Pakistan: Co najmniej 15 osób zginęło w zamachu...

[darthmaciek]

hej, forumowi Amerykanozercy, co sie lenicie. Godzina od publikacji
i jeszcze zadnego postu tlumaczacego dlaczego to jest wina USA?
Leniuszki, nie chce im sie w poniedzialek obudzic....

Bush's Global 'Dirty War'

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By: Robert Parry on: 01.10.2007 [15:35 ] (30 reads)

George W. Bush has transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including
Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into “death squads” with a
license to kill unarmed targets on the suspicion that they are a threat to
American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to evidence from
recent court cases
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Though this reality has been the subject of whispers within the U.S.
intelligence community for several years, it has now emerged into public view
with two attempted prosecutions of American soldiers whose defense attorneys
cited “rules of engagement” that permit the killing of suspected insurgents.

One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr. who was acquitted by a U.S.
military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28 in the murders of two unarmed Iraqi men –
one on April 27 and the other on May 11 – because the jury accepted defense
arguments that the killings were within the approved rules.

The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon’s
Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop “bait”
– such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot Iraqis who pick up
the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. Washington Post, Sept.
24, 2007

(Sandoval was convicted of a lesser charge of planting a coil of copper wire on
one of the slain Iraqis. He was sentenced to five months in prison and a
reduction in rank but will be eligible to rejoin his unit in as few as 44 days.)

The other recent case of authorized murder of an insurgent suspect surfaced at a
military court hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in mid-September. Two U.S.
Special Forces soldiers took part in the execution of an Afghani who was
suspected of leading an insurgent group.

Though the Afghani, identified as Nawab Buntangyar, responded to questions and
offered no resistance when encountered on Oct. 13, 2006, he was shot dead by
Master Sgt. Troy Anderson on orders from his superior officer, Capt. Dave Staffel.

According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army
investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been operating under
“rules of engagement” that empowered them to kill individuals who have been
designated “enemy combatants,” even if the targets were unarmed and presented no
visible threat.

Yet, whatever the higher-ups approve as “rules of engagement,” the practice of
murdering unarmed suspects remains a violation of the laws of war and –
theoretically at least – would open up the offending country’s chain of command
to war-crimes charges.

Troubling Picture

The troubling picture is that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up to
President Bush, has authorized loose “rules of engagement” that allow targeted
killings – as well as other objectionable tactics including arbitrary arrests,
“enhanced interrogations,” kidnappings in third countries with “extraordinary
renditions” to countries that torture, secret CIA prisons, detentions without
trial, and “reeducation camps” for younger detainees.

The U.S. counterinsurgency and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan also
have been augmented by heavily armed mercenaries, such as the Blackwater
“security contractors” who operate outside the law and were accused by Iraqi
authorities of killing at least 11 Iraqi civilians in a shooting incident on
Sept. 16.

The use of lethal force against unarmed suspects and civilians has a notorious
history in irregular warfare especially when an occupying army finds itself
confronting an indigenous resistance in which guerrillas and their political
supporters blend in with the local population.

In effect, Bush’s “global war on terror” appears to have reestablished what was
known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated
Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist political allies.

Through a classified Pentagon training program known as “Project X,” the lessons
of Operation Phoenix from the 1960s were passed on to Third World armies,
especially in Latin America allegedly giving a green light to some of the “dirty
wars” that swept the region in the following decades. For details, see Neck
Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.

Bush’s global strategy also has similarities to “Operation Condor” in which
South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent assassins on
cross-border operations to eliminate “subversives.”

Despite behind-the-scenes support for some of these Latin American “death
squads,” the U.S. government presented itself as the great defender of human
rights and criticized repressive countries that engaged in extrajudicial
killings and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush waged
his “war on terror,” while continuing to impress the American news media with
pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address
to the United Nations on Sept. 25.

Under Bush’s remarkable double standards, he has taken the position that he can
override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who gets
basic human rights and who doesn’t. He sees himself as the final judge of
whether people he deems “bad guys” should live or die, or face indefinite
imprisonment and even torture.

