zenekar
05-09-2009, 07:03 AM
After the Latest U.S. Airstrike, Can Anyone Wonder Why Do 'They' Hate Us?
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on May 8, 2009, Printed on May 9, 2009
RE: WHY WE ARE REALLY THERE | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/139923/)
About a half-hour north of Jalalabad, the children along the road change. No waving. No smiling. No thumbs up. No screaming for candy. Only serious stares and empty eyes!
I have seen this in Iraq, and it's deeply uncomfortable until you get used to it -- if you get used to it. Children by nature are friendly, when they're unfriendly it's because their parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community is worse than unfriendly. And the change can be fast, in the next village, yet most of the time the change comes slow. But you have to be looking. Otherwise you look up and the smiling and enthusiastic little ones are suddenly frosty and distant little ones.
-- Embedded journalist in Farah Afghanistan, March 2009
This was written during a four-day convoy ride with the Regional Corps Advisory Command of the U.S. Marines. The author, a Vietnam vet who says he has traveled to 109 countries -- including multiple trips to Afghanistan -- and "reported from more than a dozen wars," has no doubt seen his share of action. But reading it this week, days after a U.S. airstrike killed up to 130 people in Farah, Afghanistan, including 13 members of the same family, this quote from an journalist embedded with soldiers in a warzone that is escalating at this moment, is chilling.
It is a glimpse into the black and white logic that gave birth to the "War on Terror," where there is a "good" side and a "bad" side, and as long as we know where the bad guys are, perpetual war against an entire people is justifiable. Thus, if a child stares coldly at U.S. military convoys, it must be because their "parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community(!)" is comprised of terrorists. Thus by the unfortunate accident of lineage and geography, they too must be terrorist in the making themselves.
Is it too obvious a point that the "frosty and distant" children who stare at U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan might do so not because "their parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community is worse than unfriendly" but because "their parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community" were recently slaughtered by the U.S. military, like those killed this week in Farah?
Even in the face of an official apology from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reports that villagers collected "two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies" and remarks from Afghan president Hamid Karzai that the U.S. forces must operate from a "higher platform of morality," the Pentagon has tried to claim that the civilian victims of this week's deadly airstrikes in Farah were actually killed by the Taliban, who staged the massacre in order to pin the blame on the U.S. For those who see the fight against the Taliban as a battle of good versus evil, this might seem plausible.
But six years into the bloody war on Iraq, almost eight years into the war in Afghanistan, five years after the release of the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib, weeks after the release of the grisly CIA torture memos, and one day after a U.S. soldier was found guilty of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, then killing her family it is hard to imagine that people around the world still have much faith in the infallibility -- let alone moral superiority -- of the U.S. military, even over the murderous Taliban. As more civilians die by U.S. hands in the escalating war on Afghanistan -- including children and their families -- the less convicing such cynical claims and cover-ups will be.
Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights and Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: RE: WHY WE ARE REALLY THERE | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/139923/)
_________
After U.S. Strikes, Afghans Describe 'Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies'
By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports
Posted on May 7, 2009, Printed on May 9, 2009
After U.S. Strikes, Afghans Describe 'Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies' | | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/story/139881/)
As President Barack Obama prepares to send some 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, anger is rising in the western province of Farah, the scene of a U.S. bombing massacre that may have killed as many as 130 Afghans, including 13 members of one family. At least six houses were bombed and among the dead and wounded are women and children. As of this writing reports indicate some people remain buried in rubble. The U.S. airstrikes happened on Monday and Tuesday. Just hours after Obama met with U.S.-backed president Hamid Karzai Wednesday, hundreds of Afghans -- perhaps as many as 2,000 -- poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting "Death to America.” The protesters demanded a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In Washington, Karzai said he and the U.S. occupation forces should operate from a "higher platform of morality," saying, "We must be conducting this war as better human beings," and recognize that "force won’t buy you obedience."*And yet, his security forces opened fire on the demonstrators, reportedly wounding five people.
According to The New York Times:
In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. Afghan lawmakers immediately called for an agreement regulating foreign military operations in the country.
