“Schizophrenic Individualism”: Lonely Connection

Children near open sewer
 large slumKibera, Nairobi, Kenya 

In search of “Solidarity,” credible kindness

Excerpting, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett

In her article in “Chronicle of a Mess Foretold,” author and journalist Silvia Swinden writes,  “The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and TTIP (The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, aka U.S.-EU ‘Free’ Trade Agreement) continue hurtling toward their coveted objective:

…to create the largest “free” trade zone ever seen in the world, in reality the largest U.S. and Multinational Corporations area of total control.

Nation states will be powerless to defend themselves (see Argentina v Vulture funds dress rehearsal in the news this week).

"Shock and Awe"
U.S. in Iraq

“China and Russia [are] negotiating the formation of a bloc to slow down this new advance of predatory capitalism. They are even talking about dropping the dollar as the international exchange currency for oil and for the accumulation of reserves.

“We know how that went when Saddam Hussein (sold Iraq’s oil in Euros) and [Muammar al-] Qaddafi (wanted to establish the Gold Dinar to sell Libya’s oil) went that way.

Anti-U.S. demonstration
in Libya

“So it is not surprising that Russia and China want to look big and powerful (in this case there are WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and they will not be hidden, rather likely they will be shown prominently) if the U.S. begins to make noises about ‘protecting human rights’ or ‘bringing democracy’ to their citizens.

“This advance of the neoliberal agenda was not lost to Silo [Argentine writer, philosopher and founder of the Humanist Movement] who in 1991 wrote his ‘First Letter to my Friends’ …. It is interesting to review it," she says, "not only because of its insights about the history of economic power and violence but also because it contains a fresh point of view about the new sensitivity that is developing and the way, a nonviolent way, it can be the basis for an alternative way … ── through reconstruction of the social fabric carried out by simultaneous personal and social change.”

 

This is an excerpt from Swinden’s posting of Silo’s 1991 First Letter to my Friends

“History demonstrates that peoples have advanced when they have demanded their rights from the established powers, and that social progress has clearly not been the result of some automatic trickle down’ of the wealth accumulated by one sector of society.… 

 “The regionalization of markets, like the demands for local and ethnic autonomy, underscores the disintegration of the nation state.… Since economic processes reflect human intentions and interests, in light of events, we see nothing to support the belief that those with control over the well-being of humanity are concerned with overcoming the difficulties of others less privileged than themselves.…”

Protests al-Assy Square
 Hama, Syria 2011

C

hange, Relationships among People

Protests Tahrir Square
Cairo, Egypt 2011

“Our companions at work, school, in sports—even old friends—have all taken on the character of competitors.… 

Anti-war 

Never before has the world been so closely interconnected, yet each day individuals experience a more anguishing lack of communication. 

Never before have urban centers been more populous, yet people speak of their ‘loneliness.’ 

 Never before have people needed human warmth so much as now, but any approach to another in a spirit of kindness and help elicits only suspicion.

Protests
Algiers, Algeria, 2011

 “This is the predicament to which our hapless people [have] been abandoned, each isolated individual being led to believe in the greatest unhappiness that he or she has something important to lose—an ethereal ‘something’ that is coveted by all the rest of humanity!”

H

uman Change

“In sharp contrast to other times, so full of empty phrases meant only to garner external recognition ──today people are beginning to find value in humble and deeply felt work, work done not to enhance one’s self-image, but rather to change oneself and bring about change in one’s immediate environment of family, work, and friendship.

“Those who truly care for people do not disdain this work done without fanfare, this work that proves so incomprehensible to those opportunists who were formed in an earlier landscape of leaders and masses—a landscape in which they learned well how to use others to catapult themselves to society’s heights.

Anti-war 

“When a person comes to the realization that schizophrenic individualism is a dead end,

…when they openly communicate what they are thinking and what they are doing to everyone they know without the ridiculous fear of not being understood,

…when they approach others not as some anonymous mass but with a real interest in each person,

Protests Jordan

…when they encourage teamwork in both the interchange of ideas and the realization of common projects,

…when they clearly demonstrate the need to spread this task of rebuilding the social fabric that others have destroyed,

Iran 1979

…when they feel that even the most ‘unimportant’ person is of greater human quality than some heartless individual whom circumstance has elevated to what is, for now, the pinnacle of success—

“When all this happens, it is because within this person

A.N.S.W.E.R. USA

destiny has once again begun to speak, the destiny that has moved entire peoples along their best evolutionary path, 

the destiny that has been so many times distorted and so many times forgotten, but is always reencountered in the twists and turns of history.

