US troops drag schoolchlidren from their beds and execute them - Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed
Johnny Asia
Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were
killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that
some victims were handcuffed before being killed.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece
December 31, 2009
Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including
children
Afghan protesters shout slogans during a protest in Kabul
(/Ahmad Masood/Reuters)
American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent
children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that
left ten people dead.
Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were
killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that
some victims were handcuffed before being killed.
The allegations of civilian casualties led to protests in Kabul and
Jalalabad, with children as young as 10 chanting �Death to America�
and demanding that foreign forces should leave Afghanistan at once.
President Karzai sent a team of investigators to Narang district, in
eastern Kunar province, after reports of a massacre first surfaced on
Monday.
�The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces
descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang
district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from
three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and
ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them
dead,� a statement on President Karzai�s website said.
Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, said that US soldiers flew
to Kunar from Kabul, suggesting that they were part of a special
forces unit.
�At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with
helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village,�
he told The Times. �The troops walked from the helicopters to the
houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the
students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire.� Mr Wafa, a
former governor of Helmand province, met President Karzai to discuss
his findings yesterday. �I spoke to the local headmaster,� he said.
�It�s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were
civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack.�
In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster said that the
victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. �Seven
students were in one room,� said Rahman Jan Ehsas. �A student and one
guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with
his wife in a third building.
�First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them.
Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then
they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came
outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside.
That�s why his wife wasn�t killed.�
A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one
room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. �I saw their
school books covered in blood,� he said.
The investigation found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to
17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster
said. He said that six of the students were at high school and two
were at primary school. He said that all the students were his
nephews. In Jalalabad, protesters set alight a US flag and an effigy
of President Obama after chanting �Death to Obama� and �Death to
foreign forces�. In Kabul, protesters held up banners showing
photographs of dead children alongside placards demanding �Foreign
troops leave Afghanistan� and �Stop killing us�.
Hekmatullah, 10, a protester, said: �We�re sick of Americans bombing
us.� Samiullah Miakhel, 60, a protester. said: �The Americans are just
all the time killing civilians.�
lo yeeOn
News last summer:
"We are confident that if we are assisting the Afghan people and
improving their security situation, stabilizing their government,
providing help on economic development . . . those things will
continue to contract the ability of Al Qaeda to operate. And that is
absolutely critical."
According to the link:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/23/obama-victory-necessarily-goal-afghanistan/
The leaders of the largest contributors to the coalition . . . say a
Western pullout at this time would enable a resurgent Taliban to take
over the country and give Al Qaeda more space to plan terror attacks
against the West. Some emphasize humanitarian aspects of their
missions, like development aid and civilian reconstruction.
What has been swept under the rug is the human costs.
For example, a bomb dropped by coalition forces killed the parents and
several siblings of 11-year-old Grana from Kandahar. She had her
right leg and left hand amputated - she now uses two different
crutches.
The link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8414337.stm
shows the sweet girl without a hand and with only one leg. She lost
also both of her parents and several of her brothers and sisters.
As we find more and more enemies around the world we want to pick a
fight with, we also leave more and more victims in the trail of our
destruction, including this sweet 11-year-old from Afghanistan. Even
as the US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is known to the world as
a terrorist organization which has worked to destabilize every country
it's set its foot in, our president calls its members our heros.
Why are so many CIA agents sent to Khost and work in Forward Operating
Base Chapman which is equipped with a long airstrip designed to send
unmanned airplanes (drones) directly into the airspace of Pakistan and
killing a bunch of people every time it runs a mission?
Paying tribute to the fallen, Mr Obama said those killed were "part of
a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their
fellow citizens, and for our way of life".
President Obama:
I know firsthand the excellent quality of your work because I rely on
it every day.
I know he's not the first President to talk this kind of talk - what
else can he say? But given the fact that the CIA has a reputation for
sending its employees out to destabilize the world and also the fact
we the US have so tarnished our reputation as a nation in the past 8
years (because of the destruction we wreaked under false pretenses)
that we now have a desperate need to reassure the world that we're
really not what it has perceived us to be, namely thugs fixated at
dominating the world by all means, it is surprising that the world
continues to hear our president speak of the CIA in terms spoken by
his predecessors under which the agency did its dirty deeds.
