UPDATE 2: Afghan officials retract an earlier claim that there are eyewitness villager accounts of several soldiers involved in the massacre: The evidence collected from the villagers was not enough to confirm that there was more than one shooter. Accounts of multiple gunmen were based on hearsay.

UPDATE 1: Did Staff Sergeant Robert Bales kill and wound all of the victims, or did other troops in his unit participate as well? Consider, for example, this troubling information:

Residents of an Afghan village near where an American soldier is alleged to have killed 16 civilians are convinced that the slayings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack on US forces in the same area a few days earlier.

In accounts to The Associated Press and to Afghan government officials, the residents allege that US troops lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack.

Consider also that witnesses have told an Afghan investigative team that a substantial number of troops were involved in the massacre:

Between 15 and 20 American soldiers were involved in the March 11 massacre of civilians in Kandahar Province, according to a parliamentary probe of the killings, not merely one sergeant as has been widely reported for the past week. An investigative team of parliament members spent two days in the province, interviewing members of the victims' families and tribal elders and gathering evidence related to last Sunday's murders in which 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, were killed and their bodies set on fire. The attacks lasted one hour Sunday morning and were carried out by two groups of U.S. soldiers, the leader of the investigative team told Pajhwok Afghan News.

The villages are one and a half kilometre from the American military base, Hamidzai Lali said. We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups. The investigation indicates 15 to 20 soldiers took part in the killings, said Lali, who has asked the Afghan government, the United Nations and the international community to ensure the perpetrators are punished in Afghanistan. He expressed anger that the one soldier arrested by the U.S. military in connection with the murders had been flown from Afghanistan to Kuwait. People interviewed by the lawmakers warned that if the killers were not punished, they would launch a movement against the Afghan authorities who had agreed to the presence of foreign troops in the country in 2001, Lali said.

Meanwhile, Bales' defense attorney is suggesting that he had nothing to do with the massacre because he purportedly doesn't remember anything. His attorney has also stated that, to date, the Pentagon has not provided him with any information connecting Bales to it. Implausible? Probably, but, then again, the mainstream media has been recycling Pentagon press releases about the incident without requiring any actual proof to the point of incredulity.

INITIAL POST: Qais Azimy identifies the anonymous victims of the Afghan massacre:

The dead:
Mohamed Dawood son of Abdullah
Khudaydad son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa Mohamed son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

The wounded:
Haji Mohamed Naim son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja

As emphasized here in the days after the massacre, Azimy contrasts the anonymity of the victims with the obsessive interest in the details of the accused perpetrator's life: We even know where his wife wanted to go for vacation, or what she said on her personal blog.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, Sadomasochism

UPDATE: Publicly, at least, the Pentagon has already figured it out:

A similar line came from the Pentagon, where a spokesman described the killings as a deplorable but isolated incident and said that the indications were that they were perpetrated by a single individual acting on his own.

Of course, there are a lot of important questions to ask. Did the perpetrator tell anyone else in the unit of his plans? Did anyone notice him departing the base in full gear and night goggles by himself? Did he really act alone, or did anyone provide him with assistance? If so, what did they do? Did he display any behavior in the days and weeks prior to the killings that alarmed anyone? If so, did they act upon what they observed? The Pentagon will probably ask all of these questions, and more, but don't expect it to tell us the answers because they would contradict the specious humanist explanation for the occupation.

INITIAL POST: A witness recounts how the soldier went about killing his victims:

One survivor recounted how the US soldier, reportedly a father himself, had hunted down an Afghan family like military targets through their modest home, set among vineyards and pomegranate orchards just south of the US base.

He was walking around taking up positions in the house in two or three places like he was searching, said 26-year-old Muhammad Zahir, who from a hiding place in another room recognised the man's Nato uniform but was unable to see his face.

He was on his knees when he shot my father, Zahir said. His father had been carrying only a cup of tea when he came out of his room to meet the shooter; he was wounded in the thigh, but survived.

After the gunman left, Zahir said he heard gunshots near the house again. He stayed in hiding for a few minutes to make sure the killer was gone.

Some of the bodies had single, execution-style bullet wounds in their heads, and those from a home where he killed 11 people were charred and wrapped in burned coverings, although Dastagiri and villagers were unsure whether they had been set deliberately on fire or a blaze had been started by munitions.

And, another, similar account:

In Panjwai, a reporter for The New York Times who inspected bodies that had been taken to the nearby American military base on Sunday counted 16 dead, including five children with single gunshot wounds to the head, and saw burns on some of the children’s legs and heads. All the family members were killed, the dead put in a room, and blankets were put over the corpses and they were burned, said Anar Gula, an elderly neighbor who rushed to the house after the soldier had left. We put out the fire.

Relatives said the bodies of two women showed stab wounds and that some of the women were shot as they ran from room to room to try to avoid the gunman. Among the dead at the base, a man aged about 50 had a single gunshot wound to his chest.

The villagers also brought some of the burned blankets on motorbikes to display at the base, Camp Belambay, in Kandahar, and show that the bodies had been set alight. Soon, more than 300 people had gathered outside to protest.

Meanwhile, the process of personalizing the perpetrator while preserving the anonymity of the victims has already begun:

An official told ABC News that the soldier has suffered a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the past, either from hitting his head on the hatch of a vehicle or in a car accident. He went through the advanced TBI treatment at Fort Lewis and was deemed to be fine.

He also underwent mental health screening necessary to become a sniper and passed in 2008. He had routine behavioral health screening after that and was cleared, the official said.

When the soldier returned from his last deployment in Iraq he had difficulty reintegrating, including marital problems, the source told ABC News. But officials concluded that he had worked through those issues before deploying to Afghanistan.

For more background as to how this humanization, this selective individualization, serves the purpose of rationalizing the killings of civilians by US troops, please consider reading my post from August 2008, People in White. Consistent with this, John Glaser enumerates numerous incidents in which US troops killed Afghan and Iraqi civilians and received minimal or no punishment. I wonder whether investigators will look into whether there were any warning signs that should have been recognized. I also wonder whether the other troops in the unit will adopt the well known code of silence utilized by the police when investigated for misconduct. The military has a strong motivation to characterize the killings as something that happened in isolation. The personalization of the perpetrator assists in the attainment of this objective as well.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, Sadomasochism

UPDATE 2: Afghan witnesses say that multiple soldiers were involved.

UPDATE 1: Laura King of the Los Angeles Times seeks to downplay the killings:

Civilian casualties -- almost always accidentally inflicted when they come at the hands of the Western military -- have long been a sore point in the West’s dealings with Karzai.

Apparently, she hasn't read the reports that the US acknowledges a 50% error rate in targeting perceived enemies during night raids and drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even assuming that one is willing to accept the US narrative as to the purpose of these attacks, given that the US has continued to launch these attacks with full knowledge that they kill large numbers of civilians, it is not possible to characterize the resulting deaths as accidental.

INITIAL POST: From the Guardian:

A US soldier has killed more than a dozen Afghan civilians, many of them women and children, in a night-time shooting spree in southern Afghanistan.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, condemned the shootings as intentional murders and demanded an explanation from the US.

The victims of the shootings, which left up to 16 civilians dead, included nine children and three women, Karzai's office said in a statement.

This is an assassination, an intentional killing of innocent civilians and cannot be forgiven, Karzai said. He said he has repeatedly demanded the US stop killing Afghan civilians.

The White House said it was deeply concerned by initial reports of the incident and was monitoring the situation closely.

General John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, issued a statement pledging a rapid and thorough investigation into the shooting spree, and said the soldier will remain in US custody.