"The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred," Mr. Farahi said. "Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene."
Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.
The U.S. airstrikes hit villages in two areas of Farah province on Monday night and Tuesday. The extent of the deaths only came to public light because local people brought 20-30 corpses to the provincial capital. If the estimates of 130 dead are confirmed, it would reportedly be the single largest number of deaths caused by a U.S. bombing since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially "apologized" Wednesday for the civilian deaths and Obama reportedly conveyed similar sentiments to Karzai when they met in person, later in the day Clinton’s spokesperson, Robert Wood, framed her apology as being based on preliminary information and, according to AP, said they "were offered as a gesture, before all the facts of the incident are known." By day’s end, the Pentagon was seeking to blame the Taliban for "staging" the massacre to blame it on the U.S. Last night, NBC News’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said military sources told him Taliban fighters used grenades to kill three families to "stage" a massacre and then blame it on the U.S.
The senior U.S. military and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, spoke in general terms: "We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of the civilian casualties," he said. McKiernan left the specific details of the spin to unnamed officials.
According to The Washington Post, "A U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that ‘the Taliban went to a concerted effort to make it look like the U.S. airstrikes caused this. The official did not offer evidence to support the claim, and could not say what had caused the deaths." Meanwhile, according to the Associated Press, a senior Defense official who did not want to be identified "said late Wednesday that Marine special operations forces believe the Afghan civilians were killed by grenades hurled by Taliban militants, who then loaded some of the bodies into a vehicle and drove them around the village, claiming the dead were victims of an American airstrike. A second U.S. official said a senior Taliban commander is believed to have ordered the grenade attack."
As the AP reported, "it would be the first time the Taliban has used grenades in this way."
While the Pentagon spins its story, the International Committee of the Red Cross has stated bluntly that U.S. airstrikes hit civilian houses and revealed that an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead. "We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike," said the ICRC’s head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker. “We are deeply concerned by these events. Tribal elders in the villages called the ICRC during the fighting to report civilian casualties and ask for help. As soon as we heard of the attacks we contacted all sides to warn them that there were civilians and injured people in the area.”
Read the entire ICRC statement here.
The Times, meanwhile, interviewed local people who contradict the unnamed U.S. Defense officials’ version of events:
Villagers reached by telephone said many were killed by aerial bombing. Muhammad Jan, a farmer, said fighting had broken out in his village, Shiwan, and another, Granai, in the Bala Baluk district. An hour after it stopped, the planes came, he said.
In Granai, he said, women and children had sought shelter in orchards and houses. "Six houses were bombed and destroyed completely, and people in the houses still remain under the rubble," he said, "and now I am working with other villagers trying to excavate the dead bodies."
He said that villagers, crazed with grief, were collecting mangled bodies in blankets and shawls and piling them on three tractors. People were still missing, he said.
Mr. Agha, who lives in Granai, said the bombing started at 5 p.m. on Monday and lasted until late into the night. "People were rushing to go to their relatives’ houses, where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way," he said.
In her earlier statement regarding the bombing, Clinton told Hamid Karzai "there will be a joint investigation by your government and ours."
But before that investigation began, the Pentagon was already using its unnamed officials to blame the Taliban. It also bears remembering that the U.S. track record of thoroughly "investigating" U.S. massacres is pathetic. The UN said there was convincing evidence that last year's U.S. attack on the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan killed 90 civilians, but the military only acknowledged 30 civilian deaths.
Standing between Hamid Karzai and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday, Obama said the U.S. would "make every effort" to avoid civilian deaths in both countries (which are regularly bombed by the U.S.). But as he was making those remarks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was arriving in Kabul on Wednesday "to make sure that preparations were moving forward for the troop increase and that soldiers and Marines were getting the equipment they needed."
Jessica Barry, a spokesperson for the ICRC said, "With more troops coming in, there is a risk that civilians will be more and more vulnerable."
Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.
© 2009 Rebel Reports All rights reserved.
