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US has deadliest month in Afghan war

Press TV – August 30, 2011

August 2011 has become the deadliest month for US troops in the decade-long war in Afghanistan with 66 American soldiers killed in the month.

The figure, released by the Associated Press on Tuesday, eclipsed the earlier figure of 65 belonging to July 2010.

Most fatalities were those of an August 6 helicopter crash in which 30 US troops lost their lives. The victims were aboard a Chinook shot down by Taliban militants in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province in the single deadliest incident of the Afghan war.

Twenty-three other American troops died this month in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces in southern Afghanistan. The remaining 13 were killed in eastern Afghanistan.

Besides the 66 Americans killed so far this month, the US-led NATO coalition also suffered the loss of two British, four French, one New Zealander, one Australian, one Polish and five other troops whose nationalities have not yet been disclosed.

So far this year, 403 US-led soldiers, including at least 299 Americans, have been killed in Afghanistan, according to the AP tally.

There are currently about 150,000 US-led foreign troops in Afghanistan, almost 100,000 of them American forces.

August 30, 2011 Posted by | Militarism | 3 Comments

One killed in Danish mosque shooting

Press TV – August 30, 2011

A shooting incident outside a mosque in the Danish capital of Copenhagen has killed at least one person and wounded some others, police say.

Danish police officials say the shooting occurred in a parking lot next to the mosque after Muslim prayers marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, the Copenhagen Post reported.

Witnesses told local media that some 15-20 shots were fired from a car driving by as hundreds of worshippers were leaving the Muslim Cultural Institute.

“It’s horrible. It’s not a day of festivities anymore. I can’t stop thinking about the fact that it was a poor young man heading home to his parents to celebrate that Ramadan was over – and maybe some siblings sitting there waiting for him to come home and they were going to eat together and he’s not coming home now because somebody decided to kill him,” said Jibran Sarwar, one of the witnesses on the scene.

The Institute was founded in the late 1970, and includes both a mosque and several other facilities where Islam is being taught in Danish to children.

The institute has been frequented by many Muslims of South Asian origins. The developments come in backdrop of a dramatic rise of Islamophobia in several Western countries.

August 30, 2011 Posted by | Islamophobia | 1 Comment

UK: Minister says ‘wall is a land grab’– and is censored by Israel lobby

By Ron Taylor | Mondoweiss | August 30, 2011

The Jewish Chronicle reported last week that a video made by Alan Duncan, UK minister for international development, infuriated the Israeli lobby so much that it was withdrawn from the ministry’s website.

In the video Duncan said that, “The wall is a land grab. It hasn’t just gone along the lines of the proper Israel boundary. It’s taken in open land which actually belongs to Palestine”. He added: “Israeli settlers can build what they want and then immediately get the infrastructure so that takes the water deliberately away from Palestinians here.”

Horrified that a government minister could say such things, the lobby went into action. The Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote to Duncan to demand the withdrawal of the video, copying in his boss, Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell, and Foreign Secretary William Hague. Board president Vivian Wineman commented: “Mr Duncan’s apparent disregard for Israel’s legitimate security concerns is of great concern.”

The episode seems to have caused a row between Duncan’s department (DFID) and the Foreign Office. According to the Jewish Chronicle, “Civil servants at the FO made it clear that they did not believe Mr Duncan had struck the right diplomatic tone with the language he had used. However, they did not refer the matter to ministers when DfID and Mr Duncan defied the advice.”

But the FO has now prevailed. Duncan has been brought to heel and the video withdrawn. By way of explanation a spokesperson said, “The video was aimed at highlighting DfID’s work to alleviate poverty in the OPTs [Occupied Palestinian Territories], as well as some of the key challenges facing the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, some elements were misinterpreted and Mr Duncan has asked for it to be taken down”.

It is not clear whether Duncan believes his views were misinterpreted. But one thing is definitely clear – whilst the Israeli lobby in the UK is not visible as its US counterpart, it is still very effective.

August 30, 2011 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | 2 Comments

Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

By JOHN WALSH | August 30, 2011

Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted.  And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan.  After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.”  Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”?  Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya.  This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country?  Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’s version of the “left.”  Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been  fine and dandy.  But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush time.   The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown.   Within a week of the Times piece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an “interrogator.”   Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time “consultant” for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies.  Here is what nearly caused me to keel over when I heard it (From the Democracy Now transcript.):

AMY GOODMAN: So, did you know Professor Cole or know of him at the time you were asked? And can you go on from there? What happened when you said you wouldn’t do this? And who was it who demanded this information from you, said that you should get information?

