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05.07 YouthWorks Campaign Needs Support for Summer Jobs
05.15 Frances Fox Piven's "Challenging Authority"
05.15 Major Omissions Flaw Book on Global Economics
05.14 George W. Bush’s Other Undeclared War: NCLB
05.13 New Buchanan Book: Anglo-American Ascendancy Lost in Unnecessary Wars
04.30 A Litany of Horrors
04.17 Peter Hallward's "Damming the Flood" (Part II)
Ref. : Letters to the editor
05.12 The World above 350 ppm CO2
04.28 Green Scare State Terrorism
04.21 Hunger Plagues Haiti and the World
04.16 WORLD FACING HUGE NEW CHALLENGE ON FOOD FRONT
Ref. : Single-Payer FAQ
Ref. : Environmental Health News
Ref. : Sundance Channel's THE GREEN
Ref. : What is Global Warming, and what can citizens do about it?
Ref. : Global Warming Links
Ref. : Health & Nutrition Links
05.06 US Media Trivializes Campaign 2008
05.06 Death's Factotum: Michael Gordon and the Times Pour Pentagon Poison into Nation's Ear
05.05 TV News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits
05.05 Color-Coded: Jeremiah Wright and the Real Deal on Race
05.02 The Right's America-Hating Preacher
04.23 Pentagon Pundits
04.22 US News Media's Latest Disgrace
04.18 ABC's Debate Debacle
04.16 Reprising the Genocidal Fury of Thomas Friedman
05.16 Danger: Tough Talk & Wishful Thinking
05.14 Bush Operative Pushes Voter-ID Law
05.13 Hillary Clinton, John McCain and the "Stupid" Vote
05.13 McCain and the 'Unitary Executive'
05.09 The Democratic Presidential Race: A View from Pennsylvania
05.08 Serving the System: Corporate Control of U.S. Would Continue Under Obama
05.06 A Republican for Barack
05.05 Thinking About Voter Registrations
05.05 'Beware the Terrible Simplifiers'
05.01 U.S. Military Coordinated Day Of Prayer Events With Christian Right Group
04.30 John McCain Won’t Be Looking for the Union Label
04.30 Put Him Out With the Pastor!
04.25 Clinton Courted Racists in the Pennsylvania Primary
04.24 Groundbreaking Book Documents Widespread Election Fraud; Warns Elections Vulnerable to Theft
04.24 Triviamongering in the U.S. presidential race
04.24 Campaign 1988 Lives!
04.23 Hillary Clinton's Monstrous Threat
04.21 Brilliant Disguise: Bush Torture, Obama and The Boss
04.19 The Clintons, Triangulating with China
04.18 American Hegemony Is Not Guaranteed
04.18 Are the Clintons Playing Joe McCarthy?
04.17 The Weather Underground 'Theme'
05.16 Election Fraud, not Voter Fraud, is a National Security Threat
05.16 Constitution’s Checks, Balances Failing As Bush Prepares Iran Attack
05.14 Falling Cedars: Fomenting War in Lebanon -- and Beyond
05.12 Armed Truce: Surging Into Slaughter on Sadr City's Jerusalem Street
05.10 Lost E-Mails Obscure 'Plame-gate'
05.09 Fallujah Revisited: Bush, Petraeus Prepare 'Cleansing' of Sadr City
05.09 Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America's New Moral Universe
05.07 Willing Executioners: America's Bipartisan Atrocity Deepens in Somalia
05.05 The Terror Master: Bush Orders Covert 'Surge' Against Iran, with Dem Support
05.01 American and Israeli War Crimes: Same Atrocities, Different Responses
04.30 Halliburton Bribe Case Haunts Cheney
04.29 Getting Over Scalia
04.29 The Iraq War Morphs Into The Iranian War
04.28 The Torture Election
04.28 The Clock is Ticking for A US Attack on Iran
04.28 The Bush Team's Geneva Hypocrisy
04.25 New Terror War Atrocity: Beheading the Innocent for Bush in Somalia
04.23 Glorious Fruits of the War for Civilization
04.22 VA Tried to Conceal Extent of Attempted Veteran Suicides, Email Shows
04.21 What About the War, Benedict?
04.18 Updating Sami Al-Arian - His Ordeal Continues
04.16 Would Obama Hold Bush Accountable?
05.12 Thinking About Strategies
05.08 Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower
04.28 Thinking About Subtleties
04.23 The Oil Vice
04.22 The US Economy and the Costs of War
04.21 Thinking About Shakiness
05.16 Africa Must Produce or Perish
05.16 Grow Them Young, Pay Them Well - Anti-Chavistas, That Is
05.12 Disturbing Stirrings - Ratcheting Up For War on Iran
05.05 Sixty Years of Palestinian Displacement, Occupation and Suffering
05.02 Feeding Moloch: Last Barriers to War on Iran Come Down
05.01 The Iranian Chessboard
05.01 Blood Diamonds, Blood Oil and Blood Food
05.01 Denying Palestinians Free Movement in the West Bank
04.30 The Ignored Lessons on the Stupidity of War
04.24 Breaking the Silence - Israeli Soldiers Speak
04.23 What the Iraq War is about
COMMENTARY:
Terrorist Nation? It Takes One to Know One
Whatever the truth about the activities of the Iranians, certainly when it comes to terror, the US is unrivalled in the world today.
Nor are we getting any figures on the numbers of dead innocents in Afghanistan, where the blackout on reporting is even more effective than in Iraq.What is clear is that American tactics are causing an unending slaughter in both places—a slaughter that is clearly not just part of but central to the policy, and that is so serious that it has led to protests from Britain and other NATO countries that have soldiers in Afghanistan. And let’s be honest: this is no matter of “collateral damage.” It is a deliberate policy of terror. As I’ve written before, when your army is killing vastly more civilians than enemy fighters, the deaths of innocents cannot be termed “collateral damage.” It’s the deaths of enemy fighters which are the “collateral damage.” The innocents are the targets.
Just consider one of the weapons being used by American forces, the so-called GBU-31. Marc Herold, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, who has been documenting the violence in Afghanistan, has investigated the use of this weapon and in a new article available at the Traprock Peace Center offers this description of how it works:
“Dropped from a plane and hurtling toward its target at 300 mph, the 14-foot steel bomb uses small gears in its fins to pinpoint its path based on satellite data received by a small antenna and fed into a computer. Just before impact, a fusing device triggers a chemical reaction causing the 14-inch-wide weapon to swell to twice its size. The steel casing shatters, shooting forth 1,000 pounds of white-hot fragments traveling at speeds of 6,000 feet per second. The explosion creates a shock wave exerting thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch (psi). By comparison, a shock wave of 12 psi will knock a person down; and the injury threshold is 15 pounds psi. The pressure from the explosion of a device such as the Mark-84 JDAM can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities and tear off limbs hundreds of feet from the blast site, according to trauma physicians. When it hits, the JDAM generates an 8,500-degree fireball, gouges a 20-foot crater as it displaces 10,000 pounds of dirt and rock and generates enough wind to knock down walls blocks away and hurl metal fragments a mile or more.“
Nor is this weapon the only example of American terror. Far from it.
Stan Goff, in his excellent report on the killing of Cpl. Pat Tillman in Counterpunch magazine, notes that one reason Tillman was killed by his own unit is that the members of his own separated team that fired on him had launched their attack upon a village despite the fact that not a shot had been fired from that village—a clear violation of the Geneva Accords, but an instructive example of how US forces are actually operating in the field. (Tillman himself was also shot while standing up with his arms raised in a sign of surrender—another violation of international law.)
Reports are mounting that make it clear that the US is using a deliberate strategy of terror in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The documented (and illegal) use of white phosphorus bombs, which spray wide areas with a substance that burns through flesh down to the bone, first disclosed in the devastating assault and leveling of the city of Fallujah in 2004, the widespread use of helicopter and fixed-wing “gunships” that inundate football-field-sized areas with bullets and fragmentation weapons, the use of delayed action cluster bombs and shells, the use of concussion weapons and napalm, all speak to a policy of indiscriminate killing.
Americans need to wake up to what the rest of the world already knows: The United States is indisputably the number one terrorist nation in the world today.
Indeed, the very administration that is talking about calling Iranian Republican Guard troops “terrorists” is at this moment developing plans for an unprovoked aerial assault on Iran that would feature the dropping of 30,000-lb bombs, all manner of anti-personnel weapons, and possibly even tactical nuclear weapons, on Iranian targets, many of them in populated areas.
There is a word for this kind of behavior: terrorism.
About the author: Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is co-author, with
Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment
. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on August 15, 2007.