Arab Spring

Sources and notes

“Chronicle of a mess foretold: TTIP and TPP seen from Silo’s 1991 letter,” posted by Silvia Swinden, June 21, 2014, in Humanism and Spirituality, International, International issues, Nonviolence, http://www.pressenza.com/2014/06/chronicle-mess-foretold-ttip-tpp-seen-silos-1991-letter/

Dr. Silvia Swinden is Pressenza London Bureau Chief, retired Forensic Psychiatrist and Coordinator of the World Centre for Humanist Studies in the United Kingdom. She is also author of From Monkey Sapiens to Homo Intentional: The Phenomenology of the Nonviolent Revolution (Adonis & Abbey, London 2006), http://www.dw.de/swinden-dr-silvia/a-17629952

Silo

Argentine writer, philosopher and founder of the Humanist Movement, Silo (pseudonym of Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos) gave speeches and wrote books, short stories, articles and studies related to politics, society, psychology, spirituality and other topics. His years January 6, 1938 – September 16, 2010, Mendoza, Argentina, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Rodr%C3%ADguez_Cobos

Images:

Children near open sewer in Kibera, a large Nairobi, Kenya, slum

Protests (center streaked) in al-Assy Square, Hama (Hamah), central Syria 2011

Protests with flag streamer Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt

Protests (between buildings) Algiers, Algeria

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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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Survival screams! Facing military omnipotence, Gazans crouch helplessly in fear ─ UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights

Protests in Scotland

Grotesque reality passing under radar of world conscience because of the geopolitical shield behind which Israel is given a free pass to do whatever it wishes ─ this morally unendurable circumstance should be politically unacceptable.

It must be actively opposed, globally: by every person, government, and institution of good will, says Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights  

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

From Falk’s opinion and Stop the War Coalition (UK) Newsletter

Yemenis protest
U.S. drone strikes

 Commander in chief of Mendacity and Dissembling

The United States under the present leadership in Washington, the Guardian at UK reports, “has used drones in hundreds of attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.”

Pakistanis protest
U.S. drone strikes

The lead of an article “The full horrific impact of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan” posted late last month at Stop the War UK (David Rose) notes, “Those who push the buttons to fire the missiles call these strikes ‘bug-splats’ [and] bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath.”

Yet, given his murderous actions during his four years in office, the U.S. president acts as if his violent, repeated breach of Pakistan's and Yemen's and Somalia’s sovereignty is somehow other than what it is; and in the face of Israel’s raw, violent, irrational aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, he makes this ridiculously absurd statement:

Somalis suffer
U.S. drone strikes

There’s no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.

Really?

I

n the latest edition of its newsletter, Stop the War Coalition responds, “This [statement] from a U.S. president whose first term was characterized by raining down missiles on citizens from outside U.S. borders − in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia ─ and was comfortable enough with the atrocity to make jokes about his use of pilotless drone attacks. (See http://bit.ly/Sg2Ift)

“As for the possibility of a land invasion, which Benjamin Netanyahu is intimating could be imminent; [U.S. President Barack] Obama says it would be ‘preferable’ if this could be avoided ‘because if Israeli troops are in Gaza, they’re much more at risk of incurring fatalities or being wounded.’ 

U.S. drone launch

“[The U.S. President] will give his unqualified support to Israel ─ whatever carnage and mass slaughter is inflicted on the people of Gaza.

“As will the British government with David Cameron and William Hague both parroting Barack Obama in supporting Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, using the world’s fourth most powerful military to bombard a defenseless population of 1.7 million Palestinians trapped in a strip of land which across its narrowest point is barely six miles wide.”

Since the start of this latest raw aggression by Israel, scores of Palestinians have died unspeakable deaths, schools and other structures have been destroyed; and responding “hundreds of towns and cities across the world have begun demonstrating against Israel’s onslaught.” (See excellent video of London protest: http://bit.ly/S7yMmA)

Unacceptable tactics

I

AFP image of Gaza at Al Jazeera

n an opinion piece at Al Jazeera posted over the weekend, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights wrote …

The intensity of air and sea strikes against the helpless people of Gaza strikes terror in the hearts and minds of every person living in the Strip, a form of indiscriminate violence against the spirit and mental health of an entire people that cannot be measured in blood and flesh, but by reference to the traumatizing fear that has been generated.