The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has always been about retribution for 9/11, at least as far as many of the troops are concerned. Of course, the Afghans had nothing to do with it, except for that small number of people who helped shelter Bin Laden and others involved in al-Qaeda. But the US keeps telling the troops that Afghanistan is a central theatre in the war on terror, despite the lack of any quantifiable al-Qaeda presence in the country, and when faced with predictable resistance from the Afghan populace, horrifying incidents of this kind are inevitable.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", 9/11, Afghanistan, Sadomasochism

From CNN yesterday, a story that Anderson Cooper has covered extensively on his show this week:

Witnesses began describing the final moments of and futile attempts to save a Connecticut mother and her two daughters inside their burning home, opening the trial Monday for one of the men who authorities claim is responsible for their murders.

Prosecutors declined to give an opening statement to start the trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky, 31, who faces 17 charges in a brutal home invasion in Cheshire. But they did introduce tapes from two 911 calls, a bank teller who claimed the mother tried to withdraw $15,000 as ransom and a police officer who found Dr. William Petit -- the lone survivor -- fighting for life outside his family's burning home.

The first defendant to stand trial in the case, Steven Hayes, was sentenced to the death penalty in December after being convicted on 16 of 17 charges filed against him.

Prosecutors allege that Hayes and Komisarjevsky went into the Petit home, beat and tied up Dr. William Petit, raped and strangled his wife, molested one of their daughters and set the house on fire before attempting to flee.

Gareth Porter, today:

A military officer who had approved night raids told one of the authors that targeting individuals believed to know one of the insurgents is a key factor in planning the raids. If you can’t get the guy you want, said the officer, you get the guy who knows him.

Even when people who are known to be civilians have not been targeted in a given raid, they have been detained when found on the compound of the target, on the ground that a person’s involvement in the insurgency is not always clear until questioned, according to military officer who has been involved in operational questions surrounding the raids interviewed for the report.

Raids prompted by the desire for intelligence can result in the deaths of civilians. The Afghan Analysts Network, a group of independent researchers based in Kabul, investigated a series of night raids in Nangarhar province in October and November 2010 and found that the raids were all targeting people who had met with a local religious cleric who was believed to be the Taliban shadow province governor.

Two civilians were killed in those raids when family members came to the defense of their relatives.

According to Time, the US stages approximately 40 raids every night. Porter states that the number of raids in neighboring Pakistan is kept secret. Beyond this, it is important to remember that US forces have only successfully targeted the right homes, businesses and individuals about 50% of the time, leaving aside the question as to whether they were properly selected at all.

Last year, there was this incident in Afghanistan:

Days after the raid in Surkhrod, the fear and outrage were still palpable — and the bloodstains and bullet holes still much in evidence.

Accounts by villagers, including Kushkaki, the head of the extended family of men, women and children living in the compound, suggested that gunfire had erupted without warning shortly after 1 a.m. Most of those inside, together with farmworkers on rope cots out in the courtyard, were fast asleep, they said.

My brother ran out to see what was happening; he was killed right away, Kushkaki said. My son ran out too and was shot as well. I carried him inside in my arms, but he bled to death, here on this carpet.

The American officials describe a much different scenario: the arriving troops, through Afghan interpreters, making repeated calls through bullhorns for those inside to come outside — a practice they say is always adhered to.

It's literally a script, said one of the task force officials, adding that the call-out was answered with a hail of gunfire from inside the compound.

Family members acknowledged firing AK-47s at the invaders, but insisted they did not know they were shooting at Afghan and American forces.

We thought they were thieves, raiders, said Kushkaki. Other family members said any warning might have been drowned out by the sound of a storm that night.

Family members said that when the shooting broke out, they called the police, an assertion supported by the district police chief, Said Ghafour. The gun battle was in full swing by the time he and his men arrived, Ghafour said, and they were kept 200 yards away from the scene.

Ghafour said he knew nothing of the raid in advance; the U.S. military said the strike had been coordinated with provincial leaders. When authorities at the district level are not told in advance about a raid, the American officials said, it is generally because of concerns about corruption or insurgent sympathies that will lead to the target being tipped off.

All the deaths — eight by the Americans' count, nine by the family's — occurred in the first 45 minutes of contact, the U.S. officials said.

Kushkaki said he believed his 16-year-old son had run from the house unarmed. The American officials said he would have been shot only if he had a weapon in his hands, but they could not be certain that he did.

And, then, there was this one:

It was two o’clock in the morning on Feb. 15. Mullah Abdul Khaliq, who taught at a local school here in Nawa district, was asleep with his family when the helicopters began circling overhead.

We could not leave our houses, said Abdullah, a neighbor of Mullah Khaliq’s. Everyone understood that the U.S. forces were carrying out a raid somewhere, and we were all afraid. In the morning we found out that something was very wrong at the house of Mullah Khaliq.

U.S. forces had broken into Khaliq’s house and what happened next is an all too familiar scenario to the people of this beleaguered district, which has now been caught for almost two years between the Taliban and the U.S. military.

The wife told me that her son ran out of the house and was shot on the spot, recounted Abdullah. They then asked Mullah Khaliq if he was Taliban. He said ‘no we are not,’ but they searched the house and shot him in the head. His other son is missing. We saw blood, he must have been injured. His nephew, who was visiting, was also killed.

Prosecutable as heinous crimes at home, a preferred counterinsurgency strategy abroad.

Labels: Afghanistan, American Empire, Pakistan, Sadomasochism

The war at home post-9/11, as related by Adama Bah, falsely accused as a suicide bomber at the age of 16 in 2005:

Later I found out why they'd taken my dad. After I'd been reported as a suicide bomber, the FBI started investigating my whole family. That's how they found out about my dad being here without papers.

The FBI drove us to Pennsylvania, across state lines, without my parents' permission. We got to the juvenile detention centre late at night. The female guard told me and Tashnuba we had to get strip-searched.

I was in tears. My own mother doesn't look at me naked. I said, It must be against some law for you to do this to me.

The female guard said, It's not. You no longer have rights.

She said, Lift your breasts.

I lifted my breasts.

She said, Open your legs.

I opened my legs.

She said, Put your hands in there, to see there's nothing.

I said, There's nothing there!

She said, Just do it.

I did it.

She gave me a blue uniform and told me to take a shower in five minutes, and then she left. I sat at the corner of the shower and held myself and cried. I was thinking, I cannot believe what I just went through. When I got to the cell, I could see Tashnuba in the corner, praying. There was one blanket, and it was freezing cold. We stayed up the whole night talking about everything. I don't know how we fell asleep, but I remember at one point we were both crying.

Nobody told me what was going on. I wasn't brought before a judge until probably my fourth week there, and it was via video conference. An article came out in the New York Times about why Tashnuba and I were there, that we were suspected of being suicide bombers. I never saw the article while in prison. After that came out we got extra strip-searches, about three times a day, and the searches got stricter. They would tell us to spread our butt cheeks, and they made racist comments. If I talked back, I would be put into solitary confinement.

Those first three weeks, my family didn't have any idea where I was. They had to do research to find out, and hire a lawyer. The lawyer, Natasha, came to see me. She said, There's a rumour about you being a suicide bomber. I said, Are you serious? If you knew me, you would laugh and say, 'Hell, no.' She said, They're not charging you with anything except overstaying your visa.

My mom came to visit me. It was the worst visit ever because she didn't want to say anything. When I asked about my dad, she just said, He's fine. She knew he was being held in New Jersey.

After a while, my lawyer called. She said she had good news. I have a way to get you out of jail. You're going to have to wear an ankle bracelet.

I said, I'll wear anything.

