a lawsuit arguing that the company’s public relations materials misrepresented sweatshop labor conditions.

Most recently, the Retail Industry Leaders Association has relied on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause to fight Maryland’s Wal-Mart law, designed to force the company to expand its spending on employee health care. The retail group has also sued Suffolk County, New York, which last fall passed a similar ordinance aimed at nonunionized supermarkets.

Which brings us to last month when the Supreme Court reasserted the application of legal “personhood” to corporations in their ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which overturns previous campaign finance law and grants corporations (and unions) the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence federal elections.

For Chris Hedges, this marks the final nail in the coffin of democracy. We are now living in a state of “Inverted Totalitarianism“. You can find some some more analysis at the SCOTUSblog. (BTW, the “corporation” icon in the image above is taken from the excellent documentary, The Corporation.)

“Detainees” are not persons.

But while the Supreme Court assumes that corporations are included withing the set of “persons”, actual human beings are still being excluded from the category.

The Obama Administration, for example, decided last month to follow the Bush policy of imprisoning detainees without charges, denying them what the 14th Amendment guarantees to all “persons” – not just citizens.  Glenn Greenwald has analysis of this decision here, where he criticizes the hypocrisy of democratic leaders and liberal pundits who were opposed to these measures under Bush – but defend them now that their guy is in charge. Also, he points out the sad irony of the timing of this decision:

“…today is the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s Executive Order to close Guantanamo within one year — an anniversary the administration decided to celebrate not by fulfilling its terms, but instead by announcing that the central feature of Guanatanamo — indefinite detention with no charges — will continue indefinitely.”

Keep in mind that these “detainees” are merely terrorism suspects – but many have endured torture and years of imprisonment.  Although torture and imprisonment without trial are clearly unconstitutional, those “people” who ordered and legally justified torture brag about their accomplishments, teach at universities and work on their books – without any fear of reprisal.

The US versus THEM mentality that rose from the ashes of 9-11 is still operational under Obama, though it has become more insidious because it appears in intelligent, bipartisan blackface – and therefore now a largely unquestioned feature of “liberal” as well as “conservative” world-views.

Also, it is the perfect mirror of Al-Qaeda’s theological justification for slaughter of civilians – an “American Takfiris”

Homosexuals are people – more or less, sooner or later.

After the 14th Amendment was adopted, there was a wave of marriages between former slaves. But many southern states maintained miscegenation laws which prohibited marriages between the races. It wasn’t until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that these laws were declared unconstitutional – again by appealing to the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  According to that decision, marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man”.

And yet gay people continue to be denied this right to in all but five of the United States, and the Federal Government does not recognize gay marriage due to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by President Clinton.

The two lawyers on the opposite sides of Bush v. Gore are teaming up to challenge California’s Proposition 8 in Federal Court. You can listen to these strange bedfellows argue the case for marriage equality in an interview with Bill Moyers here. (Moyers, always the seeker of truth, plays devils advocate.)

Also, Gay people still can’t serve openly in the military, also a lingering Clinton policy.  Things look like they are turning around here, however, now that the top defense officials are seeking the end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.

5 (Plus) Front Terror War

January 2, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

5_Front_War

Now that Yemen has been added to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s list of military targets, the United States is bombing and shooting people in 5 predominately Muslim countries. Greenwald elaborates here:

…if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we’re fighting five different wars in Muslim countries — or, to use the NYT‘s jargon, “five fronts” in the “Terror War” (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, “we will continue to use every element of our national power”). Add to those five fronts the “crippling” sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even “harsher” than the prior ones, and it’s almost easier to count the Muslim countries we’re not attacking or threatening than to count the ones we are.

The U.S. strike on Yemen, which included raids by Yemeni forces and which witnesses say killed as many an 120 civilians, including women and children, was in order to preempt “an imminent attack against a U.S. asset”.

To hear an extended interview with someone who seems to know a lot about the internal politics of Yemen, go here. A transcript of this interview is here. Time magazine takes a look at developments in Yemen here, with some photos here.

INCOHERENT BULLSHIT

December 19, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

WGP_NobelWhile Nobel Peace prize recipients of the past have used their acceptance speeches to decry war in Afghanistan, Barack Obama attempted to justify it.

