Via America’s Lawyer: After spending $2 trillion over the past 20 years, lawmakers on Capitol Hill aren’t letting the Afghanistan withdrawal get in the way of securing more military funding. RT correspondent Brigida Santos joins Mike Papantonio to explain. Also, a Wisconsin school board reverses its decision to cancel a free lunch program for students after facing nationwide backlash. Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss […]
On 10 September 2021 Brian Dooley blogged for Human Rights First: “British Government Proposes Amnesty for Killings That’s Worse Than Pinochet’s”:
In a startling move, in July 2021, the British government announced a proposal to end all Troubles-era prosecutions, granting amnesty to its soldiers for any crimes they committed during this time. While the proposal has yet to be introduced as a bill, its mere introduction has already received a strong reaction.
Last week, I visited Belfast and Derry where I met with human rights NGOs and families of those killed during the Troubles. Human Rights First has been active on these issues for decades, with a focus on past abuses and on supporting the human rights lawyers helping families bring prosecutions against those who committed them.
This recently introduced proposal is a significant setback to the families whose loved ones were killed by British forces during those years. Many of which have spent decades looking for the truth about what happened to those who were killed. During my time with them, some of the family members said that this proposal, which would eliminate any potential for accountability, has left them exasperated and angry.
Some of the killings from this period, like those on Bloody Sunday in Derry or Ballymurphy in Belfast, are well known and have received international attention. Others, such as the Springhill-Westrock shootings and many others, have had less attention. Overall, during the Troubles (1969-1998), 3,350 people were killed, including 1,840 civilians, and 47,500 were injured.
In many cases of killings, there was no real investigation done at the time. Local human rights NGO, the Pat Finucane Centre, has recently published declassified documents showing how some soldiers evaded prosecutions. The new proposal would remove any possibility of the families having any possibility for legal recourse or bringing the killers to justice.
The wide scope of the UK government’s proposed amnesty is breathtaking.
Human Rights First has for many years worked with Belfast-based human rights NGO the Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ). This week, with a team of experts from Queen University, Belfast, the CAJ produced an analysis of the proposed amnesty laws, measuring the British government’s proposals “against binding international and domestic human rights law, the Good Friday Agreement and other international experiences of amnesties to deal with past human rights violations.”
This study found that the proposal would create an amnesty more sweeping than that of General Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator who introduced a policy to shield human rights violators from prosecution, which is often regarded as the worst. However, unlike the UK proposal, which excludes no crimes and has no temporal limits, Pinochet’s amnesty excluded certain crimes, such as sexual violence, and applied only to the first five years of the 17-year dictatorship. Additionally, Pinochet’s amnesty excluded criminal cases already before the courts and applied only to criminal prosecutions. The UK proposal on the other hand would close cases already in the system and apply to both civil and criminal cases.
Professor Louise Mallinder, one of the experts on the report and a world-renowned scholar of transitional justice who has examined roughly 300 amnesties relating to various conflicts around the world from 1990 until 2016, says the UK’s proposed amnesty “would offer the broadest form of impunity of all the amnesties surveyed.”
Yes, the British government’s standard for addressing past human rights violations by its soldiers, including murders, appears to be lower than that of General Pinochet’s.
The plan is so bad that all major political parties in Ireland, north and south, have united in rejecting it. Members of the U.S. Congress are reportedly signing a letter objecting to it.
The British government got many things wrong over the course of The Troubles. This proposed amnesty for its former soldiers is another huge mistake and should be rejected immediately.
Instead, a real process of justice should be followed, along the lines of that outlined in the 2014 Stormont House Agreement. Dealing with The Troubles’ past is difficult but not impossible. The families of those killed – and of victims of human rights violations in other post-conflict situations that a new UK precedent might influence – deserve much better than what the British government has proposed.
We live in a world of manufactured lack, manufactured enemies, manufactured crises and manufactured consent. We’ve had sufficient resources to care for everyone for generations. All our wars are based on lies. All our problems are cooked up by a few psychos with too much power.
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Ever since he came to Australia my American husband still finds it strange to see a parrot out in the open instead of sitting in a cage. I feel much the same whenever I see George W Bush.
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The capitalist class has never voluntarily returned anything it has stolen from the working class; every time it manages to give people less it never reverses it, no matter how much greater profits become. Capitalism is never going to get less abusive. It will only grow more so.
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If there were good billionaires they wouldn’t still be billionaires.
It’s impossible to be a good billionaire, not just because it’s immoral to remain that wealthy in a world full of need and because all billionaires are parasitic middlemen siphoning the profits off other people’s labor, but also because in order to obtain that much wealth you generally have to manipulate the actual movement of human civilization to your benefit in some way.
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“You’re anti-American!”
No I’m anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-empire, anti-ecocide, anti-oligarchy, anti-capitalism and anti nuclear brinkmanship. It just happens that the US is at the center of a globe-spanning power structure that is the worst offender on all these fronts by an extremely wide margin.
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The most evil and destructive things Trump did as president weren’t the Trumpian things but the American things. The things his predecessors and his successor are also guilty of doing.
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If the US empire ran out of excuses to use and test its extremely profitable military arsenal on impoverished foreigners, it would simply invent more excuses.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around, because it’s so much more profoundly evil than we’re ever taught to anticipate, but it really is an objective fact that people who make money manufacturing military weapons have a tremendous amount of influence over how and when those weapons are used. A war profiteer can pour money into campaign contributions which incentivize policymakers to push for acts of military interventionism, and pour money into think tanks and lobbying to give those policymakers an excuse to do so. This is all perfectly legal, and it happens constantly.
It’s exactly the same as murdering human beings at mass scale and selling their body parts for a tremendous profit. And it’s deemed perfectly reasonable and acceptable.
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I grow continually more and more amazed at how western media get away with citing think tanks funded by governments and defense contractors to promote imperialist propaganda. If everyone understood that they do this constantly and what that means, it would end the mass media.
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The real heroes of 9/11 were those precious few who immediately took a stand against the jingoistic hysteria that swept across public consciousness and opposed the horrors the western empire was about to unleash upon the world.
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History seldom vindicates the peacemongers. Not because they aren’t right, but because history is written by warmongers.
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Covid could just as easily have been used to transfer wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest and pay people to voluntarily stay home and to take the vaccine. Instead it’s seen a massive wealth transfer to the very wealthiest, and vaccine mandates that will hurt the poorest.
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We’re a few months out from seeing American libertarians angrily sharing around a video of police beating an unvaccinated Black person for noncompliance with some new authoritarian law, and seeing liberals in the comments cheering for the police.
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Don’t look to other leftists to figure out how to think about a given issue, look at the values and priorities which led you to the left in the first place. The group consensus and your most deeply held values will not always be in alignment.
Humanity is deeply insane, even the parts of humanity which align with your ideological preferences. For this reason it’s never a safe bet to go along with the consensus positions of your ideological faction instead of figuring things out on your own based on your own values.
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There are a lot of people who correctly ask “who benefits?” whenever there’s a potential false flag event yet fail to ask who might benefit from a religion whose teachings glorify poverty, meekness, humility, docility, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
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True humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, and it isn’t thinking of yourself less. True humility is the deep, all-pervading insight that the very phenomenon we call “self” is pure illusion.
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You just have to wonder how much of a mass-scale psychological pummelling human consciousness can take before it snaps. And you have to wonder what might lie on the other side of that snap. Maybe something bad. But maybe something very, very good.
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It’s a tricky tightrope walk the oligarchs have to do, making sure they don’t steal too much of our wealth and freedom all at once so we don’t rise up and take it back. It’s easy to forget that we’re actually the ones with all the power here. Only problem is we don’t yet know it.
They’re more afraid of you than you are of them. It’s true of spiders, snakes, and oligarchic imperialists.
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Twenty years ago, I was on a plane from Rarotonga to Auckland. Lovely flight, with a path at the end I had never experienced before.
Almost from the tip of the North Island, down to Tamaki Makaurau — the rising sun bathing the hills and coastline in rich, almost mango, orange. So rich and orange that for a second I wondered if I had mistakenly got on a flight to Aussie, not Aotearoa.
Half asleep from the then usual awake-all-night, early morning departure, dawn arrival, I floated through duty free and customs, not noticing anything really different — until our old Cook Islands Press photographer Dean Treml who was on the same flight came up looking alarmed.
“There’s been an attack in New York – two planes have flown into the World Trade Towers,” or words to that effect. I was like, “..whaaat? No …Really??”
He nodded, hurried off.
I blinked a bit, shook off my disbelief, and forgot about it as we moved through the lines, looking forward to seeing my younger son, Mikaera.
He was there in arrivals. Rushed to give my three-year-old a kneeling hug. Smiled up at his grandparents.
‘Stay calm’
“Stay calm,” the grandfather told me, “and don’t get upset, but terrorists have attacked the Twin Towers in America,” or words to that effect. “It’s on the screen behind you.”
In those days, news was still played on the big multiscreens over the arrival doors. I turned, looked, and caught sight of a jet slicing into one of the towers. Over the rest of the day, that scene, and its twin, were replayed over and again, as a stunned world witnessed an unthinkably cinematic display of destruction.
And then, hours later, one by one, the towers dropped.
Like billions of others, I watched, in my case in between playing with my young son, alone at his mum’s home, looking over his shoulder at the television.
A few times it got too much. Made sure Mikaera was okay with toys and/or food, then stepped outside to the garage to cry, the replay sight of people jumping from the smoking towers to their deaths; hiding my tears and low moans of stunned despair.
Big breaths, wipe away the tears, back inside to play with blocks and trucks, and … planes. One eye on the TV.
Nearly 3000 people died that day. Almost all Americans, with a few hundred other nationalities.
Since then?
Tragedy of so-called ‘War on Terror’
Millions of non-Americans have died in the Middle East, mostly from economic blockades resulting in deaths from starvation and treatable diseases. Hundreds of thousands dying in a so-called “War on Terror” that served to produce tens of thousands more “terrorists”, vowing to avenge the deaths of their children, siblings, parents, aunties, cousins and uncles.
Western states have spent trillions of dollars, weapons dealers making obscenely fat profits on the back of jingoistic propaganda from news media which, to this day, counts Western deaths to the last man and woman, but barely mentions any civilian deaths from their bullets, bombs and drones.
