“We must be capable of resolving conflicts without bloodshed”— Eddie Vedder

“A remarkable species capable of creating beauty and awe-inspiring advancements”…; the existence of global technological achievements, “enhanced communication and information devices”— must we reduce ourselves to accepting “the devastating reality that conflict is resolved by bombs, murder, and acts of barbarism?” 

From Pearl Jam News July 16, 2014, statement by musician Eddie Vedder

Copied with minor edit by Carolyn Bennett

I don’t know how to process the guilt and complicity I feel when hearing of the deaths of civilian families, resulting from strikes by U.S. drones; but I know we cannot let sadness turn to apathy. I do know we are better off when we reach out to one other.

Imagine That—I’m Still Anti-War

Most of us have heard John Lennon sing: ‘You may say I’m a dreamer… but I’m not the only one.’

And some of us, after another morning dose of news coverage full of death and destruction, feel the need to reach out to others to see if we are not alone in our outrage. With about a dozen assorted ongoing conflicts in the news every day, with the stories becoming more horrific—the level of sadness becomes unbearable.  

What becomes of our planet when … sadness becomes apathy?  Because we feel helpless, we turn our heads and turn the page.

… I’m full of hope.

That hope springs from the multitude of people that our band has been fortunate enough to play for night after night…. To see flags of so many different nations; to have huge crowds gather peacefully and joyfully is the exact inspiration behind the words I felt the need to emphatically relay.

When attempting at a rock concert to make a plea for more peace in the world, we are reflecting the feelings of all those we have come in contact with—so that we may all have a better understanding of each other.  

That’s not something I’m going to stop anytime soon.

Call me naïve. I’d rather be naïve, heartfelt, and hopeful than resigned to say nothing for fear of misinterpretation and retribution.

The majority of human beings on this planet are more consumed with the pursuit of love, health, family, food and shelter than with any kind of war.

War hurts. 

It hurts no matter on which sides the bombs fall.

W

ith all the global achievements in modern technology, enhanced communication and information devices, cracking the human genome, land rovers on Mars … ─ do we really have to resign ourselves to the devastating reality that conflict will be resolved with bombs, murder, acts of barbarism?  We are such a remarkable species: Capable of creating beauty ● Capable of awe-inspiring advancements.

We must be capable of resolving conflicts without bloodshed.

I don’t know how to reconcile the peaceful rainbow of flags we see each night at our concerts with the daily news of a dozen global conflicts and their horrific consequences. I don’t know how to process the feeling of guilt and complicity when I hear about the deaths of a civilian family from a U.S. drone strike. 

But I know that we can’t let the sadness turn into apathy. I do know we are better off when we reach out to each other.

‘I hope someday you’ll join us…’ Won’t you listen to what the Lennon said?   

— Eddie Vedder —

Further notes

http://pearljam.com/news/0/1/22387/imagine_that_--_i%E2%80%99m_still_anti-war

An Illinois-born American musician “known for his social and political views” and famously “known for his distinctive and powerful vocals” (on compilation by Rolling Stone ranked at #7 on a list of ‘Best Lead Singers of All Time’), Eddie Vedder is “best known for being the lead vocalist and one of three guitarists of the alternative rock band Pearl Jam.” Ament, Gossard, and McCready  formed Pearl Jam in 1990 and “recruited Vedder and three different drummers in sequence.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Vedder

____________________________________________________


A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

____________________________________________________

Presidential rhetoric assessed as contradictory, dismissive, mendacious

Endless USA UAVs kill while claiming end of war; USA policies kill worker chances while claiming pro-labor values

Excerpts, editing, end comment by 

Carolyn Bennett

Flashback briefly to a significant presidency: One of America’s founders, James Madison Jr. (b. 1751 in Port Conway, Virginia, d. 1836 in Montpelier, Virginia) was the fourth president of the United States (1809–1817). He influenced the planning and ratification of the U.S. Constitution and collaborated with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in the publication of the Federalist papers. As a member of the new House of Representatives, James Madison sponsored the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution, commonly called the Bill of Rights. He was secretary of state under US President Thomas Jefferson when the Louisiana Territory was purchased from France. The War of 1812 was fought during Madison’s presidency [Britannica note]. 

U

S Domestic affairs—Ralph Nader on the US president’s latest State of the Union rhetoric 

Destruction, rights abuse, corruption 

The President “stressed civil liberties and never mentioned what he’s going to do about the renewal of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act provisions. 

