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Local News & Opinion
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Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters:
03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak Health & Environment
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim 03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare! 03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm 02.24 Obama’s New Plan 02.21 Time to Pass the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009 Media Watching
03.16 WPost Blames Obama First, on Israel 03.16 Letter to the New York Times' Editor: Stovepiping To Persia 03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion 03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax 03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq 03.03 It's Snow News 03.03 The Woeful Washington Post 02.28 The NYT Veers Neocon 02.18 US Media Replays Iraq Fiasco on Iran Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution US Politics, Policy & Culture
03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives" 03.09 Thinking About Countings 03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism 02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium 02.24 The Last Flight of Joe Stack 02.22 Thinking About Sadie 02.18 All Systems Go: No Dysfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise High Crimes?
03.16 America's Secret Prisons 03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem 03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue 03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children 03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session 03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid 03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda 02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery 02.23 Israeli Unaccountability and Denial: Suppressing the Practice of Torture 02.22 American Genocides: is Haiti Next? 02.18 Israeli Abusive Administrative Detentions 02.16 MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network 03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource 03.05 Is the Recovery Real? 03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You 03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction" 03.01 Thinking About Fees 02.22 Campaigning for State-Owned Banks 02.22 Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do 02.19 Obama’s Stealth Entitlement Commission 02.19 Selling Out America to Wall Street International
03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception 03.03 Muslim Disunity 03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation 02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist 02.24 The Dubai Hit 02.22 Holland Has Had Enough: Killing of Innocent Civilians Goes On Apace in Afghanistan 02.19 The Placeman Cometh: New IAEA Chief Stokes Iran War Fever for the Bush-Obama Regime We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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WHAT WILL THE POST-ELECTION OBAMA DO?The Beat Goes On: More Atrocity as Afghanistan Braces for Obama SurgeThursday, 6 November 2008
Mass slaughters of civilians are now a regular occurrence in this occupied land.
While America continues its giddy, self-congratulatory celebration of "change," Afghans find themselves mired in the tragically familiar: yet another round of mourning for yet another massacre of innocent civilians in yet another blind, bludgeoning air strike by American forces.This time almost 40 people, including 10 women and 23 children, were ripped to shreds of bone and viscera when an American missile struck a wedding party in the remote village of Wech Bakhtu, according to Washington's own hand-picked native satrap, President Hamid Karzai. As the Guardian and National Post report:
Such mass slaughters of civilians are now a regular occurrence in the occupied land. At last 18 people -- three women and 15 children -- were killed by an allied air strike in Helmand in mid-October. Some 90 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in a night raid on the village of Azizabad in September -- an atrocity that the Pentagon at first tried, My Lai-like, to cover up completely, but was eventually forced to partially acknowledge, admitting "only" 33 civilian deaths in a report that contradicted the eyewitness evidence gathered by the Afghan government, NGOs and UN investigators who detailed the much larger true death toll. In July, Americans bombed yet another wedding party in Nangahar, killing 47 civilians -- including the bride, as the NY Times notes. In deploring the new slaughter at Wech Bakhtu, Karzai pleaded with the incoming U.S. president, Barack Obama, to "end civilian casualties in Afghanistan" after he takes over the American war machine in January. But there is little chance of that happening. Obama has pledged to send even more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Obama took a great deal of heat during the campaign for brief remarks last year that actually acknowledged the carnage being wrought by U.S. strikes:
His opponents, including that great "progressive," Hillary Clinton, somehow turned this into an indication of Obama's "weakness" on "defense" -- although it was in fact a forthright commitment to more war. But far more noteworthy than Obama's acknowledgment of the obvious, however, was his idea that increasing the number of American troops in Afghanistan will somehow reduce the number of bombing runs and missile strikes that are taking such a horrific toll on civilians. Because of course the opposite is true. More U.S. troops on the ground will mean more "close air support" to back them up, and bail them out, when they are under fire. This is precisely what happened Monday at Wech Bakhtu, as the NY Times reports:
Most of the civilian slaughters by American and allied air power have occurred while in support of ground forces. It is inevitable that more ground troops will draw more fire, necessitating more air support. This in turn guarantees an increase in civilian casualties; for despite the modern myths about "precision bombing" and "smart weapons," bombs and missiles are indiscriminate killers, targeting is an inexact science -- and the lives of an occupied people are always cheap. This is not hard to figure out. And Obama, who is, as we are constantly told -- correctly, I think -- one of the most intelligent men ever elected president, must know it. He must know that putting more troops into Afghanistan will mean "more air-raiding [of] villages and killing civilians." Perhaps he is counting on the bipartisan backing of this "good war" in the American political and media establishments (including most of the "progressosphere") to circumvent the "enormous pressures" that will inevitably be caused by his planned "surge." Meanwhile, innocent Afghans will continue to die at the hands of their "liberators" -- even as these "liberators" blame the survivors for the attacks on their families. As the Guardian notes:
And the National Post reports:
Come January, how will Barack Obama answer that question? We can only look to his own words on the campaign trail. As we noted here last month:
In other words, he will answer it with steel, fire and blood. Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.This column is republished here with the permission of the author. Copyright © 2008 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own. This story was published on November 6, 2008. |
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