Of course, Adama's father was deported. She was forced to wear the ankle bracelet for three years until she was granted asylum. On September 11, 2011, you won't hear anything about her, or anyone else victimized by those who exploited the deaths in the Twin Towers in furtherance of their gratification of their bigotry against Muslims. For these people, the attacks upon the Twin Towers were a joyous moment, because they were now free to physically and psychologically torture Muslims without fear of condemnation. 9/11 provided a justification for their immersion in their most extreme sadomasochistic desires associated with their simultaneous attraction and repulsion from the other as personified by Muslims and Islam. Such dehumanization has taken on the qualities of an erotic release, with Abu Ghraib being the most well known notorious instance.

But it wasn't limited to Iraq and Afghanistan, as Adama Bah's story demonstrates. One shudders at the thought of the pleasure that her guards may have experienced as they subjected her to strip searches. For them, it was a legally sanctioned form of child molestation, and one wonders if they volunteered for the duty. Or, perhaps, superiors parceled out the assignment as an incentive for performance. But, understandably, we won't hear much of this during the 9/11 celebrations.

Instead, we will probably will hear the President, or some other prominent dignitaries, praise the Department of Homeland Security for keeping us safe, which is a sort of code hinting at darker, more sinister things, because, as we all know from watching television and film crime dramas, the police cannot keep us safe without participating in the degradation of themselves and those they abuse. General McChrystal was alluding to this when he pondered the rings of sorrow, the emotional consequences experienced by US troops in the Middle East and Central Asia as they kill and torture. 9/11 should therefore be a day for introspection, a day for contemplating how to escape this cycle of irrational, eroticized violence, rather than reinforcing it through a continuing nationalistic expropriation of the lives of the victims.

Labels: 9/11, American Empire, Police, Racism, Sadomasochism

UPDATE 1: A 50% error rate in targeting US enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan is acceptable:

JSOC’s lethality was evident in its body counts: In 2008, in Afghanistan alone, JSOC commandos struck 550 targets and killed roughly a thousand people, officials said. In 2009, they executed 464 operations and killed 400 to 500 enemy forces. As Iraq descended into chaos in the summer of 2005, JSOC conducted 300 raids a month. Over 50 percent of JSOC Army Delta Force commandos now have Purple Hearts.

The most intense Iraqi raids reminded McChrystal of Lawrence of Arabia’s description of rings of sorrow, the emotional toll casualties take on small groups of warriors. Greatly influenced by Lawrence’s life story, McChrystal thought of his JSOC troops as modern-day tribal forces: dependent upon one another for kinship and survival.

If killing were all that winning wars was about, the book on JSOC would be written. But no war in modern times is ever won simply by killing enough of the enemy. Even in an era of precision weaponry, accidents happen that create huge political setbacks.

Every JSOC raid that also wounded or killed civilians, or destroyed a home or someone’s livelihood, became a source of grievance so deep that the counterproductive effects, still unfolding, are difficult to calculate. JSOC’s success in targeting the right homes, businesses and individuals was only ever about 50 percent, according to two senior commanders. They considered this rate a good one.

INITIAL POST: One of the most disturbing aspects of US policy post-9/11 has been the embrace of gangsterism as a preferred counterterrorism strategy. According to Nick Turse:

Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987. Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate. Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions. Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal kill/capture campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine. This assassination program has been carried out by commando units like the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force as well as via drone strikes as part of covert wars in which the CIA is also involved in countries like Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. In addition, the command operates a network of secret prisons, perhaps as many as 20 black sites in Afghanistan alone, used for interrogating high-value targets.

Fred Branfman has provided corroborating details, with an emphasis upon the authorized expansion of the program by President Obama:

. . . A third factor behind the shift to mass assassination is that Petraeus and the U.S. military are also determined to attack jihadi forces in nations where the U.S. is not at war, and which are not prepared to openly invite in U.S. forces. As the N.Y. Times reported on May 24, General Petraeus (has argued) that troops need to operate beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to better fight militant groups.

The most significant aspect of this new and expanded assassination policy is President Obama’s authorizing clandestine U.S. military personnel to conduct it. The N.Y. Times has also reported:

In roughly a dozen countries—from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife—the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists (Military) Special Operations troops under secret Execute Orders have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies.

Particularly extraordinary is the fact that these vastly expanded military assassination teams are not subject to serious civilian control. As the N.Y. Times has also reported, Petraeus in September 2009 secretly expanded a worldwide force of assassins answerable only to the military, without oversight by not only Congress but the president himself:

The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents. The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president’s approval or regular reports to Congress.

Although sold to the American public and Congress as targeted, selective assassination aimed only at a handful of high value insurgent leaders, the program has in fact already expanded far beyond that. As personnel and aircraft devoted to assassination exponentially increase, so too do the numbers of people they murder, both insurgents and civilians.

While it is reasonable to assume that expanding the number of Special Operations commandos to its present worldwide level of 13,000 will result in increasing assassinations, the secrecy of their operations makes it impossible to know how many they have murdered, how many of those are civilians, and the effectiveness of their operations. It is not known, for example, how many people U.S. military assassins murder directly, and how many they kill indirectly by identifying them for drone strikes. Much of their activity is conducted, for example, in North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan which, as the N.Y. Times reported on April 4 is virtually sealed from the outside world.

More information, however, has emerged about the parallel and unprecedented mass mechanized assassinations being carried out by the C.I.A. drone programs. It is clear that they have already expanded far beyond the official cover story of targeting only high-level insurgent leaders, and are killing increasing numbers of people.

So, when President Obama describes 9/11 veterans as a one America team that changed the way their country fights and wins its wars and learned the cultures of the lands in which they had served, you now have a clearer understanding of precisely what he means. Here, within the US military, we have the bowling clubs of J. G. Ballard's super-cannes, groups of corporate executives who revitalize their entrepreneurial creativity through participation in cruel, sadistic assaults upon poor, socially marginalized people, adapted for the infliction of violence on a global scale. Like the Kennedys, Obama has a fondness for covert operations that conceal the ugliness of American foreign policy from the public. And he wants us to celebrate it on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 by associating it with those who died in the Twin Towers.

Labels: "War on Terror", 9/11, American Empire, Barack Obama, Pakistan, Sadomasochism

Yesterday, President Obama made the connection between 9/11 and perpetual war explicit:

US President Barack Obama today hailed the 9/11 generation of US veterans and 6200 service members who perished in the hard decade of war spawned by the September 11 attacks.

Mr Obama, speaking to the 93rd annual convention of the American Legion, paid tribute to millions of servicemen and women who had signed up after the world's deadliest terror strike 10 years ago killed nearly 3000 people.

Today, as we near this solemn anniversary, it's fitting that we salute the extraordinary decade of service rendered by the 9/11 generation, the more than five million Americans who have worn the uniform over the past 10 years, he said.

Today we pay humble tribute to the more than 6,200 Americans in uniform who have given their lives in this hard decade of war. We honour them all.

Mr Obama said the 9/11 veterans had become a one America team that changed the way their country fights and wins its wars and had learned the cultures of the lands in which they had served.

We see the scope of their sacrifice in the tens of thousands who now carry the scars of war, both seen and unseen, our remarkable wounded warriors.

Most profoundly, we see the wages of war in those patriots who never came home. They gave their all, their last full measure of devotion, in Kandahar and the Korengal and Helmand, in the battles for Baghdad and Fallujah and Ramadi.

It is a most remarkable statement of imperialist intent and purpose, all the way down to the condescending remarks about how the troops learned the cultures of the lands in which they had served. It is an imperialism that the US intends to pursue indefinitely.