“He said there should be more oil and gas production and then he warned about climate change. 

“He said there should be a strengthening of unions and voices of workers and then he took it away with the Trans-Pacific trade agreement

[Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)], which exports jobs, and he wants to ram through Congress a voiceless fast track that prohibits amendments and labor from having a role in that deliberation.”

The President “didn’t even mention the hundreds of billions of dollars of commercial fraud on Medicare and Medicaid and patients in the private sector—hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars of corporate crime.”

The President “could have done a convergence with the Republicans on auditing the Pentagon, which … is a huge issue supported by the rank and file on both sides of the isle.” The grounds for this is that when the president was a US Senator, “he teamed up with Republican Senator Coburn to put the full text of hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate contracts online so that competitors, taxpayers, media and academia could analyze and prune the huge waste, fraud and corruption.” 

Oklahoma physician and politician Thomas Allen (Tom) Coburn arrived in the US Senate at the same as Barack Obama and reportedly the two became friends, despite ideological differences. Before his election to the Senate, Coburn was a member of the US House of Representatives. Again, in his final years in office, the president missed an obvious opportunity for making common cause.

Torture, illegal detention

Nader continues. The President “said, again, ‘Close down Gitmo’” [the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba], a “song … we have heard before. Also the president again in this speech failed entirely to address the heart of the Middle East struggle, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

The President failed to mention where money would come from for programs he mentioned and failed to mention a critical source of lost or uncollected funds: the Internal Revenue Service budget being squeezed by the Republicans to the extent that the agency cannot “begin collecting what the IRS says is $300 billion of evaded (not avoided but evaded) taxes every year.”

In sum, Nader says, the President’s speech lacked essential specifics. It was insufficiently coherent and failed to articulate convergence with the other major political party. The President, he said, “missed a lot of opportunities.”

M

endacious rhetoric: Foreign relations “values” soaked with the blood of millions— Institute for Policy Studies Fellow Phyllis Bennis also today on Democracy Now

The United States under the current president is “in at least five or six separate wars that may not involve large numbers of ground troops.

“[However] There are troops on the ground” and more not fewer are being deployed; but “there are primarily air wars.”

Values licensing to kill

Phyllis Bennis said, “Closing Guantánamo [the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba] is easier if you just kill all the people that your predecessor arrested. So there’s something very disturbing about this framework in [the President’s] speech where he spoke so much of values.

“This is about the values of our country [but] what values are we talking about here? What does the rest of the world—what do people in Iraq, people in Syria, people in Gaza—what are they seeing of our values as they watched the speech last night?”

Unconscionable killing by remote

“It was extraordinary… -- this notion of constraining drone strikes, which means that we only have a ‘kill meeting’ at the White House once a week; not every day. Only on Tuesdays does the White House staff meet, literally, to decide who should be on the so-called ‘kill list’.

Repeating an astonishing yet true statement, Bennis continued, “When I said earlier that this is a scenario where closing Guantánamo becomes easier if you have fewer people—it is not because they are not going after people.…

They are simply assassinating people—at far higher numbers. There has been a serious escalation in the drone war.

“…To say that instead of going to war, we are pulling back, we are doing something else… belies the reality of what the drone war looks like on the ground.” 

I

n my view, there should be no tribal politics of any kind, no taking of one or another side—whatever the color, cast or ideology of the side—when faced with such barefaced betrayal and utter mendacity on the part of public officials against the public good. 

Sources and notes

“Ralph Nader on What was Missing in President Obama’s State of the Union Address,” Democracy Now, January 21, 2015, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/21/ralph_nader_on_what_was_missing

“Phyllis Bennis: As Obama Hails ‘Turning Page’ on Wars, U.S. Drone Strikes Continue Across Globe,” Democracy Now January 21, 2015, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/21/phyllis_bennis_as_obama_hails_turning

Ralph Nader

Veteran consumer advocate, author, critic, and former candidate for the US presidency, Ralph Nader, his latest book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.

