Category: politics

Currently we live with net neutrality, so there is no perception of real danger. You pay an internet service provider for access and the content you post is available to viewers who are accessing the internet with competing providers. There have only been a few isolated incidents to date where providers blocked access to content, explaining in one case it was to free up bandwidth. Yet the technology exists to restrict access and as panelist, Michael Livermore maintains, the major broadband providers are fighting very hard for the right to do so, while maintaining they have no intention of carrying through on it.

#4 – Post it. Facebook just passed Google as the most visited US website, which means friends’ recommendations can be a huge force in effecting social change. So use your Facebook and Twitter accounts to post that riveting article you just finished and spark dialogue and action on the issues. Full article.

Four Afghan civilians were killed and 18 others wounded Monday when US troops opened fire on a passenger bus they believed was a threat to a military personnel working to remove roadside bombs from a highway near Kandahar. In a statement, the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said it “deeply regrets the tragic loss of life.” Full article.

In 2001 Shaker was in Afghanistan doing voluntary work for an Islamic charity when he was captured by Northern Alliance fighters and handed over to the US army. He was subsequently transferred to Guantánamo Bay, where he remains to this day. He has never been charged with any crime. Full article.

A completely new trend has emerged that, in many ways, is more dangerous than the trends under Bush. Extrajudicial killings and targeted assassinations will soon become the main point of contention that Obama’s administration will need to justify. Although Bush was known for his support for such policies, the extensive use of drones under Obama have taken the death count well beyond anything that has been seen before. Full article.

why we MUST withdraw from afghanistan: “If we aim to create and leave behind a reasonably secure society in Afghanistan, we must set a firm and reasonably prompt date for withdrawal. Only thus can we dissociate humanitarian aid from counterinsurgency warfare. This is because once a timetable is clearly announced, a fundamental transformation will begin in the political psychology of our relationship. The Afghans will have no reason to regard our aid as a counterinsurgency tactic. At that point, beneficial projects will become acceptable to the local jirgas, whose members naturally focus on their own and their neighbors’ prosperity and health. They will then eagerly seek and protect what they now allow the Taliban to destroy.” Full article.

We, the undersigned, call upon the Norwegian Nobel Academy to rescind its award of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace to US President Barak Obama. Sign here.

“The Day the Internet Lost” read a full-banner headline on Huffington Post yesterday. The New York Times held a wake for the Internet reporting that Internet service providers can now “block or slow specific sites” and demand that content producers now “pay a fee to ensure delivery of material.”

On Tuesday, the DC Circuit of the Federal Appeals Court took away the Federal Communications Commission’s to protect our rights on the Internet. The decision has been widely reported as the end of an era for America’s Internet. But what does the future hold? And what can we do to keep the Internet open and democratic? Full article.

General McChrystal agrees: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat”. At last the mask slips. We get a dash of straight talking about the cruelty and futility of these odious invasions. As I write, bombs continue to explode in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan – a legacy of the mess created by the West. How can we claim to be Godly, as we blast families in mud huts with drones? How can we send war criminals from small nations to the International Court, while our own offenders still live high on the hog, immune from rebuke. Long live WikiLeaks. May it continue to tear down the veils of illusion. Full article.

Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s. Full article.

The Obama administration is using mercenaries with the firm formerly known as Blackwater to kidnap and assassinate high value targets in Pakistan, according to a published report.

The program, operated out of the US Joint Special Operations Command, “is so ‘compartmentalized’ that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence,” an unnamed source with direct knowledge of the program told The Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill.

Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, is also allegedly involved in intelligence collection for a drone bombing campaign in the country. Full article.

protecting iraqis from saddam and bringing stability to iraq – for what will happen when we leave?

A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today.

The footage of the July 2007 attack was made public in a move that will further anger the Pentagon, which has drawn up a report identifying the whistleblower website as a threat to national security. The US defence department was embarrassed when that confidential report appeared on the Wikileaks site last month alongside a slew of military documents.

The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies. Watch video.

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded. The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead were all “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of three women had been found bound and gagged inside the home (including two pregnant women, one a mother of 10 children and the other a mother of six children, and a teenage girl), and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack. Full article.