Meanwhile, wikileaks has provided us with an example of what US troops have been doing in Iraq during the period referenced by Obama, courtesy of a diplomatic e-mail written by a US diplomat in Geneva, Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Execution:

I would like to draw the attention of your Government to information I have received regarding a raid conducted by the Multinational Forces (MNF) on 15 March 2006 in the house of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee, a farmer living in the outskirts of Al-Iss Haqi District in Balad (Salah-El-Din Governorate).

I have received various reports indicating that at least 10 persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay'ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra'a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz's mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz's sister (name unknown), Faiz's nieces Asma'a Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid.

According to the information received, American troops approached Mr. Faiz's home in the early hours of 15 March 2006. It would appear that when the MNF approached the house, shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued for some 25 minutes. The MNF troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a US air raid ensued that destroyed the house.

Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (i.e. five children and four women) in the morgue of Tikrit. Autopsies carries out at the Tikrit Hospital's morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.

I am aware that the MNF confirmed that an air raid took place that day in Balad and that it caused an unconfirmed number of casualties. The US military attacked the house to capture members of Mr. Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee's family on the basis that they were allegedly involved in the killing of two MNF soldiers who were killed between 6 to 11 March 2006 in the Al Haweeja area. The US military was further reported in the media as stating that MNF troops attacked the house in question to capture a foreign fighter facilitator for the Al Qaeda in Iraq network. Other reports indicate that over the past five months, there have been a significant number of lethal incidents in which the MNF is alleged to have used excessive force to respond to perceived threats either at checkpoints or by using air bombing in civilian areas.

Perhaps, you wonder, why is it so important to deconstruct such obvious propaganda? Well, first of all, it isn't that obvious for a lot of people, and second, it is the means by which US politicians preserve public support for US military operations around the world. As Donald Rumsfeld did on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, US politicians, like the President, persist in associating the deaths of those who died on 9/11 with US invasions and occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and, to much lesser extent, Pakistan. Sweep it all up. Things related and not remains the governing principle of US foreign policy.

Exploitation of the people who died on 9/11 and, conversely, the suppression of any acknowledgement of the people who have subsequently died in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia as a consequence of US military operations is culturally central to perpetuating this imperialist policy. In other words, a mythology of victimization, a mythology whereby those who died on 9/11 are connected to conflicts unrelated to the attacks themselves, is necessary to provide a comprehensible ideological narrative for actions that would otherwise be recognized as violently expansionist. Needless to say, recourse to racist and sectarian stereotypes about Arabs, commonly described as Islamophobia, is also an essential feature of it, financed by influential corporate interests.

Accordingly, we should speak clearly about the tenth anniversary events associated with 9/11. They are offensive, because they exploit death to justify death on a permanent, exponentially greater scale. They constitute part of a sinister foundation myth for the so-called war on terror, a euphemism for the expansion of the American Empire, and its neoliberal, capitalist values, by means of military force. To participate in them is to participate in the embrace of the war on terror and all of the sadomasochistic brutality associated with it. On September 11, 2001, a covert clash of fundamentalisms erupted in full public view in the most spectacular fashion, a clash between the violence of radical Islamic fundamentalism and the violence of American exceptionalism, and we should instead recognize that these deaths are the tragic result of this conflict.

Shortly after the attacks, Tariq Ali asked an immigrant Central American cab driver in New York City about them, and he responded:

You know how many people they've killed in Central America? You know?... I feel sorry for the ones who died. That's more than they feel for us.

Indeed. But it's actually worse than that. Turns out that people like Rumsfeld and Obama, representative of the the political elites that govern the US, don't feel much for the people who died in the Twin Towers, either, because, if they did, they wouldn't have stripped the victims of their humanity and reduced them to US propaganda symbols. We can most sincerely respect their deaths by ascribing a tragic dimension to them equal to the deaths of anyone else.

Labels: "War on Terror", 9/11, Afghanistan, American Empire, Barack Obama, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Pakistan, Rumsfeld, Sadomasochism

UPDATE 1: A video of a cell extraction at the News from a Nation in Lockdown site, as pointed out by Yusef:

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Consider perusing the comments to the video, as Yusef suggests.

INITIAL POST: James Ridgeway and Jean Casella have done extraordinary work in revealing the brutalities of the US prison system through their blog, Solitary Watch. They have posted numerous accounts about the abuse of inmates by placing them in solitary confinement for indefinite periods, sometimes for years and years, as was the case with Ojore Lutalo, who spent the majority of his 26 year sentence for armed robbery in isolation because of his involvement in anarchist and black nationalist organizations:

Ridgeway and Casella have posted the accounts of other inmates on a YouTube channel, News from a Nation in Lockdown, as explained here. A cursory reading of Solitary Watch reveals that many of the practices of the purported war on terror originated in US supermax prisons. Consider, for example, this account by Pornchai Moontri:

Every day there was the same monotony: breakfast at 0530 followed by forty-five minutes alone in the rec pen. That was like a big dog cage. I could take exactly eleven steps inside it and then back again. It was about five feet wide and eight feet long with chain link on all sides and above. It really was a cage. I could have a fifteen-minute shower five times a week, and one fifteen-minute telephone call per week. There was no use of a TV or radio.

Lunch was always at 11:30 and dinner at 4:30. Four times a day guards would come to count me at the same time every day. I would have to stand up or sit on the concrete bunk. I was allowed to look at three books per week. I would take any books that were big so they would last a long time. I read the Bible cover to cover twice. I read Stephen King books because they were big. I also read Shogun and any other large novel I could get. At O7OO every day, someone would come by with a tube of toothpaste, put a dab on my finger, and I would brush with that.

Super Max was so depressing and so solitary that prisoners would try to cut themselves deeply or hang themselves just to get out of there. Since this Super Max prison opened in 1992, there have been three inmate deaths there by suicide (one was a suspected homicide), and hundreds of prisoners were seriously injured. One prisoner was extracted from his cell so he could not harm himself, and then he died from the injuries he sustained while being extracted.

The longer a prisoner stayed in Super Max, the more anti-social he became. Inmates would do anything to try to break up their day and entertain themselves. Some played with their own urine and feces, and others used those as weapons, throwing them at the guards after calling their names to get their attention. Some of the more manipulative would talk other prisoners into acting up. I know today that we acted like animals because we were treated like animals.

Supermaxed.com makes the connection explicit by means of a webpage that provides links to resources related to US prisons, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Alternative Media, American Empire, Guantanamo, Prisons, Sadomasochism

You may have seen this elsewhere already, but I think it is important to acknowledge these atrocities. From Mark Boal's article in Rolling Stone, The Kill Team:

The morning of May 2nd, the platoon was on a routine patrol in a village called Qualaday, a few miles from base. Following standard procedure, the unit's leaders entered a house to talk with a man who had previously been arrested for having an IED. That inadvertently left the rest of the platoon free to roam the village looking for targets, without having to worry about an officer's supervision.

Outside the house, Morlock was overheard instructing Winfield in how a grenade explodes, cautioning him to remain on the ground during the blast. Then the two soldiers moved off with Gibbs. Nearby, in a compound filled with children, they picked out a man with a white beard and escorted him outside. He seemed friendly, Winfield recalled. He didn't seem to have any sort of animosity toward us.

Gibbs turned to his men. You guys want to wax this guy or what? he asked. Morlock and Winfield agreed that the man seemed perfect.

Gibbs walked the Afghan to a nearby ditch and forced him to his knees, ordering him to stay that way. Then he positioned Morlock and Winfield in a prone position behind a small berm no more than 10 feet away. To be honest, Morlock later told investigators, me and Winfield thought we were going to frag ourselves, 'cause we were so fucking close.