Professor Richard Falk continued: “We hear many claims in the West as to a supposed decline in international warfare since the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. Such claims are to some extent a welcome development.”

Rafah protests

However, “the people of the Middle East have yet to benefit from this trend ─ least of all the people of Occupied Palestine; and of these, the people of Gaza are suffering the most acutely.

This spectacle of one-sided war in which Israel decides how much violence to unleash, and Gaza waits to be struck, firing off militarily meaningless salvos of rockets as a gesture of resistance, represents a shameful breakdown of civilization values. These rockets do spread fear and cause trauma among Israeli civilians even when no targets are struck, and represent an unacceptable tactic.

“Yet such unacceptability must be weighed against the unacceptable tactics of an Israel that holds all the cards in the conflict.

“It is truly alarming that now even the holiest of cities, Jerusalem, is threatened with attacks.

But the continuation of oppressive conditions for the people of Gaza, inevitably leads to increasing levels of frustration; in effect, cries of help that world has ignored at its peril for decades. 

These are survival screams!

“To realize this is not to exaggerate! To gain perspective, it is only necessary to read a recent UN Report that concludes that the deterioration of services and conditions will make Gaza uninhabitable by 2020.

“Completely aside from the merits of the grievances on the two sides, one side is militarily omnipotent and the other side crouches helplessly in fear. Such a grotesque reality passes under the radar screens of world conscience because of the geopolitical shield behind which Israel is given a free pass to do whatever it wishes. Such a circumstance is morally unendurable and should be politically unacceptable.

“It needs to be actively opposed, globally: by every person, government, and institution of good will.”

 

Global protests

“

Entering the sixth day of Israel’s barbaric assault on Gaza, more than 80 have been killed, including at least 13 children,” Stop the War Coalition (UK) reports, “Hospitals are overwhelmed by hundreds more who have been wounded; 1,350 sites have been attacked, two media centers have been bombed, injuring eight journalists, including one who lost his leg.”

Ending the current week, global protests will rise in numbers. Among them will be the November 24  national demonstration in London called by Stop the War, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and British Muslim Initiative (BMI), and supported by a number of other organizations.

Source and notes

Newsletter #1260. 19 November 2012, 1b Waterlow Road, London N19 5NJ

www.stopwar.org.uk | office@stopwar.org.uk | 020 7561 9311

twitter.com/STWuk | facebook.com/stopthewarcoalition

The London protest assembles at noon at Downing Street to show David Cameron and the UK government that its unstinting support for Israel’s assault on Gaza is not in our name. From there protesters will march to the Israeli embassy. (Details and updates at http://bit.ly/UzD4Br)

The global protests show the people of Gaza that they are not alone. We urge you to support this national demonstration and to encourage everyone you can to join us. Please use every available means you have ─ email, Facebook, Twitter etc ─ to publicize the demonstration as widely as possible.

NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION

SATURDAY 24 NOVEMBER

STOP ISRAEL'S WAR ON GAZA

END THE SIEGE NOW

ASSEMBLE 12 NOON DOWNING STREET LONDON

MARCH TO ISRAELI EMBASSY

Called by Stop the War, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, CND, BMI and others

Details and updates at http://bit.ly/UzD4Br

U.S. attacks Pakistan, reports October 21, 2012: http://stopwar.org.uk/index.php/usa-war-on-terror/1960-the-full-horrific-impact-of-us-drone-attacks-in-pakistan

“U.S. drone strikes listed and detailed in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen

Where has the U.S. been using drones in attacks - and how many people have died there?”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/aug/02/us-drone-strikes-data

“Drones by country: who has all the UAVs? The U.S. has used drones in hundreds of attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen - but which countries have UAVs and how many? Over 800 detailed here, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/19/un_special_rapporteur_calls_for_global

“The latest Gaza catastrophe − Many aspects of the current assault on Gaza pass under the radar screens of world conscience,” November 18, 2012 [The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy], http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/2012111874429224963.html

See also: http://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/latest-gaza-catastrophe-085957587.html

Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. In March 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Falk to a six-year term in this position.

In 2001, Professor Richard Anderson Falk served on a three-person Human Rights Inquiry Commission for the Palestine Territories that was appointed by the United Nations, and previously, on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo.

