Category: politics

Over the past several weeks, thousands of people have visited New York City’s International Center of Photography (ICP) for the restaging of an exhibition that the museum presented two decades ago, but which has taken on fresh urgency in the shadow of the ongoing war in Iraq. “El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers” was first shown at the center in 1984, at the height of the bloody struggle in El Salvador that pitted a popular insurgency against a US-backed regime that ruled through savage military repression and death squads. Full article.

War’s effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanis…tan a week ago and listen to the wails of their parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people. (Chris Hedges)

Full article.

some perspective: “Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians.” Full article.

US President Barack Obama personally issued the order for US air strikes in Yemen last Thursday which killed scores of civilians, including women and children. Local officials and witnesses in the area of Mahsad, the site of the heaviest US bombardment, put the number of those killed at more than 60 and said the dead were mostly civilians. They denied that the target was an al Qaeda stronghold. Full article.

To: Un Human Rights, European Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International USA, Islamic Human Rights Commission
Appeal for the Release of Dr. Afia Siddiqui & Her 3 Children

Sign petition here.

According to the BBC Urdu, the FBI has conceded that Dr. Afia Siddiqi who had vanished from Karachi over five years ago in March 2003 along with her children is in the custody of American forces in Afghanistan but sadly in a horrid medical condition. Full article.

The Obama administration has sharply escalated the drone attacks, launching more than twice as many over the past year as the Bush administration carried out in its last year in office. The secretive nature of the CIA program is designed in large part to obscure the horrific toll in civilian lives inflicted through the firing of Hellfire missiles into Pakistani villages. As with virtually all of these attacks, the US media parroted unnamed intelligence officials in claiming that the victims of the latest missile strike were all “militants,” without any corroboration of who had been killed. The Lahore newspaper The News, citing figures supplied by Pakistani officials, reported in April that 687 civilians had been killed in approximately 60 drone strikes that had been carried out since January 2008. Given that fatality rate, with nearly 30 drone attacks having been launched since, the number of Pakistani civilians slaughtered in this fashion could easily have topped 1,000. Full article.

At least 10 Afghan civilians, including eight schoolchildren, have been killed in fighting involving Western troops, President Hamid Karzai has said. Full article.

US special forces have also been active along the border, in the tribal belt east of Balochistan. The source said US commando units had conducted four cross-border raids into Pakistan since 2003. Only one, in September 2008, was reported. The first three went undetected thanks to “constant reporting about American spies” in the tribal belt. The former Nato officer said: “There’s so much bullshit out there – the militants blame everything on American soldiers or spies or helicopters. So [when we did act] it was real easy to become part of the background noise.” Full article.

My personal breaking point, after months of jaw-dropping astonishment at Obama’s betrayals, was his refusal almost alone of the world’s leaders to ban child-killing landmines and cluster bombs. His state department announced this shameful policy on Thanksgiving eve, as if to hide it from public notice Obama is continuing Bush’s policy of refusing to honour an international antipersonnel landmine ban – the Ottawa treaty – signed by 158 nations. It’s so cruel and pointless. Mostly the victims are the rural poor, many of them children of the same age as the president’s two daughters. They die from shock or blood loss far from any hospital; and the survivors suffer amputations and blinding. Full article.

Thus the bewildering continuities between Obama’s policies and those of George Bush, his predecessor, emerge: the continued presence in Iraq – which is not close to “winding down” as the president described it, the deepening footprint in Afghanistan, the refusal to support treaties banning land mines and biological weapons, the continued use of private mercenaries, the ongoing detainee abuse at Guantanamo and Bagram prisons, and defence spending higher even than his Republican predecessor’s.These are not mistakes; they are inevitable policy choices in a system built on imperial dominance. And like empires past, they are justified by the use of rhetoric and arguments that exalt one’s own ideals while misrepresenting and denigrating those against whom the mistakes are committed. Full article.