Indeed, Obama took it upon himself to start his presidency by
traveling to Egypt and other parts of Asia and Africa to tell his
audiences that under him, America was a born-again peacemaker. Yet,
behind the syrupy rhetoric, the deed has turned out to be to be just
as dirty if not worse.
First let's ask why we need to have "irregular" forward operating
bases in Khost (Afghanistan) with countless CIA officers milling
around engaged in "reconstruction" projects when
1) we are the ones who knowingly committed the wanton destruction of
those countries in the first place and
2) when those CIA officers recently killed at FOB Chapman were at the
same air strip where unmanned planes carrying lethal missiles are
regularly fired into Pakistan, indiscrimantly killing everyone in its
crosshairs?
And now consider a little bit of the historical reputation of the CIA
in destabilizing countries around the world.
I) The CIA and Iran
The 1953 Iranian coup d'etat deposed the democratically elected
government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq.
The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) overthrew the
government of the popular Prime Minister Mosaddeq at the request of,
and with support from the British government. In what the CIA called
Operation Ajax, the U.S. enabled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to become an
authoritarian monarch, who went on to rule Iran for 26 years until he
was overthrown in 1979.
--------
II) The CIA and Chile
CIA spreads disinformation that Salvador Allende, the Socialist
candidate, was receiving funds from Eastern Bloc nations or Cuba. The
Christian Democrat Party of Chile candidate Eduardo Frei Montalva
wins the election.
Chile 1970
On September 4, 1970 Salvador Allende gained presidency of Chile
after four elections and became the first socialist to be
democratically elected in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th
century. Soon after, President Richard Nixon ordered a covert
operation, Project FUBELT, to undermine Allende's government and
promote a military coup in Chile. The operations included Henry
Kissinger (National Security Advisor), Richard Helms (CIA Director),
and Attorney General John N. Mitchell. Under the supervision of
Thomas Karamessines, a special task force was established and led by
veteran David Atlee Phillips.[1] $10,000,000 is authorized;
$8,000,000 is spent.
Chile 1973
On September 11, 1973 General Augusto Pinochet, who had just 19 days
prior become the commander in chief of the army, executed a coup
d'etat which resulted in the death of Allende and the beginning of
Pinochet's dictatorship, during which opposition was suppressed via
state terrorism. Whether the US directly participated in the coup
itself is disputed, see 1973 Chilean coup d'etat. Pinochet's crime
has been immortalized by the movie Missing, starring Sissy Spacek and
others.
General Augusto Pinochet was indicted on 10 October 1998 by Spanish
magistrate Baltasar Garzon. He was arrested in London and finally
released by the British government in March 2000. Authorized to
freely return to his native Chile, he was there first indicted by the
judge Juan Guzman Tapia, and charged of a number of crimes, before
dying on 10 December 2006, without having been convicted in any
case. His arrest in London made the front-page of newspapers
worldwide as not only did it involve the head of the military
dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, but it was the first
time that several European judges applied the principle of universal
jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes
committed by former head of states, despite local amnesty laws.
[from the Wikipedia]
III) The CIA and Vietnam and other parts of Indochina
IV) The CIA and Nicaragua
V) The CIA and Tibet
"Democratic Imperialism" Tibet, China, and the National Endowment
for Democracy
by Michael Barker
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6530
[excerpt]
People familiar with Asian history will be aware that during Tibet's
popular uprising against their Chinese occupiers in 1959, his Holiness
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (then aged 23), escaped from his
homeland of Tibet to live in exile in India. Subsequently, the Dalai
Lama formed a Tibetan government-in-exile, and to this day the Dalai
Lama and his government remain in exile.
. . .
This part of Tibetan history is fairly uncontroversial, but a part of
Tibet's story that less people will be familiar with is Tibet's
historical links to the US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Indeed, as Carole McGranahan (2006) notes "[t]he case of Tibet
presents a mostly unexplored example of covert Cold War military
intervention."