Falk is author or coauthor of numerous books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance; Human Rights Horizons; On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics; Explorations at the Edge of Time; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; The Promise of World Order; Indefensible Weapons; Human Rights and State Sovereignty; A Study of Future Worlds; This Endangered Planet; coeditor of Crimes of War.

His latest book The Great Terror War [2003] considers the American response to September 11, 2001, including its relationship to patriotic duties of American citizens.

Falk chairs the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Board of Directors and is honorary vice president of the American Society of International Law. He was counsel to Ethiopia and Liberia in the Southwest Africa Case before the International Court of Justice.

His academic credentials his position as Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara.  His law degrees (LLB or JD, doctor of law or JSD) were taken at Yale Law School and Harvard University respectively; his undergraduate degree at University of Pennsylvania-Wharton School.

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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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Washington's WARS far from over

Brits Sunday Dec 18
Protest
West's attack on Iran

Continuing carnage in Middle East
This week's protests, commentary on lies

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

U.S. in Iraq

 “Fifty-seven (57) percent of all Iraqis lived in slums,” Van Buren cites a 2009 UN report. “In the worst areas, such as Maysan and Diyala, more than 80 percent lived in slums.” 

IRAQ

Before the 2003 U.S. invasion, “the average number of slum dwellers in Iraq was 20 percent.”

The foreign service officer wrote, “After years of seeking a military solution, followed by years of building ineffective privies through our embedded (with military) Provisional Reconstruction Teams (abbreviated ePRTs), we [the U.S.] simply declared victory and started to pack up.

Van Buren said one of the sheiks commented that the U.S. “‘dug a deep hole in 2003 and now are walking away leaving it empty.’ America sneezed and Iraq caught the cold.”

Van Buren seems to excuse the inexcusable not only with his book title “We meant well”; but he concludes, “Hubris stalked us; we suffered from arrogance and we embraced ignorance.… [W]e lacked the courage to be responsible. It was almost as if a new word were needed, disresponsible, a step beyond irresponsible, meaning you should have been the one to take responsibility but shucked it off.”

This week as the Nobel laureate president claimed, “mission accomplished,” many reports and commentators assessed the continuing carnage.

Iraqis protest U.S. wall

IRAQ

Women suffer most

The President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, said Friday on the Democracy Now program, “Iraqi cities are now much more destroyed than they were” before the U.S. invasion and years of foreign occupation. “All the major buildings are still destroyed. If you drive in the streets of the capital, your car cannot survive more than one month, because all the streets are still broken. There was no reconstruction for the buildings, for the cities.”

Because of the policies that were imposed in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed said, “we have turned into a society of 99 percent poor and 1 percent rich.… Destruction is everywhere. Poverty is for all the people except the 1 percent who live inside the Green Zone.”

More than one million women have been widowed, some reports give higher figures. “These widows try to survive on a salary of $150” but, because of internal displacement, most widows “cannot get this salary.” Yet the 1 percent of Iraqis living in the Green Zone — where there was a loss $40 billion from the annual budget — “drowns in a sea of money.” After nine years, she said, “we have the most corrupt government in the world and nobody is accountable for it.

“We are divided into a society of Shias, who are ruling, and Sunnis, who want to get divided from the country of Iraq. We are now on the verge of the division of country according to religions and ethnicities; it has already happened.

The biggest losers are the women. “Poverty and discrimination against women has become the norm.” Under the new constitution “are articles referring to the Islamic Sharīah according to which “women are worth half a man legally and one-quarter of a man socially in a marriage.”

Her organization, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, she says, meets women daily “who are vulnerable to being bought and sold in the flesh market.”

Iraqis, she said, “are living in a huge military camp in which a million Iraqi men are recruited into the army.” In addition, there are “almost 50,000 militia members.”

Irrevocable Malevolence

Refugees
UNHCR image

In an article republished at Press TV, Chris Floyd (author of Empire Burlesque) observes much more forcefully that the U.S. president, in claiming an end to the war on Iraq, uttered not a single word “about the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed by this ‘fulfilled mission,’ this ‘extraordinary achievement,’ this ‘success.’

“These human beings — these sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, kinfolk, lovers, friends — cannot be acknowledged; they cannot be perceived. It must be as if they had never existed. It must be as if they are not dead now.