Profits that have been used to bribe officials at home and abroad, via a network of secrecy havens such as New Zealand and the Cook Islands, but mostly via American states like Delaware, or financial centres like London in the UK, flushing trillions more through millions of secret companies for the benefit of a few.
9/11, they said, changed everything.
Twenty years later, with the war on terror a complete and utter failure, everything certainly has changed.
For the worse.
Western financial hypocrisy
Trillions continue to be hidden, including with our help, legally or otherwise. Legality being a very moveable feast. Western states pick on tiny offshore banking centres like the Niue, Samoa and the Cook Islands, while ignoring the gaping holes in their own banks and finance centres.
Governments like New Zealand and Australia fund corruption studies in the Pacific, as one regional example, but not their own.
And, like little children, we are still over-awed when famous people come to visit our homelands, happily posing and smiling in delight whenever big country people deign to visit our shores.
Unlike when then Tahitian president Gaston Flosse came to Rarotonga in 1996, and Cook Islanders protested nuclear testing, for example, the Cook Islands happily welcomed then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012.
Even media people and supposed journalists lined up to grin, to grip the hand of a leader reported as once asking about using a drone to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
In fact, in 1996, I was one of those people, “meeting” Clinton on a rope line at the Atlanta Olympics when I was “Press Attache” for our Olympics team.
“Greetings from the South Pacific!” I said cheerily when she offered her hand to me, among a hundred or so others who had suddenly gathered.
“Outstanding!”, she replied, equally delighted.
Of course, none of us knew then what was coming.
But we know now.
Cook Islands in lockstep
And still the Cook Islands walks in lockstep with our powerful neighbours, a “dear friend” of Australia’s ruling party and its unbelievably corrupt mining, military and media networks.
Two decades later, the Homeland seems yet to learn any lessons from 9/11, yet to admit any responsibility for its part in enabling #corruption, money laundering and terrorism which breeds extremism, hate, and death, on all sides.
Instead, our government works against the interests of our own region, a Pacific pawn used and abused in age-old colonial tactics of divide et empera – divide and conquer – a phrase going back over two millennia.
Today our peoples are further misled by a tsunami of fake news – misinformation and disinformation – from mysteriously well-resourced sources. Distracted from real responses to the #covid19 pandemic, which distracts further from even bigger threats from global warming — or “climate change” as it was known for so long, before leaders started only recently admitting we face a “climate crisis” — but still locked to “market mechanisms” as a supposed solution.
So, what are the solutions?
Fight fake news. Fight corruption. Fight the hateful, extremist, death cults hiding behind religion, especially within the largest, most powerful faith in the world — Christianity.
Fight for a world where shorelines are bathed in mango dawns, and our children don’t grow up watching death replayed every single day of their lives.
Jason Brown is founder of Journalism Agenda 2025 and writes about Pacific and world journalism and ethically globalised Fourth Estate issues. He is a former co-editor of Cook Islands Press. This article is republished with permission.
Via America’s Lawyer: After spending $2 trillion over the past 20 years, lawmakers on Capitol Hill aren’t letting the Afghanistan withdrawal get in the way of securing more military funding. RT correspondent Brigida Santos joins Mike Papantonio to discuss how Congressional war hawks are still hoping to add tens of billions of dollars to next year’s already-colossal defense budget. Transcript: *This […]
More than a week after four Indonesian soldiers were killed by pro-independence fighters in an attack on a military post in Kisor village, South Aifat sub-district, Maybrat district, West Papua, police have arrested two suspects and launched a manhunt for 17 others.
Also, a joint team of personnel from the Indonesian Military (TNI) has continued to crack down on Papuan rebels operating in the area.
The XVIII/Kasuari Regional Military Command’s spokesperson, Colonel Hendra Pesireron, said that TNI soldiers had “secured” several villages.
The troops’ presence in villages had “restored the security situation” in Maybrat district, and guaranteed public safety, he claimed in a statement.
On 5 September 2021, TNI personnel engaged in a gunfight with several members of a pro-independence group in the neighborhood areas of East Aifat sub-district.
The rebels retreated into a thick forest to escape, Colonel Pesireron said.
Before the gunfight, the rebels destroyed a bridge, he said.
Kisor military post attacked
On Thursday, pro-independence rebels had ambushed several soldiers while they were sleeping at the Kisor military post.
Four soldiers—2nd Sergeant Amrosius, Chief Private Dirham, First Private Zul Ansari, and First Lieutenant Dirman—died in the attack, while two others suffered serious wounds.
The bodies of three soldiers had been found at the post, while the body of another soldier had been discovered in bush not far from the post.
Several local residents had fled their homes fearing for their safety.
On Friday, Indonesian police investigators named 19 alleged suspects in connection with the attack on the military post.
Rahmad Nasutionis a journalist for the Indonesian news agency Antara.
Protests continue on the streets of Kabul and other cities in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, over hundreds of activist organisations and individuals around the world have pledged support for the Afghan women facing oppression by the Taliban.
Courageous
On 4 September, women protesters attempted to march to the presidential palace in Kabul. But the Taliban attacked them with tear gas:
The women demanded there be no recognition of Taliban government without the full participation of women in politics and without recognition of their right to work. Tear gas was reportedly used to disperse the demonstrators and one woman allegedly beaten. Women also reportedly demonstrated in Herat and other regional cities.
The Taliban fired in the air to disperse these protesters (parts of this footage may be distressing for some readers):
Despite a ban by the Taliban on demonstrations, protests continued in Kabul and other cities such as Takhar, Parwan, Badakshan, and Ghazni.
Solidarity pledges
Meanwhile over 370 activist organisations and hundreds of individuals have pledged to take to the streets on 25 September in support of Afghan women.
Their demands are as follows:
Refuse to recognize a Taliban government, which has no legitimacy beyond the brutal force it commands, and which terrorizes the people of Afghanistan, girls and women in particular.
Stop all forms of support to the Taliban, including funding, providing of arms, and technical know-how.
End imperialism, militarism, fascism and religious fundamentalism. Cut the Pentagon Budget.
Stop and prevent manipulating women’s rights for commercial and other interests.
Support the women’s resistance to the Taliban inside Afghanistan. Respect and support Afghan women and people’s exercise of their democratic and human rights, including their right to self-determination.
Evacuate women and men, human rights defenders, journalists, police officers, public employees, athletes, and LGBTI+ who wish to leave the country and ensure their safe passage.
Create an independent body of observers, made up with a majority of women, who have a track record of promoting women’s human rights to monitor the situation in Afghanistan.
Welcome refugees, with the US and their allies assuming the responsibility of financing the cost of resettling displaced people from Afghanistan.
Immediately open humanitarian corridors to support the people of Afghanistan.
Stop arms trade policies and the military industrial complex, which profits from the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere the world.
Support from Kurdish women
Previously, The Canarypublished messages of defiance by the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA). There were also messages of support from a number of Kurdish women’s organisations, including the armed YPJ (women’s protection units).
Now Kurdish women’s organisation Kongra Star is calling on all governments and the UN to refuse recognition of a Taliban government:
We urgently call upon governments, @UN Security Council & regional entities to:
— Kongra Star Women's Movement Rojava (@starrcongress) September 1, 2021
Turkey assisting ISIS
The Kurds of northern Syria have been at the forefront of the war against Daesh (ISIS). NATO member Turkey is at war with the Kurds and Yazidis – a war which will likely benefitIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K). IS-Khorasan is the organisation that claimed responsibility for the Kabul airport bombing. As one commentator observed:
Thus, the more Ankara erodes the ability of Kurdish and Yazidi militant groups to combat ISIS, the greater the chance Turkish forces could face ISIS-K attacks in Afghanistan, like the one that killed some 180 people at Kabul airport last month.
It now appears that Turkey, led by authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is working up a deal to provide intelligence and military support to the Taliban. Indeed, on 18 August, Erdoğan explained:
The main point is to reach an understanding with the Afghan authorities. For example, we can achieve this with a bilateral agreement like we did in Libya.
And in July, Erdoğan admitted Turkey:
has nothing against the Taliban’s ideology, and since we aren’t in conflict with the Taliban’s beliefs, I believe we can better discuss and agree with them on issues.
we call for the establishment of a democratic front against the Taliban, we call upon all democratic, secular, anti-fundamentalist and anti-occupation forces, all our tormented women, girls and men, to say that nothing will come out of mourning. Let us rise and resist against the Taliban and their partners, in any way and at any level, and give them a taste of defeat and sorrow.
The Afghan people – particularly women and their supporters globally – are now the only true opposition to the fundamentalists.
The UK Defence Committee has proposed an inquiry into the recent, messy end of the 20 year war in Afghanistan. The scrutiny body has laid out a series of questions it wants answered. But it’s far from the inquiry we need into the decades-long disaster.
The sheer speed of the Taliban takeover following our withdrawal from Afghanistan sent shockwaves across the world. After twenty years of war, the images of Taliban fighters celebrating victory on the streets of Kabul are sobering. It has been a dark and troubling time for the West and supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide.
Pot, kettle?
Certainly the resurgent Taliban is no friend of human rights and democracy. But this isn’t the whole story. The scope of the inquiry will not extend to the legacy of human rights abuses carried out in Afghanistan by the West and its allies.
The questions proposed are very narrow in scope, often focusing on recent events only. It also covers whether the disaster will affect future UK wars and occupations. One question reads:
What effect will the withdrawal have on future operations, and what will be the impact on the willingness of local personnel to work with, and support, the UK in future operations?
A key priority, then, seems to be the next war. Wherever that will be…
A real inquiry?
PM Boris Johnson has already rejected the idea of a proper inquiry, as The Canary reported recently. Yet other voices are demanding that the war is properly scrutinised.
Among them is former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He challenged Johnson on the matter in the Commons on 7 September.
In response to his statement on #Afghanistan, I asked Boris Johnson if it was not "time for a full inquiry into the whole process that led us into Afghanistan and the whole notion of a foreign policy in which we intervene all over the world." pic.twitter.com/vAZqiNKI9d
Others have warned that there will be no accountability. Former military officer Frank Ledwidge is among them. And he said this was the case despite the Afghan war being more damaging than the Iraq War in “every respect”. He added:
Over the past 20 years, 457 members of the armed forces have been killed in Afghanistan – and thousands more ruined for life. We don’t count the suicides. We killed thousands of non-combatants in Helmand, and many more insurgents.