GLENN CARLE: Well, I did know Professor Cole. He was one of a large number of experts of diverse views that the National Intelligence Council and my office and the CIA respectively consult with to challenge our assumptions and understand the trends and issues on our various portfolios. So I knew him that way. And it was sensible, in that sense, that the White House turned to my office to inquire about him, because we were the ones, at least one of the ones—I don’t know all of Mr. Cole’s work—who had consulted with him. (Emphases mine.)

That seems like strange toil for a man of the “left.”  But were the consultations long drawn out and the association with the CIA a deep one?   It would appear so.  Again from the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the way James Risen (the NYT reporter) writes it, he says, “Mr. Carle said [that] sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. [Mr.] Low and [Mr.] Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, [Mr.] Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear [that] he wanted [Mr.] Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled [his] boss saying, ‘The White House wants to get him.’”

GLENN CARLE: Well, that’s substantially correct. The one nuance, perhaps, I would point out is there’s a difference between collecting information actively, going out and running an operation, say, to find out things about Mr. Cole, or providing information known through interactions.  (Emphasis mine.)  I would characterize it more as the latter.

And later in the interview Carle continues:

On the whole, Professor Cole and I are in agreement. The distinction I make is it wasn’t publicly known information that was requested; it was information that officers knew of a personal nature about Professor Cole, which is much more disturbing. There was no direct request that I’m aware, in the two instances of which I have knowledge, for the officers actively to seek and obtain, to conduct—for me to go out and follow Professor Cole. But if I knew lifestyle questions or so on, to pass those along. (Emphasis mine.)That’s how I—which is totally unacceptable.

It would seem then that the interaction between the CIA operatives and Cole was long standing and sufficiently intimate that the CIA spooks could be expected to know things about Cole’s lifestyle and personal life.  It is not that anyone should give two figs about Cole’s personal life which more than likely is every bit as boring as he claims.  But his relationship with the CIA is of interest since he is an unreconstructed hawk.  What was remarkable to me at the time is that Goodman did not pick up on any of this. Did she know before of Cole’s connections?  Was not this the wrong man to have as a “frequent guest,” in Goodman’s words, on the situation in the Middle East?

This is not to claim that Cole is on a mission for the CIA to convince the left to support the imperial wars, most notably at the moment the war on Libya.  Nor is this a claim that the revelation about the White House seeking information on Cole was a contrived psy-ops effort to rehabilitate Cole so that he could continue such a mission.  That cannot be claimed, because there is as yet no evidence for it.  But information flows two ways in any consultation, and it is even possible that Cole was being loaded with war-friendly information in hopes he would transmit it.

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya.  At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), “We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers.”  It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not.  (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.)  In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy.  The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide.

Whither the Left on the Question of Intervention? 

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk.  But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion.  One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole pro-war.  It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention.  Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam.  But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort.  Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate?  That is a strange choice indeed.

This writer does not get to listen to Democracy Now every day.  But I have not heard a full-throated denunciation of the war on Libya from host or guests.  Certainly according to a search on the DN web site, Cynthia McKinney did not appear as a guest nor Ramsey Clark after their courageous fact finding tour to Libya.  There was only one all out denunciation of the war – on the day when the guests were Rev. Jesse Jackson and Vincent Harding who was King’s speechwriter on the famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967 in which King condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam.  Jackson and the wise and keenly intelligent Harding were there not to discuss Libya but to discuss the MLK Jr. monument.  Nonetheless Jackson and Harding made clear that they did not like the U.S. war in Libya one bit, nor the militarism it entails.

If one reads CounterPunch.org, Antiwar.com or The American Conservative, one knows that one is reading those who are anti-interventionist on the basis of principle.  With Democracy Now and kindred progressive outlets, it’s all too clear where a big chunk of the so-called “left” stands, especially since the advent of Obama.   In his superb little book Humanitarian Imperialism Jean Bricmont criticizes much of the left for falling prey to advocacy of wars, supposedly based on good intentions.  And Alexander Cockburn has often pointed out that  many progressives are actually quite fond of “humanitarian” interventionism.   Both here and in Europe this fondness seems to be especially true of Obama’s latest war, the war on Libya .  It is little wonder that the “progressives” are losing their antiwar following to Ron Paul and the Libertarians who are consistent and principled on the issue of anti-interventionism.

