Re-reporting, editing, comment by Carolyn Bennett
“No man, for any considerable period,
can wear one face to himself,
and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered
as to which may be the true.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, 1850—
U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS
AFGHANISTAN
Ten people died and 25 suffered wounds today during three attacks on civilians in the Shirin Tagab district, Faryab province of the north and in the Khost province of the east of Afghanistan. Roadside bombs, IEDs, and suicide bombs reportedly caused the deaths. Among the civilian dead were women and four children.
Earlier on Saturday, three rockets fired into the heart of Kabul, the capital, and one landed close to the presidential palace. Last Sunday, five suicide attackers targeted a bank in the eastern city of Jalalabad; 40 people died and 70 suffered wounds in that incident. Last month Taliban suicide bombers attacked two shopping centers in Kabul.
•
Foreign forces and Afghans are debating who inflicted burns on Afghan children, Afghan parents or foreign forces.
Quoting unidentified sources, the Washington Post “reported Tuesday that Gen. David Petraeus, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, had suggested that Afghans might have intentionally burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties.”
On the other side, the director of the health department for Kunar province, Assadulah Fazeli, in his comments on patients from the Ghazi Abad district, said, though he did not know where or when the children had sustained the injuries, “all [the children’] injuries were caused by a bomb. The burns “were consistent with an explosion…. [The children's] are all from the same family and all the injuries they have are multiple wounds from a bomb. This has been determined by the doctors in the hospital that the wounds are from an air strike and each one of these patients has multiple wounds on different parts of their bodies.”
Foreign coalition forces are conducting an investigation into claims that international troops killed scores of civilians in northeast Afghanistan.
•
U.S. Army Colonel Patrick Hynes is investigating allegations by Kunar province governor Fazilullah Wahidi that U.S.-led NATO forces killed up to 63 people, including women and children in air strikes on suspected rebels and Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s accusations that “about 50 civilians have been martyred during international military forces operations in Ghaziabad district in Kunar province.”
•
U. S. Generals’ war according to ROLLING STONE —
“The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in ‘psychological operations’ to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war,” Michael Hastings writes in a February 23 Rolling Stone magazine article. “When an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators....
“The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war.
“‘My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,’ says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders.‘ I am prohibited from doing that to our own people.
“‘When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.’... According to the Defense Department’s own definition, psy-ops – the use of propaganda and psychological tactics to influence emotions and behaviors – are supposed to be used exclusively on ‘hostile foreign groups.’
“The incident offers an indication of just how desperate the U.S. command in Afghanistan is to spin American civilian leaders into supporting an increasingly unpopular war.
U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS
PAKISTAN
In the latest on this case of impunity, a United States CIA agent and former Blackwater operative accused in the double murder of two men last month “refuses to sign Pakistan’s charge sheet.”
Some 2,000 people protested Friday in Lahore rejecting immunity for Davis and demanding justice in the murder case. Organized by the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party, the rally was attended by family members of all three Pakistanis killed in the January 27 incident.
Agence France-Presse reports the hearing in the murder case against Raymond Davis took place amid high security in Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore where [Davis] is being held and was adjourned until March 3. Public prosecutor Abdul Samad told AFP, “Davis refused to sign the copy insisting that he be released and claiming that he enjoys immunity.”
Under international laws, embassy diplomats have full diplomatic immunity whereas consular officials are liable for detention in case of grave crimes.
The revelation that Davis was a CIA contractor — when making the arrest after the January 27 shooting, police found a “Glock pistol, four loaded magazines, a GPS navigation system and a small telescope in his car” — has further strained Pakistan’s fragile government and further inflamed “public mistrust of Washington.”
•
Four people died Friday when militants or rebels in northwest Pakistan, on the outskirts of the city of Peshawar, “blew up at least 11 tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in neighboring Afghanistan.”
Pakistan closed its main northwestern border crossing to NATO supply vehicles for 11 days last September after a cross-border NATO helicopter assault killed two Pakistani soldiers.
An assistant who had been in the cab of the tanker on Friday and sustained burn wounds told reporters, “Some of [the attackers] had covered their faces with masks and ordered all drivers to get down then began planting some gadgets… They shouted that the tankers were supplying fuel to America, which is our enemy and warned us to leave the tankers, which are being blown up.”
U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS
Domestic WAR ON TERROR
Foreign Student Arrested on Terror Charges
In the U.S. State of Texas, a Saudi national was arrested on terrorism charges. In the United States on a student visa, Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari was accused of “purchasing chemicals and equipment with the intent to make a bomb, his alleged targets former U. S. president George W. Bush and three former U.S. military officials stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where scores of Iraqis were tortured.” White House spokesperson Jay Carney announced the arrest.
U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS
IRAQ
Iraqi protesters not unlike those in other parts of the Middle East took to the streets of Hawija denouncing government corruption and demanding better services. In clashes presumably with government or military forces two people died and 20 suffered wounds. In Ramadi, 15 people died and 21 suffered wounds after a suicide bomb exploded.