Phyllis Bennis

U.S. journalist, activist, and political commentator Phyllis Bennis is Director of New Internationalism at the Institute for Policy Studies.  The New Internationalism project “works to challenge U.S. domination of the UN and to help democratize and empower the global organization,” according to its website. It works primarily on Middle East and United Nations issues with key areas of interest including U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Instrumentally, the NI project focuses on “education and activism to change the failed and failing U.S. policies and retool those policies to meet the goals of peace with justice” [http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/new-internationalism/]

Madison, James. (2013). Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Deluxe Edition.  Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

Proposed as a regional regulatory and investment treaty, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) implementation “has been one of the primary goals of the trade agenda of the Obama administration.… The proposed agreement began in 2005 as the Trans-Pacific Strategic Partnership Agreement (TPSEP or P4) and participating countries set 2012 as the goal for wrapping up negotiations.” However, “contentious issues such as agriculture, intellectual property, and services and investments have caused negotiations to continue past that deadline. … Global health professionals, internet freedom activists, environmentalists, organized labor, advocacy groups, and elected officials have criticized and protested the negotiations, in large part because of the proceedings’ secrecy, the agreement's expansive scope, and controversial clauses in drafts leaked to the public.” As of 2014, twelve countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region have participated in negotiations on the TPP: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership

________________________________________________

A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

________________________________________________

A matter of massacre: Whose death, whose life, who’s mourned; whose truth, whose lies?

Yemeni suffer drone attacks

Reflecting also on impunity

Excerpts, editing, end comment by 

Carolyn Bennett

Complicit in violence, terrorism

A

uthor Teju Cole in the aftermath of an attack on a French magazine peddling "satire" reflected on relatively current and unending massacres.

“France is in sorrow today and will be for many weeks come,” he wrote. “We mourn with France. We ought to but it is also true that violence from ‘our’ side continues unabated.

France's Motto

“By this time next month (February 2015), in all likelihood, many more ‘young men of military age’ and many others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. If these strikes in the past are anything to go by, many of (the dead and wounded) will be innocent of wrongdoing. Their deaths will be considered as natural and incontestable (and) those of us who are writers will not consider our pencils broken by such killings.

“But that incontestability, that unmournability – as much as the massacre in Paris – is the ‘clear and present danger’ to our collective liberté.”

Selective grieving selective victims; selective villains

“The scale, intensity, and manner of the solidarity that we are seeing for the victims of the Paris killings, encouraging as it may be, indicates how easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy.

“This focus is part of the consensus about mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from paying proper attention to other, ongoing, instances of horrific carnage around the world: abductions and killings in Mexico, hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year, internecine massacres in the Central African Republic, and so on.

“Even when we rightly condemn criminals who claim to act in the name of Islam, little of our grief is extended to the numerous Muslim victims of their attacks, whether in Yemen or Nigeria—in both of which there were deadly massacres this week—or in Saudi Arabia, where, among many violations of human rights, the punishment for journalists who ‘insult Islam’ is flogging.

“We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, more worthy of commemoration than others.”

Sustained provocation

Victims of the crimes in Paris that killed more than a dozen people “are being mourned worldwide: they were human beings, beloved by their families and precious to their friends.” Twelve of the victims had been “targeted by (assassins) for their affiliation with satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.”

This magazine “has often aimed (its ridicule) at Muslims and has taken particular joy in flouting the Islamic ban on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.”

The magazine has also targeted political, Christian and Jewish icons; “depicted the ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’ in a sexual threesome. … In recent years the magazine has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations.  Its numerous anti-Islam images have been inventively perverse, featuring hook-nosed Arabs, bullet-ridden Korans, variations on the theme of sodomy; and mockery of the victims of a massacre.”

Cole concludes, “It is not always easy to see the difference between a certain witty dissent from religion and a bullyingly racist agenda, but it is necessary to try.”

Sustained massacre of innocents, Impunity without mourning

T

BIJ reports

Pakistanis suffer drone attacks

“In January 2014, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a leaked Pakistani government document showing details of more than 300 CIA drone strikes between 2006 and 2013.” TBIJ challenged some of the United States’ “rare public statements on its drone campaign in Pakistan.

