US, S Korea plan more joint naval drills
Press TV – December 1, 2010
In recent months, the US and South Korea have conducted several massive joint sea and air drills in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
Amid a growing tension between North Korea and the South, the US and South Korea plan more joint naval drills as early as this month as they wrap up war games in the Yellow Sea.
According to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) on Wednesday, South Korea and the US were discussing holding a joint naval exercise this month or in early 2011.
“Discussions are still under way on when and where the drill would take place and on what scale,” AFP quoted the JCS spokesman as saying.
Ten warships and 7,300 crews have taken part in the joint war games in the Yellow Sea that started three days ago.
The US and South Korea conducted the drills amid recent tensions between South Korea and the North. Last week, Seoul and Pyongyang exchanged artillery fires in the Yellow Sea border island of Yeonpyeong and the two blamed each other for the border fighting.
South Korea says it returned fire after North Korean forces shelled one of its islands, but the North says the South fired first. Two South Korean troops lost their lives in the clashes.
US President Barack Obama has already promised what he called unshakeable support for Seoul. He also called North Korea a serious threat that must be dealt with. He, however, ruled out a US military intervention.
“The United States remains firmly and fully committed to the defense of its ally the Republic of Korea,” he said.
In recent months, the US and South Korea have conducted several massive joint sea and air drills in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
Meanwhile, envoys from North Korea and Japan are in the Chinese capital of Beijing to discuss the latest developments in the region.
China has called for prevention of any moves that could fuel tensions in the region. Beijing says the recent crisis on the Korean Peninsula should be resolved through dialogue and negotiations.
The Environmental Impact Of War
IMAGES OF DEVASTATED battlefields are all too familiar. A German officer in 1918 described ‘dumb, black stumps of shattered trees which still stick up where there used to be villages. Flayed by splinters of bursting shells, they stand like corpses upright. Not a blade of grass anywhere. Just miles of flat, empty, broken and tumbled stone.’ The ploughs in Flanders fields still turn up human bones every year.
But twentieth century technology, busily applied to the practice of war, has ensured a more lethal harvest. For example, landmines: planted in millions in war-torn countries across the world, killing and maiming long after wars are over, and denying agricultural use of the land in which they lurk. A Khmer Rouge general called them ‘the perfect soldier’: cheap, efficient, expendable, never hungry, never needing sleep. But eighty percent of landmine victims are civilians, not soldiers; and nearly a quarter of those are children.
Clearing mines is laborious, dangerous, and 30 times the cost of the weapon itself. So is clearing unexploded ordnance of all kinds (including worldwide munitions dumps which leak toxic wastes). The most severe UXO contamination in the world is in Laos. Bomb disposal teams have no records to work from. ‘It was America’s secret war and we can’t get the information,’ says a team leader. ‘All you can do is teach people to live with the bomb.’
But it’s the testing and manufacture of the nuclear bomb which has been responsible for some of the most profound and persistent environmental damage to life on earth. “The complex mixture of contaminants found on many military sites is dynamically moving through the environment,’ says a medical expert. Radiation problems affect people near nuclear plants in every country that has them. Repair and maintenance of many installations and equipment are dangerously inadequate.
Nuclear waste is a global problem that won’t go away, threatening environmental disaster on a vast scale: its poison, and toxic chemicals which accompany all weapon production, have travelled round the globe in the atmosphere and ocean currents; as well as water and air, they harm earth, plants that grow in it, and subsistent livestock and wildlife. Human exposure to nuclear and chemical tests and factories, or via the food chain, results in miscarriages, malformed foetuses, high infant mortality and congenital disorders, leukaemia and other cancers, tumours, thyroid disorders, and complex debilitating and life-shortening syndromes. The number of reports of such harmful effects on health, habitat and culture – always at risk in war – continues to grow.
Because war disrupts social structures, ecostructures are neglected and abused, with lasting and costly consequences.
