Category: politics

Aid agencies describe the situation as catastrophic, warning that recruitment is on the rise. The children go through a terrifying ordeal. Almost immediately they are trained to kill. One tactic favoured by the militia is to force the child to murder a member of his own family.

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, 27, of the Royal Logistic Corps, said the presence of British forces in one of the world’s poorest countries was making the situation worse. “It is distressing to disobey orders, but when Britain follows America in continuing to wage war against one of the world’s poorest countries, I feel I have no choice,” he told anti-war protesters at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Full article.

LOVE him…

Washington, DC, October 22, 2009 – On behalf of a coalition of U.S. and international musicians, including R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Tom Morello and Jackson Browne, the National Security Archive today filed a series of FOIA petitions requesting the full declassification of secret U.S. documentation on the strategy of using music as an interrogation device at Guantanamo and other detention centers. Full article.

PhD economist Faber states: How am I so sure about this final collapse? Of all the questions I have about the future, this is the easiest one to answer. Once a society becomes successful it becomes arrogant, righteous, overconfident, corrupt, and decadent … overspends … costly wars … wealth inequity and social tensions increase; and society enters a secular decline. [Quoting 18th century Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler:] The average life span of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years progressing from “bondage to spiritual faith … to great courage … to liberty … to abundance … to selfishness … to complacency … to apathy … to dependence and … back into bondage.” Where is America in the cycle? It is most unlikely that Western societies, and especially the U.S., will be an exception to this typical “society cycle.” The U.S. is somewhere between the phase where it moves “from complacency to apathy” and “from apathy to dependence… Full article.

If technology has transformed warfare into a spectacle of shock and awe, its contribution to the cause of dissent has been no less remarkable. It has enabled solidarities across borders and facilitated networks and forums dedicated to impartial communication of ground realities beyond the sanitized projection of mainstream news. True, technological advances have not brought an end to either occupation, but it has certainly helped alternative voices and views to be heard. Full article.

What is important here is that the judge is saying that violations of war crimes can be committed by private people or corporations,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He said Ellis’s ruling is “an affirmation of the precedent set by CCR thirty years ago” when it brought the first successful Alien Tort suit in 200 years “that those who engage in violations of fundamental human rights abroad can be held liable in the US.” Full article.

So, the CIA, in 1999, set up an investment arm called In-Q-Tel that sort of makes investments in technologies that the spy agencies would like to see grow. And their latest investment is in this company called Visible, which basically takes blog posts and takes Twitter updates and takes comments on YouTube videos and sort of sorts them out and decides which people have the most weight in the blogosphere, which people are the most influential, and also filters out, you know, certain key words, decides whether certain posts are hostile or positive. And it’s basically a way for them to sort of keep track on what’s going on in Twitter, on the blogs, etc. Full article.

mark danner is too soft on obama but there’s some v intelligent analysis here – on torture, the war on terror and afghanistan. watch interview.

Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to a published report. Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports. In fact, the first two strikes took place on Jan. 23, the President’s third day in office and the second of these hit the wrong house, that of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one just five years of age. Full article.

sad statistic for the only super power of the world.

A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government’s official figure. Full article.

The university on the outskirts of the capital has more than 18,000 students, nearly half of them women. Many of the students come from abroad, including around 700 from China. It is a seat of Islamic learning, but most of the students take secular subjects such as management science or computer studies. The blasts follow a string of bloody militant attacks around the country in recent weeks and amid warnings of more triggered by the start of the assault on South Waziristan tribal region four days ago. Full article.

Afghanistan is seen as an “empty space.” The U.S. seeks to re-establish Afghanistan as an empty buffer state at minimum cost (by which I mean few soldiers’ bodies and a few dollars). All the talk about democracy and girls’ schools is for public consumption in Euro-America. Indeed, the new so-called humanitarian interventions are merely a smokescreen to hide and sell larger geopolitical agendas. (Marc W. Herold)

THE U.S. bears responsibility for the suffering in Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan. In an attempt to create a little more maneuverability for itself in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has literally put a down payment on permanent Pakistani instability. The U.S. has forced the hand of the Pakistani military into a campaign that, only a few months ago, it confessed an inability to accomplish. In fact, it has been a long-held piety in Pakistani military circles that offensives in the tribal region are more trouble than they’re worth. Rush deliveries of American night-vision goggles are hardly likely to make up the difference. The other problem is that the Pakistani offensive in Waziristan is more likely to galvanize support for the Islamists in Pakistan than it is to help weaken the Taliban in Afghanistan. Full article.

In their judgment last August, the judges made it clear that they were appalled by the global torture program in which they had found themselves unexpectedly immersed. In one of the most extraordinary stories in the “War on Terror,” Mohamed, a British resident picked up in Pakistan in April 2002, had been rendered by CIA agents to Morocco in July 2002, where he had spent 18 months being tortured, had then been rendered to Afghanistan, to the “Dark Prison” outside Kabul, a secret prison run by the CIA, where he had spent another four months, and had then been flown to Guantánamo, where he remained while the judges grappled with the largely classified evidence of a global web of kidnapping and torture. Full article.