“In one particularly glaring discrepancy, the document recorded the deaths of 10 people during a 2012 attempt to kill Abu Yahya al Libi, al Qaeda’s second-in-command. Congressional aides told LA Times reporter Ken Dilanian however that the CIA had shown footage of the strike to politicians in which only one person was seen to be killed.”  These are excerpts from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s “Monthly Updates on the Covert War: US drone war” … The CIA Pakistan drone campaign reported to have killed nearly five times more people under US President Barack Obama than under the previous president, George W. Bush. Published in All Stories, Covert Drone War, Monthly Updates on the Covert War by Jack Serle and Abigail Fielding-Smith, January 7, 2015, 2014 in numbers:

No confirmed civilian casualties in Pakistan for second year running 

Domestic buildings continue to be the most frequently hit target in Pakistan 

Highest ever number of drone strikes in a year in Somalia 

Total people killed per strike in Yemen hits highest level 

 Pakistan

Drones were reported to have killed at least 114 people in 2014, more than in all of the previous year. The number of people killed per strike, or casualty rate, also increased slightly.

December 2014 actions

Total CIA strikes in December: 4

Total people reported killed: 14-20

All 2014 actions

Total strikes: 25

Total reported killed: 114-183

Civilians reported killed: 0-2

Children reported killed: 0-2

Total reported injured: 44-67

All actions 2004 – 2014

Total Obama strikes: 357

Total US strikes since 2004: 408

Total reported killed: 2,410-3,902

Civilians reported killed: 416-959

Children reported killed: 168-204

Total reported injured: 1,133-1,706

Yemen

Yemenis suffer US drone attacks

Except one, all of these actions have taken place during the Barack Obama presidency. … Though “the frequency of strikes may have fallen in 2014, more people were killed, on average, per strike than in any previous year. The casualty rate for last year even outstrips 2012 – the bloodiest year recorded in the US’s drone campaign in Yemen when at least 173 people were reported killed in 29 strikes. In 2014 at least 82 people were reported to have died in just 13 strikes.”

December 2014 actions

Confirmed US drone strikes: 1

Other US operations: 1

Total reported killed in all US operations: 20-21

Civilians reported killed in all US operations: 8

All confirmed drone strikes in 2014

US drone strikes: 13-15

Total reported killed: 82-118

Civilians reported killed: 4-9

Children reported killed: 1

Reported injured: 7-14

All actions 2002 – 2014

Confirmed US drone strikes: 72-84

Total reported killed: 371-541

Civilians reported killed: 64-83

Children reported killed: 7

Reported injured: 81-199

Possible extra US drone strikes: 101-120

Total reported killed: 345-553

Civilians reported killed: 26-68

Children reported killed: 6-11

Reported injured: 90-123

All other US covert operations: 16-81

Total reported killed: 168-404

Civilians reported killed: 68-97

Children reported killed: 26-28

Reported injured: 22-115

Somalia

“There were three confirmed US drone strikes in 2014, the most reported in any year. Each US attack reportedly killed a senior al Shabaab figure.” The first drone strike (January 26), reportedly targeting al Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, missed” its target and reportedly killed “Sahal Iskudhuq – said to be one of Godane’s senior aides and a leading figure in Amniyat, al Shabaab’s intelligence unit.” The second drone attack (September 1, 2014) reportedly killed Godane. “[But] it was not clear if Godane had been killed and there was feverish speculation about whether the US had got its man in the days after the strike.”

Somalis suffer US drone attacks

All Somalia actions in 2014

Total US drone strikes: 3

Total reported killed: 10-18

Civilians reported killed: 0

Children reported killed: 0

Somalia December 2014 actions

Total reported US operations: 1

Total reported killed: 2-3

All Somalia actions 2007 – 2014

Drone strikes: 7-10

Total killed: 18-33

Civilians killed: 0-1

Children killed: 0

Injured: 2-3

Other covert operations: 8-11

Total killed: 40-141

Civilians killed: 7-47

Children killed: 0-2

Injured: 11-21

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/01/07/us-drone-war-2014-in-numbers/

The status quo is not only to be mourned but moved, stopped straightaway.

The lives of all people, not some people, are equally valuable; and should not be taken or threatened or even ridiculed under some misguided notion or license termed individual or press "freedom".

What's more, the behavior of the United States of America, my beloved country, through its foreign relations practice, the acts and orders of officials in government and other sectors, is unspeakably cruel, criminal, murderous, indeed UNCONSCIONABLE. And it must change by changing both the guard and the ethos.  