With everyone in position, Gibbs took cover behind a low wall and chucked a grenade toward the Afghan. All right, dude, wax this guy! he shouted. Kill this guy, kill this guy!

As the grenade went off, Morlock and Winfield opened fire. Morlock got off several rounds with his M4. Winfield, who was armed with the more powerful SAW machine gun, squeezed off a burst that lasted for three to five seconds.

Gibbs shouted for Morlock to proceed with the next stage of the plan. Get up there and plant that fucking grenade!

The man lay where he had fallen. One of his feet had been blown off by the blast; his other leg was missing below the knee. Morlock ran up and dropped the Russian pineapple grenade near the dead man's hand. Gibbs walked up to the body, stood directly over it, and fired twice into the man's head, shattering the jaw.

Later, when the scene had calmed down – after soldiers had pushed away the dead man's wife and children, who were screaming, hysterical with grief, and Morlock had spun the story to the higher-ups – Gibbs took out a pair of medical shears and cut off the corpse's left pinky finger, which he kept for himself. Then, wearing a surgical glove, he reached into the dead man's mouth, pulled out a tooth and handed it to Winfield.

No wonder the US tried to prevent Malalai Joya from entering the country. As I observed when the allegations about the kill team were first publicized: If anything, the conduct of these troops, if substantiated, brings to mind attacks upon homeless people by young males. But Boal goes beyond the brutality of the kill team members, as grotesque as it is, and exposes the unwillingness of higher ranking officers to stop them.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Sadomasochism

Esam Al-Amin summarizes the events that brought down the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia:

On December 17, Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed graduate in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire in an attempt to commit suicide. Earlier in the day, police officers took away his stand and confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling because he lacked a permit. When he tried to complain to government officials that he was unemployed and that this was his only means of survival, he was mocked, insulted and beaten by the police. He died 19 days later in the midst of the uprising.

Bouazizi's act of desperation set off the public's boiling frustration over living standards, corruption and lack of political freedom and human rights. For the next four weeks, his self-immolation sparked demonstrations in which protesters burned tires and chanted slogans demanding jobs and freedom. Protests soon spread all over the country including its capital, Tunis.

The first reaction by the regime was to clamp down and use brutal force including beatings, tear gas, and live ammunition. The more ruthless tactics the security forces employed, the more people got angry and took to the streets. On Dec. 28 the president gave his first speech claiming that the protests were organized by a minority of extremists and terrorists and that the law would be applied in all firmness to punish protesters.

However, by the start of the New Year tens of thousands of people, joined by labor unions, students, lawyers, professional syndicates, and other opposition groups, were demonstrating in over a dozen cities. By the end of the week, labor unions called for commercial strikes across the country, while 8,000 lawyers went on strike, bringing the entire judiciary system to an immediate halt.

Meanwhile, the regime started cracking down on bloggers, journalists, artists and political activists. It restricted all means of dissent, including social media. But following nearly 80 deaths by the security forces, the regime started to back down.

On Jan. 13, Ben Ali gave his third televised address, dismissing his interior minister and announcing unprecedented concessions while vowing not to seek re-election in 2014. He also pledged to introduce more freedoms into society, and to investigate the killings of protesters during the demonstrations. When this move only emboldened the protestors, he then addressed his people in desperation, promising fresh legislative elections within six months in an attempt to quell mass dissent.

When this ploy also did not work, he imposed a state of emergency, dismissing the entire cabinet and promising to deploy the army on a shoot to kill order. However, as the head of the army Gen. Rachid Ben Ammar refused to order his troops to kill the demonstrators in the streets, Ben Ali found no alternative but to flee the country and the rage of his people.

On Jan. 14 his entourage flew in four choppers to the Mediterranean island of Malta. When Malta refused to accept them, he boarded a plane heading to France. While in mid air he was told by the French that he would be denied entry. The plane then turned back to the gulf region until he was finally admitted and welcomed by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime has a long history of accepting despots including Idi Amin of Uganda and Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Al-Amin also exhaustively documents the complicity of the US and European governments, so it is worth reading his article in its entirety. The French were so supportive of Ben Ali that the foreign minister of the Sarkozy government, Michele Alliot-Marie, offered the assistance of French security forces to put down the rebellion. Meanwhile, President Obama avoided any substantive comment on the situation until the outcome was decided. Or, as As'ad Abukhalil ascerbically said:

The funny announcement by Obama yesterday has clear conclusions: the US administration is thus officially in support of its dictators around the world until the time when they are overthrown. So Obama continued to support the Tunisian dictator until the time when he left the country.

Apparently, the US wasn't that concerned with the fact that the Ben Ali regime had killed between 150 to 200 people since the uprising began on December 17th. Perhaps, it was because the US considered the Ben Ali regime an important ally in the war on terror:

The Tunisian Government is an important ally for the U.S. in its resource-driven colonial wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. A United Nations report on secret detention practices lists Tunisia as having secret detention facilities where prisoners are held without International Red Cross access. Intelligence services in Tunisia cooperated with the U.S. efforts in the War on Terror and have participated in interrogating prisoners at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and in Tunisia.

And, then, there is the disappointment that the US may lose the ability to continue to persuade future Tunisian governments to impose policies of austerity as Ben Ali did:

. . . Tunisia -- more than almost any country in the region -- has followed the dictates of Washington and the International Monetary Fund in instituting structural adjustment programs in privatizing much of its economy and allowing for an unprecedented level of free trade. These policies have increased rather than decreased unemployment while enriching relatives and cronies of the country's top ruling families. This has been privately acknowledged by the U.S. embassy in a recently-released wikileaks cable, which labeled the U.S.-backed regime as a kleptocracy. The U.S. has also been backing IMF efforts to get the Tunisian government to eliminate the remaining subsidies on fuel and basic food stuffs and fuel and further deregulate its financial sector.

Predictably, the meticulous lenin provides us with the factual and analytical details of this embrace of neoliberalism by Ben Ali:

Globally, the dictatorship aligned itself with neoliberal institutions, acceding to GATT, then joining the WTO. Throughout the 2000s, it forged a closer relationship with the EU, under an agreement removing all tariffs and restrictions on goods between the two. France and Italy have been its main export and import partners in this period. Given his zeal in prosecuting the war against terrorism throughout the 1990s, which mission he took to the UN and the EU, Ben Ali was an obvious candidate to be a regional ally in the Bush administration's programme for reconfiguring the Middle East in America's (further) interests in the context of the war on terror. Ben Ali thus joined Team America, alongside other lifelong democrats such as Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah.

The results of Ben Ali's authoritarian neoliberalism for capital were impressive in their way: GDP on a par with the European periphery, low public-sector deficit, controlled inflation and renewed credit-worthiness. The financial sector was reformed and initially experienced a mini-boom. Significant sections of the public sector were turned over for profitable investment. A total of 160 state owned enterprises have been privatised. The stock market capitalisation of the 50 largest companies listed on the Bourse de Tunis was worth $5.7bn by 2007. Ben Ali's famously, corruptly wealthy family also made a mint from the boom. He himself became a darling of the EU and the US, conferring global prestige on his regime. The cost of all this to the working class, though concealed in some of the official figures, was just as significant. High unemployment, growing inequality, the removal of subsidies for the poor, rising housing costs and weaker welfare protections are among the added burdens of the Tunisian working class in the neoliberal era.