Truth and justice
There can be no meaningful peace without justice. This is as true in Afghanistan as anywhere else. And that will never be achieved by another narrow inquiry which amounts to the UK warmongering class marking its own homework once again.
Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.
This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.
This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.
The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.
The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.
When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warnedagainst the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.
The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.
Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.
The military industrial juggernaut Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.
This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.
Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.
More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.
Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Image: The Conversation/Ross D. Franklin/AP
The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.
These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.
Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.
Normalisation of the security state Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.
This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.
Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.
And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.
Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.
Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Image: The Conversation/Curtis Compton/AP
Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend. The heavy cost of the war on terror The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.
Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.
The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.
These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.
Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.
Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.
Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Image: The Conversation/Hasan Jamali/AP
Life must be precious Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.
In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,
We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.
As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.
The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.
As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.
West Papua activists have called on the Australian government to raise concerns about the Indonesian military’s ongoing human rights abuses in West Papua, when they met with their Indonesian counterparts this week.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton are attending the seventh Indonesia-Australia Foreign and Defence Ministers 2+2 dialogue in Jakarta, which started yesterday, before continuing on to visit New Delhi, Seoul, Washington and New York.
Australia-West Papua Association spokesperson Joe Collins said: “We can expect all the usual statements about regional stability, peace, economic prosperity, terrorism and defence cooperation, but highly unlikely anything about human rights — unless it is criticism of China’s record.”
In a reply to correspondence from AWPA, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) indicated that because of Australia’s close relationship with Indonesia it had allowed DFAT to discuss a range of issues, including sensitive topics like the situation in Papua.
Given this close relationship, Collins said activists were hoping the human rights situation in West Papua would be raised, including: the ongoing concerns for arrested West Papuan activist Victor Yeimo; the security force operation taking place in the Maybrat Regency; and the death of Kristian Yandun from a beating in a police cell in Merauke.
Yeimo faces a number of charges, including treason with conspiracy. There is concern for his mental and physical health, which is deteriorating.
According to AWPA, after an attack on a military post in Kisor village in the Maybrat regency, security forces have retaliated, causing residents from five districts to flee their villages in fear of the Indonesian military.
AWPA is concerned that Merauke local police chief Untung Sangaji was trained by Australian Federal Police and trainers from the United States and Britain in anti-people smuggling and surveillance techniques at the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC).
AWPA is calling on Payne and Dutton to urge Jakarta to release Yeimo and all political prisoners, and to raise the human rights abuses committed by the Indonesian security forces.
Susan Price reports for Green-Left.
Clash between Indonesian forces and the WP National Liberation Army, reportedly on 5/9/21 in Maybrat.
Notes for int’l humanitarian law observers:
– level of intensity
– the operation seems to be led by soldiers not police
Stronger Australian-Indonesian military ties
Indonesian troops could join regular training exercises on Australian soil, as part of a deepening of defence ties with Australia, reports The Guardian.
While Indonesia regularly joins naval exercises with Australia, and has participated in occasional joint military exercises on Australian land, the two countries have flagged plans to “step up” their joint training in the coming years, writes Daniel Hurst.
Australia’s defence minister, Peter Dutton, and foreign minister, Marise Payne, met their Indonesian counterparts in Jakarta yesterday, on the first leg of a four-country trip.
Indonesia’s Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto said he and Dutton had discussed “the possibility of Australia opening their training areas for the participation of Indonesian units to be training together with Australia”.
“I think this is a historical first,” Prabowo said.
Indonesian security forces troops being flown in to Sinak, Puncak region, in the Papuan highlands for operations against independence fighters. Image: Screenshot APR
UK governments often claim their wars and occupations have a moral element. And the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libyan wars were no different.
But a recent Freedom of Information request by the research charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) calls that claim into question. The charity has discovered that the UK military doesn’t even keep a count of the civilians it kills.
In a new blog, AOAV’s Murray Jones reported that the MOD had said the information was “not held”.
Only data on the deaths of non-UK civilians employed by the military was offered. Reportedly, 38 died between 2015 and 2021.
Contested figures
Actual figures of civilian deaths from UK military action are hard to pin down. As AOAV points out, some official estimates seem very odd.
In the air war against ISIS, according to MOD figures, only a single civilian died.
The MOD has been repeatedly challenged over its claim that its bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria (Op SHADER) has killed and injured an estimated 4,315 enemies, but only resulted in one civilian casualty between September 2014 and January 2021.
AOAV also argues that due to the bombing in cities, a figure of zero civilian casualties seems optimistic.
It’s highly likely that civilian deaths have been under-reported, as 1,000 targets were hit by the RAF during its bombing campaign in the cities of Raqqa and Mosul.
Self denial
AOAV previously revealed that the Royal Air Force does not always keep count of the amount of bombs it uses in areas filled with civilians.
In August, AOAV revealed that the RAF does not keep a specific record of how many bombs they have dropped on populated areas, raising questions over how they are measuring civilian harm.
The organisation suggested under-reporting may be due to the UK’s very high threshold of evidence for civilian deaths. While the US relies on a “balance of probabilities approach”, the UK requires “hard fact” totally innocent deaths.
In their new article, AOAV cited Chris Cole, director of Drone Wars UK, who described the MOD approach as:
A kind of internal structural self-denial, where it has become seemingly impossible for the MoD even to accept that civilian casualties have occurred.
We may never know the true cost in innocent civilian lives. But it seems that the UK’s claims to be a humanitarian force in the world are, at best, massively optimistic.
The CIA just casually discussed sinking a boat full of Cuban refugees and planting bombs in Miami and blaming Castro, but you’re bat shit crazy if you suspect such agencies may have had similar discussions about other geostrategic situations and decided to go through with it.
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There’s more public criticism of ordinary people taking ivermectin than there is of planet-dominating power structures driving humanity to armageddon.
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Nobody who supports internet censorship does so because they’re worried they themselves might consume dangerous words and believe them, it’s always to protect other people from dangerous words. It’s about the most megalomaniacal, emotionally stunted desire anyone could possibly have.
They see themselves as responsible adults who can be trusted to independently sort out truth from falsehood, but see other people as infants who cannot be trusted to do this. This is nothing other than garden variety narcissism.
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Internet censorship via monopolistic government-tied tech corporations isn’t just a problem because of free speech issues, it’s a problem because the way it’s applied is completely uneven and power-serving: politicians and the mass media circulate disinformation constantly without ever being censored. It’s not just silencing people, it’s actually shifting power upwards.
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There is no path forward for humanity on this planet without complete female reproductive sovereignty.
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Imagine if the world’s deadliest terrorist group got their hands on drones and cruise missiles and nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers and circled the planet with hundreds of military bases and began waging wars and destroying any country which disobeyed their dictates.
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No, Texas conservatives aren’t like the Taliban. No, US government authoritarianism isn’t like China or North Korea. You know what it’s like? It’s like America. It says so much that the most corrupt and destructive nation on earth keeps comparing its homegrown depravity to foreign nations.
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It’s crazy how there are guys whose whole entire job is trying to get large number of people killed by mass military violence and we just let that be a thing like it’s a perfectly legitimate way for someone to be.
“Hey why does that mustache guy keep trying to get large numbers of people violently killed?”
“Oh he’s just one of those war starty guys.”
“What?? Why are there war starty guys??”
“I dunno. Isn’t that normal? I just assumed it was normal to have war starty guys.”
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Every single soldier who died in Afghanistan died in vain. Don’t make up sugary fairy tales about it, just stop letting it happen.
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Are soldiers working under the US empire the worst people in the world? No. But in terms of moral standing you’d have to rank someone who murders foreigners on behalf of imperialists and war profiteers below most of the people in your average prison.
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“If it wasn’t us waging all these wars and killing all those people it’d be someone else” sounds very much like the sort of thing an abusive tyrant would say.
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There’s no good reason to respect the analysis of anyone who thinks China’s behavior on the world stage is worse than or equally as bad as America’s.
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Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no bill of rights of any kind. Most people are unaware of this, including most Australians. What you’re seeing in Australia is simply what happens when you add a pandemic response on top of a nation with no foundational legal protection from government overreach. That’s why our Covid measures are so notoriously harsh relative to other western countries.
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Modern gods are corporations and banks, faceless inhuman entities whose agendas of growth and conquest supercede even the wishes of their own executives. Our gods are insatiable devourers controlled by no one. Our gods have no heads.
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At a time when our species is hurtling toward its own demise we ought to be coming together and working in unison to avert disaster, and it says so much about the power of propaganda that we are instead doing the exact opposite.
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All of humanity’s problems are ultimately due to a misperception of the way things are.
Propaganda causes us to misperceive reality in a way that benefits establishment power structures, so we don’t rise up and use the power of our numbers to put an end to the ecocidal, omnicidal status quo which oppresses and exploits us.
Advertising causes us to misperceive our own bodies and the source of real contentment, leading to the obsessive consumption habits necessary for turning the gears of capitalism.
Ego causes us to misperceive our own experience of consciousness and the information which enters our minds through the senses, leading to the suffering and dysfunction which ultimately underlies all abuses in our world.
What we need, then, is clear seeing, both outwardly and inwardly. An end to government secrecy and the mass-scale manipulations which distort our perception of reality. An end to restrictions on psychedelic tools which help people behold their inner processes with lucidity. A greatly elevated prioritization of self-honesty and self-reflection to help us see through the ego’s illusions.
We can’t move toward health until we can see where we’re going.
_______________________
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US president Joe Biden recently announced that he will sign an executive order to facilitate the release of classified documents about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The move is the result of a long-running campaign by victims’ families to determine whether the government of Saudi Arabia played a hand in the atrocities.
Throughout the 20 years since the attacks, it appears that successive US administrations and the US intelligence community alike have gone out of their way to suppress evidence that might implicate one of Washington’s staunchest allies. This refusal to release the documents speaks volumes about the US’s fawning treatment of one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies. It also raises big questions about the US’s flagrant double standards in the Middle East during its so-called ‘War on Terror’.
Documents finally redacted after three presidents in a row refuse
On 3 September, Biden ordered the US Justice Department to release documents produced as part of a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) probe into the 9/11 attacks. Groups representing families of 9/11 victims have lobbied hard for years for their release. In response, Biden committed to declassifying the documents during his 2020 presidential campaign.
As the anniversary of the attacks approached, these groups released a statement urging Biden not to attend memorial events unless his administration declassified the documents. The administrations of former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all refused to do so.