The speech has been praised for its “complexity” and for its “confronting the paradoxes” of a pro-war peace prize speech, but there are seven elements of the speech I found to be incoherent, self-contradictory, simple minded, hypocritical or plain dishonest.

1. WAR IS PEACE

The fundamental incoherence is the root claim that “instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.” This is false. While it may be true that instruments of war have a role in ACHIEVING peace – by replacing an oppressive order with a more just one, for example – it only does this through a SUSPENSION of peace. That is the force of the activist chant, “No Justice, No Peace!”

An exception can be made, perhaps, in the case of the Cold War. One could argue, for example, that atomic weapons “preserved” the peace through the threat of mutually assured destruction. But Cold War peace was war for the “Third World”, and the arms race has left us with a military-industrial-congressional complex that dictates a hawkish foreign policy which includes the bombing of villagers with remote control robots.

2. NON-VIOLENCE IS NAIVE; NON-VIOLENCE IS NOT NAIVE

But regardless of the efficacy of instruments of war in “preserving” the peace, it should be noted that its potential to achieve peace can also be doubted, as it clearly was by both halves of Obama’s guiding binary “North Star” – Martin Luther King and Gandhi. In a blatant self-contradiction, Obama says that “there is nothing weak – nothing passive – nothing naive – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King” but that at the same time he “cannot be guided by their examples alone” because he “must face the world as it is”.

(For a review of MLK’s reasons for opposing imperial wars, see our first post here.)

3. EVIL IS BAD, mmm’KAY?

And how is the world, really, in Obama’s view? It is the world of Christian mythology, where “evil” exists, evolutionary sciences are ignored, and “man” must struggle with the legacy of Original Sin.

“War, in some form or another, appeared with the first man,” Obama asserts.

Who is he talking about? Adam? Cain? Or are we supposed to think of the opening scene of Kubrick’s 2001?

4. “JUST WAR” SHOULD BE GOVERNED MULTILATERALLY; THE EMPEROR’S UNILATERAL ACTIONS ARE JUST

In any case, for Obama the inevitability of war means that one must strive not to end war, but to make it more just. And this is where another incoherence of the speech emerges. First, Obama touts the role of U.S. in creating the U.N., which he commends as a mechanism “to govern the waging of war.” Then he laments that “this old architecture [i.e., the U.N.] is buckling under the weight of new threats” (never mind that the greatest threat to the U.N. in the past decade has been U.S. refusal to be limited by multilateralism and international law). Then he proceeds to re-assert the Bush doctrine of unilateralism and preventive war: “I – like any other head of state – reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation” against “threats to the American people.”

So, “just war” requires multilateral governance but it is the Emperor’s right to act unilaterally in “defense” of his nation against “terrorists”.

(For a comparison between Obama and FDR on unilateralism, see here. For an academic philosopher’s perspective on how Obama’s war fails all six criteria for a “just war”, see here.)

5. THE UNITED STATES HAS MADE THE WORLD SECURE, EXCEPT FOR A FEW MISTAKES

Here Obama’s geo-political unilateralism merges with his mythology of “good” versus “evil” to produce a thorough U.S. Exceptionalism:

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Therefore, according to Obama, each of the following either “underwrote” global security or was merely a “mistake”: the overthrow of democracy in Iran (’53), the Vietnam War (’60-’75), the bombings of Cambodia (’69-’75) and Laos (71-’73), C.I.A support of violent right wing movements in Greece (’47-’49), Guatemala (’54 and ’66), Indonesia (’65), Dominican Republic (’65-66), Chile (’73), Angola (’76 -’92), and Nicaragua (81-90), etc. – not to mention the invasion of Iraq or the torture and rendition programs.

According to Obama, the U.S. has done these things “not because we seek to impose our will” but because of “enlightened self-interest,” and he believes that “the United States must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war.”