U.S. in Iraq

“This divorce from reality is beyond description. It is the all-pervasiveness of the disassociation that obscures its utter, its obvious insanity. There is something intensely primitive and infantile in the reductive, navel-gazing, self-blinding monomania of the U.S. psyche today.…

“The Iraq War has not ended. Not for the dead, not for their survivors, not for the displaced, the maimed, the lost, the suffering, not for all of us who live in the degraded, destabilized, impoverished world it has spawned, and not for the future generations who will live with the ever-widening, ever-deepening consequences of this irrevocable malevolence.”

Carnage over there, simultaneously over here

USA

USA

Local U.S. municipalities bankrupt

Federal shutdown 3

School closings

Institute for Policy Studies vice chair Saul Landau spoke in interview this week about U.S. breakdown and Americans’ denial.

“There is a level of denial in the ruling group of Americans, the political class and Congress and in the administration,” Landau said. “They are denying climate change. They are denying the extent to which the economy has tanked and really is close to going under in certain places, or indeed, has gone under; and they continue to equate the Republic, which is in terrible shape. We see empire: look at the defense budget that passed, $700 billion not counting the money that goes for various wars, for nuclear weapons, for the CIA, all of that adds up to almost a trillion dollars.”

 Military tactics
USA

Money goes for a new fighter plane nobody wants and absolutely nobody thinks is necessary — all the while U.S. schools are closing, people have no access to health care,  the cushion people used to be able to fall back on has diminished, for the really poor it no longer exists and they are falling onto hard concrete.

“The system is collapsing,” he said, “and government officials and those running for office are not facing it. … They want to cut, but not the military — a military power greater than any in the world — because the military stands for the empire.”

Landau says, “There is a disconnect, [and] we have now found a new enemy, Iran. All of a sudden Iran is going to be the bane of the new cold war, which is totally ridiculous.”

 IRAN

British activists call for end to hostility, provocation against Iran

Today protesters dressed in white gather at the Bank of Ideas next to Finsbury Square, make banners, share ideas in preparation for tomorrow’s protests.

On Sunday, Britain’s peace activists will hold a peace march in protest of ‘the British Government’s aggressive, illegal, and dangerous policy toward Iran.’ The anti-war protesters will also protest against ‘the unjust war in Afghanistan, which is at its bloodiest after ten years.’

“The protesters declared that the British government’s involvement in wars around the world is ‘only in the interest of the 1 percent — a government cabinet of millionaires and their friends in the oil and arms companies.’”

Announcing protest plans was Britain’s most prominent campaigner against unjust wars, the Stop the War Coalition.

Oil Rig - Iran

From Tehran, the Director of the Iranian Armed Forces Center for Strategic Studies, Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, has restated Tehran’s view of a dangerous Western hypocrisy: that “the West and the U.S. are the founders and sponsors of terrorism in the world and use terror tactics against their opponents.”

The U.S. is using the imposition of sanctions on Iranian military commanders as a means of exerting “psychological pressure and for propaganda purposes.”

Iran, Iraq
Afghanistan, Pakistan
Saudi Arabia

The officer was referring to recent sanctions imposed on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces Major General Hassan Firouzabadi and Deputy Commander of the Ground Forces of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Abdullah Araqi.

Press TV today is reporting Shamkhani saying, “‘Given that both commander Firouzabadi and Araqi on the list of [individuals targeted by] U.S. sanctions, such a measure (imposing a ban) is questionable.’” Criticizing Western double standards regarding terrorism, he said, “‘Some Western countries, which promote terrorism and sponsor assassination, accuse other countries and their officials of terrorism.’

“As signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the IAEA,” the news article reports, “Tehran has stood by its right to develop and acquire nuclear technology meant for peaceful purposes.”

Continuing to terrorize Afghanistan and Pakistan

Afghan woman's body

AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN

AFGHANISTAN

A pregnant Afghan woman died and four other women suffered wounds today when U.S. forces raided a house in Afghanistan’s southeastern Paktia Province.

Two sons of the director of the counter-narcotics department of Paktia Province, Hasibullah Ahmadzai, were reportedly detained during the raid.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of eradicating Taliban militants. Since the invasion countless civilians have died or been injured. The security situation remains fragile in Afghanistan despite (or because of) the presence of nearly 150,000 U.S.-led foreign forces.

bombed minibus Afghanistan

The slaughter of civilians has caused deep anger among Afghans and prompted violent demonstrations throughout the country.

Yesterday in Kabul, a police station came under attack. A bomber blew himself up at a police station in Kotai Sangi area. In a second incident, a group of armed militants broke into police headquarters and detonated an explosive.