View this story online at: After U.S. Strikes, Afghans Describe 'Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies' | | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/story/139881/)
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on May 8, 2009, Printed on May 9, 2009
RE: WHY WE ARE REALLY THERE | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/139923/)
About a half-hour north of Jalalabad, the children along the road change. No waving. No smiling. No thumbs up. No screaming for candy. Only serious stares and empty eyes!
I have seen this in Iraq, and it's deeply uncomfortable until you get used to it -- if you get used to it. Children by nature are friendly, when they're unfriendly it's because their parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community is worse than unfriendly. And the change can be fast, in the next village, yet most of the time the change comes slow. But you have to be looking. Otherwise you look up and the smiling and enthusiastic little ones are suddenly frosty and distant little ones.
-- Embedded journalist in Farah Afghanistan, March 2009
This was written during a four-day convoy ride with the Regional Corps Advisory Command of the U.S. Marines. The author, a Vietnam vet who says he has traveled to 109 countries -- including multiple trips to Afghanistan -- and "reported from more than a dozen wars," has no doubt seen his share of action. But reading it this week, days after a U.S. airstrike killed up to 130 people in Farah, Afghanistan, including 13 members of the same family, this quote from an journalist embedded with soldiers in a warzone that is escalating at this moment, is chilling.
It is a glimpse into the black and white logic that gave birth to the "War on Terror," where there is a "good" side and a "bad" side, and as long as we know where the bad guys are, perpetual war against an entire people is justifiable. Thus, if a child stares coldly at U.S. military convoys, it must be because their "parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community(!)" is comprised of terrorists. Thus by the unfortunate accident of lineage and geography, they too must be terrorist in the making themselves.
Is it too obvious a point that the "frosty and distant" children who stare at U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan might do so not because "their parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community is worse than unfriendly" but because "their parents, possibly their extended family, maybe their whole community" were recently slaughtered by the U.S. military, like those killed this week in Farah?
Even in the face of an official apology from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reports that villagers collected "two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies" and remarks from Afghan president Hamid Karzai that the U.S. forces must operate from a "higher platform of morality," the Pentagon has tried to claim that the civilian victims of this week's deadly airstrikes in Farah were actually killed by the Taliban, who staged the massacre in order to pin the blame on the U.S. For those who see the fight against the Taliban as a battle of good versus evil, this might seem plausible.
But six years into the bloody war on Iraq, almost eight years into the war in Afghanistan, five years after the release of the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib, weeks after the release of the grisly CIA torture memos, and one day after a U.S. soldier was found guilty of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, then killing her family it is hard to imagine that people around the world still have much faith in the infallibility -- let alone moral superiority -- of the U.S. military, even over the murderous Taliban. As more civilians die by U.S. hands in the escalating war on Afghanistan -- including children and their families -- the less convicing such cynical claims and cover-ups will be.
Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights and Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: RE: WHY WE ARE REALLY THERE | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/139923/)
_________
After U.S. Strikes, Afghans Describe 'Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies'
By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports
Posted on May 7, 2009, Printed on May 9, 2009
After U.S. Strikes, Afghans Describe 'Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies' | | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/story/139881/)
As President Barack Obama prepares to send some 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, anger is rising in the western province of Farah, the scene of a U.S. bombing massacre that may have killed as many as 130 Afghans, including 13 members of one family. At least six houses were bombed and among the dead and wounded are women and children. As of this writing reports indicate some people remain buried in rubble. The U.S. airstrikes happened on Monday and Tuesday. Just hours after Obama met with U.S.-backed president Hamid Karzai Wednesday, hundreds of Afghans -- perhaps as many as 2,000 -- poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting "Death to America.” The protesters demanded a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In Washington, Karzai said he and the U.S. occupation forces should operate from a "higher platform of morality," saying, "We must be conducting this war as better human beings," and recognize that "force won’t buy you obedience."*And yet, his security forces opened fire on the demonstrators, reportedly wounding five people.
According to The New York Times:
In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. Afghan lawmakers immediately called for an agreement regulating foreign military operations in the country.