All along the coast of Somalia huge sand dunes, 20 miles across, have crept from the sea towards the main coastal highway. ‘When the dunes hit the road, a new road will need to be built,’ says a Red Cross agronomist. ‘There used to be government plans to stop them. Now there’s nothing. The communication breakdown will be a social disaster.’ The ICRC, encouraging self-sufficiency and seawater fish in the conservative Somali diet, provided boats, nets, hooks and training – only to discover another of war’s ecological chain effects: the coastal waters off Somalia had become a free-for-all, all protocols for international fishing rights ignored. Resources are being fished unsustainably – ‘almost a mining operation,’ says a UN observer. Illegal fishermen now go armed, to protect what they perceive as their property rights.
It’s widely agreed that Sudan’s 1988 famine was caused by its protracted civil war. Southern Sudan has some of the most productive land in Africa; its people are hardworking farmers and herdsmen. If fighting stopped, they’d manage to survive. Instead, thousands have been forced out of their homes, thousands have died, and their land is uncared-for.
‘Most disasters are like this: a mess of war, displacement, hunger and ignorance,’ says Africa specialist John Ryle. ‘To feed the hungry and treat the sick in such circumstances is to become part of the war economy. Part of what aid workers do involves clearing up the chaos left by the global arms trade. They say they are saving lives – but for what? To be lost in endless wars that feed on aid?’
Meanwhile the worst outbreak of sleeping sickness this century has been spreading through the south-west; disease follows war everywhere.
The earth’s environment is battered by war, its preparation, practice and aftermath. It is destroyed as an act of war; it is used as a weapon of war; and its destruction is expensive and sometimes irreversible. Its integral involvement with war is often secret, widely ignored, and easily forgotten – until now.
Now, some people are beginning to talk and listen. Some people are beginning to act. There is a treaty to ban landmines now. There are moves towards tackling the problems of nuclear waste and weapon stockpiles. There is a growing global awareness – with charters to prove it – that war has created consequences which cross boundaries and ignore territories. Natural disasters are costly enough; the cost of war damage is much higher. Even if politics don’t achieve change, economics might.
It’s the natural tendency of governments to suppress or talk down bad news. So it’s the duty of the rest of us – to uncover and publicise it wherever possible. Without the facts, there can’t be informed public opinion, nor a corporate will to deal with the disasters that war creates – dangerous not only for combatants but for civilians, not only for the duration of the war but far into the future, not for warring countries alone but for the whole world.
In one way or another, everyone is already affected. In one way or another, the still-quickening rush to even greater disasters must be stopped.
And the first thing to go must be war.
Army to seize new national sacrifice zone for militarism
This land will be used to conduct military exercises with a new generation of automated heavy tracked combat equipment, including live fire and bombing. The area to be sacrificed stretches from Kansas to the Rocky Mountains and is larger than Vermont and many entire nations.
Our Land is Our Life
Essay by Andrea Leininger
So what does the land signify, what does it mean to you? This question has been asked of ranchers nonstop for the past few years, ever since it was made known that the Army wanted to expand their Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site. And every time, we answer, “It’s our life.”
Now, some people just can’t understand why we get so worked up over a piece of land. And wouldn’t it just be easier, they ask, to take the money and get a house in town where you don’t have to work yourself to the bone 24/7? Well, actually, no. It would not be easier. We would be miserable. Why? Because we’re not working.
I know that sounds preposterous to some, but to us, it makes all the sense in the world. When you have worked so hard to build something out of nothing, and you have put your sweat, your tears, and your blood into it, it is impossible to give it up and see all of those years, all of that time, and all of that precious, hard-earned money go to waste. And when you think of what will happen to that land when tanks roll over it, bombs blast it, and bullets riddle your house in urban warfare training, it makes you sick, and it makes your blood boil. How can they take something away from us that we worked our whole lives to build, and put everything into it until that is all we live and breathe?
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The environmental overseers of Fort Hood (a current maneuver site) made this statement, “Our mission is to train soldiers to fight and win wars wherever they are sent. To accomplish that training, it is anything but friendly to the environment.”