Effective Immunity

While such actions by other leaders might provoke demands for an international
war-crimes tribunal, there would appear to be no likelihood of that in this case
since the offending nation is the United States. Given its “superpower” status,
the United States and its senior leadership are effectively beyond the reach of
international law.

However, even if the Bush administration can expect a real-politik immunity from
a war-crimes trial, the brutal tactics of the “global war on terror” – as well
as in Iraq and Afghanistan – continue to alienate the Muslim world and undermine
much of Bush’s geopolitical strategy.

The ugly image of Americans killing unarmed Iraqis also helps explain the
growing hostility of Iraqis toward the presence of U.S. troops.

While the Bush administration has touted the supposed improved security created
by the “surge” of additional U.S. troops into Iraq, a major poll found Iraqis
increasingly object to the American occupation.

A survey of more than 2,000 Iraqis by the BBC, ABC News and the Japanese news
agency, NHK, discovered mounting opposition to the U.S. occupation and
increasing blame put on American forces for Iraq’s security problems.

Eighty-five percent of those polled said they had little or no confidence in
American and British occupation forces, up from 82 percent in February, when the
“surge” began. Only 18 percent said they thought the coalition forces had done a
good job, down from 24 percent in February. Forty-seven percent said occupying
forces should leave now, up from 35 percent.

The number of Iraqis who feel the U.S. invasion was wrong also jumped 10
percentage points to 63 percent in August compared to 53 percent in February.
The new survey found 57 percent of Iraqis supporting attacks on U.S. troops, up
from 51 percent in February and 17 percent in 2004.

As for the surge itself, 70 percent said it had made the security situation
worse with only 18 percent citing any improvement.

Regarding social and economic conditions, the poll also revealed a dismal outlook:

Only 8 percent of

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Only 8 percent of Iraqis now rate their supply of electricity as good, down from
46 percent in 2005. Only 25 percent were satisfied with the availability of
clean water compared to 58 percent two years ago, helping to explain the
outbreak of cholera from northern Iraq to Baghdad.

Only 32 percent of Iraqis called medical care adequate compared to 62 percent in
2005. Satisfaction with schools fell to 51 percent from 74 percent in 2005.
Satisfaction with family economic situations also was down to 37 percent from 70
percent two years ago.

Blackwater Mercenaries

Little wonder that the unpopular Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki has sought to make an issue over the trigger-happy tendencies of
Blackwater mercenaries who provide security for U.S. embassy personnel and other
American VIPs.

On Sept. 16, Blackwater gunmen accompanying a U.S. diplomatic convoy apparently
sensed an ambush and opened fire, spraying a Baghdad square with bullets.
Eyewitness accounts indicated that the Blackwater team apparently overreacted to
a car, containing a husband and a wife and their child, moving into the square
and killed at least 11 people, including the family in the car.

“Blackwater has no respect for the Iraqi people,” an Iraqi Interior Ministry
official told the Washington Post. “They consider Iraqis like animals, although
actually I think they may have more respect for animals.” Washington Post, Sept.
20, 2007

Iraqis have objected to other disregard of innocent life by American troops,
such as the killing of two dozen Iraqis in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005, after one
Marine died from an improvised explosive device.

According to published accounts of U.S. military investigations, the dead
Marine’s comrades retaliated by pulling five men from a cab and shooting them,
and entering two homes where civilians, including women and children, were
slaughtered.

The Marines then tried to cover up the killings by claiming that the civilian
deaths were caused by the original explosion or a subsequent firefight,
according to investigations by the U.S. military and human rights groups.

One of the accused Marines, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, gave his account of the Haditha
killings in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” including an admission that
his squad tossed a grenade into one of the residences without knowing who was
inside.

“Frank, help me understand,” asked interviewer Scott Pelley. “You’re in a
residence, how do you crack a door open and roll a grenade into a room?”

“At that point, you can’t hesitate to make a decision,” Wuterich answered.
“Hesitation equals being killed, either yourself or your men.”

“But when you roll a grenade in a room through the crack in the door, that’s not
positive identification, that’s taking a chance on anything that could be behind
that door,” Pelley said.

“Well, that’s what we do. That’s how our training goes,” Wuterich said.