This does not mean that the average working class person has experienced an absolute decline in income throughout this period. In fact, the development of the cities has meant more people moving from the poorer rural areas to cities and towns where absolute poverty is less common. What it means is that wage growth has been suppressed by the government, and made conditional upon productivity rises. In the private sector, liberalisation means that the discipline of the market has been used to extract higher productivity from the workforce. The total effect is that more of the wealth that has been generated has gone into the pockets of the very rich. In simple terms, it means that the rate of exploitation has been increased. For as long as the political opposition was effectively suppressed, and for as long as the trade union movement was effectively subjugated, the old order could continue. But that in turn depended on the regime's ability to boast that it was creating a wealthier economy that would eventually benefit everyone. That is, the viability of the regime rested on the viability of neoliberal institutions, both domestically and globally - and that is exactly what has taken a knock.

lenin's exposition is enlightening because of his recognition that the so-called war on terror and the imposition of neoliberal economic policies are interrelated aspects of the same social process. It is difficult for one to exist in the absence of the other, as the invasion and occupation of Iraq demonstrated. Without the invasion, there would have been no subsequent attempt to incorporate the Iraqi economy into the neoliberal order. Meanwhile, elite support for the invasion was dependent upon this opportunity to privatize a heavily socialized economy.

Hence, the Ben Ali regime comes across as one that recalls Pinochet's Chile, one that actively participated in the repression of people considered enemies of the US, while serving as an economic laboratory for policies that the US would like to see imposed globally. Much as Pinochet proselytized against the leftist peril that he reduced to communism, prefiguring the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, Ben Ali was an anti-terrorism missionary, preaching his gospel prior to the creation of the Project for a New American Century and 9/11.

Indeed, the parallels between Operation Condor, a sort of Phoenix Program brought to the southern cone of South America by Pinochet and his regional allies in the 1970s, and the current war on terror are striking:

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor), was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate alleged socialist and communist influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments. Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. It is estimated that a minimum of 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor, possibly more. Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States participated in a supervisory capacity, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.

So, like a mistress attending the funeral of her married lover, US officials present a public appearance of stoicism while privately shedding tears of sorrow for the passing of the Ben Ali regime. We can only hope that the rebellion succeeds in eradicating whatever the residual power of his supporters so that the archives of the military and interior ministry can be opened to scrutiny in order to discover what horrors US and Tunisia intelligence perpetrated. Given the military's astute decision to act against Ben Ali's supporters in the security forces, as described by Al-Amin, it remains doubtful that this will happen.

FOOTNOTE: lenin has also written several other excellent posts about the Tunisian situation, which can be found here and here and here. In the last one, he ponders the peril that the revolution may pose for other US allies in the region:

But if, as seems increasingly possible, the revolt spreads and takes down some other pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan or Algeria, then Obama has problems. One can well imagine him, despite his ongoing commitment to aggression in Afghanistan and Pakistan, going down as a Carter-style weakling if a few US embassies in the region start to look vulnerable. Which is why I would expect some sort of panicked intervention by the US and its local proxies to be going on even as you read.

If only someone in one these embassies would get in contact with wikileaks. Just imagine the valuable service that it could provide by releasing sensitive diplomatic cables related to US actions in Tunisia in close to real time.

Labels: "War on Terror", Activism, Africa, American Empire, Chile, IMF, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, Poverty, Sadomasochism, South America, Tunisia

UPDATE:

. . . the Bush administration may have misused science to justify such enhanced interrogation, Iacopino and his colleagues note in Science. A memo from the Department of Justice in 2005 explicitly authorized such techniques, noting that CIA doctors observed no long-lasting ill effects in detainees or intent to torture in interrogators during the application of such techniques to 25 detainees.

The actual observations themselves have not been released publicly and may have constituted illegal and immoral scientific research, Iacopino and his colleagues charge. It is also possible that CIA doctors may have neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm among detainees held after the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to a separate report from Physicians for Human Rights.

The CIA has denied that any such research took place, though the agency's guidelines did call for medical personnel to monitor waterboarding, confinement in a box and other techniques when used. Iacopino and his colleagues assert that such monitoring constitutes a breach of both basic medical ethics—do no harm—and research norms—an international ban on research conducted on non-consenting human beings.

INITIAL POST: An excellent article by Alexander Cockburn, placing the current practices of torture and indefinite detention in a broader historical context. An excerpt:

Covertly, there was always plenty of torture, just as there were assassinations, high and low. After World War Two the CIA’s predecessor, OSS, imported Nazi experts in interrogation techniques. But this was the era of Cold War competition: Uncle Sam the Good against the dirty Russians and Chinese. The US government would go to desperate lengths to counter accusations that its agents in the CIA or USAID practiced torture.

One famous case was that of Dan Mitrione, working for the US Agency for International Development, teaching refinements in torture techniques to Brazilian and Uruguayan interrogators. Mitrione was ultimately kidnapped by the Tupamaro guerillas and executed, becoming the subject of Costa Gavras’ movie State of Siege. The CIA mounted major cover-up operations to try to discredit the accusations against Mitrione, quoted as having said to his students: The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.

The liberal conscience began to make its accommodation with torture in June, 1977, which was the month the London Sunday Times published a major expose of torture of Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces and the security agency, Shin Bet. Suddenly American supporters of Israel were arguing that certain techniques – sensory deprivation, prolonged stress positions while hooded, incarceration in cells the size of packing crates, etc – somehow weren’t really torture, or were morally justifiable torture under ticking time bomb theory.

Back in my youth, I read William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Beyond the horrors of the Holocaust, I was especially appalled at the German use of Jews and Russian prisoners of war in so-called scientific experiments centered primarily around testing the human tolerance for pain and the limits of the human ability to survive intolerable conditions. For example, Shirer describes one such experiment where the Germans placed two Russian POWs in a vat of icy cold water, and kept them there until they died of hypothermia. Meanwhile, the Japanese engaged in similar activities with Chinese victims in Manchuria, with an emphasis upon the development of weapons for chemical and biological warfare.

At the time that he wrote the book, Shirer presented such atrocities as aberrational, but, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognize that the Germans and the Japanese were initiating a specific aspect of the modernist project that so characterized much of the 20th Century. Just as the Russians, and later, the Tanzanians and the Chinese, sought to collectivize agricultural production along lines that reduced peasants to fungibility, as examined by James Scott in Seeing Like a State, the Germans and the Japanese were pioneering research into the resiliency of the human body for the purpose of finding ways to overcome it. Given the tenor of the times, both focused upon the creation of weapons that would kill or immobilize thousands of people, but there remained a great utility in terms of individual applications.

In effect, the Germans and the Japanese established the acceptability of the belief that the human body, in all of its individual manifestations, should be addressed objectively in order to facilitate the objectives of the state. Hence, the subsequent proliferation of measures such as sensory deprivation, starvation and prolonged stress positions, many of which are primarily psychological in nature, as a means of shattering the will of those who insist upon resisting state control. Paradoxically, the physical brutalities of the German and Japanese efforts lead the way towards the development of practices that increasingly emphasized psychological cruelty, a form of torture that, according to Alfred McCoy, results in more enduring, damaging consequences for the victim than the physical kind.

And, this is what has been institutionalized within the US prison system and secret detention facilities around the world. The fact that many of the practices currently utilized at places like Guantanamo and Bagram originated from within the US, and were specifically implemented to crush political dissent, is one of the best kept secrets of the so-called war on terror. Consider, for example, the treatment of people incarcerated for crimes in furtherance of the Puerto Rican independence movement:

The captured Puerto Rican independentistas have been singled out for extreme punishments within the U.S. prison system. Exactly because they are prisoners held for political reasons–the system has tried to make an example of them to intimidate others. The authorities have applied cruel tactics in an attempt to break their spirits and make them renounce the struggle.

From the day of their capture, many of these Puerto Rican independentistas were kept in solitary confinement for long periods of time. Oscar Lïpez has now spent the last 12 years under almost constant solitary confinement–including two years of cruel sleep deprivation experiments at ADX Florence prison in Colorado. This abuse has had acute effects on his health.