"The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred," Mr. Farahi said. "Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene."
Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.
The U.S. airstrikes hit villages in two areas of Farah province on Monday night and Tuesday. The extent of the deaths only came to public light because local people brought 20-30 corpses to the provincial capital. If the estimates of 130 dead are confirmed, it would reportedly be the single largest number of deaths caused by a U.S. bombing since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially "apologized" Wednesday for the civilian deaths and Obama reportedly conveyed similar sentiments to Karzai when they met in person, later in the day Clinton’s spokesperson, Robert Wood, framed her apology as being based on preliminary information and, according to AP, said they "were offered as a gesture, before all the facts of the incident are known." By day’s end, the Pentagon was seeking to blame the Taliban for "staging" the massacre to blame it on the U.S. Last night, NBC News’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said military sources told him Taliban fighters used grenades to kill three families to "stage" a massacre and then blame it on the U.S.
The senior U.S. military and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, spoke in general terms: "We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of the civilian casualties," he said. McKiernan left the specific details of the spin to unnamed officials.
According to The Washington Post, "A U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that ‘the Taliban went to a concerted effort to make it look like the U.S. airstrikes caused this. The official did not offer evidence to support the claim, and could not say what had caused the deaths." Meanwhile, according to the Associated Press, a senior Defense official who did not want to be identified "said late Wednesday that Marine special operations forces believe the Afghan civilians were killed by grenades hurled by Taliban militants, who then loaded some of the bodies into a vehicle and drove them around the village, claiming the dead were victims of an American airstrike. A second U.S. official said a senior Taliban commander is believed to have ordered the grenade attack."
As the AP reported, "it would be the first time the Taliban has used grenades in this way."
While the Pentagon spins its story, the International Committee of the Red Cross has stated bluntly that U.S. airstrikes hit civilian houses and revealed that an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead. "We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike," said the ICRC’s head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker. “We are deeply concerned by these events. Tribal elders in the villages called the ICRC during the fighting to report civilian casualties and ask for help. As soon as we heard of the attacks we contacted all sides to warn them that there were civilians and injured people in the area.”
Read the entire ICRC statement here.
The Times, meanwhile, interviewed local people who contradict the unnamed U.S. Defense officials’ version of events:
Villagers reached by telephone said many were killed by aerial bombing. Muhammad Jan, a farmer, said fighting had broken out in his village, Shiwan, and another, Granai, in the Bala Baluk district. An hour after it stopped, the planes came, he said.
In Granai, he said, women and children had sought shelter in orchards and houses. "Six houses were bombed and destroyed completely, and people in the houses still remain under the rubble," he said, "and now I am working with other villagers trying to excavate the dead bodies."
He said that villagers, crazed with grief, were collecting mangled bodies in blankets and shawls and piling them on three tractors. People were still missing, he said.
Mr. Agha, who lives in Granai, said the bombing started at 5 p.m. on Monday and lasted until late into the night. "People were rushing to go to their relatives’ houses, where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way," he said.
In her earlier statement regarding the bombing, Clinton told Hamid Karzai "there will be a joint investigation by your government and ours."
But before that investigation began, the Pentagon was already using its unnamed officials to blame the Taliban. It also bears remembering that the U.S. track record of thoroughly "investigating" U.S. massacres is pathetic. The UN said there was convincing evidence that last year's U.S. attack on the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan killed 90 civilians, but the military only acknowledged 30 civilian deaths.
Standing between Hamid Karzai and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday, Obama said the U.S. would "make every effort" to avoid civilian deaths in both countries (which are regularly bombed by the U.S.). But as he was making those remarks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was arriving in Kabul on Wednesday "to make sure that preparations were moving forward for the troop increase and that soldiers and Marines were getting the equipment they needed."
Jessica Barry, a spokesperson for the ICRC said, "With more troops coming in, there is a risk that civilians will be more and more vulnerable."
Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.
© 2009 Rebel Reports All rights reserved.
View this story online at: After U.S. Strikes, Afghans Describe 'Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies' | | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/story/139881/)