•
An estimated 5,000 Iraqis demonstrated (seven died) on Friday in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, Agence France-Presse reported. Protesters threw stones, shoes and plastic bottles at riot police and soldiers blocking off Jumhuriyah Bridge and “overturned two concrete blast walls, which had been erected to seal off access to Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, home to the U.S. embassy and parliament.”
After the prime minister claimed that Al-Qaeda insurgents and loyalists of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein had organized the demonstrations, security forces imposed a citywide ban on vehicles and brought out water cannons. The government imposed similar curfews on the central cities of Samarra, Tikrit and Baquba, and the western city of Ramadi — all places that endured some of the worst violence after the 2003 U.S. invasion ousted the Iraqi president.
Transparency International has rated Iraq the fourth most corrupt country in the world. Nearly eight years since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country, Iraq “suffers poor electricity and water provision, and high unemployment.”
Rallies across U.S.-occupied Iraq are calling for “improved public services, more jobs and less corruption, and broader political reforms.”
•
IRAQ’s OIL
One person died Saturday and an oil refinery in the Iraqi town of Baiji shut down following a fire started by a bomb attack. The Agence France Presse (Jane Arraf) report from Baghdad quoted the deputy director of the state-owned North Oil Company saying that unknown gunmen equipped with silencers infiltrated the biggest refinery in the Baiji refining complex, laid Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in several operational units and fled before detonating them.
Iraq has three major refineries in Baiji (with an overall capacity of 290,000 barrels, operating at 70 per cent capacity before the attack) in the north, Basra in the south, and Dora in south Baghdad with a combined capacity to handle 550,000 barrels per day of crude. Attacks in Iraq “still occur on a daily basis.”
AFRICA
Rising
The editor of Pambazuka Online, an advocacy website for social justice in Africa, writes, “Egypt is in Africa” and warns that we should not fall for attempts by the North “to segregate countries of North Africa from the rest of the continent.” Their histories have been intertwined for millennia,” Firoze Manji says.
Globalization and the accompanying economic liberalization create circumstances in which the people of the global South share very similar experiences:
Increasing pauperization, growing unemployment, declining power to hold their governments to account, declining income from agricultural production, increasing accumulation by dispossession — something that is growing on a vast scale — and increasing willingness of governments to comply with the political and economic wishes of the North.
“… Most American media compulsively ignore everything south of the Sahara and north of Johannesburg. A demonstration has to be filmed, photographed, streamed-live into the offices of foreign leaders to achieve everything Egypt’s achieved.” This “journalistic shortcoming, says Nanjala, a political analyst at the University of Oxford, “‘stems from journalists’ tendency to favor explanations that fit the whole ‘failing Africa’ narrative.’”
U.S. President Barack Obama publicly condemns the use of violence in Bahrain, Yemen and Libya but “when was the last time you saw Obama come out and make a statement on Ivory Coast, or Eastern Congo, or Djibouti where 20,000 people protested over the past weekend?”
Twenty African countries among them Zimbabwe and Nigeria have scheduled elections for 2011; but as food prices continue to rise and economic hardship tightens its grip on the region, it is plausible to imagine Africans revolting and using means other than the often-meaningless ballot box to remove their leaders.
“What people want is the democratization of society, of production, of the economy, and indeed all aspects of life,” says Manji. “What they are being offered instead is the ballot box but elections don’t address the fundamental problems that people face. Elections on their own do nothing to enable ordinary people to determine their own destiny.…
“It is difficult to quantify the role of social media in the popular uprisings gaining momentum across the Arab world but it is even more difficult to quantify the effect of the perception of being ignored — of not being watched, discussed and, well, retweeted to the throngs of others needing to be heard.
“Ignoring the developments in Africa is to miss half the story.”
U.S.-led
WAR DEAD?
Casualty sites reporting February 26, 2011
(Accurate totals unknown)
• Anti-war dot com Casualties in Iraq since March 19, 2003
[U.S. war dead since the Obama inauguration January 20, 2009: 211]
Wounded 32,967-100,000
U.S. veterans with brain injuries 320,000
Suicides estimated: 18 a day
Latest update on this site: February 25, 2011
http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/
• Iraq Body Count
Worldwide update on civilians killed in the Iraq war and occupation— Documented civilian deaths from violence
99,712 – 108,866
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
• ICasualties figures:
IRAQ: 4,439 U.S.; 4,757 Coalition
AFGHANISTAN: 1,483 U.S.; 2,341 Coalition
http://icasualties.org/oif/
•
Migrations in fear fleeing conflict then ostracized and rejected by the West are, in the first instance, caused by the West’s new colonization, invasion and occupation, and by Western-stoked conflict among factions who carry arms sold/trafficked/traded to them by the West.
Consequences of
FLAWED FOREIGN RELATIONS POLICY
Focusing on terrorism and immigration, Western countries have damaged their own interests, says Jeremy Keenan, a research associate at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
“Whether it is the French, the Americans or the British, the preoccupation with Islamists and terrorism has undermined Western intelligence services’ ability to understand political and social dynamics in the region.”