Who’s at Fault?

Four Marines were singled out for courts martial over the Haditha killings
though some legal analysts believe the case could be jeopardized by the loose
“rules of engagement” that let U.S. troops kill Iraqis when a threat is detected.

Nevertheless, as in earlier killings of Iraqi civilians – or the sexual and
other abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison – punishments are likely to
stop at the level of rank-and-file soldiers with higher-ups avoiding accountability.

In large part, the lack of high-level accountability stems from the fact that
the key instigator of both the illegal invasion of Iraq and the harsh tactics
employed in the “war on terror” is President Bush.

Not only did he order an aggressive war – a concept condemned by World War II’s
Nuremberg Tribunal as “the supreme international crime differing only from other
war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”
– but Bush pumped U.S. troops full of false propaganda by linking Iraq with the
9/11 attacks.

Bush’s subliminal connections between the Iraq War and 9/11 continued years
after U.S. intelligence dismissed any linkage. For instance, on June 18, 2005,
more than two years into the Iraq War, Bush told the American people that “we
went to war because we were attacked” on 9/11.

Bush’s rhetorical excesses, though primarily designed to build and maintain a
political consensus behind the war at home, had the predictable effect of
turning loose a revenge-seeking and heavily armed U.S. military force on the
Iraqi population.

Little wonder that a poll of 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq – taken in
January and February 2006 – found that 85 percent believed the U.S. mission in
Iraq was mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
Seventy-seven percent said a chief war goal was “to stop Saddam from protecting
al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

In that context, many Americans sympathize with the individual U.S. soldiers who
have to make split-second life-or-death decisions while thinking they are
operating under legitimate rules of engagement that allow killing perceived
enemies even if they are unarmed and showing no aggressive intent.

‘Salvador Option’

By early 2005, as the Iraqi insurgency grew, an increasingly frustrated Bush
administration reportedly debated a “Salvador option” for Iraq, an apparent
reference to the “death squad” operations that decimated the ranks of perceived
leftists who were opposed to El Salvador’s right-wing military junta in the
early 1980s.

According to Newsweek magazine, President Bush was contemplating the adoption of
that brutal “still-secret strategy” of the Reagan administration as a way to get
a handle on the spiraling violence in Iraq.

“Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy in El Salvador to have been a
success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote.

The magazine also noted that many of Bush’s advisers were leading figures in the
Central American operations of the 1980s, including Elliott Abrams, who is now
an architect of Middle East policy on the National Security Council.

In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth commission
later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El
Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such as the
slaughter committed by a U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women
and children near the town of El Mozote in 1981.

The Reagan administration’s “Salvador option” also had a domestic component, the
so-called “perception management” operation that employed sophisticated
propaganda to manipulate the fears of the American people while hiding the ugly
reality of the wars.

For details about how these strategies worked and the role of George H.W. Bush,
see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. For more on the Salvador option, see
Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Death Squads,” Jan. 11, 2005.

In the Iraqi-sniper case, Army sniper Sandoval admitted killing an Iraqi man
near the town of Iskandariya on April 27 after a skirmish with insurgents.
Sandoval testified that his team leader, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered
him to kill a man cutting grass with a rusty scythe because he was suspected of
being an insurgent posing as a farmer.

The second killing occurred on May 11 when a man walked into a concealed
location where Sandoval, Hensley and other snipers were hiding. After the Iraqi
was detained, another sniper, Sgt. Evan Vela, was ordered to shoo

Bush's Global 'Dirty War' Part 3

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The second killing occurred on May 11 when a man walked into a concealed
location where Sandoval, Hensley and other snipers were hiding. After the Iraqi
was detained, another sniper, Sgt. Evan Vela, was ordered to shoot the man in
the head by Hensley and did so, according to Vela’s testimony at Sandoval’s
court martial.

Sandoval was acquitted of murder charges because a military jury concluded that
his actions were within the rules of engagement. Hensley is to go on trial in a
few weeks.