6. ALL WHO BREAK INTERNATIONAL LAW MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, EXCEPT FOR U.S. OFFICIALS WHO HAVE BROKEN THE LAW IN THE PAST

Obama’s incapacity for self-reflection (or, less generously, his mendacity) is boundless when it comes to the question of accountability. At every turn, OBAMA’S “Justice” Department has blocked accountability for his predecessor’s torturers and war-starters, but with a straight face he asserts that “those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable” and that “those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted.”

7. WE ALL SHARE A COMMON HUMANITY, EXCEPT FOR AL-QAEDA

Even Obama’s Exceptionalism unravels into incoherence, however. “As the world grows smaller,” Obama muses, ” you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we all basically want the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.” On the other hand, “negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

According to Obama, we all have a “spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.” All of us, that is, except for the “vicious adversary that abides by no rules.”

AF-PAK ADVENTURE

December 8, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

Here is a basic primer on the Af-Pak Adventure, courtesy of the inestimable LLoyd Dangle of Troubletown:

And for an elaboration of the final panel, see Tom Engelhardt’s essay, “Meet the Commanded-in-Chief.”

WALKING JOHNSON’S PATH

December 4, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

In the chart below, note the sharp rise in troop commitments since Obama has held the office, and, in the video to the right, the disparity between campaign words and presidential action.

The Johnson analogy is suggested by the recent Bill Moyers show. (Although I have already linked to it, I can’t recommend it highly enough as a piece of compelling historical journalism.

MILITARY SOLUTIONS

December 3, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

In the video on the right, hear lesser known voices – veterans, scholars and Afghans themselves – on Obama’s plans for a military escalation in Afghanistan.

Or check TRRN‘s interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powel, who discusses the less than enthusiastic expressions on the faces of the West Point Cadets and calls Obama’s decision “pure politics“.

Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary for the Treasury under Reagan, argues that when it comes to the choice to escalate in Afghanistan “Obama is irrelevant” – that he is just following the orders of a too-powerful military industrial coplex.

In any case, it is not just Afghanistan that is going to suffer an escalation. The NYT is reporting that the C.I.A. is expanding drone air-strike program in Pakistan – a program which has been known to end the lives of collateral toddlers.

YET ANOTHER AIRSTRIKE IN OBAMA’S “NECESSARY WAR”

September 21, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

According to North American Treaty Organization, its role in Afghanistan “is to assist the Afghan Government in exercising and extending its authority and influence across the country…”

They do this, evidently,by calling in deadly air strikes on villagers scavenging for winter fuel. From the Guardian:

At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.

What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker’s fuel. Poor people in one of the world’s poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much asthey could for the coming winter.

“We didn’t recognize any of the dead when we arrived,” said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. “It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this,” he brought his two hands together,his fingers curling like claws. “There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.

“The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone.”

So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.

A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews,and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn’t matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.

“A man comes and says, ‘I lost my brother and cousin’, so we gave him two bodies,” said Omar Khan. “Another says I lost five relatives, so we gave him five bodies to take home and bury. When we had run out o bodies we started giving them limbs, legs, arms, torsos.” In the end only five families went away without anything. “Their sons are still missing.”

Omar Khan’s small eyes narrowed and his mouth formed a disgusted circle. “The smell was so bad. For three days I smelled of burned meat and fuel.”

Read more here, video here, photos here.

Meanwhile the Afghan government it is NATO’s role to protect was installed by the United States following the its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan had elections last month, so that everybody could start chanting Bushilsms about Freedom on the March, but the U.N.-appointed elections watchdog found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud”.

And Jimmy Carter straight up said that “Hamid Karzai has stolen the election.”

The BBC itemizes the fraud allegations here. The Guardian addresses the fraud and has some video of pre-marked ballots here.

CONTINUITIES 4 (OF JULY)

July 4, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

To commemorate the 4th of July, here is another update on some of the many ways Obama has proven continuous with Bush:

Civil Liberties
Foreign Policy
Environment
Transparency
Sense of Humor
Gay Rights

And for the fuck of it, here is Howard Zinn questioning the necessity and value of the U.S. War of Independence.

(And btw – the Bush/Obama digital mash-up face is not mine. I just jacked it and placed it in the 4th of July context. I would credit, but I can’t find the original artist. And here is another good image on the same topic.)