Saudi involvement?
Many victims’ families have been particularly motivated by a suspicion that the government of Saudi Arabia might have been involved in planning the attacks. On 3 September, Reutersreported:
Family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks asked a U.S. government watchdog on Thursday to investigate their suspicions that the FBI lied about or destroyed evidence linking Saudi Arabia to the hijackers.
These suspicions have been heightened by the fact that Saudi Arabia is, after Israel, the US’s second staunchest ally in the Middle East. Throughout the presidencies of Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, Washington all entered intoprofitable armsdeals with the country’s royal family. Successive US administrations, therefore, have had an incentive to suppress information that could reveal Saudi involvement in 9/11. Politicoreported in April 2017 that the 9/11 Commission’s “own members protested drastic, last-minute edits that seemed to absolve the Saudi government of any responsibility”.
Bogus justification for meddling in the Middle East
But the reality is that Washington’s deceitfulness runs even deeper. Because the 9/11 attacks were used as a ruse to provide bogus justification for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to topple the Taliban and the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein respectively. Yet there is evidently significantly less reason to believe that either of these actors had any connection to 9/11 when compared with Saudi Arabia.
In spite of this rather obvious reality, there were no calls in the aftermath of 9/11 to take any kind of action whatsoever against Saudi Arabia, let alone to invade it and replace its government. Yet despite much thinner evidence linking them to the attacks, the Bush administration instead launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. What could explain this stunning paradox?
Revealing double standards
The answer lies in examining the criteria on which the US bases its treatment of other countries. As The Canary has extensivelyargued, US administrations of both parties do not base their treatment of other countries on their publicly-stated criteria of human rights and democracy. (Indeed, if the true motivation behind Washington’s foreign policy was to spread democracy, as George W. Bush claimed, then Saudi Arabia would probably top the list of countries to invade given its status as one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies.) Rather, Washington bases its stance towards other nations according to how obedient they are to US geo-strategic and economic interests.
When it comes to Saudi Arabia, the evidence speaks for itself. In the final year of World War II, the US entered into a deal with the Saudi royal family to ensure continued privileged access to the country’s ample oil reserves. Ever since, the Saudi royals have been rewarded for this with the most fawning treatment imaginable. As then-US president Donald Trump put it in a November 2018 statement:
The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.
Opening up the region to Western oil companies in Afghanistan…
When it comes to Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, the Taliban and the government of Saddam Hussein had fallen afoul of the US foreign policy establishment due to their growing unwillingness to serve US interests. This was particularly so in terms of providing favorable access to their countries’ oil reserves. And that resulted in a desperate scramble by the Bush administration to somehow tie them to 9/11.
In the case of Afghanistan, Washington attempted to strike a deal with the Taliban in the late-1990s to allow the US-based petroleum giant Unocal to build an oil pipeline through the country to the Caspian Sea. When it became clear that the Taliban was unlikely to accommodate this process, Unocal withdrew from negotiations and the plans were shelved. When 9/11 came along, it gave the Bush administration its perfect ruse to topple the Taliban in order to install a more friendly government that would allow the building of the pipeline. (Though there were considerable delays, probably owing to the chaos caused by the US invasion, construction of the pipeline finally began in February 2018. The New York Times reported at the time: “The United States has supported pipelines to bypass Russia and alleviate former Soviet states’ economic dependence on it.”)
Since this motivation would have surely provoked widespread scorn, Washington weaponized 9/11 by issuing allegations that the Taliban were ‘harboring terrorists’ and had links to al-Qaeda to whip up public and congressional support for invasion. On both counts, these allegations were dubious. A 2011 report by the Center on International Cooperation describes the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban as “complicated and often tense”, adding that they “knew little about each other”. Nonetheless, the ploy seemingly paid off: only one congress member voted against the invasion while public opinion polls at the time put support for it at around 80%.
…and Iraq
A similar, and even more duplicitous, dynamic played out with respect to Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been a close US ally, and even received US military funding in the 1980s. But throughout the 1990s, the relationship began to sour over his invasion of Kuwait. In the early 2000s, Hussein’s status as a US enemy was cemented when he fully nationalised Iraq’s oil industry and closed off access to Western petroleum companies. Unfortunately for the Bush administration, however, his connection to 9/11 was simply nonexistent – even Bush himself said after the invasion “I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein”.
So his administration concocted a narrative, which the media dutifully repeated, that would nonetheless play on public fears that had been ignited by the attacks. It fabricatedbogus claims that Hussein’s government had been developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to provide a ruse for invading the country. (To demonstrate the absurdity of denouncing Iraq for purportedly having ‘weapons of mass’ destruction, consider that the only nuclear armed state in the entire region is the US’s number one ally, Israel.) As was the case with Afghanistan, the true purpose of the invasion was to create a more favorable environment for US oil companies. Even members of the US’s own military have admitted this reality. Former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq gen. John Abizaid said in 2007: “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that”.
Some of the Bush administration’s leading figures, meanwhile, had extensive ties to the very corporations that ultimately benefited from the invasion, such as the former CEO of oil giant Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who served as Bush’s vice president. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were highly profitable for such US private contractors, which received billionsin contracts for both wars. Halliburton itself ultimately became the largest single US government contractor in Iraq and by 2013 had received over $39bn in contracts.
The final piece of evidence could be coming soon
Clearly, the US foreign policy and intelligence establishment have a vested interest in suppressing evidence of potential Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. After all, this would make even further nonsense of the entire edifice of bogus justification that the Bush administration built in order to manufacture consent for invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
Though his administration is hardly a decisive break from the bipartisan consensus for endless war, Biden’s decision to declassify the documents should nonetheless be welcomed. It might end up providing the final piece of evidence needed to determine whether one of the US’s own allies in the Middle East played a hand in the worst domestic terrorist atrocity in US history.
Indonesian authorities have been accused of adopting a strategy of deploying military force to drive thousands of Papuans from their homes to make way for powerful business interests.
The humanitarian crisis there is being compared to Nduga and Intan Jaya, where more than 50,000 West Papuans have been displaced by military operations in recent years.
“Maybrat is a peaceful place. The violence we are seeing now is a result of Indonesian state attempts to clear the local people and grab the gold and minerals that lie under the earth,” said ULMWP interim president Benny Wenda.
“I have been stating for a long time that Indonesia’s military operations are not about ‘sovereignty’, but business.
“Now, Indonesia’s own NGOs have confirmed this. New reports from WALHI Papua, LBH Papua, KontraS, Greenpeace Indonesia and several other groups have noted the deep links Indonesia’s retired generals, Kopassus officers and intelligence chiefs have with resource extraction projects in West Papua.
“Powerful Indonesian leaders like Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, Maritime Affairs Minister, hold direct interests in the Wabu Block gold concession in Intan Jaya, where huge military operations have forced thousands of people from their homes.”
‘Wiping our entire villages’
Wenda claimed the military operations were attempts to “wipe out entire villages and clear the way for illegal mines”.
“They are killing us because we are Black, because we are different. This is state-sponsored terrorism,” he said.
Wenda said that given these economic interests, the Papuan people could not “trust the reports of the Indonesian police and military whenever one of their own is killed”.
“The military men’s presence in the region is illegal. Their presence is part of Indonesia’s business interests, part of their illegal colonial occupation of my land.
“The 1969 Act of No Choice was illegal, it was not done by one man one vote as required by the 1962 New York Agreement. The UN did not endorse what happened, it only ‘took note’ following fierce opposition led by Ghana in the UN General Assembly.
“Indonesia cannot claim that its invasion of West Papua is a done deal – it is not. It is the root cause of all the issues we see today.
“Indonesia has no right to send any more military to West Papua, to build the Trans-Papua Highway, or to construct any more military posts.”
Negotiated solution
Wenda said the issue would never end until Indonesian President Joko Widodo negotiated a “solution for the good of West Papua and Indonesia to hold a referendum on independence”.
“If the international community wants to help end the bloodshed in my homeland, it must act to ensure this visit happens,” Wenda said.
A new wave of displacement of thousands of people from 19 villages in Maybrat, West Papua.
They are running away from raids by Indonesian security forces following the killings of four soldiers by the West Papua National Liberation Army last week. pic.twitter.com/L7D7qTGD1N
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Dominic Raab has been urged to “find a backbone and resign” after MPs criticised his handling of the Afghanistan crisis.
Spineless
Labour told the foreign secretary the coordination between his department and the Ministry of Defence to assist people seeking to flee Afghanistan is “still appalling” despite the efforts of some “very hardworking” civil servants.
The SNP’s Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) went a step further when asking why Raab went on holiday to Crete despite concerns being raised in July over the future of Afghanistan. He added:
When’s he going to find a backbone and resign?
Raab replied:
He referred to the risk report that the management board received in July, it’s a standard monthly report, it goes to senior officials. It didn’t contain any novel or new intelligence assessment.
What the July document made clear was that our central planning assumption at the time was the peace process in Afghanistan would probably run for a further six months.
So we followed all that advice while at the same time preparing our contingency plans for the evacuation.
The Taliban retook control of nearly all of Afghanistan by mid-August.
“Lottery of life and death”
Raab repeatedly stressed the UK will not recognise the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan and noted his “scepticism is quite deep” about their assurances. But he told MPs:
There is some evidence, in relation to the engagement we had on the ground in relation to the airport, it is possible to have a rational, constructive engagement and be able to test whether they will keep their word.
Labour’s Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) earlier warned that the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme “is going to end up as a lottery of life and death”. She asked about the number of Afghan citizens “who want and need to flee here from Afghanistan and have already asked”. Harman said:
How will the Government in practice decide between those who will be the lucky 5,000 and be allowed to come here and those who, though meeting the criteria, will because of the 5,000 cap be refused and face a terrible fate at the hands of the Taliban?
I think the reality is unless they increase the 5,000 cap, the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme is going to end up as a lottery of life and death.
Raab replied:
I think she’s right to say frankly even if we doubled or tripled the quota, the number of people fleeing Afghanistan is going to outstrip what the UK would be able to take alone.
“Appalling”
Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said:
The coordination between the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, despite some very hardworking civil servants on the ground who are working round the clock, is still appalling.
She also asked about the number of calls handled by the crisis centre. The foreign secretary said:
Since August 11, (the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office crisis centre) has handled more than 44,000 calls. We surged 45 members of FCDO staff and 35 staff from other departments.
Since August 19, we have answered well over 90% – 93% – of the total number received, and every day since the 24th, our call handlers have answered more than 94% of the calls that were made.
And just to give the honourable lady a sense, since August 20 average wait times have been less than a minute.
Raab also told MPs there is “clearly a difference” between the Taliban and terrorist groups such as Isis-K – the affiliate of the so-called Islamic State in Afghanistan – and al-Qaeda.
He added:
Indeed, there is suspicion that the Abbey Gate attack from Isis-K, that part of the intention was to target the Taliban.
In a seven-minute social media broadcast, President Duwa Lashi La has declared it is time to stop the military regime’s ongoing torture, detention, jailing and murder of civilians opposed to the military coup seven months ago.
President Duwa Lashi La said the NUG had moved to declare war to protect the people against “military terrorists” and the regime leader, General Min Aung Hlaing.
The NUG had taken responsibility to protect the life and the property of the people and had “launched a people’s defensive war against the military junta”, President Duwa Lashi La said in the broadcast.
He described this as a “public revolution”.
NUG President Duwa Lashi La called on all “citizens of Myanmar [to] revolt against the rule of the military terrorists led by Min Aung Hlaing”.
He urged the “People’s Defence Force to target military assets…protect lives and property of the people”.
Help the PDF plea
He also urged ethnic armed organisations to “assist and protect PDF [People’s Defence Force] and their allies [and] immediately attack Min Aung Hlaing and the military council”.
The President also spoke for the need for ethnic groups to protect and control their lands.
He urged citizens to minimise travel and to build supplies and medicines in preparation for the coming conflict.
In an interview with Karen News, Padoh Saw Ta Doh Moo, general secretary of the Karen National Union said his organisation was opposed to the military regime and would support those who were against it.
“In our policy, those who oppose the dictatorship are our friends. This means that we will work together with any organisations that oppose the military dictatorship.”
Padoh Saw Ta Doh Moo called for national unity, saying: “Our goal is to break free from the military dictatorship so that we need all the people to participate under a political leadership, taking accountability and responsibility on each role that each individual play that are in line with our political aspirations.”
Promoting federalism
In a recent short statement issued on September 3, the KNU said it would continue “its strong commitment and adherence to promoting federalism and democracy, working with any organisation against the coup and fighting any forms of dictatorship.”
The KNU statement offered its support to anti-coup protesters and those targeted by the military regime that staged a coup against the elected civilian government on February 1.
Since then, fighter jets had flown into Karen National Union-controlled areas 27 times and dropped at least 47 bombs, killing 14 civilians and wounding 28.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) confirmed as at September 6, the military had killed 1049 people, including 75 children, arrested 7904 and issued warrants for 1984 protesters.
Indonesian police have arrested two suspects in connection with an attack on the Kisor military post which killed four soldiers late last week, reports Antara news agency from Sorong.
“The suspects have admitted their involvement,” claimed the commander of the XVIII/Kasuari Regional Military Command, Major General I Nyoman Castiasa, after paying his respects for the dead soldiers on Friday.
Castiasa led a military procession to honour the soldiers before their caskets were transported to their hometowns for their funeral.
The two alleged West Papuan independence fighters have been placed under police custody for further investigation, he said.
The commander added that he did not yet know the exact number of the attackers.
Castiasa appealed to members of the community in West Papua who were still independence to end the conflict and “work together to develop” the province.
“If they are stubborn and continue their campaign of insurgency, they will be crushed,” he said.
Military post ambush
In the early hours of Thursday, the pro-independence fighters ambushed several soldiers while they were sleeping at the Kisor military post.
2nd Sergeant Amrosius, Chief Private Dirham, First Private Zul Ansari, and First Lieutenant Dirman died in the attack, according to spokesperson for the XVIII/Kasuari Regional Military Command, Lt Col Hendra Pesireron.
The bodies of three soldiers were found at the post, while another was discovered in the bush not far from the post.
Pesireron added that another soldier, First Private Ikbal, could not be found.
Police chief Inspector General Tornagogo Sihombing in West Papua province said two suspects have been apprehended, but police investigators were continuing their probe into the Kisor military post attack.
“The suspects are under police custody at South Sorong police precinct,” he said.
The assault on the Kisor military post was the latest incident in the armed uprising by Papuan nationalists.
Covid-19 pandemic
In the midst of the government’s handling of the covid-19 pandemic in Papua and West Papua, the two Melanesian provinces have been gripped with the armed independence struggle over the past few months of 2021.
In April, two teachers in Julukoma village, Beoga sub-district, Puncak district, were allegedly killed by independence fighters.
On August 22, 2021, a rebel group operating in Yahukimo district attacked several construction workers of PT Indo Mulia Baru who were involved in building a bridge on Brazza River, killing two.
Independence fighters also attacked the Indonesian Police’s Mobile Brigade (Brimob) unit when they went to the shooting site to recover the bodies, Pesireron said.
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Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population with 270 million, has not yet determined its stance towards the Taliban leadership after seizing power in Afghanistan.
It is also the most populous Muslim country.
The Director-General for Asia Pacific and Africa at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Abdul Kadir Jailani, said the same attitude was also being shown by other countries.
Indonesia’s Director-General for Asia Pacific and Africa at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Abdul Kadir Jailani … “quite warm” response in Indonesia to Taliban takeover. Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
“Why haven’t many countries taken a definitive stance, because the situation is still fluid and (the Taliban) have not yet formed a legitimate government,” said Abdul Kadir in the webinar ‘Post-Conflict Afghanistan: Fall or Rise?’ this week.
According to Jailani, Taliban officials are negotiating with a number of figures in Afghanistan in a bid to form a new government.
In addition to the formation of government, Indonesia is also still waiting for the status of the Taliban in the international community.
Jailani said a common view was needed about the status of the Taliban.
“This understanding is very important, so we can get faster information to determine our attitude towards the Taliban and its government later,” he added.
He said the Indonesian government was also careful in determining its stance because the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan received a “quite warm” and mixed reaction from within Indonesia.
Jailani stressed that Indonesia’s definitive stance would only be conveyed when the situation in Afghanistan became clearer.
The Taliban seized control of the civilian government in Afghanistan on August 15 without any resistance. A few days ago, the Taliban claimed to have pocketed a number of names of figures who would later fill the new government.
Unlike in the 1996-2001 era, the Taliban claimed to be forming an inclusive government that involved all elements and ethnicities in Afghanistan.
Former Papuan political prisoner Filep Karma has also joined activists and Victor Yeimo’s family along with Yeimo’s lawyer who protested at the private residence of the Papua chief public prosecutor in the Doc 5 area of Jayapura city at the weekend, reports Suara Papua.
Karma revealed that he was shocked at the attitude of the public prosecutor who was still “showing his racism” towards Yeimo during their visit on Saturday.
The panel of judges at the Jayapura District Court hearing last Thursday, August 26, ordered the prosecutor to facilitate the defendant, who is accused of “treason”, being given healthcare — an up examination and inpatient care at a hospital.
Just like before and despite being urged by several parties over the last two days following the court’s ruling, the chief public prosecutor has not demonstrated good faith, say critics.
When Yeimo was being examined by a medical team at the Jayapura pubic hospital on the evening of Friday, August 27, the prosecutor accompanied by security personnel put pressure on Yeimo not to be treated overnight.
He was then returned to the Papua regional police Mobile Brigade command headquarters detention centre where he has been detained since his arrest in May.
Yeimo’s lawyer, who is part of the Papua Law Enforcement and Human Rights Coalition (KPHHP), has already met all of the administrative requirements for Yeimo’s hospital treatment, including providing guarantors from the Papuan Regional House of Representatives (DPRP) — legislators John NR Gobai and Laurenzus Kadepa, as well as an advocate.
‘Long-winded lawsuits’
“Legal affairs in Indonesia are indeed like this, excessively long-winded,” he said.
“Indonesia does not regard life as important — procedures are more important than people’s lives.”
Karma said the prosecutor’s actions were “strange”, especially because ipso facto it was an an indigenous Papuan who had not heeded the order by the judges.
“Because the prosecutor is a Papuan, he’s afraid of being labeled as biased towards Papuan independence. So, he will try to show that he is more nationalist than the Javanese,” said Karma.
“Yet in the eyes of the Javanese, he’s ‘just a monkey’. I lived in Java for a long time, so I have felt this.”
Yeimo must be treated first because, according to Karma, a suspect and a defendant was guaranteed by law to receive treatment if they were ill.
“What we want this evening is for brother Victor Yeimo to be allowed to be treated in hospital. But this has not happened because of other considerations and they say they are following legal procedures,” he said.
‘Surrender to God’
Because of efforts to get Yeimo treated in hospital have not been carried out, Karma is calling on all Papuans to “surrender to God”.
“We will cool our passionate hearts, let us rise in hymn and prayer. Myself and all of us exist not just because of power, but rather because Jesus who lived before us, today and forever,” Karma said.
KPHHP litigation coordinator and Yeimo’s lawyer Emanuel Gobay believes that the Papua chief public prosecutor’s response to Gobai and Kadepa when he met with them at his private residence was different from the court’s ruling that his client receive inpatient treatment because his state of health had deteriorated while being detained at the Mobile Brigade detention centre.
“We have heard the chief public prosecutor’s response. If seen from the court’s ruling, there is difference in how it is seen,” he said.
“What the chief public prosecutor has conveyed proves that he does not respect the judges’ ruling at the Abepura Class IIA District Court.
“The public prosecutor has gone against the court’s order.”
Speaking in front of Yeimo’s family and activists gathered in front of the prosecutor’s home at 8am, Gobay said Yeimo’s lawyers would accompany him at the next hearing on Tuesday. His guarantors, Gobai and Kadepa would also attend the hearing.
Boris Johnson has “full confidence” in Dominic Raab despite bitter Whitehall infighting about the performance of the foreign secretary as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.
“Control freak”
Downing Street said there were no plans for a reshuffle following widespread reports claiming that Raab’s position is under threat. Hostile briefings from government insiders have seen the foreign secretary labelled a “control freak” who would be “toast” when the prime minister carries out a shake-up of his Cabinet.
The prime minister’s official spokesman told reporters there were “no plans for any reshuffle”. They added:
The Prime Minister has full confidence in his Foreign Secretary
The foreign secretary, who was on holiday in Crete as the Taliban swept away opposition, has denied claims that he did not speak to ministers in Afghanistan and Pakistan for months ahead of the evacuation crisis. He called the allegations “not credible and deeply irresponsible”.
