Tag: Dead Civilians

Tanks Giving

November 25, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

The U.S. and its NATO allies are introducing the Abrams tanks to Afghanistan this holiday season, despite the rise in civilian casualties — such as Asan and Slima, pictured above — brought on by the recent intensification of air strikes, in which more than 1000 bombs and missiles were fired in October.

Up until now, NATO has avoided using tanks in Afghanistan for fear of reminding the Afghans of the tank heavy Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

According to the AP, Colonel Dave Lapan explained to reporters in Washington that “American tanks would have a much different role than the Soviet tanks, which he said had been used to ‘oppress’ the Afghans.”

U.S. tanks don’t oppress Afghans, you see – they “protect” them from “insurgents”.

Meanwhile, a recent poll taken by the International Council on Security and Development finds that 92% of young men in Kandahar and Helmand provinces know nothing about 9-11, the putative reason the U.S. has been occupying their country for almost a decade.

In any case, many Afghans themselves refuse to give thanks to the occupiers of their country, choosing instead to lodge complaints with U.S. and Afghan officials about the destruction of their trees, crops, homes and loved ones.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of Imperial Functionaries, such destruction can be seen as a good thing:

Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor’s office to submit a claim for damaged property, “in effect, you’re connecting the government to the people,” the senior officer said.

Success!

Nuclear Explosions

November 16, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has made a beautiful and terrifying video mapping the 2053 nuclear explosions that have taken place on our planet between 1945 and 1998. Enjoy!

I wonder if this has anything to do with cancer rates?

(video via C&L)

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.

Animated IED Incident Map 2004 – 2009

July 30, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Based on info from the leaked Afghanistan war logs:

I think the end tag – “Stop all illegal wars” – is a bit fuzzy, conceptually speaking, but the animation is good, and is a great example of the kind of things that can be done with the massive amount of leaked info.

Also, it is interesting to compare the trajectory explicit in the video with what the BBC published today:

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.):

Meanwhile, in Thailand…

May 27, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In Bangkok, a 10 week anti-government protest led by “Red Shirts” was ruthlessly crushed by the Thai military.  Here is a video illustrating consequences of a sniper’s cowardly work:

Surviving Red Shirts have returned to their villages… at least for now.

Here is a slide show of the aftermath of the Thai military’s crackdown, and a play-by-play breakdown with maps of the action.

Democracy Now hosted a debate on the meaning of the Red Shirts — are they a genuine grassroots struggle for self-determination or a proto-fascist front for a billionaire ex-Prime Minister?

And here is a short piece giving historical context context to the protests and to Obama’s foreign policy stance.

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.

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.

“If anyone has a better [corporate friendly] approach… let me know.”

February 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

WGP_better_approach

As a Senator campaigning for the Presidency, Obama called himself “a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.”

Even after being elected Obama admitted, in passing, that single payer would be the only way to insure every U.S. citizen – but moved instead to strike (not-so-secret) deals with big PhRMA and completely drop any challenge to the for-profit, private health “care” system.

This is what makes his recent State of the Union request for “a better approach” to healthcare reform so completely disingenuous:

OBAMA: “If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.”

WGP_better_approach-2Pediatrician Dr. Margaret Flowers took Obama at his word and went to the White House the next day with a letter urging the revival of the idea of  a “single payer” or a “medicare-for-all” system.

The Secret Service turned her away, but she tried to respond to the president’s request again the next day in Baltimore where she was arrested for trespassing.

Congratulations, Dr. Flowers, you are The World’s Got Problems Undersung HeroTM of the Month!

Hear her interviewed by Bill Moyers here.