Democracy Now, quo vadis?  Wherever you are heading, you would do well to travel without Juan Cole and his friends.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

After wading through Cole’s loose prose and dubious logic to write this essay, the author suspects that the rejection of Cole by the Yale faculty was the result of considerations that had little to do with neocon Bush/Cheney operatives.

Source

August 30, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Survey: Most Jewish Israeli Youth Would Vote Right, Lieberman

August 30, 2011 | Alternative Information Center

The majority of Jewish high school students in Israel have right-wing political views and would vote for Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as Prime Minister, according to the results of a survey released yesterday in the Israeli media.

The survey, conducted for the sixth annual Haair Conference for Education held in Haifa, surveyed 1000 11th and 12th graders online and was analysed by Tel Aviv University’s Kamil Fox, professor of statistics.

75% of Israeli youth object to removing the siege from the Gaza Strip and 60% believe that Israel is better off giving up on a peace agreement with the Palestinians if it includes returning Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. Moreover, 83% of the youth preferred no peace agreement with Syria over returning the occupied Syrian Golan.

August 30, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | 1 Comment

Jewish settlers attack Qasra village and damage hundreds of olive trees

Palestine Information Center – 30/08/2011

NABLUS — Jewish settlers attacked on Monday evening the village of Qasra to the south east of the northern West Bank city of Nablus and inflicted damage on a number of fields planted with olive trees.

Ghassan Daghlas, in charge of settlements file in the northern West Bank, said in a press statement that settlers from the Aish Kodesh settlement outpost attacked the village and started inflicting damage to fields planted with olive trees.

He pointed out that this was the second attack by the settlers on the village in 48 hours, as the settlers attacked the village two days earlier and damaged dozens of olive trees before the villagers confronted them and chased them away.

Local sources also said that settlers Monday night uprooted 270 olive saplings from villagers fields at the edge of the village and that the settlers’ attacks increased since evening hours.

The sources also said that settlers were throwing stones at Palestinian cars on the road between Nablus and Ramallah and managed to break some car windows.

August 30, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

UK arms sales to despots enjoy rise

Press TV – August 29, 2011

Britain has increased by about 30 percent its weapons exports to the Middle East and North African regions, where a wave of Islamic Awakening is challenging totalitarian regimes.

A new inquiry found that the UK has exported arms worth at least £30.5 million to various countries, including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia between February and June this year, as compared to £22million in the same period of 2010, The Times newspaper reported.

According to the report, arms exports to countries, where human rights records are deteriorating, have spiked by one third at the same time when the rulers of these countries are brutally repressing their own people.

The arms exports included weapons used for internal repression, such as small arms ammunition, rifles and sub-machine guns, the report said.

This was despite the Foreign Office promising in February an “immediate and rapid” review of all military exports to the region.

Shortly before the UN Security Council imposed an embargo on weapon supplies to Libya in February this year, Britain provided the Libyan regime with ammunition worth a total of £64,000, the report added.

Meanwhile, the UK weapons manufacturers continued selling weapons to Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt during the period from February to April. The Bahraini regime received the British-made weapons in April, several weeks after its troops violently broke up a pro-democracy rally in Manama’s Pearl Square.

The revelations add to the UK government’s double standard policy as it has been harshly denouncing Bahraini regime of al-Khalifa for gunning down pro-democracy activists in the country, and at the same time selling them weapons, which its regime used to suppress dissent.

It is also difficult to assume that the British authorities were unaware of weapon supplies to the troubled countries of the Middle East and North Africa, given that the country’s license to sell arms is under strict control of the government.

British laws accurately outline that the license should not be issued if weapons sold may be used for internal repressions, attacks against other countries, as well as heating up or extending armed conflicts.

Meanwhile, the UK’s largest peace campaign group, Stop the War Coalition (STWC) has said in a report that Britain is one of the prominent “gunrunners” to the world’s most oppressive and corrupt regimes.

“Britain is one of the world´s biggest arms traders, with a long history of arming the most oppressive regimes, like Libya, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, who we can assume used UK arms in putting down Arab Spring rebellions,” STWC said.

“Out of the 26 countries that the UK has highlighted as being ‘countries of concern´ on human rights, we sell arms to 16 of them,” it said.

August 30, 2011 Posted by | Militarism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment