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| U.S. War on Terror Caused |
Presumed Enemy’s Enemy: USA
Re-reporting, editing, commentary by Carolyn Bennett
America indoctrinates the young, the ideologues, the clueless, the indifferent in the false belief that “they” (Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Somalis, Iranians, Malians, Pakistanis, Turks, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorans, Muslims, an endless list of expedient enemies and pretexts) are America’s enemies.
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| U.S. War on Terror Caused |
Indoctrinated by invader nations into the belief that a sovereign
people are their enemies, soldiers
land among them; and in their time among sovereigns, in their aggression, their
occupation and in their departing ─ soldiers and invader nations become the enemy of a sovereign
people.
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| Pakistani coffins |
Limitless Consequences
“Invade a series of countries. Drop millions of pounds of
ordnance on heavily populated cities. Destroy infrastructure. Murder millions
of people. Cause incalculable suffering. And feel not an ounce of remorse or
regret,” Lebanese-American journalist Mark Glenn wrote this week at Press TV
news. A couple of his thoughts resonated with me.
In the contemporary “world of post-destruction Iraq, Syria,
Libya,
Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon and others, it is more than a little
believable that someone” from the neighborhood of one of these countries “might
harbor enough of a grudge to strike back.… It is entirely believable, even
expectable,” that ─ from a people in the throes of “raw and powerful emotions” after
seeing unspeakable harm inflicted on family members ─ there might emerge “a few who
decide to pull an ‘Uncle Sam.’” |
| U.S. War on Terror Afghanistan's dead |
I
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believe in neither offensive or preemptive violence nor violence
as justice. But I understand Afghans’ emotions expressed in news accounts
covering the case of a U.S. soldier who, made to believe “they” are our
enemies, turns us into “theirs”: a 2012 massacre of a sovereign people.
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| U.S. War on Terror |
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| American coffins |
“If someone entered your house and killed the children and
old men and women of the family, what would your response be?” asked Haji
Baran, whose brother died in yet another massacre carried out in the course of
the U.S. “War on Terror.”
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| Iraqi coffins |
Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, age 39, recipient of medals by
the U.S. government during his combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, has admitted
to leaving his post in the Afghan province of Kandahar last March and then gunning
down and setting fire to unarmed villagers ─ mostly women and children ─ asleep
on their family compounds. Bales had been charged with walking off a U.S.
outpost in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province in the early morning of
March 11, 2012, and shooting or stabbing to death the Afghan civilians.
According wire services and the Guardian, “The U.S. Army insists that Bales
acted alone (but) an Afghan fact-finding mission has found that the American
trooper was not the only perpetrator of the crime and that up to 20 U.S.
soldiers collaborated in the carnage.”
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| Gaza's dead |
In a military court this week in the U.S. State of
Washington, the soldier pleaded guilty of the crimes. In adherence to the plea deal,
he provided detail of the carnage. The military judge, Colonel Jeffery Nance, this
week accepted the guilty plea. In August, a jury will decide the length of his
life sentence: life with the possibility of parole or life without the
possibility of parole.
press+tv.jpg) |
| U.S. in Afghanistan |
How much is a life (whose life) worth?
BBC March 25, 2012
After the Kandahar massacre, the United States (U.S.
military), according to Afghan officials and tribal elders, paid death dollars
to Afghan family members who survived the U.S. attack ─
$46,000 (£29,000) for each person
killed
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| U.S. in Afghanistan |
$10,000 (£6,300) for each person
injured
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| U.S. in Afghanistan |
Guardian June 2, 2013
In Afghan tradition, payments of this sort are usually
handed out after a killing in order to end hostilities between families. According
to this tradition, if a family accepts the payment, they “renounce the right to
avenge the death.” Though handed out by
U.S. and Afghan governments for seemingly similar reasons, some Afghan
villagers consider the payments equivalent to “blood money.”
Many Afghans are angry. Some had called for trial before an
Afghanistan court instead of a U.S. military court. Many have called for the
death penalty. Some have pledged revenge for the 2012 massacre by the accused,
U.S. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.
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| U.S. in Afghanistan |
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| U.S. in Afghanistan |
Though “‘it is their right to take the money,’” said Abdul
Halim Noorzai, a former mujahedeen commander from Panjwai district; doing so
relinquishes their “‘rights to decide (the U.S. soldier’s) punishment. ….
Relatives of the people who were killed and wounded,’” Noorzai said, “‘have
already sold their bodies to the Americans.’”
Immeasurable Suffering
Guardian November 2012 ─ witness accounts
Night-time killing spree: five hours of chaos and terror
Preliminary hearing testimony of survivors
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| U.S. drone strikes |
“Mohammad Wazir lost 11 members of his family and survived
only because, on the night of the attack, he and one of his sons were away from
home. His cousin, Khamal Adin, recounted going to his home and finding his aunt
dead in the doorway, a gunshot wound to her head. Inside were the partially
burned bodies of six children, Wazir’s wife, and other victims. … ‘Everybody
was shot in the head.’...” |
| U.S. in Afghanistan |
A young girl hiding behind her father saw him shot and dying
in agony.