“North African leaders have worked with the West against Islamists and migrants — becoming more repressive as a result.…
Adding fuel to the fire, European Union member nations’ arms exports to Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco rose significantly over the past five years. “Arms export licenses from the EU to the four countries,” according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), “rose from $1.3 billion to $2.7 billion in 2009.”
Western nations and leaders, acting out of their own interests, have supported anti-democratic leaders, supported corruption, and destroyed peoples and nations.
Uprisings in North Africa lay bare Western governments’ relationships with regimes in the region— relationships long “fixated on anti-terrorism, immigration and oil.” Keenan says, “These states have become more repressive in the knowledge that they have the backing of the West.”
“‘People aspire to freedom, and they haven’t been able to enjoy that freedom, partly thanks to the support of Western countries.’”
•
“No man, for any considerable period,
can wear one face to himself,
and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered
as to which may be the true.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, 1850—
Sources and notes
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 15th and 125th anniversary edition revised and enlarged John Bartlett, ed. Emily Marison Beck, Little, Brown and Company, 1980; Also quote variation at Thinkexist.com http://thinkexist.com/quotation/no_man-for_any_considerable_period-can_wear_one/14333.html
Nathaniel (b. ‘Hathorne’) Hawthorne (1804-1864): U.S. writer of short stories, biography and novels born in Salem and spent adult life in Concord, Massachusetts, friend of Henry David Thoreau. Among Hawthorne works Twice-Told Tales (1837); The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851); after European travels, The Marble Faun (1860) and Our Old Home (1863)
“Civilians killed in Afghan attacks — Children and women among at least 10 killed and 25 injured in violence across the country,” February 26, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2011/02/2011226111723677780.html#
“Tensions rise over Afghan civilian deaths” (Associated Press), February 25, 2011; original URL of this page is:
http://topnews360.tmcnet.com/topics/associated-press/articles/2011/02/25/148469-tensions-rise-over-afghan-civilian-deaths.htm
“NATO accused of killing 50 civilians in air strikes,” February 20, 2011; February 21: (Ben Farmer, Kabul): a “morning blast in the northern province of Kunduz took the death toll from a recent wave of attacks on government buildings and security forces to over 100”;
February 14: “Suicide bomber attacks up-scale market shopping center” Scores of Afghan civilians, police and soldiers have died in recent weeks in a string of bloody bombings.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8338713/Taliban-suicide-bomber-kills-30-in-attack-on-government-office.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8336818/Nato-accused-of-killing-50-civilians-in-air-strikes.html
“Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators,” February 10, 2011,
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/another-runaway-general-army-deploys-psy-ops-on-u-s-senators-20110223
“Pakistan Trial of CIA Operative Adjourns,” Democracy Now headlines (According to Reuters, two U.S. citizens were quietly withdrawn from Pakistan last month after causing a fatal car accident as they came to Davis’s aid. A police report says the pair struck a Pakistani motorist, only to flee the scene. … On Thursday, Pakistan’s main spy agency, the ISI, announced it is scaling back cooperation with the CIA), February 25, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/25/headlines
“U.S. shooter refuses to sign Pakistan charge sheet,” (AFP), http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20110225/twl-us-pakistan-unrest-shooting-court-di-4bdc673.html
“Four die as NATO tankers attacked in Pakistan” (AFP), February 25, 2011, http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20110225/twl-pakistan-unrest-nato-northwest-4bdc673.html
“Seven killed on Iraq ‘Day of Rage’ AFP - Saturday, February 26, 2011, http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20110225/twl-iraq-politics-unrest-575b600.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/25/headlines
“Blast prompts Iraq refinery closure — At least one employee dead after attack sets alight facility that produces 11 million litres of petroleum a day.” February 26, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/201122654436778763.html#
Yasmine Ryan, February 25, 2011, Yasmine Ryan on Twitter @yasmineryan, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/02/201121310169828350.html#
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/02/201122164254698620.html#
The arms business has a devastating impact on human rights and security, and damages economic development. Large-scale military procurement and arms exports only reinforce a militaristic approach to international problems — The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) in the UK works to end the international arms trade. In seeking to end the arms trade, CAAT’s priorities are —
To stop the procurement or export of arms where they might: Exacerbate conflict, support aggression, or increase tension • Support an oppressive regime or undermine democracy • Threaten social welfare through the level of military spending
To end all government political and financial support for arms exports; and
To promote progressive demilitarization within arms-producing countries
CAAT considers that security needs to be seen in much broader terms that are not dominated by military and arms company interests. A wider security policy would have the opportunity to reallocate resources according to actual threats and benefits, including addressing major causes of insecurity such as inequality and climate change. CAAT values the diversity of opinion amongst its supporters and is committed to nonviolence in all its work, http://www.caat.org.uk/about/
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Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]
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