Fort Hood spends up to 119 days a year just putting out fires set during live fire practice.
Not only will the local communities be dispersed, but the public will be barred from visiting this unique part of the world. It will eventually be abandoned as a massive depleted uranium contamination site.
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US to spend $413bn more on Afghan war
Press TV – November 21, 2010
A decision by US President Barack Obama to extend the presence of American troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 is likely to increase the remaining cost of the unpopular war to USD 413 billion.
The US president, who was expected to announce an exit strategy from Afghanistan at the recent NATO summit in Lisbon, pushed for an indefinite postponement of troop withdrawal instead.
Obama declared in a nationally televised address in December that the transfer of the US forces out of Afghanistan would begin in July 2011. He, however, later redefined the previous timeline stating that Afghan forces would only begin taking the lead for security across Afghanistan by 2014.
On Saturday, NATO Secretary General said the US-led military alliance will remain in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to finish off its enemies there.
The newly defined deadline comes with a heavy price tag at a time when the US and many of its allies are facing increasing deficit cuts at home.
“I don’t think anyone is seriously talking about cutting war funding as a way of handling the deficit,” said Todd Harrison, a Defense funding expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Calculating costs based on USD 1.1 million per soldier per year, Harrison assesses that the new description of the deadline will cost the American taxpayers an additional USD 125 billion through 2014 alone.
The remaining war cost had been estimated to be USD 288 billion assuming that the troops involved in Obama’s surge would be withdrawn by 2012.
LAOS: For Cluster Bomb Survivors, War Far From Over
By Irwin Loy | November 10, 2010 | IPS
VIENTIANE – Eighteen-year-old Phongsavath Manithong rubbed his eyes with the back of his arms as he described how his life changed forever.
He was not even born yet when U.S. military pilots dropped millions of tiny explosives onto Laos. But almost four decades after war ended for this South-east Asian nation, it is people like him who still suffer.
Three years ago, Phongsavath stumbled onto a small, metallic sphere buried in the ground near his school.
He had heard stories about the planes that rumbled overhead decades before, dropping fire from the sky. But he had never before seen a bomb, or held one in his hands. “I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t think it would be dangerous. So I tried to open it,” Phongsavath recalled.
That decision changed his life forever. Phongsavath remembers only seeing a flash of light before his world fell dark. When he awoke in a hospital, he was blind. The bomb had robbed him of his eyesight and ripped away both his hands.
The weapon was part of a decades-old cluster bomb that had been dropped on Laos during the U.S. military’s secretive operations in Indochina between 1964 and 1973. The goal of the air strikes had been to destroy the crucial North Vietnamese Army supply line that snaked its way through Laos and Cambodia on its way to the south. By the time the war was over, those aerial campaigns entrenched Laos as the most heavily bombed country in history.
But today, it is people like Phongsavath who are paying the price for that conflict. Since the war ended, more than 20,000 people in this country have been killed or injured by leftover explosives.
Critics take particular aim at so-called cluster bombs – large explosives dropped from the sky, which contain hundreds of smaller submunitions, or ‘bombies’, as they are referred to in Laos – because they are especially deadly to civilians long after military hostilities have ended.
Estimates suggest more than 270 million individual bombies were scattered over Laos. With a failure rate estimated at around 30 percent, these deadly weapons litter the Lao countryside.
But advocates hope that 2010 represents a turning point in a long-running campaign to eradicate cluster bombs. In August, a treaty banning the use of cluster bombs came into effect. Starting Nov. 9 here in Vientiane, delegates from more than 100 countries are taking part in the first high- level meeting of signatory nations since then, aiming to hammer out a plan to implement the landmark accord.