British military personnel prepare to remove cargo from a C-17 aircraft at RAF Brize Norton (Peter Nicholls/PA)
The Sunday Times reported that the foreign secretary had “shown no interest” in taking calls from either country’s government in the six months before the evacuation. The newspaper cited an unnamed Pakistani official, who said Raab had thought of Afghanistan as “yesterday’s war”.
“Not credible” – Raab
On 31 August, Raab hit back at the claims, and said there had been a “team effort” across the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to communicate with the two countries. He told Sky News:
Anyone that is toddling off to the Sunday Times or any other newspaper at a time of crisis, including the evacuation which has been two weeks running, giving buck-passing briefings either at me or the FCDO is, frankly, not credible and it is deeply irresponsible.
The Cabinet minister added that he had spoken to Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi “more intensively given the evacuation” and defended the Foreign Office’s record in Afghanistan, because it has supported the evacuation of 17,000 people since April.
However, he was unable to name any time before the last few weeks in which he had spoken to ministers from either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
He told LBC:
I can’t tell you my precise call sheet for the last six months.
He claimed he was part of a “team of ministers” and delegated phone calls to colleagues, including Foreign Office minister lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, who had led the UK’s relationship with the Afghan government.
Allegedly ‘operating effectively’
Raab added:
It is right that you have delegation, a division of labour, if you are going to operate effectively as a team. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not done a job like this.
The Foreign Office told the Sunday Times that Raab had spoken to Pakistani minister Qureshi on 22 and 27 August – both dates after the fall of Kabul – but could not cite any earlier conversations between the two men in the last six months. It instead said that Ahmad was responsible for communicating with Pakistan and Afghanistan as the minister for South Asia.
Raab faced criticism for not returning early from his holiday in Crete earlier this month, as Kabul was seized by the Taliban. The foreign secretary has said that “with hindsight” he would have abandoned his holiday sooner.
The military’s brutality is a daily reality for all the people of Myanmar. As Myanmar’s army prepares to deploy and reinforce its bases with hundreds of extra troops, the country’s media workers remain exposed to Covid-19 and under extreme threat, writes Phil Thornton.
Myanmar’s military leaders used its armed forces to launch its coup and take control of the country from its elected government on 1 February 2021. In protest, millions of people took to the streets.
The military responded to these protests by sending armed soldiers and police into residential areas to arrest defiant civilians, workers, students, doctors and nurses.
In March, martial law was enforced in Yangon, snipers were used, and protesters were shot on sight.
To restrict news coverage of their crimes and to impede the organisatiojn of protests, the military ordered telecommunication companies to restrict internet and mobile phone coverage. Independent media outlets had their licences withdrawn, offices were raided and trashed.
Journalists were targeted and hunted by soldiers and police. Obscure laws were added to the penal code and used to restrict freedom of speech and expression. State-controlled media published pages of arrest warrants and photographs of the wanted, including journalists.
To avoid arrest, independent journalists went underground or sought refuge with border based ethnic armed organisations.
Myanmar journalists are well aware that being “arrested” and held in detention by the military doesn’t come with respect for their legal or human rights. The military uses a wide range of obscure laws, some dating back to colonial times, to detain, intimidate and silence its critics — academics, medics, journalists, students and workers.
95 journalists arrested
Independent website, Reporting ASEAN, recorded that, as of August 18, 95 journalists had been arrested and 42 were being held in detention.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) estimated by August 29 that the military has now killed at least 1026 people, arrested 7627, issued warrants for 1984 and are still holding 6025 in detention.
Journalists Sithu Aung Myint and Htet Htet Khine pictured in a newspaper clipping. Image: Global New Light of Myanmar
They want names Those arrested are taken to interrogation centres and held indefinitely without contact with family or legal representation. Torture is used to extort names and contacts from the detained to be added to the military’s long list of those to be hunted down and suppressed into silence.
One of those names on the military’s wanted list is that of journalist Nyan Linn Htet, now in hiding, after a warrant under Section 505 (a) was issued for his arrest.
Nyan Linn Htet, managing editor of Mekong News, in an interview with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) explains the impact of being hunted has had on both him and his family.
“If I’m arrested it means I lose everything. When we had to run and go into hiding, we lost our home and our possessions. You lose your income. Your equipment. You never feel safe when hiding. Living like this affects all of us. If the military does not find me, they will pressure and threaten my family with arrest.”
Nyan Linn Htet said he is still working despite the risk of arrest.
“Losing a journalist is a big loss for our struggle for democracy. We’re only doing our job as reporters, but our news coverage exposes the military and its abuses – this is why we’re the enemy.”
Despite the danger to him and his family, Nyan Linn Htet worries about the safety of those who helped him avoid arrest.
‘Caught in hiding’
“If I’m caught in hiding, the SAC (military-appointed State Administration Council) will persecute the people who gave me a place to live. I’m afraid they [the military] will arrest those who helped me.”
His fears are well founded.
Journalist and political analyst Sithu Aung Myint was high on the military’s wanted list for his political commentary and published opposition to the coup.
On Sunday, August 15, the military raided the home of his colleague, BBC freelance producer, Htet Htet Khine, and arrested both of them.
A week later, in its Sunday, August 21, edition, the military-run newspaper, Global New Light of Myanmar, said Sithu Aung Myint had been charged with sedition, spreading “fake news” and being critical of the military coup leaders and its State Administration Council under Sections 505 (a) and 124 (a) of the Penal Code.
He could be sentenced to life in jail under Section 124 (a) of the penal code.
Htet Htet Khine was arrested for giving shelter to Sithu Aung Myint, and charged under section 17(1) of the Unlawful Association Act for working with the recently formed National Union Government’s radio station, Federal FM.
Held in interrogation centre
Friends and colleagues of Sithu Aung Myint and Htet Htet Khine told IFJ they are concerned both journalists were held at an interrogation centre for more than a week before having access to either legal help or contact with colleagues or family.
Nyan Linn Htet told IFJ he is aware his legal and human rights will not be respected if he is arrested.
“They will not let us get legal help until they’ve got what they want from us. The military amended 505 (a) of the Penal Code to prevent giving us bail. We know they will jail us even if we have legal representation.
“We know SAC is torturing journalists because of the work we do.”
Reports by local and international humanitarian groups have detailed the severe beatings — hours of maintaining stressed positions, use of sexual violence — and killing of people while held in detention.
Nyan Linn Htet said if arrested, he knows it will come with beatings. He admits that the thought of being tortured keeps him awake at night.
“They will jail me, but only after they torture me. I will not be released until I sign a statement that I will never criticise them. I’m not afraid of being arrested, but torture scares me. There are nights when I’m too afraid to sleep.”
International media drop Myanmar He and other local journalists told the IFJ it was disappointing that international media has dropped Myanmar from its news agenda and moved on to cover other stories.
Nyan Linn Htets said despite access difficulties, the international media can use local reporters who are willing to help.
“We know the difficulties media has getting ground access to Myanmar. Covid-19 restrictions also make it impossible to legally cross borders from neighboring countries, but we are already here in the country and are capable of doing the job.”
Despite the fear of arrest and torture, he is still reporting and urged local journalists to keep doing the same.
“It’s important we use what we can to still work and report news events of interest to people. People are accessing news and information in many different ways now.”
The military, while trashing local and international laws and ignoring its constitution, is quick to use and amend laws to jail its opponents for being critical of the coup and for reporting military violence, abuse and corruption.
We have no rights
Nan Paw Gay, editor-in-chief at the Karen Information Center, says the military council has no respect for journalists or their right to publish information in the public interest.
“There is no freedom of the press. If journalists try to report news or seek information from the military’s opponents — CRPH, NUG, CDM, G-Z and PDF — the State Administration Council prosecutes them under Section 17/1 of the Illegal Association Act.
“Since the military launched its coup, sources we use have had their freedom of speech and expression made illegal and they now risk arrest for talking to us and… we can be arrested for speaking with them.
“Independent media groups have been outlawed and totally lost their right to speak freely or write about news events.”
Nan Paw Gay points out if journalists are “critical of the military, its appointed State Administration Council or its lack of a public health plan to tackle the covid-19 pandemic now ravaging the country, section 505 (a) is used to arrest journalists for spreading false news.”
Essentially torture is used to terrorise journalists, he says.
“When the military council arrests and detains journalists, the torture is both physical and psychological. Even before being detained threats are issued and then during the arrest the violence becomes real – shootings, people being kicked and dragged from homes by their hair and beaten.”
Women journalists tortured
Nan Paw Gay says women journalists are more likely to be “tortured using psychological abuse – kept in a dark room and constantly told that they will be killed tomorrow – to mess and generate fear with their thoughts. You can see the effects of the tortured on some journalists when they appear in court – shaking hands and body spasms.”
Military brutality is a daily reality for Myanmar’s people. At the time of writing, the army is preparing to deploy and reinforce its bases with hundreds of extra troops into areas of the Karen National Union-controlled territory and where anti-coup protesters, striking doctors and politicians have been offered refuge and safety.
A senior ethnic Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) soldier told the IFJ that army drones and helicopters have been surveying the area in recent months.
“We know they’ve sent munitions and large troop numbers to our area… last time we had drones flying over our area, they later attacked villages and our positions with airstrikes. They’re already fighting in our Brigade 5 and 1 and have started in 6 and 2.”
Since the military launched its coup on February 1, there has been at least 500 armed battles between the KNU and the military regime and 70,000 Karen civilians have been displaced and are hiding in makeshift camps as a direct result of these attacks.
Fighter jets have flown into Karen National Union-controlled areas 27 times and dropped at least 47 bombs, killing 14 civilians and wounding 28.
Burning rice stores in Myanmar. Image: KIC
Naw K’nyaw Paw, general secretary of the Karen Women Organisation, in an interview with Karen News, said villagers displaced by the Myanmar Army attacks are now in desperate need of humanitarian aid.
‘Shoot at villagers’
“They shoot at villagers if they see them on their farms, burning down their rice barns and killing the livestock left behind. The Burma Army also arrests people when they see them and use them as human shields to protect them when attacked by Karen soldiers.”
Naw K’nyaw Paw said accessing the displaced villagers is difficult, especially during the wet season.
