Category: politics

An estimated 100,000 people who disappeared during the 1936-39 Civil War are still unaccounted for, including Spain’s best known 20th-century poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. Garzon opened the investigation at the request of victims’ relatives in October 2008. Most of the disappeared were supporters of the Republican government against which Franco led a military uprising in 1936. Thousands of Franco supporters who were also killed have long since been tallied and commemorated. Garzon passed the case on to regional courts amid claims that the crimes were covered by a 30-year statute of limitations and a 1977 amnesty law passed during Spain’s tense transition to democracy. His trial stems from a lawsuit brought by the small rightist Manos Limpias union and the far-right Falange party, which was a mainstay of Franco’s dictatorship but is now marginalized. Full article.

According to a report from Alexandria’s Town Talk newspaper, LaSalle Parish Sheriff Scott Franklin prepared the assembled crowd for a violent day. “It’s going to be like Baghdad out in this community at five am,” he continued dramatically, explaining that their target was 37-year-old Darren DeWayne Brown, who owns a barbershop — one of the only Black-owned businesses in town — and his “lieutenants,” who Franklin said supplied eighty percent of the narcotics for three parishes. “Let me put it to you this way,” declared the sheriff, “When the man says, ‘We don’t sell dope today,’ dope won’t get sold.” Catrina Wallace, 29, was sleeping in her bed with her youngest child when her door was broken down and she awoke to the feeling of a gun to her head. When she opened her eyes, her small home was filled with police. “I never seen that many police at one time,” she recalled. “Everywhere I looked all I saw was police. There were six or seven just in my bedroom.” Full article.

It has been a hidden war ignored by the outside world. Up to last week nobody paid much attention to the fighting in north-west Pakistan, though more soldiers and civilians have probably been dying there over the last year than in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In reality this corner of Pakistan along the Afghan border is the latest in a series of wars originally generated by the US response to 9/11. The first was the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, the second in Iraq after the invasion of 2003 and the third the renewed war in Afghanistan from about 2006. The fourth conflict is the present one in Pakistan and is as vicious as any of its predecessors, though so far the intensity of the violence has not been appreciated by the outside world.

Western governments and media for long looked at the fighting in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan as a sideshow to the Afghan war. Washington congratulated itself on using pilotless drones to kill Taliban leaders, a tactic which meant that there were no American casualties and apparently no political fall out in the US.

I recently visited Bajaur, a well-watered and heavily populated hilly agency on the Afghan border north of Peshawar from which the army has driven the Taliban over the last two years. Colonel Nauman Saeed, the commander of the Bajaur Scouts, a 3,500-strong force made up of tribal levies, says that Taliban have been defeated and driven out of Bajaur and into Afghanistan and will never be able to return. The area looks as if it is wholly under military occupation with checkpoints every few hundred yards, little traffic on the roads and many shops closed in the villages. Col Saeed says that twelve villages have been completely destroyed.

It is the same story south of Peshawar. I drove down the main road running to Lakki Marwat just east of Waziristan where there continues to be frequent suicide bombings. One had demolished part of a village police station a few hours before we passed through, killing seven people. People are wary and there is an atmosphere of subdued menace. I was glad to be riding in a well-armoured civilian vehicle with bullet proof glass protected by the bodyguards of a powerful tribal leader, businessman and senator. “I tell people that this vehicle will only stop pistol bullets,” explained a former army colonel who was head of his security. “In this area if you tell them that your vehicle can stop an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] round then they will fire something even heavier at you.”

The Taliban had gone but nobody believes that they had gone very far. “People don’t want to cooperate with the army because they think the Taliban will find out and take revenge,” said one man from a nearby village. Probably they will never come back in full force, but they show on a daily basis that they are still a force to be to be feared. When one village called Shah Hassan asked the local Taliban to leave they retaliated by sending a suicide bomber into a crowd of young men playing volley ball where he detonated his explosives and killed one hundred people.

Civilians are being squeezed between two implacable forces. The army’s tactic is to order the civilian population out of whatever district it is trying to clear of Taliban and then freely use its artillery and air power on the assumption that all who remain are Taliban supporters.

It is a policy heavy on destruction which would be widely reported by the media if it occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan. In Pakistan it does not attract much criticism because places like Waziristan are almost impossible for Pakistani or foreign journalists to reach because they are too dangerous except under the protection of the army. But travellers who do go there are aghast at the extent of the devastation. “What I saw was stuff nightmares are made of,” writes Azyaz Wazir, a former Pakistani ambassador who travelled on a bus through South Waziristan. “Houses, shops, madressahs and even official buildings on the roadside stood in ruins or demolished. There was no sign of any human or animal life, except for a few cows wondering about in the deserted villages.”