While in recent years far more information has been made available
concerning the CIA's While in recent years far more information has
been made available concerning the CIA's current independence
campaigners and an organization that maintains close ties with the
CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
A Brief History of CIA-Tibetan Relations
Jim Mann (1999): ". . . during the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively
backed the Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air
support and all sorts of other help."
Michael Parenti (2004): ". . . in the United States, the American
Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, energetically publicized the
cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama's eldest brother,
Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that group. The Dalai Lama's
second eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence
operation with the CIA in 1951 [although CIA aid was only formally
established in 1956]. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained
guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet."
Indeed, according to formerly secret US intelligence documents
(released in the late 1990s), it turned out that "[f]or much of the
1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a
year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of
$180,000 for the Dalai Lama."By 1969, however, it appears that covert
support for the Tibetan cause had either served its geopolitical
purpose (or it was decided that these operations were simply no longer
effective), and the CIA announced the withdrawal of its aid for the
Tibetan revolutionaries. That said, support for the Tibetan freedom
fighters was still provided by the Indian and Taiwanese governments
"until 1974, two years after President Richard Nixon normalized
U.S. relations with China" (as were the U.S. subsidies for the Dalai
Lama, which also continued until 1974): however, thereafter (as were
the U.S. subsidies for the Dalai Lama, which also continued until
1974): however, thereafter - especially once the Dalai Lama urged the
fighters to put down their weapons - the violent resistance collapsed
and the "CIA quietly paid to resettle the survivors." With the
apparent end of CIA operations in Tibet, John Kraus (2003) observes
that although:
"President Ford ended the U.S. government's involvement with Tibet as
part of its Cold War strategy. The next phase of the U.S.
relationship with the Dalai Lama and his people was to be cast in
terms of a contest between human rights and political engagement with
China."
Thus Kraus adds that in 1979 the Dalai Lama was "inally granted a visa
by President Jimmy Carter to visit the United States" and the "Tibetan
cause then found new sponsors in a bipartisan group of senators,
members of Congress, and congressional staff assistants who worked
with the Dalai Lama's entourage to focus the attention of successive
U.S. administrations and a responsive world community on the Tibet
situation." As this article will demonstrate, a large part of this
freedom work is presently being actively supported by the NED, so the
following section will now examine this organization and it
anti-democratic history.
The National Endowment for Democracy: Revisiting the CIA Connection
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was established in 1984
with bipartisan support during President Reagan's administration to
"foster the infrastructure of democracy - the system of a free press,
unions, political parties, universities" around the world.
Considering Reagan's well documented misunderstanding of what
constitutes democratic governance,[9] it is fitting that Allen
Weinstein, the NEDs first acting president, observed that in fact "A
lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by
the CIA." So for example, it is not surprising that during the 1990
elections in Nicaragua it has been estimated that "for every dollar of
NED or AID funding there were several dollars of CIA funding."
By building upon the pioneering work of liberal philanthropists (like
the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) - who have a long history of
co-opting progressive social movements - it appears that the NED was
envisaged by US foreign policy elites to be a more suitable way to
provide strategic funding to nongovernmental organizations than via
covert CIA funding.
The seminal book exposing the NED's "democratic" modus operandi, is
William I. Robinson's (1996) Promoting Polyarchy, which as it's title
suggests, lays out the argument that instead of promoting more
participatory forms of democracy, the NED actually works to promote
polyarchy. Robinson argues that the NED's active promotion of
polyarchy or low-intensity democracy "is aimed not only at mitigating
the social and political tensions produced by elite-based and
undemocratic status quos, but also at suppressing popular and mass
aspirations for more thoroughgoing democratisation of social life in
the twenty-first century international order."
His book furnishes detailed examples of how the NED has successfully
imposed polyarchal arrangements on four countries, Chile, Nicaragua,
the Philippines, and Haiti; while similarly, Barker (2006) has
illustrated the NED's anti-democratic involvement in facilitating and
manipulating the "color revolutions" which recently swept across
Eastern Europe. More recently, both Barker and Gerald Sussman (2006)
have provided detailed examinations of how the NED works to promote a
low intensity public sphere (globally) through its selective funding
of media organizations.[13] This article will now extend these three
initial studies by critically examining the NED's support for Tibetan
media projects from 1990 onwards.