Regarding the Afghanistan case, Special Forces Capt. Staffel and Sgt. Anderson
were leading a team of Afghan soldiers when an informant told them where a
suspected insurgent leader was hiding. The U.S.-led contingent found a man
believed to be Nawab Buntangyar walking outside his compound near the village of
Hasan Kheyl.

While the Americans kept their distance out of fear the suspect might be wearing
a suicide vest, the man was questioned about his name and the Americans checked
his description against a list from the Combined Joint Special Operations Task
Force Afghanistan, known as “the kill-or-capture list.”

Concluding that the man was insurgent leader Nawab Buntangyar, Staffel gave the
order to shoot, and Anderson – from a distance of about 100 yards away – fired a
bullet through the man’s head, killing him instantly.

‘Classified Mission’

The soldiers viewed the killing as “a textbook example of a classified mission
completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement,” the
International Herald Tribune reported. “The men said such rules allowed them to
kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell
leader, once they positively identified him.”

Staffel’s civilian lawyer Mark Waple said the Army’s Criminal Investigation
Command concluded in April that the shooting was “justifiable homicide,” but a
two-star general in Afghanistan instigated a murder charge against the two men.
That case, however, has floundered over accusations that the charge was
improperly filed. IHT, Sept. 17, 2007

The U.S. news media has given the Fort Bragg case only minor coverage
concentrating mostly on legal sparring. The New York Times’ inside-the-paper,
below-the-fold headline on Sept. 19 was “Green Beret Hearing Focuses on How
Charges Came About.”

The Washington Post did publish a front-page story on the “bait” aspect of the
Sandoval case – when family members of U.S. soldiers implicated in the killings
came forward with evidence of high-level encouragement of the snipers – but the
U.S. news media has treated the story mostly as a minor event and has drawn no
larger implications.

The greater significance of the cases is that they confirm the long-whispered
allegations that the U.S. chain of command has approved standing orders that
give the U.S. military broad discretion to kill suspected militants on sight.

The “global war on terror” appears to have morphed into a global “dirty war”
with George W. Bush in ultimate command.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous
Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and
can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege:
The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras,
Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

www.consortiumnews.com/2007/100107.html
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Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy

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Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy


It is about oil—unabashedly and shamefully. Even to those lacking experience
with US policy in the Middle East, it should have been obvious early on, when
every one of Bush’s senior national security officials spoke verbatim from the
talking-point sheet, ‘It’s not about oil’, says Ray McGovern.


It is an exceedingly dangerous time. Vice President Dick Cheney and his
hard-core “neo-conservative” protégés in the administration and Congress are
pushing harder and harder for President George W. Bush, isolated from reality,
to honor the promise he made to Israel to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear
weapon.

On Sept. 23, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned pointedly:

“If we escalate tensions, if we succumb to hysteria, if we start making threats,
we are likely to stampede ourselves into a war with Iran, which most reasonable
people agree would be a disaster for us...I think the administration, the
president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the
atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq.”

So why the pressure for a wider war in which any victory will be Pyrrhic—for
Israel and for the US? The short answer is arrogant stupidity; the longer
answer—what the Chinese used to call “great power chauvinism”—and oil.

The truth can slip out when erstwhile functionaries write their memoirs (the
dense pages of George Tenet’s tome being the exception). Kudos to the still
functioning reportorial side of the Washington Post, which on Sept. 15, was the
first to ferret out the gem in former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan’s book that
the Iraq war was “largely about oil.”

But that’s okay, said the Post’s editorial side (which has done yeoman service
as the White House’s Pravda) the very next day. Dominating the op-ed page was a
turgid piece by Henry Kissinger, serving chiefly as a reminder that there is an
excellent case to be made for retiring when one reaches the age of statutory
senility.

Dr. Kissinger described as a “truism” the notion that “the industrial nations
cannot accept radical forces dominating a region on which their economies
depend.” (Curious. That same truism was considered a bad thing, when an integral
part of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” applied to Eastern Europe.)

What is important here is that Kissinger was speaking of Iran, which—in a
classic example of pot calling kettle black—he accuses of “seeking regional
hegemony.”

What’s going on here seems to be a concerted effort to get us accustomed to the
prospect of a long, and possibly expanded war.