“The only accessible way in is on foot, supplies have to be carried through jungle. Given the restrictions due to covid-19 as well as the increasing Burma Army military operations, villagers are unable to return to their homes and they will need food, clothing and medicine, especially the young and old.”
Nan Paw Gay says the military’s strategy to muzzle the media is a familiar tactic that has been used before.
“Stop international media getting access to conflict areas, shut down independent media, hunt local journalists and when there’s no one to left to report, launch attacks in ethnic regions, displacing thousands of villagers.”
Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in South East Asia. This article was first published by the IFJ Asia-Pacific blog and is republished with the author’s permission. Thornton is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Via America’s Lawyer: The NSA quietly awards Amazon Web Services a $10 billion contract which includes biometric screening technology. Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Amazon scored a major NSA contract recently after spending years beefing up their ranks within the military, brass. […]
To cover up the humiliating defeat for the United States and its allies in Afghanistan, the Anglo-American media is spinning tales of a great “humanitarian” airlift to save Afghani women from assumed brutality when the Taliban consolidate their power across Afghanistan.
But, at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, last week the Chinese changed the narrative, calling for the US, UK, Australia and other NATO countries to be held accountable for alleged violations of human rights committed during the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
“Under the banner of democracy and human rights the US and other countries carry out military interventions in other sovereign states and impose their own model on countries with vastly different history, culture and national conditions [which has] brought severe disasters to their people,” China’s ambassador in Geneva Cheng Xu told the council.
“United States, the United Kingdom and Australia must be held accountable for their violations of human rights in Afghanistan, and the resolution of this Special Session should cover this issue,” he added.
Amnesty International and a host of other civil society speakers have also called for the creation of a robust investigative mechanism that would allow for monitoring and reporting on human rights violations and abuses, including grave crimes under international law.
They have also asked for the mechanism to assist in holding those suspected of criminal responsibility to justice in fair trials.
However, they were looking at the future rather than the past.
Adopted by consensus
The UNHRC member states adopted by consensus a resolution which merely requests further reports and an update by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in March 2022.
China was extraordinarily critical of Australia in May this year when the so-called Brereton Report was released by the Australian government into a four-year investigation of possible war crimes in Afghanistan by Australian forces.
The findings revealed that some of Australia’s most elite soldiers in the SAS (Special Air Services) had been involved in unlawful killing, blood lust, a warrior culture and cover-up of their alleged atrocities.
It came as a surprise to an Australian public, which believes that Australian military engagement in Afghanistan was designed to keep the world safe from terrorists.
Today, Australians and the rest of the world are fed by a news narrative that the West saved Afghani women from the brutality of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime, and now they need to be airlifted by Western forces to save them from falling into the hands of the Taliban again.
Rather than airlifting Afghans out of the country, China’s ambassador Xu told UNHRC: “We will continue developing a good neighbourly, friendly and cooperative relationship with Afghanistan and continue our constructive role in its process of peace and reconstruction.”
Reporting this, Yahoo Australia pointed out that Afghanistan was sitting on precious mineral deposits estimated to be worth US$1 trillion and the country also had vast supplies of iron ore, copper and gold. Is believed to be home to one of the world’s largest deposits of lithium.
The report suggested that China was eyeing these resources.
Accountability for the West
However, such suspicions should not come in the way of calling for the West to be accountable for its war crimes in Afghanistan, which have been well documented even by such organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The UNHRC has not taken up these issues so far, fearing US retaliation.
Speaking on Sri Lankan Sirasa TV’s Pathikade programme, Professor Prathiba Mahanamahewa, a former member of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission who went to Afghanistan on a fact-finding mission on the invitation of the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission in 2014, argued that Western nations had been instrumental in creating terrorist groups around the world like the Taliban to destabilise governing systems in countries.
“At the core of the Taliban is the idea of spreading Islamic fundamentalism and they have inspired similar movements in the region; thus, it is a big threat to countries in Asia, especially in South Asia,” argued Professor Mahanamahewa.
“There are parties that pump a lot of funds to the Taliban.”
He said that in 2018, Sri Lanka (with several other countries) fought at the UNHRC to come up with a treaty to stop these financial flows to terrorist groups.
“Until today, nothing has been done,” said Professor Mahanamahewa.
Producer of opium and hashish
He added that Afghanistan was a large producer of opium and hashish, and the West was a big market for it, thus “Talibans would obviously like to have some form of relations with the West”.
In April 2019, the International Criminal Court (ICC) rejected its prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s November 2017 request to open an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity during Afghanistan’s brutal armed conflict.
Such an investigation would have investigated war crimes and brutality of both the Taliban and the US-led forces and activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The panel of judges concluded that since the countries concerned had not taken any action over the perpetrators of possible “war crimes”, ICC could not act because it was a court of last resort.
In March 2011, the Rolling Stones magazine carried a lengthy investigative report on how war crimes by US forces were covered up by the Pentagon.
After extensive interviews with members of a group within the US forces called Bravo Company, they described how they were focused on killings Afghan civilians like going to the forests to hunt animals, and how these killings of innocent villages who were sometimes working in the fields were camouflaged as a terror attack by Taliban.
The soldiers involved were not disciplined or punished and US army aggressively moved to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit”. The Pentagon clamped down on information about these killings, and soldiers in the Bravo Company were barred from speaking to the media.
Documented incidents
While the US occupation continued, many human rights organisations have documented incidents like these and called for independent international investigations, which have met with lukewarm response.
Only a few were punished with light sentences that did not reflect the gravity of the crime.
After losing the elections, in November 2020 President Trump pardoned two US army officials who were accused and jailed for war crimes in Afghanistan. While some Pentagon leaders expressed concern that this action would damage military discipline, Trump tweeted “we train our boys to be killing machines, then persecute them when they kill”.
It is perhaps now time that the US indulged in some soul-searching about their culture of killing, rather than using a narrative of “saving Afghani women” to cover up barbaric killing when the US-led forces were involved in Afghanistan.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of one of India’s top think-tanks, the Centre Policy Research, argued in an Indian Express article that terrorist groups like the Taliban or ISIS were “products of modern imperial politics” that was unsettling local societies, encouraging violence, supported fundamentalism, thus breaking up state structures.
He listed 7 sins of the US Empire that contributed to the debacle in Afghanistan. These included corruption that drives war; self-deception like what happened in Vietnam and now Afghanistan; lack of morality where the empire drives lawlessness; and hypocrisy, a cult of violence and racism.
It is interesting that the Rolling Stones feature reflected the last two points in the way the Bravo Company went about picking up innocent villages for killing. But Mehta argued that “the modality of US withdrawal exuded the fundamental sin of empire. Its reinforcement of race and hierarchy”.
‘Common humanity’
He noted: “Suddenly, the pretext of common humanity, and universal liberation, which was the pretext of empire, turned into the worst kind of cultural essentialism. It is their culture, these medieval tribalists who are incapable of liberty”.
Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, writing on the Al Jazeera website asked: “What can the Taliban do to Afghanistan that it and the US, and their European allies have already not done to it?”
He described the Doha deal between the US and the Taliban as a deal to hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban.
“As for Afghan women and girls, they are far better off fighting the fanaticism and stupidity of the Taliban on their own and not under the shadow of US military barracks,” argued Professor Dabashi.
“Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish and Arab women have been fighting similar, if not identical, patriarchal thuggery right in their neighbourhood, so will Afghan women.”
Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.
Via America’s Lawyer: Taliban forces seize billions of dollars in U.S. weaponry including Black Hawk helicopters, M4 rifles, and Humvees left behind by American troops. Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: The Taliban has now secured billions of dollars worth of weapons and […]
Witnessing young and middle-aged Afghans running toward a fleeing United States Air Force plane conjures up the notion that supposedly the Afghans don’t want to bid farewell to their U.S. “friend.” The perception this gives to many Americans watching this on television is one of pity and derision, a narrative repeated by policymakers and media personalities alike: We spent billions and lost thousands of servicepeople for a country that just “can’t get it together.” For Afghans, this should be an awakening from the notion that their “friend” the United States — or the so-called “international community” — who came to rescue the country from the Taliban, build the country, and bring democracy, is leaving all too hastily and leaving Pakistan to export the Taliban back into the country.
Both perceptions could not be farther away from the actual truth. This can be easily debunked in three obvious ways. Taking into account the U.S.’s specific military, economic and political actions in Afghanistan, we must recognize that the invasion and occupation were never intended as a route to democracy or progress.
Military Deception: Systemic Underfunding and Harm
Furthermore, according to two very revealing books, Douglas Wissing’s 2012 Funding the Enemy: How the US Taxpayers Bankroll The Taliban and Anand Gopal’s 2014 No Good Men Among the Living: America, The Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, after the 2001 U.S. invasion, most Taliban rank and file members were ready to assimilate back into Afghan society. Yet the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continued to harass, imprison, and kill Taliban leaders and soldiers to the point of forcing them to take up arms again to defend themselves. By 2005, according to Gopal and Wissing, the U.S. had effectively revived the Taliban.
Added to this was U.S.’s brutal counterinsurgency policies of bombing villages and its night raids in rural areas with nonexistent infrastructure, which further alienated a rural Afghan population already experiencing high unemployment and underdevelopment due to decades of war.
Economic Deception: U.S./NATO Economic Investments Neglected the Most Important Sectors of “Nation-Building”
How is it that 40 of the world’s most developed countries involved in the U.S./NATO operation supposedly spent more in Afghanistan than they did in implementing the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, and yet, somehow still systematically disregarded where that investment needed to go? If sincerely invested, this money would have gone toward building the central state’s administrative capacity for social services and law and order as well as the agricultural sector, since the vast majority of Afghanistan’s population has lived in rural areas for the past 20 years, which is also incidentally the region from which the Taliban got most of their recruits. The World Bank estimates that 74 percent of Afghans live in rural areas, but that number is almost certainly an undercount due to the way in which its figures categorize rural residents who have only temporarily moved to cities.
Instead, the agricultural sector was willfully neglected, which contributed to the high national unemployment rate of at least 40 percent in a country where about 70 percent of the population is under 25 years old. This is rather ironic when the U.S. and the European Union (EU) subsidize their own agricultural sectors, which make up not more than 5 percent of their national labor forces respectively — about $49 billion and $101 billion just in 2019. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, a country with a total GDP of about $20 billion that they occupied for 20 years, they could not subsidize Afghan farmers enough in order to make the country food self-sufficient while creating jobs in the rural areas.