. . .
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated the close ties that exist between the
Dalai Lama's non-violent campaign for Tibetan independence and
U.S. foreign policy elites who are actively supporting Tibetan causes
through the NED.
This finding is particularly worrying given the international media
profile of many of the groups exposed in this article, especially
when it is remembered that the NED's activities are intimately linked
with those of the CIA. This funding issue is clearly problematic for
Tibetan (or foreign) activists campaigning for Tibetan freedom, as
the overwhelmingly anti-democratic nature of the NED can only weaken
the legitimacy of the claims of any group associated with the NED. In
this regard it seems only fitting that progressive activists truly
concerned with promoting freedom and democracy in Tibet should first
and foremost cast a critical eye over the antidemocratic funders of
many of the Tibetan groups identified in this study. Only then will
they be able to reappraise the sustainability of their work in the
light of the NED's controversial background.
Once this step has been taken, perhaps progressive solutions for
restoring democratic governance to Tibet can be generated by
concerned activists, so that Tibetan people wanting to reclaim their
homeland will [??]able to be more sure that they are bringing
democracy home to Tibet, not polyarchy.
(Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University,
Australia. He can be reached at Michael....@griffith.edu.au)
Although Mr. Barker's aim for his dissertaion is to help the Tibetans
better understanding the pitfalls of working with the infamous CIA and
its descendants, his research has once again revealed the ignominous
role our various spy agencies have systematically played for the
purpose of destabilizing and toppling other countries.
For this reason, Obama's eulogy for the CIA agents recently killed in
Khost's FOB Chapman in northeast Afghanistan, casually rehashing old
tired and phony praise for actually dirty deed done by the CIA, helps
to convince the world that the US powers-that-be's hegemonic ambition
hasn't changed a bit, despite the change of the leadership, the result
of which can't be anything but to harden the divide between us and the
rest of the world, which continues to be trampled upon by our killing
machines and our covert operations.
lo yeeOn
========
In article <n7t1k5hb9o10frrt9...@4ax.com>,
lo yeeOn
News last summer:
"We are confident that if we are assisting the Afghan people and
improving their security situation, stabilizing their government,
providing help on economic development . . . those things will
continue to contract the ability of Al Qaeda to operate. And that is
absolutely critical."
According to the link:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/23/obama-victory-necessarily-goal-afghanistan/
The leaders of the largest contributors to the coalition . . . say a
Western pullout at this time would enable a resurgent Taliban to take
over the country and give Al Qaeda more space to plan terror attacks
against the West. Some emphasize humanitarian aspects of their
missions, like development aid and civilian reconstruction.
What has been swept under the rug is the human cost.
For example, a bomb dropped by coalition forces killed the parents and
several siblings of 11-year-old Grana from Kandahar. She had her
right leg and left hand amputated - she now uses two different
crutches.
The link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8414337.stm
shows the sweet girl without a hand and with only one leg. She lost
also both of her parents and several of her brothers and sisters.
As we find more and more enemies around the world we want to pick a
fight with, we also leave more and more victims in the trail of our
destruction, including this sweet 11-year-old from Afghanistan. Even
as the US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is known to the world as
a terrorist organization which has worked to destabilize every country
it's set its foot in, our president calls its members our heros.
Why are so many CIA agents sent to work in Khost's "irregular" FOB
Chapman, a Forward Operating Base equipped with a hugely extended
airstrip designed to send unmanned airplanes (drones) directly into
nearby Pakistan's airspace to kill a bunch of people on the ground
every time each runs a mission? Are they not actually operating by
remote control those drones from the ground far away in a presumably
secure building in the air base? Are they not effectively fighting a
covert war against Pakistan from the neighboring Afghanistan which we
have invaded and are still fighting to occupy after 8 years?
President Obama:
regularly fired into Pakistan, indiscriminately killing everyone in
their crosshairs?
--------
Chile 1970
Chile 1973
[from the Wikipedia]
by Michael Barker
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6530
[excerpt]
. . .
. . .
Conclusion
lo yeeOn
========