On Thursday, at least two Afghan soldiers died and two others were wounded when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in Afghanistan’s northwestern province of Badghis.

Also on Thursday at least four civilians died and eight others were injured when a roadside bomb exploded in Afghanistan’s western province of Farah. A minibus came upon the explosive device on a road in the Malai area of Pur Chaman district in the province.

On Wednesday a roadside bomb had killed an anti-Taliban district governor and two of his bodyguards in the southern Helmand Province.

Roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices are reportedly the most lethal weapons Taliban militants have used against foreign troops, Afghan forces, and civilians.

PAKISTAN

Demanding end to assassination drones, breach of sovereignty

On Thursday at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, Pakistani officials reportedly made a presentation about the November 26 NATO cross border attacks that left Pakistani officers dead. 

Senior Pakistani officials showed relevant material that they said could prove what happened in NATO’s deadly assault on a pair of Pakistan’s army border outposts at the Afghan border was no mistake.

“The evidence presented to international journalists also showed that the shooting by helicopter gunships continued for an hour after NATO forces told Pakistani officials at the posts that it would stop.”

Acting Pakistani envoy Iffat Imran Gardezi said, “‘We want to offer our view of the incident as we see it.’”

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Islamabad will continue blocking of NATO convoys.

Meeting on Friday with the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said that the United States had to guarantee that it would commit no more breaches of the country’s borders in the future.

The United States, Gilani said, “must respect Pakistan’s red lines as well as the Central Asian nation’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Pakistan has closed the border crossings the Western military alliance uses to send fuel and other supplies to the U.S.-led forces in landlocked Afghanistan. Around 40 percent of the non-lethal supplies travel across the Pakistani soil.

On Thursday in the eastern city of Lahore, hundreds of Pakistanis took to the streets to voice their anger over the NATO cross-border airstrikes that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in that late November attack. NATO helicopters and fighter jets on November 26 attacked two military border posts in northwest Pakistan and killed 24 Pakistani troops.

Protesters continued their chants of anti-U.S. slogans. They burned NATO in effigy and lit candles to mourn for Pakistani soldiers who died in the attack.

DRONES

Britain interrogated on collusion

In the face of many reports indicating that UK intelligence has assisted U.S. CIA with providing  locations of alleged militants later targeted by U.S. drones, law firm Leigh Day and Co, acting on behalf of Noor Khan, have called on British Foreign Secretary William Hague “to clarify the role of the British intelligence in CIA drone attacks.… Reveal how British intelligence has assisted America’s ‘targeted killing’ campaign in Pakistan.”

Together with the killing of hundreds of Pakistani civilians, among the dead was Noor Kahn’s father. He was a victim of U.S. drone strikes in northwest Pakistan.

 “‘Unless it is categorically denied that the UK continues to pass such information to the U.S. government forces,’” said the  head of the law firm’s human rights department, “‘we require a clear policy statement of the arrangements which are in place and circumstances in which the UK considers it to be lawful to do so.’”

                                                                                                      

AFRICA

Libya- War crime?

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, says there are serious suspicions that the death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi may be a war crime.

On October 20, eight months into the revolution that put an end to his 42-year-long rule, “Revolutionary fighters found Muammar Qaddafi hiding inside a concrete sewage pipe in his hometown of Sirte.” Videos taken at the time show the Libyan leader injured but alive and surrounded by a frenzied crowd. “He is hustled through revolutionaries and beaten to the ground on several occasions.” Qaddafi “then disappears in the crush and the crackle of gunfire.”

On October 25, Qaddafi and his slain son, Mu’tassim, are buried in a secret location in the North African country.

Somalia hospital
Displaced people

SOMALIA

Hardest hit in worst drought in the Horn of Africa in six decades.

This week in a 12-hour period, 50 children died in refugee camps between Mogadishu and Afgoye. Cholera and malaria had broken out in the camps of this famine-stricken country where there are insufficient medicines to help those stricken with diseases. Close to 580 children went to hospitals.

Drought and famine have affected millions of people across Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. United Nations reports say a quarter of Somalia’s 9.9 million people are either internally displaced or living outside the country as refugees.

Reports have shown that the Somali people have also come under attack by U. S. drones.

Cairo October 

EGYPT

Protests against army persist

Yesterday in Cairo two people died in Egyptian army rulers’ crack down on protesters who are demanding an end to military rule in the country. Close to a hundred people were injured.