Special restrictions have been applied at times to keep the prisoners from being heard on the outside. And prison authorities have often been afraid of allowing these radical activists contact with the general prison population.

Often, these prisoners have been prevented from seeing their families–either because visitations or phone access have been restricted. Adolfo Matos, for example, was moved ten different times without warning–from prison to prison in the Illinois state system–often without anyone on the outside being told where he was or where he was going.

Mail has been censored, and for years, these prisoners were forbidden to communicate with each other and prevented from reading any political literature. There have been cases where these prisoners were denied ordinary library access and prevented from participating in social or education programs in prison.

Over and over again, those with serious health conditions have been denied medical care.

The women prisoners have been subjected to special harassments. During her early days of imprisonment, Alejandrina Torres was subjected to rape-like cavity searches conducted by teams of guards that included males. She suffered a dislocated shoulder and a heart attack from the mistreatment.

Several of the prisoners of war have been confined in special prisons designed for extreme security and torture. In 1986, the Lexington Control Unit was opened in Kentucky to break women political prisoners. Alejandrina Torres was one of the first three women sent there–the other two being the political prisoners Susan Rosenberg and Silvia Baraldini. Prisoners there were under 24-hour surveillance, even while bathing. They were subjected to sensory deprivation–prevented from seeing the outside, and subjected to constant lighting. In 1988 the U.S. and Bureau of Prisons were forced to shut down the Lexington Control Unit, after a judge conceded that these women had been sent there for their political beliefs.

After that, the Marion Control Unit in Illinois and then ADX Florence in Colorado have been used as special punishment centers–where prisoners are confined to their cells 23 hours a day, and kept in extreme isolation. Ralph Arons, former warden at Marion, admitted: The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large.

There are many people incarcerated in the prison system for violent crimes, but, as Arons acknowledged, the brutal conditions of confinement at Marion exist to deter political dissent, not violence. The authorities exploit the loss of control over one's body, as so ruthlessly imposed by the Germans and the Japanese, to achieve that end.

Of course, this is not to say that the Germans and the Japanese were the only ones engaged in the practice, after all, the US prison system, as just one example, has subjected inmates to solitary confinement since 1829, but merely that they pushed it to heretofore unprecedented extremes by reference to the legitimacy of modernist scientific investigation. No doubt, readers who are familiar with Foucault can provide a more nuanced presentation of this historical process. In any event, one can only recall Shirer's righteous indignation about the brutalities of German experimentation upon humans with sadness, as their underlying objectives are now considered not only acceptable, but necessary.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Guantanamo, Police, Prisons, Sadomasochism

Perhaps, you've already read about this subject in relation to the WikiLeaks release of material associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Even if you have, please bear with me, starting with the following from The Guardian:

A frago is a fragmentary order which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ.

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

The systematic viciousness of the old dictatorship when Saddam Hussein's security agencies enforced order without any regard for law continues, reinforced by the chaotic savagery of the new criminal, political and sectarian groups which have emerged since the invasion in 2003 and which have infiltrated some police and army units, using Iraq's detention cells for their private vendettas.

Hundreds of the leaked war logs reflect the fertile imagination of the torturer faced with the entirely helpless victim – bound, gagged, blindfolded and isolated – who is whipped by men in uniforms using wire cables, metal rods, rubber hoses, wooden stakes, TV antennae, plastic water pipes, engine fan belts or chains. At the torturer's whim, the logs reveal, the victim can be hung by his wrists or by his ankles; knotted up in stress positions; sexually molested or raped; tormented with hot peppers, cigarettes, acid, pliers or boiling water – and always with little fear of retribution since, far more often than not, if the Iraqi official is assaulting an Iraqi civilian, no further investigation will be required.

Beyond allowing the US and the other participants in the coalition to outsource the brutalization of detainees, Frago 242 created opportunities for a perverse voyeurism, whereby US troops were permitted to watch the most gruesome abuse of people without any obligation to do anything about it.

If there was any question that the US was complicit in much of this abuse, Justin Raimondo helpfully directs our attention to another article in the The Guardian that eliminates any remaining doubt:

Within the huge leaked archive is contained a batch of secret field reports from the town of Samarra. They corroborate previous allegations that the US military turned over many prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos.

In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for further questioning. Typical entries read: All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning (from 29 November 2004) and The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning (30 November 2004).

The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films: US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing, while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.

An interview conducted by Maass in 2005 at the improvised prison, accompanied by the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.

The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects. The then interior minister in charge of them was alleged to have been a former member of the Shia Badr militia.

According to this post by lenin in 2006, the situation in Samarra was not unique:

6,000 bodies in Baghdad's mortuaries since the start of the year, and what's more, no-one believes these are the true figures from the violence in and around Baghdad as many bodies are not taken to the morgue, or are never found.

Here's the thing: the US government can openly announce its intentions. It can even be reported once in a while (albeit with a rather crude apologia bracketing the facts). Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee can die while uncovering the truth behind it. Yet somehow, invariably, it's simply taboo to mention what is richly evident. The BBC did not mention any of this either on television or on the internet. No one mentions that the bulk of these deaths are attributed to the Special Police Commandos, who were formed under the experienced tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly secretive US special-forces units.

Yasser Salihee found that many of the dead were apprehended by large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios. He died shortly after reporting this at a US checkpoint, with a bullet in the head.

As Patrick Cockburn drily observed: Of particular interest to Iraqis, when WikiLeaks releases the rest of its hoard of documents, will be to see if there is any sign of how far US forces were involved in death squad activities from 2004.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Death Squads, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism, US Military

(snip)

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.

(snip)

In A Journey: My Political Life, Blair depicts Cheney as believing the United States was at war not only with Islamic terrorists but with rogue states that supported them and that the only way of defeating [this threat] was head-on, with maximum American strength.

Cheney wanted forcible regime change in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to U.S. interests, according to Blair.

He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas, etc., Blair wrote. In other words, he [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

(snip)

The majority concludes its opinion with a recommendation of alternative remedies. Not only are these remedies insufficient, but their suggestion understates the severity of the consequences to Plaintiffs from the denial of judicial relief. Suggesting, for example, that the Executive could “honor[ ] the fundamental principles of justice” by determining “whether plaintiffs’ claims have merit,” [see Maj. Op. at 13554] disregards the concept of checks and balances. Permitting the executive to police its own errors and determine the remedy dispensed would not only deprive the judiciary of its role, but also deprive Plaintiffs of a fair assessment of their claims by a neutral arbiter. The majority’s suggestion of payment of reparations to the victims of extraordinary rendition, such as those paid to Japanese Latin Americans for the injustices suffered under Internment during World War II, over fifty years after those injustices were suffered [Maj. Op. at 13554], elevates the impractical to the point of absurdity. of Similarly, a congressional investigation, private bill, or enacting of “remedial legislation,” [Maj. Op. at 13556], leaves to the legislative branch claims which the federal courts are better equipped to handle. See Kosak v. United States, 465 U.S. 848, 867 (1984) (Stevens, J., dissenting).

Arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstance is a “ ‘gross and notorious . . . act of despotism.’ ” Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 556 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)). But “ ‘confinement [and abuse] of the person, by secretly hurrying him to [prison], where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.’ ” Id. (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)) (emphasis added).

(snip)

Yet nothing comes closer to Titus Andronicus than the insistent, terrible stories of gang rape by United States personnel in Abu Ghraib. You hear this repeatedly in Amman, and a very accurate source of mine in Washington – a man who deals with military personnel – tells me they are true. This, he says, is why Barack Obama changed his mind about releasing the photographs which George W Bush refused to make public. The pictures we saw – of the humiliation of men – were outrageous enough. But the ones we haven't seen show Americans raping Iraqi women.

