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Latest Articles: War, War, War
The war on terror has been about scaring people, not protecting them
Post Date: 2010-01-05 06:17:35 by Ada
1 Comments
The ease with which the plane bomber could operate exposes the vacuity and recklessness at the heart of the US response to 9/11 So there was no ticking time bomb. No urgent need ever arose to torture anybody who was withholding crucial details, so that civilisation as we know it could be saved in the nick of time. No wires had to be tapped, special prisons erected or international accords violated. No innocent people had to be grabbed off the street in their home country, transported across the globe and waterboarded. Drones, daisy-cutters, invasions, occupations were, it has transpired, not necessary. Indeed, when it actually came down to it, to forestall a near-calamitous terrorist ...
Yemen - Prolly Oughta Watch This One
Post Date: 2010-01-04 20:34:39 by tom007
2 Comments
Obama's War on Yemen
Post Date: 2010-01-04 05:57:46 by Stephen Lendman
7 Comments
Obama's War on Yemen - by Stephen Lendman Besides waging direct or proxy wars on multiple fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Sudan, Eastern Congo, elsewhere in Africa, and likely to erupt almost anywhere at any time, Yemen is now a new front in America's "war on terror" under a president, who as a candidate, promised diplomacy, not conflict, if elected. In 2008, he told the Boston Globe that: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." None exists, yet he's done the opposite and ...
The Next Quagmire
Post Date: 2010-01-04 05:46:38 by Ada
3 Comments
Non-G.I. Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney’s fellow Vietnam-era draft dodger turned warmonger, said on the Dec. 27 edition of Fox News Sunday that "Yemen is now one of the centers of that fight." It’s difficult to tell from reading the transcript of the interview between Joe and Chris Wallace what exactly Joe means by "that fight." Does he mean the fight against al-Qaeda, or the fight the military-industrial-congressional complex is waging to ensure that we have a Long War of 50 years’ duration or more? "If we don’t act preemptively," Joe warned, "Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face." Yet, as Joe ...
Brutal massacre of white flag-bearing Taliban surrendees under US watch: No criminal probe yet
Post Date: 2010-01-03 10:33:08 by Googolplex
3 Comments
The Boston-Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has renewed its call for a criminal probe in the wake of a major New York Times story with new evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in 2002. PHR is calling for Obama administration’s Department of Justice to investigate why the Bush administration impeded an FBI criminal probe of the alleged Dasht-e-Leili massacre. According to US government documents obtained by the PHR, as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters were reportedly suffocated in container trucks by Afghan forces operating jointly with the US in November 2001. The ...
CIA Attacker Driven in from Pakistan (by CIA)
Post Date: 2010-01-03 01:25:49 by AGAviator
22 Comments
Exclusive: CIA Attacker Driven in From Pakistan Suicide Bomber Was a Regular CIA Informant, Had Been to Chapman Base Multiple Times By ALEEM AGHA and NICK SCHIFRIN KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 2, 2010 The suicide bomber who killed at least six Central Intelligence Agency officers in a base along the Afghan-Pakistan border on Wednesday was a regular CIA informant who had visited the same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base's security director. The informant was a Pakistani and a member of the Wazir tribe from the Pakistani tribal area North Waziristan, according to the same source. The base security director, an Afghan named Arghawan, would pick up ...
Yemen angered by al-Shabab threat
Post Date: 2010-01-02 19:34:07 by tom007
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Yemen angered by al-Shabab threat Al-Shabab has vowed to send its fighters to boost al-Qaeda in Yemen [AFP] Yemen has said it will not tolerate foreign fighters on its soil, following a pledge by Somalia's al-Shabab group that it would send fighters to help an al-Qaeda affiliate in the country. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, Yemen's foreign minister, told the official Saba news agency he was "astounded" by the comments from al-Shabab. "Yemen will not accept on its territory any presence by [foreign] terrorist elements and will be on guard against anyone who tries to act against its security and stability," he was quoted as saying. Yemen is home to al-Qaeda in the ...
Changing the Narrative for War
Post Date: 2010-01-02 14:49:42 by F.A. Hayek Fan
1 Comments
In spite of the calamities of the past eight years, there continues to be no shortage of neoconservatives in one's face in the media, advising their fellow Americans that wars can be won quickly and decisively and that using military force to change how other nations behave is sound policy. The Washington Post features Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, all three Kagans, John Bolton, and Eliot Cohen on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is the epicenter for those who favor muscular interventionism. The New York Times, America's most influential newspaper, is somewhat more circumspect, featuring neocons-lite David Brooks and Thomas Friedman regularly, but also ...
Threats to Yemen prove America hasn't learned the lesson of history
Post Date: 2010-01-02 14:30:24 by F.A. Hayek Fan
3 Comments
We are the Awaleq Born of bitterness We are the nails that go into the rock We are the sparks of hell He who defies us will be burned This is the tribal chant of the powerful Awaleq tribe of Yemen, in which they bid defiance to the world. Its angry tone conveys the flavour of Yemeni life and it should give pause to those in the US who blithely suggest greater American involvement in Yemen in the wake of the attempt to destroy a US plane by a Nigerian student who says he received training there. Yemen has always been a dangerous place. Wonderfully beautiful, the mountainous north of the country is guerrilla paradise. The Yemenis are exceptionally hospitable, though this has its limits. For ...
Attack on CIA base in Afghanistan may have had inside help
Post Date: 2010-01-02 10:39:22 by Ada
4 Comments
Intel official promises revenge on Taliban -- Two of the dead were Blackwater employees The suicide bombing Wednesday that took the lives of seven CIA officers and contractors in Afghanistan may have had help from an informant close to the spy agency, and may have been carried out on behalf of a Taliban warlord family that was once an ally of the CIA, news reports say. Citing an unnamed "Western official," the Wall Street Journal reported that "an Afghan informant with the agency" may have helped the suicide bomber carry explosives past layers of security at the base. The allegation echoes what the Taliban themselves now say about the attack. Having taken credit for ...
Militants Vie to take credit for CIA Bombing
Post Date: 2010-01-02 09:50:14 by Ada
1 Comments
Pakistani, Afghan Taliban Both Claim Strike Wednesday’s bombing against a key CIA installation in Afghanistan’s Khost Province was the biggest loss suffered by the agency in over a quarter century, and has led to considerable speculation over who managed to hit such a secretive site that even the US military was calling it a “gym” full of “civilians” in the middle of a warzone. It would be quite a coup for whichever group managed it, and interestingly enough, more than one group is claiming credit. The Afghan Taliban were first, claiming they had recruited a “disillusioned Afghan National Army soldier” to carry out the hit. But not long after, the ...
Hamid Karzai demands US hand over gunmen who killed children
Post Date: 2010-01-02 02:39:42 by Original_Intent
10 Comments
President Karzai’s security chiefs have demanded that America should hand over the gunmen behind a night raid in eastern Afghanistan that government investigators and the United Nations say killed at least eight schoolchildren. It was the Afghan Government’s most aggressive response yet to an alleged attack on civilians. But the US insisted that its men had come under fire and that all the victims were part of an Afghan cell manufacturing bombs. The call heightens a war of words between the Afghan Government and its powerful military backers. It is the first time that Mr Karzai has tried to hold foreign forces directly accountable for killing civilians, although he has issued ...
How Obama and Ron Paul demoralize America
Post Date: 2010-01-01 13:19:46 by rotgut
20 Comments
Clausewitz defines war as "an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will." The remarkable thing about terrorist warfare is that, once it has been carried out, even a foiled terrorist attack serves that strategic objective. The terrorist understands that what ultimately compels the will is not just the successful application of force but the fear and demoralization that results from it. Therefore fear and demoralization are the terrorist's strategic weapons. Even when a blow is averted, and the enemy escapes immediate death and destruction, the near miss can be enough to raise his level of apprehension. It can increase the weight of his sense of vulnerability, especially ...
Source: 2 killed in Afghanistan bombing were security contractors
Post Date: 2010-01-01 12:22:01 by abraxas
1 Comments
Source: 2 killed in Afghanistan bombing were security contractors Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Two of the seven CIA officers killed Wednesday in a suspected terrorist attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan were contractors for Xe, a private security firm formerly known as Blackwater, a former intelligence official said Thursday. A current intelligence official confirmed to CNN that the casualties included a mix of people -- CIA staff and contractors. The CIA considers contractors to be officers. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for Wednesday's attack, which wounded six other people. A senior U.S. official said information suggested that a bomber walked into a gym facility at ...
The Real War [Pat on Target w/ this one!!!]
Post Date: 2010-01-01 12:05:55 by Eric Stratton
1 Comments
The Real War Pat Buchanan Friday, January 01, 2010 Had he not proven incompetent to detonate his lap bomb, Umar Farouk Abdulmullatab would have carried off an air massacre to rival Lockerbie. We would all have ended Christmas day watching TV footage of 300 mangled bodies being picked up around Detroit. The system breakdown was total. His father had reported to the U.S. embassy that Umar had gone extremist, disowned his family and vanished in Yemen. Though the 23-year-old Nigerian had been put on a U.S. terrorist watch list and denied a visa to enter Britain, his U.S. visa was not revoked. Though he had been in Yemen for months, bought his plane ticket in cash and boarded without luggage, ...
"Victory" in Iraq? Really? [Part 3]
Post Date: 2010-01-01 11:17:40 by Eric Stratton
1 Comments
"Victory" in Iraq? Really? [Part 3] Diana West Thursday, December 31, 2009 There's at least one more aspect to consider when appraising the past six years in Iraq climaxed by the "surge." This would be the indirect effect of "reflected glory," if such a quaint term applies, and has to do with the sort of state the U.S. helped create in Iraq. I don't know how to candy-coat reality: Post-surge Iraq is a state of increasing repression, endemic corruption, religious and ethnic persecution and encroaching Sharia. Recent media reports flag just some of these glaring truths that American elites, civilian and military, seem to shy away from. In October, from ...
Iraq 'to appeal Blackwater verdict'
Post Date: 2010-01-01 09:17:59 by tom007
2 Comments
Iraq 'to appeal Blackwater verdict' The September 2007 shooting in Baghdad left 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians dead [AFP file] The Iraqi government will push to appeal a US court ruling dismissing charges of murder against five security guards of the private Blackwater firm, an official has told Al Jazeera. Saad al-Muttalibi, an adviser to the Iraqi council of ministers, said that if the guards did not receive a just sentence for the killing of 14 Iraqis in 2007, the issue would complicate relations between Iraq and the United States. "This matter will be appealed in the American court and if not resolved correctly, this will definitely add another strain on the relationship ...
Neither wars nor drones
Post Date: 2010-01-01 09:15:48 by tom007
2 Comments
A young Nigerian from an affluent family, trained in Yemen and reportedly influenced by extremists in the United Kingdom, tried to blow a hole in a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day and failed. Instead, he blew a greater hole in the logic of the US Global War On Terror - GWOT. If he succeeded, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would have cost the lives 300 innocent people and bruised Western economic recovery. But even though he failed, his journey demonstrated that there is nothing "central" about the ''central front in the war on terror". Nor is it a war in any traditional military sense. Although the Obama administration inherited the war ...
Houthi Leader: Yemeni civilians targeted by design
Post Date: 2009-12-31 16:22:40 by Horse
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Abd Al Malek Badreldin Al Houthi launched an urgent appeal today by audio message to listeners everywhere: He questions the deafening silence of the world to the savage crimes against humanity now being committed in Yemen by Saudi, Yemeni, and USA warplanes targeting innocent civilians, and killing women and children, as they bombard population centers far away from the battle fields: towns, market places, mosques… He also warns of the grave humanitarian crisis created by the bombing, and by the siege of North Yemen. No humanitarian assistance whatsoever has been provided by any party to the thousands of refugees and the wider population which is now starving for basic necessities. ...