Los Angeles immigrants

Activists told reporters that the clashes originally erupted on Thursday evening after the police beat up a young man participating in a sit-in protest outside the cabinet building.

YEMEN

Egyptian protesters accuse the military junta of carrying on with practices used by the former ruler, Hosni Mubarak. They are calling for his successor, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, to hand over power to a civilian government.

BAHRAIN

Protests and military-style crackdowns also continued this week in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and in the United States. 

Persistent casualties of persistent war

“Despite the conventions of modern warfare that forbid armies to target civilians,” Ann Jones writes of the unhealthiness of war, it is civilians who die in far greater numbers than soldiers.

“The more high-tech the army, the more sophisticated its weaponry, the safer the soldiers; but that shield does not extend to civilians.

“In fact, in many conflicts today, ruthless leaders use an effective strategy to destroy the civil society and culture of the enemy: a deliberate but unacknowledged war against women.”

Sources and notes

IRAQ

We meant well: How I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people

Peter Van Buren. New York: Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company, 2011, pp. 253-254

“Iraqi Women’s Activist Rebuffs U.S. Claims of a Freer Iraq: ‘This is not a Democratic Country,’” December 16, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/16/iraqi_womens_activist_rebuffs_us_claims

Sharīah (also spelled sharia): the fundamental religious concept of Islam, namely its law, systematized during the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Muslim era (8th–9th centuries AD).

“The Costs of War: Tens of Thousands Dead, Billions Spent, and a Country Torn Apart,” December 16, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/16/iraqi_womens_activist_rebuffs_us_claims

“War without end, amen: the reality of America’s aggression against Iraq” (Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque, December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/216254.html

Further excerpt from Chris Floyd’s article

“In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation that had not attacked it and posed no threat to it.

“This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

“This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. Moreover, it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly.

“Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.

 “Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children — the infants, the toddlers, the school kids — whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.

“This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality. …You cannot make it otherwise. It has already happened. It always will have happened. You can of course ignore it. This is the path chosen by the overwhelming majority of Americans, and by the entirety of the bipartisan elite. This involves a pathological degree of disassociation from reality.”

CHRIS FLOYD

Chris Floyd is an U.S. journalist whose work has appeared in print and online in sources including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium; and co-founder and editor of the ‘Empire Burlesque’ political blog.

“War Without End, Amen: The Reality of America’s Aggression Against Iraq” (Chris Floyd), Friday, December 16, 2011, http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/frontpage

“Divide widening between US rich, poor — The ‘incredibly unequal top-down distribution of wealth’ in the U.S. has formed an elite group who controls most aspects of the country’s affluence, according to analysts,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216090.html

Saul Landau is an internationally known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues. In 2008, the Chilean government presented him with the Bernardo O’Higgins Award for his human rights work. Landau has written fourteen books. He is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Pomona and a senior Fellow at and Vice Chair of the Institute for Policy Studies, http://saullandau.com/

IRAN

“UK protesters urge policy shift on Iran,” December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216215.html

“‘U.S. uses sanctions as psywar tactic,’” December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216244.html

AFGHANISTAN

“U.S. forces kill pregnant Afghan woman, December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216210.html

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216170.html

“Police station bombed in Afghan capital,” December 16, 2011,  http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216066.html

“Bomb blast kills 2 Afghan soldiers,” December 15, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215858.html

“Roadside bomb kills 4 Afghan civilians,” December 15, 2011,  http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215850.html

PAKISTAN

“Pakistan: NATO raids were deliberate” (citing Christian Science Monitor reporting), December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215958.html

“Pakistan: U.S. must heed our red lines,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216099.html

“Pakistanis protest deadly NATO attacks,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215973.html

http://www.presstv.ir/section/351020401.html

DRONES

“Britain questioned over CIA drone strike” [“‘CIA drone strikes are killing hundreds - if not thousands - of civilians and destabilizing Pakistan’”], December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216274.html

AFRICA

LIBYA

“Qaddafi killing could be war crime: ICC,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215990.html

SOMALIA

“Diseases kill 50 more Somali children,” December 15, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215815.html

EGYPT

“Two protesters killed in Cairo violence,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216089.html

Jones, Ann

War is not over when it’s over: women speak out from the ruins of war, Ann Jones, New York: Metropolitan books, 2010, p. 7

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