Sources and notes

“Unmournable Bodies” by Teju Cole, New Yorker, January 9, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies

At Stop the War Coalition

“Charlie Hebdo: why are some deaths meaningful”: Teju Cole asks “How is it that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful and more worthy of commemoration than others?” January 10, 2015, Posted in News, http://stopwar.org.uk/news/charlie-hebdo-why-are-some-deaths-meaningful-and-to-be-mourned-and-others-not

Teju Cole

Nigerian-American author, writer, photographer, and art historian, Teju Cole was born in the United States to Nigerian parents, raised in Nigeria; and at 17, returned to the United States. Cole is “Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College”  and before this appointment he was “‘writer in residence’ of the Literaturhaus Zurich and the PWG Foundation in Zurich.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teju_Cole

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

Originating in the French Revolution, example of a tripartite motto, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’, became the national motto of France and of the Republic of Haiti. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9,_%C3%A9galit%C3%A9,_fraternit%C3%A9

See also

Comment with George Galloway: “Which of this week’s terror attacks will you remember?”

January 9, 2015, http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/01/09/392296/Which-terror-attack-will-you-remember

“George Galloway on the Paris massacre” posted by mondeoman, January 8, 2015

Independent Leyton Orient Forum, The Completely Unofficial and Independent Leyton Orient Message Board, http://leytonorientforum.co.uk/topic6663.html

NBC News

PARIS MAGAZINE ATTACK 116 STORIES Headline:"Charlie Hebdo Shooting: 12 Killed at Muhammad Cartoons Magazine in Paris," http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/paris-magazine-attack/charlie-hebdo-shooting-12-killed-muhammad-cartoons-magazine-paris-n281266

Time dot com

"Pris Jews Reel After Deadly Kosher Supermarket Attack," Vivienne Walt / Paris @vivwalt Jan. 11, 2015, http://time.com/3663060/paris-terror-attack-jews-kosher-supermarket-siege/
____________________________________________________________


A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

____________________________________________________________

50 million declare no more human fodder in crossfire of armed groups, armed governments: Dr Hakim

As US re-reneges, ramps up atrocities against Afghans

Editing by Carolyn Bennett

Lies, compounded terror

Common Dreams and other sources reporting from the weekend show US government's terrorizing of Afghans sees no end in sight.

US President Barack Obama’s “secret decision” to increase hostilities in Afghanistan as he has done in Iraq “will keep American troops on the ground and fighting for at least another year.”

 

In his latest change that isn’t, the US president – as if laughing at fools – has given this endless ending a new name. His government calls it “‘Operation Resolute Support.’” However, Common Dreams explains, the United States will continue terrorizing Afghanistan’s people with “F-16 fighter jets, Predator and Reaper drones, and B-1 bombers.”

Endless suffering

 

In Democracy Now interviews today, Dr. Hakim, a physician associated with Afghan Peace Volunteers who have collected many stories from people suffering on the ground, said, “Security in Afghanistan has been deteriorating over the past few years in the face of the ongoing U.S.-NATO military strategy.”

Referencing existing data sources available in the United States, he said, “A global terrorism database done by the U.S. government and the University of Maryland has shown that since the beginning of the ‘war against terror’ in 2001, the number of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and in the rest of the world, in Iraq, etc., have increased.”

 

In view of that graph showing the increase of terrorism, Hakim said, one has to view the war against terrorism as “a cancer that needs to be treated.” And as a physician, he said this is how he views the “war against terror in Afghanistan.” It is a cancer that needs to be treated, not by increasing violence; but treated as a physician would treat sickness.

 

I

n an August 13, 2014, Countercurrents article, he declared, “We are human fodder caught in the crossfire of armed groups and armed governments. The elite 1 percent of armed groups and armed governments are waging economic, environmental and military wars against the people! They, and perhaps we ourselves, too, have lost our imagination and empathy.”

An estimated 50 million human beings worldwide have become refugees.

 

“50 million,” Hakim emphasizes, have been driven from their homes, displaced, forced to migrate “for the self-interests of fighting groups and governments.” These people “have become human beings seeking refuge from fellow human beings.” He continues:

…Whether they are Iraqi Christians, Iraqi Yazidis, Iraqi Muslims, Ukrainian free thinkers, Ukrainian Orthodox Christians and Catholics, Ukrainian Muslims, Palestinian Muslims, Israeli Jews, Syrian Muslims, Syrian Christians, Guatemalan Catholics etc., they are all refugees, and share the risks and crises all refugees face.

…Palestinians, including children who [had taken] refuge in UN schools in Gaza, were nonetheless bombed and killed by the Israeli military [(IDF) in a massacre characterized by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon] as ‘a moral outrage and a criminal act.’

We wish to live differently

Whether war, violence, terror, intervention is perpetrated against Afghanistan, or any country, Hakim says, “If there are 50 million refugees – there ought to at least be 50 million of us working together to divest and boycott, to stop military mobilization and conscription, to take the guilty elite to court, to participate in non-violent direct actions and protests and to provide all kinds of humanitarian assistance.

“There ought to be at least 50 million of us

 working together to restore human dignity and freedom – including the building of small, self-governing, non-violent egalitarian communities, as practical alternatives to the status quo of a large, 1 percent-dominated, violent, unequal world.”

Our response, he said, should be:

‘No to Afghanistan in Ukraine.’

‘No to Ukraine in Afghanistan.’

‘No to wars in the world!’

“We wish to live differently. We no longer want anyone anywhere to be human fodder caught in the crossfire of armed groups and armed governments.”

Sources and notes

“After Vowing to End Combat Mission in Afghanistan, Obama Secretly Extends America’s Longest War,” Monday, November 24, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/24/after_vowing_to_end_combat_mission

“We’re Human Fodder Caught In The Crossfire Of Armed Groups And Armed Governments: The elite 1% of armed groups and armed governments are waging economic, environmental and military wars against the people! They and perhaps we ourselves too have lost our imagination and empathy.” By Dr. Teck Young, August 13, 2014, http://www.mintpressnews.com/author/dr-teck-young/

Article printed from MintPress News: http://www.mintpressnews.com

URL to article: http://www.mintpressnews.com/human-fodder-caught-crossfire-armed-groups-armed-governments/195248/

“International Day of Nonviolence in Afghanistan,” Dr Hakim, October 4, 2014, http://www.countercurrents.org/hakim051014.htm

Countercurrents.org

“Endless War: Obama Secretly Extends US War on Afghanistan: Obama allowed the military to dictate the terms of the endgame in Afghanistan,” Common Dreams staff, November 22, 2014,

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/22/endless-war-obama-secretly-extends-us-war-afghanistan

Dr Hakim, (aka Dr. Teck Young, Wee) “is a medical doctor from Singapore who has done humanitarian and social enterprise work in Afghanistan for the past nine years.” He has been “a friend and mentor to the ‘Afghan Peace Volunteers,’ an inter-ethnic group of young Afghans dedicated to building non-violent alternatives to war.” In 2012, Dr. Hakim received an International Pfeffer Peace Prize. [http://www.mintpressnews.com/author/dr-teck-young/]

The International Pfeffer Peace Prize was established in 1989 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s (FOR) Leo and Freda Pfeffer. Its espoused purpose: to honor people around the world “who are working for peace and justice.” Leo Pfeffer was a US “theoretician on religious liberty and separation of church and state, who had argued these constitutional issues before the US Supreme Court.” He was “a founding member of the Jewish Peace Fellowship.” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/International_Pfeffer_Peace_Prize

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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Scahill talks wars, backfires, beneficiaries and Team Blackwater-Clinton-Obama

US in Iraq

UNCONSCIONABLE US FOREIGN RELATIONS

Editing by Carolyn Bennett 

Journalist and author Jeremy Scahill is founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and  book and documentary Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. 

Scahill appeared today on the New York-based Democracy Now program. These thoughts were particularly on point.  

Pakistanis protest
USA

Deniability and Impunity

Currently at trial on charges of murder and manslaughter are four former Blackwater operatives who were “allegedly involved in a 2007 massacre” in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead when a Blackwater unit indiscriminately opened fire. The four mercenaries have been charged with killing 14 of the 17 Iraqis.

In answering Amy Goodman’s question on this matter, Jeremy Scahill said the incident at Nisour Square in Baghdad “was the worst massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of mercenaries (private contractors) that we know of in Iraq.” But, he said, “It is always the people down the chain that face the consequences.”

Pakistanis protest
USA

While the four accused “should be prosecuted, should be convicted, for what they did and should be in prison, the leadership of Blackwater should also be there.”  Blackwater founder and chief operating officer Erik Prince held these positions when Blackwater was “essentially ‘Murder Incorporated’ in Iraq and when there was a company environment” in which mercenaries “were encouraged to view every Iraqi as the enemy” and when Blackwater operatives “committed many massacres” beyond the massacre at Nisour Square. Scahill takes the view that Prince should also stand trial.