Don’t you remember? Those terrorists, or Iraqis, or Iranians, or
jihadists...whoever...are trying to destroy our way of life.

The White House spin machine is determined to justify the war in ways they think
will draw popular support from folks like the well-heeled man who asked me
querulously before a large audience, “Don’t you agree that several GIs killed
each week is a small price to pay for the oil we need?”

Consistency in US Policy?

The Bush policy toward the Middle East is at the same time consistent with, and
a marked departure from, the US approach since the end of World War II.

Given ever-growing US dependence on imported oil, priority has always been given
to ensuring the uninterrupted supply of oil, as well as securing the state of
Israel. The US was, by and large, successful in achieving these goals through
traditional diplomacy and commerce.

Granted, it would overthrow duly elected governments, when it felt it
necessary—as in Iran in 1953, after its president nationalized the oil. But the
George W. Bush administration is the first to start a major war to implement US
policy in the region.

Just before the March 2003 attack, Chas Freeman, US ambassador to Saudi Arabia
for President George H.W. Bush, explained that the new policy was to maintain a
lock on the world’s energy lifeline and be able to deny access to global
competitors.

Freeman said the new Bush administration “believes you have to control resources
in order to have access to them” and that, with the end of the Cold War, the US
is uniquely able to shape global events—and would be remiss if it did not do so.

This could not be attempted in a world of two superpowers, but has been a
longstanding goal of the people closest to George W. Bush.

In 1975 in Harpers, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger authored under a
pseudonym an article, “Seizing Arab Oil.”

Blissfully unaware that the author was his boss, the highly respected career
ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, committed the mother of all faux pas
when he told a TV audience that whoever wrote that article had to be a “madman.”
Akins was right; he was also fired.

In those days, cooler heads prevailed, thanks largely to the deterrent effect of
a then-powerful Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in proof of the axiom that bad ideas
never die, 26 years later Kissinger rose Phoenix-like to urge a spanking new
president to stoke and exploit the fears engendered by 9/11, associate Iraq with
that catastrophe, and seize the moment to attack Iraq.

It was well known that Iraq’s armed forces were no match for ours, and the
Soviet Union had imploded.

Some, I suppose, would call that Realpolitik. Akins saw it as folly; his
handicap was that he was steeped in the history, politics, and culture of the
Middle East after serving in Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, as well as Saudi
Arabia—and knew better.

The renaissance of Kissinger’s influence in 2001 on an impressionable young
president, together with faith-based analysis by untutored ideologues cherry
picked by Cheney explain what happened next—an unnecessary, counterproductive
war, in which over 3,800 U. S. troops have already been killed—leaving Iraq
prostrate and exhausted.

A-plus in Chutzpah, F in Ethics

In an International Herald Tribune op-ed on Feb. 25, 2007, Kissinger focused on
threats in the Middle East to “global oil supplies” and the need for a
“diplomatic phase,” since the war had long since turned sour. Acknowledging that
he had supported the use of force against Iraq, he proceeded to boost chutzpah
to unprecedented heights.

Kissinger referred piously to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which left the
European continent “prostrate and exhausted.” What he failed to point out is
that the significance of that prolonged carnage lies precisely in how it finally
brought Europeans to their senses; that is, in how it ended.

The Treaty of Westphalia brought the mutual slaughter to an end, and for
centuries prevented many a new attack by the strong on the weak—like the US
attack on Iraq in 2003.

It was, it is about oil—unabashedly and shamefully. Even to those lacking
experience with US policy in the Middle East, it should have been obvious early
on, when every one of Bush’s senior national security officials spoke verbatim
from the talking-point sheet, “It’s not about oil.”

Thanks to Greenspan and Kissinger, the truth is now “largely” available to those
who do not seek refuge in denial.

The implications for the future are clear—for Iraq and Iran. As far as this
administration is concerned (and as Kissinger himself has written), “Withdrawal
from Iraq is not an option.” Westphalia? U.N. Charter? Geneva Conventions? Hey,
we’re talking superpower!

Thus, Greenspan last Monday with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

“Getting him Saddam Hussein out of the control position...was

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