Tag: Air Strikes

Iraq War Logs

October 26, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

This weekend Wikileaks released the Iraq War Logs – 40,000 “Significant Incident Reports” from the period of 2004-2009 that together tell the most detailed story of the war in Iraq during that time.

As was the case with the Afghan War Logs, a number of news media outlets received advanced access to the documents and extensive competing coverage can be found in the The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel, and last and least, The New York Times, which decided to lead with a hit piece on the personality of the founder of Wikileaks, rather than on what the war logs themselves reveal.  CNN played the same game.  (Not suprising, of course, from an institutions that were essential to enabling the war itself.)

Like Afghan War wikileak, there is so much to read, so video summaries can be useful:  The Guardian has a short video on prevalence of “Frago 242″, which is a “fragmentary order” not to investigate torture, and some of the consequences thereof. Al Jazeera presents an hour long special here.  And here is good highlight reel from U.K. Channel 4′s current affairs program, “Dispatches“:

The U.N.’s chief torture investigator thinks there is torture to investigate, and reminds Obama of his legal obligation to do so.  Dig through the logs yourself here.

Wikileaks, holding it down.

July 25, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Wikileaks released “The Afghan War Diaries” Today:

The Afghan War Diaries an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.

The Afghan War Diaries is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but this archive reveals locations and key events behind each of these individual deaths. We hope the impact will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and modern warfare in general.

Three newspapers were given early access on the condition the they would not publish about them until today.  Lots to read:

The Guardian (U.K.)

Spiegel (Germany)

New York Times (U.S.):

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.

Collateral Murder

April 5, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

“Ha Ha!”  “Good Shooting!”  “It is their own fault for bringing children into a battle.”

This is what “spreading democracy” looks like – slaughtering journalists and children from apache helicopters, and then slaughtering the people who come to help the wounded.  And laughing about it!

All while following standard operating procedure.

More info here, or on wikileaks. MSM discussion here. Greenwald writes about the Pentagon’s opposition to wikileaks here and about this particular video here and here. Amy Goodman interviews the wikileaks co-founder here.

Howard Zinn (1922 – 2010)

January 29, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

WGP_Zinn

Before Zinn was a historian, he was a U.S. Air Force bombardier who dropped bombs on people Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany and France during World War II, and was involved in some of the first military uses of Napalm.

The experience left him with lingering questions regarding the ultimate justice of that “good war”, and such critical self-reflection led him to study history under the G.I. Bill.

As a professor of history, he went on to radicalize the students at Spellman College on the eve of the explosion of the Civil Rights Movement, wrote the first book arguing for immediate U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and helped Daniel Ellsberg hide the Pentegon Papers.

He was even part of a diplomatic effort to North Vietnam during the war, and helped secure the release of some U.S. POWs. While there he witnessed the effects of U.S. cluster bombs on Vietnamese toddlers.

He then spent the rest of his long life writing and teaching history, including the best introductory history of the United States ever written.

I always associate Zinn with that other great writer who died recently, Kurt Vonnegut. Although Zinn writes history and Vonnegut writes fiction, the work of both were animated in large part by their experiences in World War II. They both played a role at the military edge of the American Empire at its historic “best” – during its fight against fascism – but came away with deep misgivings about the whole enterprise, which required a personal evolution beyond nationalist patriotism and towards a more universal concern that made their books so radical and so valuable.

(He died hours before Obama’s first State of the Union address, but not before giving his own assessment of the President’s performance so far.)

Anniversary of a Slaughter

January 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

The first anniversary of “Operation Cast Lead”, Israel’s U.S. enabled 22 day holiday offensive against Palestinians trapped in the open air prison of Gaza, which resulted in widespread destruction of infrastructure and the slaughter of 1,400 human beings, most of whom were civilians according to a U.N. report, was commemorated by somber ceremonies, by human rights groups such as Viva Palestina and Code Pink attempting to break the siege of that beleaguered strip of land, and by a hunger strike led by a Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust (who is interviewed here).

The state of Israel marked the anniversary with more assassinations and air strikes, although some Israeli Arab and Jewish activists protested the Gaza blockade.

Al-Jazeera has a special section covering this dark anniversary, with stories about the fear, the desperation, and the birth defects that are the legacy of the Zionist State’s munitions and blockade.

Democracy Now! reported on Egypt’s role in blocking the human rights groups from crossing the border into Gaza, and interviewed survivors of a family that lost 29 members in the attack.

Chomsky speak about the anniversary here, Chris Hedges speaks here.

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.”

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.

WAR CRIMES IN GAZA

October 26, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

Remember Israel’s Hanukkah attack on Gaza at the beginning of this year, using U.S. made weapons with the full support of the U.S. political class, and which resulted in a massacre of 1,400 people, most of whom were civilians and many of whom were women and children?

U.N. investigator Richard Goldstone issued a report accusing Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “indiscriminate use of firepower; deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian structures, including hospitals, schools, mosques, water and sewage plants, and rescue vehicles; use of white phosphorus munitions in built-up areas; use of human shields; abusive treatment of detainees; imposition of a blockade on Gaza before and after the attack itself…”

The U.N. Human Rights Council voted this month to support the report, with the United States voting against it for all of the usual reasons.

Despite the fact that Goldstone is a respected war crimes prosecutor and is himself Jewish,and also accused Hamas of war crimes, Obama administration officials have intimated without citing any details that the report is flawed and biased. Goldstone is now daring the U.S. to point out any inaccuracies.

Cited in the Goldstone report are the testimonies of Israeli veterans of “Operation Cast Lead” gathered by the group Breaking the Silence. Follow that link to download all of the testimonies, or you can read excerpts here, where Israeli solders talk about the “insane” amounts of firepower they used against civilians.

One soldier said he felt like “an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them.”