“The horrifying thing is there may be up to 80 million of these bombs scattered around the countryside, in farmers’ fields, next to schools, beside roads,” said Thomas Nash, coordinator for the Cluster Munition Coalition, a broad group of civil society organisations who have pushed for the wide-reaching ban. “So there’s a huge amount of work to be done to clear this country of the deadly legacy from a war that ended over 35 years ago.”
Laos is seen, per capita, as the most heavily affected country by such munitions. But cluster bombs have riddled conflict-ridden countries around the globe, from Angola to Zambia and Lebanon to Libya.
The 108 nations that have signed on to the Convention on Cluster Munitions have committed to banning the use of the weapons and the eventual destruction of existing stockpiles. They have also made broad pledges to clear contaminated land and provide adequate aid to victims of cluster bombs.
But while heavily affected countries like Laos have ratified the treaty, major military players that still stockpile the weapons – the United States, China and Russia, for example – have not.
Advocates like Nash, however, are hoping the convention will serve to stigmatise the weapons enough so that their use is considered untenable – something he believes has already been accomplished with landmines.
The United States, for example, has not signed on to the Ottawa Treaty, which banned the use of landmines and came into effect more than a decade ago. But it is believed that the U.S. military has not deployed the weapons since the first Gulf War.
“Anti-personnel mines have been eradicated from most military arsenals and we believe the same will happen with cluster munitions,” Nash said.
“You cannot win a political war if you kill civilians, and that’s what cluster bombs do. So I think the message to countries … that haven’t signed is that we believe we have established a standard by which all countries are judged, whether they sign the treaty or not,” he added.
For many who are already scarred by cluster bombs, however, life remains a daily struggle.
Thirty-nine-year-old Ta Doangchom lost both his arms and the sight in his right eye when he triggered a bombie while foraging for food nine years ago. “I can’t support my family,” he said. “All of my children had to leave school because we were so poor. I feel like a burden on my wife and on my family.”
Like Ta, Phongsavath now advocates on behalf of other survivors, urging an end to the use of the weapons that devastated their lives. But he is also still learning to cope with what happened to him.
“I never saw the war with my own eyes,” Phongsavath said. “But I now know that the bombs were dropped on my country. And they didn’t just kill soldiers. They killed men, women and children.”
Pentagon blows up thousands of homes in Afghanistan
Repeating the horrors of the Vietnam War
By Brian Becker | ANSWER Coalition | November 18, 2010
Borrowing a page from its infamous “pacification” effort in South Vietnam, where peasant villages were napalmed and burned to the ground to “save them from the communists,” the Obama-ordered surge in Afghanistan has been secretly blowing up thousands of homes and leveling portions of the Afghan countryside.
As tens of thousands of U.S. troops have surged into southern Afghanistan, villagers have fled. Then the Petraeus-led occupation forces have determined which homes will be destroyed.
“In Arghandab District, for instance, every one of the 40 homes in the village of Khosrow was flattened by a salvo of 25 missiles, according to the district governor, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, who estimated that 120 to 130 houses had been demolished in his district,” reported the New York Times, Nov. 16, 2010.
The Pentagon asserts that they must destroy the homes because some of them may have explosive devices inside.
The Pentagon’s murderous rampage and terror campaign 40 years ago against South Vietnamese villages, in areas that were considered sympathetic to the resistance forces, used much of the same kind of explanation. In fact, the New York Times in a throw back to Vietnam quotes the Arghandab District Governor, who is working with the occupation forces:
“We had to destroy them to make them safe.”
That this tactic is part of a high-tech terror campaign against Afghan villages and the people who inhabit them is evident even by the descriptions and accounts of western media outlets that are supporting the war.
Again, from the New York Times, Nov. 16, 2010, which describes weapons as tools:
“American troops are using an impressive array of tools not only to demolish homes, but also to eliminate tree lines where insurgents could hide, blow up outbuildings, flatten agricultural walls, and carve new “military roads,” because existing ones are so heavily mined, according to journalists embedded in the area recently.
“One of the most fearsome tools is the Miclic, the M58 Mine-Clearing Line Charge, a chain of explosives tied to a rocket, which upon impact destroys everything in a swath 30 feet wide and 325 feet long. The Himars missile system, a pod of 13-foot rockets carrying 200-pound warheads, has also been used frequently for demolition work.
“Often, new military roads go right through farms and compounds, cutting a route that will keep soldiers safe from roadside bombs. In Zhare District alone, the 101st Airborne’s Second Brigade has lost 30 soldiers since last June, mostly to such bombs.”
Activists at the organization Afghanistan Rights Monitor described the destroyed homes. “These are all mud houses, quite humble houses.”
When Gen. David Petraeus describes his counter-insurgency strategy, he always puts in a few diplomatic words about the need of surging troops to win the “hearts and minds” of the people in Afghanistan’s poverty stricken villages. That is purely for public consumption—a message echoed endlessly by the complicit corporate-owned media and the politicians of both parties that serves as a mask for the Pentagon’s campaign of systematic terror employed to subdue an occupied people.
On Dec. 16, 2010, anti-war veterans and people of conscience will stand up in a dramatic action in opposition to the terror campaign waged from the White House and Pentagon. Join us in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 16 and be part of history.
US to spend $85bn on nuclear complex
Press TV – November 19, 2010
The US plans to allocate more than $85 billion during the next decade to modernize its nuclear weapons complex, according to the White House.
Under the George W. Bush administration, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), tasked with ensuring the safety and reliability of the US nuclear weapons stockpile, lost 20 percent of its purchasing power, UPI reported.
The NNSA said it is committed to modernizing the country’s nuclear weapons and that it has the backing of the White House.
US president Barack Obama has called for $7 billion to be made available to fund the NNSA by 2011, which would represent close to a 10 percent increase from 2010.
In addition to the funding Obama is seeking, the NNSA would be funded with another $600 million in 2012.
The White House said $85 billion is to be made available to the NNSA in the coming decade, which would enable the agency to comprehensively update the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Earlier this year, US lawmakers, made a proposal to allocate $80.9 billion to the NNSA. The White House plan calls $4.1 billion more than the proposal of Congress.
“This level of funding is unprecedented since the end of the Cold War,” the White House said in a statement.
British Defense Chief: 30 to 40 Years of Afghanistan Occupation Ahead
The New American | November 17, 2010
The foreign policy bait-and-switch continues. First, President Barack Obama declared the end of combat in Iraq, withdrawing some U.S. troops but leaving many others behind, possibly for decades, and redefining their role as “advise and assist” — whereupon they continued engaging in combat. Now, with Obama having publicly stated his intent to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan next July, both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus are arguing for a long-term, if not permanent, U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
On top of that, British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, echoing their sentiments, has stated that “Nato now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role to help the Afghan armed forces hold their country against the militants,” according to the Daily Mail, though he “stuck to the government’s plans to withdraw combat troops by 2014 but made clear that thousands of troops will be needed long after that date.”
In an interview on November 14, Richards said, “Everyone is clear that we will have to remains [sic] a lot longer than” four to five years. “The plans,” he added, “are now in place to do that” and will be made “rather clearer” at the upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon.
Richards correctly argued that the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot be defeated militarily and that victory cannot be declared by “marching into another nation’s capital,” as in conventional warfare. These organizations, after all, are loosely organized and have no command center that can be neutralized. However, he contended, victory over Islamic terrorism in the traditional sense “is unnecessary and would never be achieved. But we can [sic] contain it to the point that our lives and our children’s lives are led securely? I think we can.”
The problem is that Richards, along with most other members of the government and media elite, believes that continued intervention in Afghanistan by foreign countries is the best way to go about containing terrorism. Therefore, in his opinion, U.S. and British forces must remain in Afghanistan for “generations,” albeit under the rubric of assistance rather than combat. Richards, writes the Mail, “said that there would need to be more support for the military from political, diplomatic and international aid efforts if the effort is to succeed.” (He did allow for the possibility of negotiating with some Taliban members, an option that the Obama administration has opposed.)