As the army marched in, some quarter of a million refugees have come flooding out of South Waziristan according to the UN. The army is keen for them to return home but most are refusing to do so because they say it is not safe and they are almost certainly right. “The army has control only of the roads, and we are present in the forests,” one Pakistan Taliban commander was quoted as saying. A further reason is that the Pakistani army may be expert at blowing things up but the civilian government is not good at rebuilding them. Where ever I went along the frontier people complained of the absence of any help from officials sent by the central government. They complain that no representative of the government dared attend the funeral of the 100 young men playing volleyball killed by a bomber at Shah Hassan village.

From: “The Vicious War That Sent Shahzad to Times Square” by Patrick Cockburn
Counterpunch, May 11, 2010

robert pape who has studied terrorism and looked at the numbers talks sense – if u want to end suicide attacks, end occupation. farhana ali did not impress me. she’s an instructor for the u.s. afpak team so she’s obviously toeing the line.

I’d like to invite Pipes and Goldberg to imagine an alternative universe, a universe in which behaviors — such as planting a bomb — don’t have a single “root” cause. In this universe, bomb-planting behavior is kind of like the bombs themselves: a number of ingredients have to come together before things get explosive. If you figure out what those ingredients are, and which of them you can control, maybe you can make bomb-planting behavior less common. Full article.

“The [Miranda] system we have in place has proven to be effective,” Holder told host Jake Tapper. “I think we also want to look and determine whether we have the necessary flexibility – whether we have a system that deals with situations that agents now confront. We’re now dealing with international terrorism. I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public-safety exception [to the Miranda protections]. And that’s one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress, to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional, but that is also relevant to our times and the threats that we now face.” (Eric Holder) Full article.

As solicitor general, Kagan is supposed to represent the interests of the American people in matters that come before the Supreme Court. Instead, she has gone to bat for Monsanto. In a case that the court is currently considering, Monsanto is trying to overturn a 2007 California decision that imposed a nationwide injunction on planting the company’s genetically modified alfalfa. In March, Kagan’s office interceded on Monsanto’s behalf even though the government was not a defendant in the appeal. Full article.

We, too, Mr. President, are America. We have our share of criminals amongst us, as do any other people. But we are not all terrorists, and we are tired of feeling false guilt or shame every time a criminal among us does something insane and stupid. (hamid Dabashi) Full article.

cesaire demonstrates how colonialism works to “decivilize” the colonizer; torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. (robin d.g. kelley, a poetics of anticolonialism)

Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, helped protect the Saudi royal family from lawsuits that sought to hold al Qaeda financiers responsible in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The suits were filed by thousands family members and others affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. In court papers, they provided evidence that members of the Saudi royal family had channeled millions to al Qaeda prior to the bombings, often in contravention of direct guidance from the United States. Full article.

Military resistance has been heralded for millennia by the premier scholars, poets, philosophers, scientists and spiritual leaders of humanity. I thought of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian citizen who refused to fight in Hitler’s army. His head was removed after every chance was given him by the authorities to accept some duty, even if without a weapon. I thought of those brave GIs in Vietnam who stood against the system, who worked to prevent the victimization of their brothers and sisters by resisting the continued genocide. Many went to jail. One was shot and killed while trying to escape. I thought of my brothers and sisters in IVAW. Those who realize the humanity in us all deserves to be respected beyond what the military trained us to think. We are sacred; we are beautiful. We are not killers, we are women and men of dignity and justice. (Matthis Chiroux)

A growing number of military medical professionals believe burn pits are causing a wave of respiratory and other illnesses among troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Found on almost all U.S. bases in the war zones, these open-air trash sites operate 24 hours a day, incinerating trash of all forms — including plastic bottles, paint, petroleum products, unexploded ordinance, hazardous materials, even amputated limbs and medical waste. Their smoke plumes belch dioxin, carbon monoxide and other toxins skyward, producing a toxic fog that hangs over living and working areas. The Pentagon line is that burn pits have “no known long-term health effects” but hundreds of American veterans who came in contact with burn pit smoke have been diagnosed with cancer, neurological diseases, cardiovascular disease, breathing and sleeping problems and various skin rashes. While the Americans may begin to withdraw next year, the toxic chemicals they leave behind will continue to pollute for centuries. Full article.

It is not too late to learn some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842. Then, the British officials in Kabul continued to send out dispatches of delusional optimism as the insurgents moved ever closer to Kabul. Those officials believed there was a straightforward military solution to the problem, and that if only they could recruit enough Afghans to their army, they could eventually march home and leave the pliable regime in place. By the time they realized they had to negotiate and reach a compromise with their enemy, their power had ebbed too far, and the only thing the insurgents were willing to talk about was an unconditional surrender. Today, too, there is no easy military solution to Afghanistan. Every day, despite the military muscle of the United States, the security gets worse, and the area under government control contracts. Full article.

avi lewis interviews arundhati roy – illuminating analysis. pls watch.

can’t wait to see this.