One boy saw his grandmother wrestle with a gunman after the
gunman pushed a pistol into the mouth of her granddaughter.
Other children cowered in a room as the attacker stalked
through their home.
‘We are children, we are children,’
the group shouts, says Quadratullah, whose father, Haji Mohammad Naem, survived
a shot through the throat.
The shooter ‘jumped from the wall
and I saw the light on his head … He just started shooting me.
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| U.S. in Afghanistan |
Naem had been awakened by gunshots and barking dogs and went
out to investigate. The gunman’s head lamp dazzled a family used to living
without electricity and no one from the house said they would be able to
identify the shooter.
“A bullet fractured the skull of Naem’s younger son,
Sadiquallah, who said he had been awakened by a neighbor screaming that an
American had killed their men.”
Sixteen civilians died in the five-hour massacre. Nine of the
dead were children.
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| U.S. in Afghanistan protested |
he scale of his massacre “shocked Afghanistan and the West,”
the Guardian wrote. But airstrikes have caused “far larger death tolls” and these
have been accepted as mere “tragic mistakes” ─ at least in the “home countries”
of the foreign troops who committed the massacres.
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| Middle East South/Central Asia Sovereign peoples protest USA |
Through elected officials and their tribes and agents and
corporate connections, America indoctrinates the young, the ideologues, the clueless,
the indifferent in the false belief that “they” (Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans,
Somalis, Iranians, Malians, Pakistanis, Turks, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Russians, Chinese,
Cubans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorans, Muslims, an endless list of expedient enemies
and pretexts) are America’s enemies ─ all the while weakening America and making
America the enemy of countless nations and peoples. We are on the wrong wave
and unless we rid the helm of a cabal whose character is violence we will never
steer this ship into progressive waters.
Sources and notes
“Boston massacre: Bibi’s ‘gift’ to Americans” (Mark Glenn, a
Lebanese-American journalist and author of several books focusing on the
dangers of Zionist power; co-founder of the Crescent and Cross Solidarity
Movement, an organization set up to refute the Zionist [inaccuracies]
perpetrated against Islam and to bring Christians and Muslims together against a
“common enemy”), June 6, 2013 12:34PM GMT, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/06/307488/boston-massacre-bibis-gift-to-us/
“Afghans demand arrest of U.S. troops over killings” KABUL,
Afghanistan—“Hundreds of Afghans blocked a major highway south of Kabul on
Tuesday, carrying freshly dug-up bodies they claimed were victims of torture by
U.S. Special Forces and demanding that the Americans be arrested, officials
said. A spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition said the claims are
false” (RAHIM FAIEZ Associated Press News Fuze, Associated Press writers Kay
Johnson and Patrick Quinn contributed to this report; Posted: DenverPost.com),
http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_23382908/afghanistan-road-bomb-kills-3-children-fatheroutput
“Afghans furious at Bales plea bargain ─ Relatives of the 16
Afghan villagers who were killed by an American trooper last March in southern
Afghanistan are furious at a plea bargain that could save him from execution in
return for confessing to the murders,”
June 2, 2013 10:51PM GMT,
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/02/306855/afghans-furious-at-bales-plea-bargain/
“A military judge has accepted a guilty plea by the US
soldier charged with killing 16 Afghan civilians in two villages last year,”
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afghan-massacre-suspect-pleads-guilty-161933542.html#V6IR9cw
“Robert Bales: Soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians pleads
guilty ─ In chilling account of Kandahar slaughter, Robert Bales says there is
'not a good reason in the world' for what he did” (Reuters, guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 6 June 2013 02.46 EDT),
“Relatives of murdered Afghans demand death for American
sergeant ─ Staff Sergeant Robert Bales due to plead guilty to March 2012
massacre of 16 people, in return for life sentence), (Emma Graham-Harrison in
Kabul, guardian.co.uk), June 2, 2013
09.58 EDT),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/02/afghanistan-murders-staff-sergeant-robert-bales?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
“Afghan massacre: Kandahar families given compensation ─The
Panjwai district shooting spree has rocked already tense Kabul-Washington
relations,” Also: U.S. staff sergeant Robert Bales was charged on Friday with
17 counts of premeditated murder. Meanwhile, eight Afghan police officers and
an Isaf foreign soldier have been killed by a bomb in Kandahar province. They
were on patrol when they were hit by an improvised explosive device late on
Saturday, officials said. ‘Four Afghan local police and three national police,
one ISAF soldier and one Afghan interpreter were killed,’ Shah Mohammad,
administrator for Arghandab district, said,”
March 25, 2013,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17503733
“Afghan massacre witnesses recount killing spree ─ Sergeant
Robert Bales accused of worst attack on civilians by a single American soldier
in decade-long conflict in Afghanistan” (Emma Graham-Harrison and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 11, 2012 13.08 EST,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/11/afghan-massacre-witnesses-killing-spree
Bennett's books are 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]; 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] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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