The idea that Islamic terrorism is, in large measure, a response to foreign intervention in Muslim countries seems never to have crossed Richards’ mind; but then such thoughts are anathema to a political establishment with an enormously inflated opinion of its own benevolence and effectiveness. Rare indeed is the politician or pundit who suggests that his own government ought to maintain “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none,” as Thomas Jefferson counseled. When one does make such a suggestion, he can expect to be shouted down with charges of “isolationism.”
Thus, both British and American officials, regardless of political affiliation, are playing along with the charade of ending combat while continuing to station troops in volatile regions and of stamping out terrorism by prolonging the conditions that incite it. In Britain, Prime Minster David Cameron of the Conservative Party “has recently moderated [his] stance” toward withdrawing troops from Afghanistan next year in response to Richards’ and Petraeus’ assertions that “it may be 2012 before there can be any significant draw down of frontline forces,” says the Mail. Likewise, the paper reported that the Labor Party’s shadow defense secretary, Jim Murphy, “said Gen Richards was ‘right’ that there was no purely military solution and said there would be ‘no white flag surrender moment.’ He added: ‘It will be for the long haul.’ ”
On this side of the Atlantic, Obama himself “is going to make a public announcement of the US government’s official abandonment of the July 2011 date and the new 2014 ‘target’ for the war effort’s transition to Afghan control,” according to Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz, who adds that “Obama will be vowing an ‘enduring presence’ in Afghanistan beyond the 2014 date.”
It appears, then, that Afghanistan (and Iraq) will be occupied by foreign troops for years to come, costing American and British taxpayers a hefty sum and increasing, rather than decreasing, the chances of terrorism against those same taxpayers. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion; and just this summer CIA Director Leon Panetta estimated there were no more than 100 al-Qaeda militants in all of Afghanistan. At the same time, NATO is spending an estimated $50 million for every Taliban member it kills in that same country. Surely there are better uses for this increasingly scarce money, such as in paying down both governments’ astronomical debts. Bringing the troops home, cutting the defense budget down to what is needed strictly to defend our actual territory, and eliminating foreign aid and other intervention will do far more for our pocketbooks and our security than another 40 years’ worth of futile — and, from the American perspective, unconstitutional — intervention.
White House Says Child Soldiers Are Ok, if They Fight Terrorists
Photo: Creative Commons/hdptcar
By Michelle Chen | ColorLines | November 15, 2010
“You cannot be completely happy with all these wounds—both in your body and in your mind.” — 15 year-old child soldier
The phenomenon of child soldiers, like genocide, slavery and torture, seems like one of those crimes that no nation could legitimately defend. Yet the Obama administration just decided to leave countless kids stranded on some of the world’s bloodiest battlegrounds.
The administration stunned human rights groups last month by sidestepping a commitment to help countries curb the military exploitation of children. Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reported that President Obama issued a presidential memorandum granting waivers from the Child Soldiers Prevention Act to four countries: Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Yemen. The memo instructed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton that it is in our “national interest” to continue extending military aid to those countries, despite their failure to comply with the rules Congress passed and George W. Bush signed in 2008.
A thumbs-up for child soldiers from the pen of President Obama? Whitehouse spokesperson P.J. Crowley explained it was a strategic decision to ease the 2008 law. The rationale is that on balance, it’s more effective for the U.S. to keep providing military assistance that will help countries gradually evolve out of the practice of marshaling kids to the battlefield, rather than isolating them.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, Crowley argued, “These countries have put the right policies in place… but are struggling to correctly implement them.” The New York Times reported that administration spokespeople also cited the countries’ crucial role in global counter-terrorism efforts.
Strategically granting certain countries a pass on child rights reflects Washington’s warped attitude toward the global human rights regime. The U.S. has failed to ratify, or simply ignored, numerous human rights protocols, and our ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child has languished. Human Rights Watch points out, “Only the United States and Somalia, which has no functioning national government, have failed to ratify the treaty.” (Although we did ratify two optional protocols in 2002, relating to child soldiers and other forms of exploitation.)