Wikipedia note: The American private military company founded in 1997 by Erik Prince was originally named “Blackwater.” In 2007 the company gained notoriety “when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad [Iraq].” In 2009 Blackwater was renamed “Xe Services.” In late 2010, a group of private investors purchased the company and installed a board of directors and new senior management. In 2011 the former Blackwater assumed the name “Academi.” The company founder, Erik Prince, reportedly “retained the rights to the name Blackwater and has no affiliation with Academi.” In 2014, the company became a division of Constellis Holdings along with Triple Canopy and other security companies that were part of the Constellis Group as the result of an acquisition.

Despite the notoriety of this ever name-changing private military company, the United States federal government continues to employ and partner with it. “The Obama administration contracted the group to provide services for the CIA for $250 million.” Academi subsidiary International Development Solutions in 2013 “received an approximately $92 million contract for State Department security guards.”

Scahill summed up, “Until we as a society stop cutting off who’s held accountable at the lowest ranks, nothing is ever going to fundamentally change.” In other words, no one should be above the law.

Dark Shadows

Libyans protest
USA

As if current President Barack Obama’s ruthless performance were not enough, shadowing in the wings toward the next U.S. presidency is a character “more hawkish” than the current second-term president who, Scahill says, “has emerged as a pretty significant hawk … [in] a totally militarized presidency.”

But the Clintons, Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president, “are two of the most fierce projectors of the politics of the American empire and they [enjoy] very close relationships with some of the most nefarious characters from the [George W., Jeb and George H.W.] Bush family.”  The families together constitute something like a monarchy, Scahill said. (Ah, the perks of cronyism, nepotism, corruption, Yale, Harvard, and legacy hires.)

When she was head of the State Department of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton “acted as though she was also sort of Secretary of Defense.” During her tenure as Secretary, the “State Department,” he reports, “was deeply involved with plotting covert action around the world, using the State Department as cover for CIA operations.”

Hillary Clinton, Scahill said, “is a fierce neoliberal who believes in backing up the so-called ‘hidden hand of the free market’ with merciless, iron-fisted military policies.”

Libyans protest
USA

Backfire

“For many, many decades … U.S. policy has been its own worst enemy in one sense – We have created the very threats we claim to be fighting.”

Every time we kill civilians in drone strikes, Scahill said, “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula becomes stronger in the sense that they have a greater propaganda movement that they can roll out.” But beyond this obvious creation and perpetuation of enemies and violence, the big beneficiary of war is “the war industry.…

Middle East

“Under Mr. Transformative Presidency Barack Obama,” Scahill said, “the administration has been an incredibly great friend to the war industry,” which is the greatest beneficiary of the Obama policy. 

Middle East
Camps

Every Tomahawk cruise missile launched – and coming soon a next-generation- longer-airborne-sustaining jet-propelled drones – ensure that major beneficiary (and major political campaign financing) military industrialist Lockheed Martin and like brands never stop making “a killing off killing.”

Sources and notes

“Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s Orwellian War in Iraq: We Created the Very Threat We Claim to be Fighting,” October 3, 2014,  http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/3/jeremy_scahill_on_obamas_orwellian_war

Journalist and author Jeremy Scahill is founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept; author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and the documentary of the same title, both released in 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Scahill

Blackwater brief at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

Blackwater Baghdad shootings at Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “On September 16, 2007, Blackwater Security Consulting (since renamed Academi) military contractors shot at Iraqi civilians killing 17 and injuring 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad. The killings outraged Iraqis and strained relations between Iraq and Washington. Blackwater guards claimed that the convoy was ambushed and that they fired at the attackers in defense of the convoy. The Iraqi government and Iraqi police investigator Faris Saadi Abdul alleged that the killings were unprovoked. The next day, Blackwater Worldwide’s license to operate in Iraq was temporarily revoked.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Baghdad_shootings

The Clintons

William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton (originally named William Jefferson Blythe III) was the 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001) who in his second term (1998) became the second U.S. president to be impeached.

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton was a lawyer by training who became a member of the U.S. Senate (2001–09) and a U.S. Secretary of State (2009-2013). As wife of the 42nd president of the United States, she was “First Lady” (1993-2001).

Britannica and Wikipedia biographical briefs on the Clintons

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent books in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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