The Vindication of George W. Bush
Post Date: 2009-12-31 15:38:57 by rotgut
28 Comments
Did Saddam Hussein's fall and the formation of a fledging democracy in Iraq encourage and embolden regime-threatening dissent in Iran? The anti-Iraq War crowd, many of whom suffer from Give-George-W.-Bush-No Credit-for-Anything Disease, says, "No, of course not." How dare anyone even suggest that the former President was correct, if not about the rightfulness of the war itself, then about his argument that a "free and peaceful" Iraq would provide a "dramatic and inspiring example" to the Middle East and the Muslim world. Good Lord! The Iraq War-achieved-zero crowd begrudged Bush nothing even after the democratic Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. Never mind ...
2009 Chickens and their 2010 Roost
Post Date: 2009-12-31 05:56:57 by Eric Stratton
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2009 Chickens and their 2010 Roost Victor Davis Hanson Thursday, December 31, 2009 In the coming year, plenty of our chickens will be coming home to roost. Take foreign relations. In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions. As a remedy, we loudly reached out to our foes and those with whom we had uneasy relationships. But so far these leaders -- like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Russia's Vladimir Putin -- have only interpreted Barack Obama's serial goodwill gestures as weaknesses to be exploited. They play the part of the pushy class bully, we the whiny nerd. In the waning days of 200 ...
8 Americans die in suicide blast in Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-12-30 15:15:46 by Jethro Tull
17 Comments
KABUL – At least eight Americans died Wednesday in a suicide bombing at a military base in eastern Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. Conflicting reports were reaching the Pentagon on whether the victims were civilian or military in the bombing at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province near the border with Pakistan. The deaths were confirmed late Wednesday by a U.S. official in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A senior U.S. official in Washington said the Americans were killed by an attacker wearing a suicide vest. Another senior U.S. official in Washington said there were conflicting reports on the number of casualties, and that other people were wounded in the attack.
Poster ...
The 'Surge' and 'Success,' Part II
Post Date: 2009-12-30 09:59:13 by Eric Stratton
1 Comments
The 'Surge' and 'Success,' Part II Diana West Tuesday, December 29, 2009 So much for the lack of post-surge U.S. business benefits in Iraq, as I wrote last week. Now, what kind of post-surge ally is Iraq? No kind. I write in wonder that the ultimate failures of the surge strategy -- which include the failure of anything resembling a U.S. ally to emerge in post-Saddam Iraq -- have never entered national discourse. Rather, the strategy that "won Iraq" has been mythologized as a "success" to be repeated in Afghanistan. It's not that there aren't hints to the contrary -- as when U.S. ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill arrived at the Iraqi ...
Afghan Insurgents Learn to Destroy Key US Armored Vehicle
Post Date: 2009-12-30 00:38:23 by AGAviator
29 Comments
Afghan insurgents learn to destroy key U.S. armored vehicle By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan have devised ways to cripple and even destroy the expensive armored vehicles that offer U.S. forces the best protection against roadside bombs by using increasingly large explosive charges and rocket-propelled grenades, according to U.S. soldiers and defense officials. At least eight American troops have been killed this year in attacks on so-called Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, and 40 more have been wounded, said a senior U.S. military official who, like others interviewed on the issue, declined to be ...
Christmas 1914 In no man's land
Post Date: 2009-12-29 18:21:10 by Deasy
1 Comments
The truce began on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914, when German troops began decorating the area around their trenches in the region of Ypres, Belgium, for Christmas. They began by placing candles... Click for Full Text!
Poster Comment:http://hubpages.com/hub/Christmas-in-a-War-Zone
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