Somalia, by the way, is one of just two countries that the White House allowed to be sanctioned under the 2008 law; the second was Burma. Presumably this is because Somalia is not receiving direct military funding, reports the Monitor. Yet the U.S. continues to support Somali government forces as they fight Islamic insurgents—with the help of a large force of child soldiers. (To their credit, Somalia has at least promised the U.N. they”ll stop arming kids eventually, according to the Washington Post).
Maybe you could argue that the U.S. is so “advanced” it needn’t bother with rules about children’s rights to education and whatnot. Obama’s waivers might be seen as realpolitik in areas like Yemen, whose military we support as part of our sprawling counter-terrorism operations. But the bottom line is that the administration has carved out an exception to a law intended to ethically guide the flow of U.S. aid money around the world.
According to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, which holds America to the same scrutiny that countries like Uganda and DRC routinely face in the media, we benefit indirectly and directly from the exploitation of child fighters:
In 2006 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) registered 59 children in detention during 16 visits to five places of detention or internment controlled by the USA or the UK in Iraq. US soldiers stationed at the detention centres and former detainees described abuses against child detainees, including the rape of a 15-year-old boy at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, forced nudity, stress positions, beating and the use of dogs. Following US troop increases in Iraq in early 2007, US military arrests of children there rose from an average of 25 per month in 2006 to an average of 100 per month. Military officials reported that 828 were children held at Camp Cropper by mid-September, including children as young as 11. A 17-year-old was reportedly strangled by a fellow detainee in early 2007. In August 2007 the USA opened Dar al-Hikmah, a non-residential facility intended to provide education services to 600 detainees aged 11-17 pending release or transfer to Iraqi custody. US military officials excluded an estimated 100 children from participation in the program, apparently on the grounds that they were “extremists” and “beyond redemption”.
Omar Khadr, the young Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay, remains trapped in a Kafkaesque quasi-judicial system without regard to the fact that he was a child when captured. Rights advocates like Monia Mazigh in Ottowa have called for Khadr to be recognized as a child soldier, but the administration seems to think securing a conviction in Kangaroo Court takes precedence over international law. And because Khadr, like the other Gitmo prisoners, is identified with that faceless dark horde the U.S. has branded “terrorists,” Americans aren’t even inclined to see him as a human being, let alone as a juvenile soldier deserving of sympathy.
So America’s hypocrisy on children in war has many layers. Obama condemns the practice in theory, then undermines federal law by issuing waivers for our partners in Africa and the Middle East. And of course, Washington sees no problem with punishing child soldiers as adults when they’re aligned with the terrorists who are bent on destroying America.
UN Treaties alone obviously won’t demobilize all the world’s child soldiers, but their main role is to put down a legal placeholder. And it’s that moral guidepost that the U.S. undermines every time it waives parallel U.S. laws based on the “national interest.”
Obama’s memorandum may look jarring on paper, but it’s grimly consistent with Washington’s agenda of waging war indefinitely, without boundaries, against an enemy we can no longer really define. The U.S. supports warfare that uses children as weapons, warfare that kills civilian children indiscriminately, warfare that ultimately sends our own children to perish on foreign soil. And so America marches on in a world of conflict where the first casualty is innocence itself.
US government offers Israel $3 billion weapons deal in exchange for 3-month settlement freeze
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – November 14, 2010
After US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the Israeli Prime Minister on Friday, the US set out an offer of additional military assistance to Israel in exchange for a 90-day moratorium on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Construction already in progress on hundreds of units of housing would be allowed to continue during the ‘moratorium’, which also does not include East Jerusalem.
Some Palestinian analysts say the US offer is weak, as it does not pressure Israel in any way to adhere to past signed agreements or international law, but merely forestalls the inevitable failure of ‘peace talks’ between two vastly unequal players. Some have even suggested that this is an attempt by the US to bribe Israel to do what it is required to do under international law.
Since the ‘moratorium’ would not include East Jerusalem, where the majority of current construction of Israeli-only homes and displacement of indigenous Palestinian residents is taking place, some Palestinians feel that it is only a token gesture that does not in any way address their concerns.
In exchange for the temporary, partial moratorium on construction, the Israeli military would receive a gift of 20 F35 fighter jets, worth $3 billion, from the US. The US-made jets that Israel already has have been used for aerial bombardment of Palestinian civilian areas in violation of international law, and to drop missiles on Palestinians that Israel claims are ‘wanted’ for crimes against Israelis – but instead of being tried and convicted, they are extrajudicially assassinated by missiles, in violation of international law.
The US government also promised Israel that after the 90-day moratorium, they would not seek an extension, and settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (all of which is illegal under international law) could continue unabated.
This offer is an attempt by the US to get Israel to return to the negotiating table, after their refusal to renew a moratorium on new settlement construction resulted in a breakdown of talks with the unelected branch of the Palestinian Authority led by the Fateh party.
All settlement construction by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory. The Convention prevents the transfer of civilian populations onto land that was seized by military force. The land in question is Palestinian land that was seized by Israel in 1967, and has been occupied by the Israeli military ever since.
Weapons of mass destruction labs promote GMO’s under the pretext of fighting ‘global warming’
Friends of the Earth denounces algae biofuel development
By James Cartledge – 10/04/10
Pressure group Friends of the Earth has declared war on the development of new strains of algae and bacteria to produce biofuels. The group released a report last week warning of the dangers that genetically-modified microbes could pose if released into nature.
With warnings of “devastating results” if organisms escape into the oceans, including formation of “large dead zones”, Friends of the Earth demanded a moratorium on work to produce synthetic algae strains.
The group suggested that based on the previous spread of genetically-modified crops in the environment, the public health could be at risk. Friends of the Earth also cast doubt on the efficiency of producing biofuels from algae.
Moratorium
Friends of the Earth Biotechnology Policy Campaigner Eric Hoffman said: “Synthetic microbes have no natural predators, and if they escape they may disrupt ecosystems and harm public health. Our report concludes that the federal government should put a complete moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic organisms… Full article
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Genetically altered trees, plants could help counter global warming
Study evaluates prospects for boosting carbon sequestration from the atmosphere by modifying natural biological processes and deploying novel food and fuel crops
Forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming, according to estimates published in the October issue of BioScience.
The study, by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outlines a variety of strategies for augmenting the processes that plants use to sequester carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into long-lived forms of carbon, first in vegetation and ultimately in soil.
Besides increasing the efficiency of plants’ absorption of light, researchers might be able to genetically alter plants so they send more carbon into their roots–where some may be converted into soil carbon and remain out of circulation for centuries. Other possibilities include altering plants so that they can better withstand the stresses of growing on marginal land, and so that they yield improved bioenergy and food crops. Such innovations might, in combination, boost substantially the amount of carbon that vegetation naturally extracts from air, according to the authors’ estimates.
The researchers stress that the use of genetically engineered plants for carbon sequestration is only one of many policy initiatives and technical tools that might boost the carbon sequestration already occurring in natural vegetation and crops.
The article, by Christer Jansson, Stan D. Wullschleger, Udaya C. Kalluri, and Gerald A. Tuskan, is the first in a Special Section in the October BioScience that includes several perspectives on the prospects for enhancing biological carbon sequestration. Other articles in the section analyze the substantial ecological and economic constraints that limit such efforts. One article discusses the prospects for sequestering carbon by culturing algae to produce biofuel feedstocks; one proposes a modification of the current regulatory climate for producing genetically engineered trees in the United States; and one discusses societal perceptions of the issues surrounding the use of genetically altered organisms to ameliorate warming attributed to the buildup of greenhouse gases.
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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