LOS ANGELES - U.S. airstrikes aimed at al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan have been "very effective," with few civilian deaths as a result, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Monday in a rare public acknowledgment of the raids.
Asked about criticism of the missile attacks by counterinsurgency experts, Panetta said he did not want to discuss specifics, "but I can assure you that in terms of that particular area, it is very precise and is very limited in terms of collateral damage."
"Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils
that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of
law and the rights of man -- a charter expanded by the blood of
generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give
them up for expedience sake."
The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter.
Of course there will be an inquiry. And in the meantime, we shall be told that all the dead Afghan civilians were being used as "human shields" by the Taliban and we shall say that we "deeply regret" innocent lives that were lost. But we shall say that it's all the fault of the terrorists, not our heroic pilots and the US Marine special forces who were target spotting around Bala Baluk and Ganjabad.
When the Americans destroy Iraqi homes, there is an inquiry. And oh how the Israelis love inquiries (though they rarely reveal anything).
In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a
cyborg assassin, a "terminator," back to our time. His job was to
liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of
the underground human resistance of Skynet's time. You with me so far?
That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator
movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future
machine war -- of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape
-- are unforgettable.
It has
been 10 years since the U.S.-led war on Yugoslavia. For many leading
Democrats, including some in top positions in the Obama administration,
it was a "good" war, in contrast to the Bush administration's "bad" war
on Iraq. And though the suffering and instability unleashed by the 1999
NATO military campaign wasn't as horrific as the U.S. invasion of Iraq
four years later, the war was nevertheless unnecessary and illegal, and
its political consequences are far from settled.
GAZA CITY - Eighteen-year-old Mona Al-Ashkar says she did not immediately know the first explosion at the United Nations (UN) school in Beit Lahiya had blown her left leg off. There was smoke, then chaos, then the pain and disbelief set in once she realized it was gone - completely severed by the weapon that hit her.
JERUSALEM - The main UN compound in Gaza was left in flames today after being struck by Israeli artillery fire, and a spokesman said that the building had been hit by shells containing the incendiary agent white phosphorus.
The attack on the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) came as Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, arrived in Israel on a peace mission and plunged Israel's relations with the world body to a new low.
RAMALLAH - "There is no doubt that Israel is using phosphorus bombs over Gaza. Israel is flagrantly violating the Fourth Geneva Convention," says Raji Sourani, head of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza.
"This is not the first time we have documented Israel using this kind of prohibited weapon against Gaza's civilian population," Sourani told IPS on phone from Gaza.