Lima Nabil, a journalist who now runs a home for on-the-run girls, sips coffee as the boiling Jordanian sun frowns through the window at us. In Abu Ghraib, she says, women were tortured by the Americans much more than the men. One woman said she witnessed five girls being raped. Most of the women in the prison were raped – some of them left prison pregnant. Families killed some of these women – because of the shame.

Labels: 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, American Empire, Cheney, Occupation of Iraq, PNAC, Sadomasochism, Tony Blair, War with Iran, YouTube

It pretty much speaks for itself:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret kill team that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.

According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to toss a grenade at someone and kill them.

Invariably, as an occupation faces more and more resistance, the more sadistic the occupying force becomes. Furthermore, it is also important to remember that US troops serve in one of the most technologically advanced militaries while brutalizing people in one of the poorest countries in the world. If anything, the conduct of these troops, if substantiated, brings to mind attacks upon homeless people by young males.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Sadomasochism

Ongoing revelations of enthusiastic UK participation in US renditions from the inception of the so-called war on terror:

In an MI5 report on the interrogation of Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born British resident held by the Americans at Bagram airbase north of Kabul, an officer wrote to his superiors in London: Deghayes was brought to the interview room manacled and hooded. When the hood was removed, Deghayes looked pale and shaky.

After offering water and asking Deghayes whether he felt well enough to continue, the officers introduced themselves as Paul and Martin, and explained the role of MI5.

They warned Deghayes that he was facing a long period of incarceration in US hands and that they would not consider helping him unless he told them everything they wanted to know. Deghayes was mumbling and incoherent at times but the officers told him they knew he was lying when he answered questions about links with jihadist organisations in Libya.

After another interrogation a week later, an MI5 officer reported back to London that Deghayes was thinner but mentally alert. Throughout the interview Deghayes expectorated rather disgustingly into a tissue as if he were still tubercular. These moments usually coincided with those answers where he was most evasive.

Deghayes told the officers that he was suffering internal bleeding and complained that no evidence had been presented against him. He was also being treated badly, with head-braces and lock-down positions being the order of the day, wrote the officer. He was treated better by the Pakistanis; what kind of world was it where the Americans were more barbaric than the Pakistanis? We listened but did not omment.

Post-9/11, post-invasion of Afghanistan, it was open season on jihadis. For more background on Deghayes, check out this wikipedia entry about him. Beyond a description of the torture that Deghayes says was inflicted upon him after the US subsequently transported him to Guantanamo, the entry is enlightening for its presentation of the way that administrative tribunals evaluated detainees. Detainees, like Deghayes, were only provided with an unclassified summary of evidence against them, although a personal representative was allowed to aid the tribunal in its determination while not, paradoxically, acting as an advocate.

Hence, we will never know whether there was independent corroboration of any of statements set forth in the summary of evidence memoranda provided Deghayes. To the extent that they were true, we will also never know whether the enumerated facts actually justified an enemy combatant designation or merely constituted an after the fact rationalization for Deghayes' continued confinement. We do, however, know that there is good reason to be skeptical, given what the Washington Post discovered when the entire case file for Murat Kurnaz was accidentally declassified.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, American Empire, Guantanamo, Sadomasochism

UPDATE: Sergeant Keith is going to miss his six month old son while killing people in Afghanistan. The propaganda effort in support of this conflict must be going poorly if the Pentagon has to resort to using infants to generate sympathy for the combatants. Apparently, Sergeant Keith wasn't fortunate enough to land an assignment directing drone attacks, which would have enabled him to remain in the US.

INITIAL POST: Next time someone says that you should support the troops, remember this:

Crouched in a field of opium poppies, a young Marine lieutenant pleaded over the radio for an airstrike on a compound where he believed a sniper was firing at his troops. Request denied. Civilians might be inside and the Marines couldn't see a muzzle flash to be absolutely sure the gunman was there.

The lieutenant's frustration, witnessed by an Associated Press journalist in February in Marjah in southern Afghanistan, points to a Catch-22 dilemma facing the NATO force: how to protect troops against an enemy that lives — and fights — among the population without killing civilians and turning the people against the U.S.-led mission.

Those complaints from the ranks are among the issues facing Gen. David Petraeus — along with relations with a weak Afghan government and jittery allies; slow and uncertain progress on the battlefield; and frayed ties to the civilian side of the mission.

But among the most sensitive and important to the troops he commands and to supporters of the military at home will be whether to continue the rules laid down by his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, that stress saving civilian lives but sometimes leave U.S. forces at greater risk.

Those rules, issued a year ago, helped make McChrystal a hero among many Afghans because they brought down the number of civilian casualties blamed on the NATO-led force. The rules were issued at a time of a rising tide of public anger over Afghan civilians killed by mistake in airstrikes and by heavy weapons such as cannons and mortars.

Down in the ranks, however, the rules are widely perceived as too restrictive, playing into the hands of the Taliban who appear keenly aware of the regulations. Some troops believe the rules cost American lives and force them to give up the advantage of overwhelming firepower to a foe who shoots and melts back into the civilian population.

Of course, despite rank and file troop anger, the rules had limited utility in reducing casualties among the Afghan populace. Drone strikes and night raids continue to kill large number of non-combatants. But the groundswell for liberalizing rules of engagement even further in the wake of McChrystal's departure give us an insight into the blood lust that defines the US mission in Afghanistan. Consistent with historic US practice, US troops have no problem indiscriminately killing the civilian populace in order to attain their objective.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Sadomasochism

The preliminary stages of the anticipated Kandahar offensive:

American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing as many as five civilians and wounding 18 and sparking anger in a city where winning over Afghan support is considered pivotal to the war effort.

The American-led military command in Kabul called the killings a “tragic loss of life” and said troops fired not knowing the vehicle was a bus and believing that it posed a threat to a military convoy clearing roadside bombs from a highway.

The killings triggered a vitriolic anti-American demonstration, infuriated officials and appeared likely to harm public opinion on the eve of the most important offensive of the war, in which tens of thousands of American and NATO troops will try to take control of the Kandahar region, the spiritual home of the Taliban, this summer.

Note the subsequent demonstration after the killings is described as vitriolic. You know, those emotional, irrational Afghans just can't avoid overreacting to the excesses of the NATO presence. Given all that US and NATO forces have done for them, can't they at least politely protest with signs like We appreciate your hard work, but please stop killing us? Or, maybe, Don't be so scared of us, we really do like you?

Meanwhile, the anticipated Kandahar offensive looks more and more like a slaughterhouse that will permanently define the US/NATO presence in the country. Afghans will the ability to do so will leave the city for sanctuariers in the countryside, while poorer and incapacitated ones will remain. Upon entering the city, US/NATO forces will blame them for their own deaths and injuries, as US troops did in Fallujah, and as the Israeli Defense Force does in Gaza. To be impoverished and infirm renders one Taliban, whether one likes it or not.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Death Squads, Sadomasochism

Dahr Jamail has published a harrowing article about the indiscriminate violence that has marked the occupation of Iraq:

Truthout has spoken with several soldiers who shared equally horrific stories of the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis by US occupation forces.

"I remember one woman walking by, said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. He told the audience at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland, She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.

The hearings provided a platform for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to share the reality of their occupation experiences with the media in the US.

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.

During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot, Washburn's testimony continued, The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent.

Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.

One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation.... One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.

Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take "trophy" photos of bodies.

An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by, he said, This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment.

Of course, if you haven't figured it out already, you should read the article in its entirety.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism