Tag: Somalia

Too bad the destruction of Islamic land marks in Timbuktu by the criminal thugs called “Ansar El-Islam/Supporters of Islam” did not generate or illicit the strong condemnations denunciations and material actions it deserves from the religious leaders of Al-Azhar, Mecca, Qom and Najaf. At best the condemnation was muted if not apologetic.

Led by the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) the U.S. is stepping up its war in Somalia, The Nation magazine reports.

Bob Marley newly released Video Targets African Famine

Today, 11 million people in and around Somalia are currently at risk of starvation amidst the worst drought to hit the nation in a generation.

The article by Megan Eckstein in Wednesday's FNP was titled "REASON FOR OPTIMISM" -- in big, bold letters. The subtitle was "Bartlett confident about victory in Afghanistan after trip." Pure propagandistic spin. Why such flimsy pretense in defense of this barbaric war? Why?

The ugly part of war- especially the war against innocent civilians- is the bitterness and the grudge it leaves behind. The war may be over for the Americans but it is far from over for some who lost their faith in a just and fair world. … The war may be over but the grudge ain`t.

The Marines known as "America's Battalion" were sent to Afghanistan last year as part of a contingent of 21,000 additional forces President Obama deployed in the administration's strategy to counter the Taliban insurgency. NPR followed the 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment over the months of their deployment. They have since returned home and are settling into post-combat life.

Twenty-eight nations have cooperated with the U.S. to detain in their prisons, and sometimes to interrogate and torture, suspects arrested as part of the U.S. “War on Terror.” The complicit countries have kept suspects in prisons ranging from public interior ministry buildings to “safe house” villas in downtown urban areas to obscure prisons in forests to “black” sites to which the International Committee of the Red Cross(ICRC) has been denied access.

While the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, invests Congress with the power “to declare War,” the law school dean points out this has been largely ignored since President Harry Truman in 1950 “de facto changed the Constitution so that not the Congress, but the President, and he alone, makes the decision on war.”

In Viet Nam, for example, U.S. leaders caused the deaths of thousands of their own men and several million Vietnamese after they already knew they had made probably the worst mistake in American history. Velvel writes, “Our top military men create(d) free fire zones where civilians are killed on sight, and bomb and defoliate to the nth degree.” In Iraq, our leaders unleashed “a horrendous reign of terror from the skies, create a thus far thoroughly destabilized post-war society, and then, when all their other myths have shown to be myths, retroactively justify the war by saying that we got rid of an admittedly horrible dictator, his equally horrible sons, and his entirely horrible government.”

Since World War Two, an indisputably necessary conflict, Velvel points out the U.S. has fought the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, the First Gulf War, Afghanistan, and the Second Gulf War in Iraq. It has also invaded, bombed or “quarantined” Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Haiti, Somalia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia and Libya, and has “declared” a global war on terrorists.