The policies of the U.S. and NATO, because of its lukewarm commitment to “nation-building,” systematically undermined building Afghanistan’s central state capacity (as it also did in Iraq during de-Baathification, destroying its central state capacity), by avoiding giving the majority of the reconstruction aid to the relevant government ministries with the excuse that there wasn’t sufficient capacity in the Afghan government to absorb the aid or that there was corruption.
It is not surprising then that after the U.S. spent billions supporting the Mujahadeen during the 1980s to destroy Afghanistan’s central state, the ensuing civil war among the Mujahadeen and the Taliban from 1992-2001 reduced the standard of living in Afghanistan (as measured by poverty, life expectancy, unemployment, clean water, electricity, etc.) to one of the lowest in the world by 2001. Yet after 20 years of occupation, its poverty rate is about 55 percent, which is no lower than it was in 2001.
However, for those who have followed the U.S.’s foreign development aid record for the past 70 years, Afghanistan’s (or Haiti’s or Iraq’s) case is not a surprise at all. The U.S. foreign aid program is notorious for its poor quality and the stingy quantity it provides to the Global South. It is poor quality because most of the supposed aid money it gives a country usually does not help the receiving country build self-sufficiency in its local agricultural, manufacturing or infrastructural capacity. Instead, most of the aid is “tied aid,” where the receiving country has to spend the majority of the aid money buying from U.S. firms, even though there are less expensive options. Despite the perception of generosity the U.S. has created, its aid amount is one of the lowest among the world’s high-GDP countries: The U.S. gives less than 0.20 percent of its national income to development aid. It does not even give 0.70 percent of its national income, which it has agreed to since the 1970s.
Political Deception: The U.S. Disregarded Afghanistan’s Political Tradition of Democracy
From the very beginning, the U.S./NATO alliance ignored Afghanistan’s longstanding tradition of democracy. The political tradition of the “Loya Jirga” (Grand Assembly) is rooted for at least several centuries in the Afghan tradition of “Jirga” where a council of tribal elders or village elders get together in a gathering similar to a town hall meeting and deliberate about a land dispute or other matters that are creating tensions and conflict between villages or tribes.
In the case of the Loya Jirga, this takes place at the national level where community and religious elders across the country have an assembly to discuss and decide on important matters of the nation. In the Loya Jirga at the Bonn conference in 2001, the Afghan delegates chose Professor Abdul Sattar Sirat — who was a respected Afghan from its Uzbek community, a minister of justice in the Afghan government in the 1970s and a representative of the former Afghan king — as the proposed leader of the interim administration.
However, the U.S. imposed Hamid Karzai by methods of duplicity and intimidation against the delegates’ choice. Karzai was a former Pashtun mujahideen and Taliban representative who had little experience and administrative skill, let alone expertise in rebuilding the Afghan state after 20 years of war and no following or popularity inside Afghanistan. He was seemingly selected because he would be dependent on U.S./NATO support and therefore, submissive to U.S. directives.
Contrary to the dominant orientalist narrative about Afghanistan being a tribal society without a history of a centralized state, Afghanistan had, from the 1880s to about 1992, a modern state with a qualified and professional civil administration that could govern and develop the country professionally so that it would not remain a weak and illegitimate government.
Unfortunately, instead of appointing government officials based on merit and qualifications, the U.S. and NATO deliberately chose a cadre of neoliberal, Ivy League technocrats and warlords with their attendant foreign advisers leading the transition government that ultimately became an infestation of corruption run by NGOs and foreign consultants, with little to no state capacity being built.
The last couple of months of negotiations with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, have further revealed that building a legitimate and professionally staffed Afghan central state with a productive economy for its tax base was never the true intention for Afghanistan, the Middle East or the Central Asian region.
The U.S./NATO’s rhetorical game of nation-building and democracy-building, all while funding the very forces they were officially fighting in the “war on terror,” is one of the greatest deceptions of the last 20 years. The reality is that Afghanistan has become one more bucket-list country in the Project for New American Century (PNAC), and once again, its women, children, elderly and young will pay the biggest price. Hopefully the world will awaken from the belief that the U.S. and NATO — with their shameful colonial legacy and their present neocolonial relations in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, South-East Asia, and Africa — can actually bring peace, prosperity and progress to the Global South.
The panel of judges hearing the case against a West Papuan activist accused of treason have ordered the prosecution to prioritise the defendant’s health, reports Suara Papua.
At the second hearing on Thursday when the charges were supposed to be read out against West Papua National Committee (KNPB) international spokesperson Victor Yeimo, the judges ordered the prosecution to take him to a hospital for intensive treatment because of his deteriorating health.
The first and second court hearings this week were postponed because of Yeimo’s worrying state of health and because he was unable to attend the hearing.
On Friday, Yeimo was taken to the Jayapura public hospital in Dok II for an examination and treatment.
John NR Gobay and Laurenzus Kadepan — two members of the Papua Regional House of Representatives (DPRD) — have declared that they are ready to stand as guarantors for Yeimo while he is being treated.
Papua Legal Aid Foundation (LBH) director Emanuel Gobay has also declared that he is ready to become a guarantor.
This was conveyed to the panel of judges at the Jayapura District Court on Thursday who subsequently granted the request.
Pressure from prosecutor
When contacted by Suara Papua on Friday, Gustaf Kawer, one of the members of Yeimo’s team of defence lawyers, revealed that after Yeimo had been taken to hospital there was pressure from the prosecutor who said Yeimo was not allowed to receive inpatient care.
“It is correct that Victor was taken to hospital earlier. But on the matter of inpatient care this is still being debated with the prosecutor because he doesn’t want Victor Yeimo to be treated at the Doc II hospital,” he told Suara Papua.
According to Kawer, there was a debate between Yeimo’s lawyers and the prosecutor at the hospital.
Yeimo and his lawyers wanted him to be treated at the hospital while the prosecutor did not.
Kawer said that the administrative requirements could be completed and would be handed over on Monday.
“What we are asking and urging is that Victor Yeimo’s health [be prioritised]. His state of health is not good,” Kawer aid.
‘He must be treated in hospital’
“He must be treated in a hospital. We already have the guarantors. The administrative requirements can be handed over on Monday. What we want is for Victor to be treated. Victor’s health is most important.”
A video received by Suara Papua on Friday evening shows Yeimo at the Dok II Jayapura hospital emergency unit. Several photographs received also show Yeimo being examined by a team of medics at the hospital.
Meanwhile, another video received by Suara Papua shows Yeimo debating with the authorities and the prosecutor who are insisting that Yeimo not be treated at the hospital.
Soldiers helping kids and a former British marine trying to get rescue animals out of Kabul. These have become some of the dominant images of the western evacuation from Afghanistan. They’ve started to conceal brutal truths – decades in the making – some of which I witnessed there as a soldier and journalist. That cannot be allowed to happen.
We continue to support vulnerable civilians in Afghanistan as they prepare to fly out to safety. As well as helping to secure the airport and evacuating civilians, we've provided blankets, food and water, sanitary packs and baby milk for vulnerable families. pic.twitter.com/2yUqNb5Vy5
The images are heart-warming and sickly sweet. This is precisely the point of them: to humanise and soften a pointless, 20-year war that wreaked untold havoc on one of the poorest nations on earth.
The life of every animal is precious and quite rightly the public is completely behind the hero that is @PenFarthing. Please support @Nowzad and the mission to get his team and animals back to the UK from Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/bexHgzqnWv
As an Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a journalist in the country, I think it’s worth reviewing what that record is before this sickly sweet PR comes to dominate. To do that we can take a look at just a few aspects of the war.
Death toll
Brown University’s Costs of War project, as reported by the US magazine Task and Purpose, registers an astonishing death toll in Afghanistan up to October 2018. Especially for a war which was meant to ‘liberate’ people.
This toll includes 2,401 US military deaths, 3,937 contractor deaths, 58,596 Afghan military and police deaths, 1,141 allied military dead, and (a conservative estimate) 38,480 civilians killed. The number of wounded across all sides – both mentally and physically – is difficult to pin down.
These figures don’t include the scores of Afghans killed and wounded at Kabul airport yesterday on 26 August. Nor the reported 13 US troops who died in the attack claimed by the local branch of ISIS.
BREAKING: A British defence source said it is “highly likely” Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) was responsible for the attacks outside Kabul airport.
Drones became a signature weapon of the War on Terror and were widely used in Afghanistan. Due to the secretive nature of their use, figures are hard to pin down. But The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) maintains a database to map and count deaths and strikes fairly accurately.
TBIJ projects that between 2015 and today over 13,000 strikes have been carried out in Afghanistan. These resulted in between 4,126 and 10,076 deaths over that period. Drones, however, have been in use for much longer. I can recall as a young soldier posted to Kandahar Airfield in 2006, missile-laden Predator drones taking off and landing were a daily sight.
Reports on the reality of the drone war, and its innocent victims, are widely available.
Bombs
The air war was another big part of the Afghan war – distinct from the drone war. As foreign troops drew down in recent years, bombing intensified in support of Afghan military operations. For instance, as reporter Azmat Khan toldDemocracy Now:
the United States was bombing heavily parts of that country where there were fights against the Taliban raging. So, just to give some context, in 2019, the United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. So, I think it was something close to — more than 6,200 bombs that year, as they were trying to negotiate.
The use of air power, she pointed out, boosted recruitment for the Taliban:
You know, many of its more recent recruits were people who did lose loved ones and really wanted revenge for those casualties.
House raids
Night raids on Afghan homes were another key feature of the war. These involved special forces descending on Afghan’s houses at night, supposedly in search of terrorists. These became highly controversial. In fact, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s own cousin was killed in a raid.
Later this role was handed to CIA-controlled Afghan death squads known as Zero Units. In 2020, I went back to Afghanistan to report on them. We met families whose relatives had been murdered in their homes. Another community was attacked in a night raid resulting in several deaths. This included a young boy whose father dug his body from the rubble of a mosque days later.
Skewed
There is no doubt that the working class soldiers in Kabul airport want to help the kids there. And clearly puppies and kitten have enormous appeal for the British public. But there’s a danger that these images skew our idea of what the Afghan war was actually about. The real story of the conflict is not one of rescuing kids and dogs. It’s one of twenty years of imperial violence and failure in a war that never needed to be fought.
(@DefenceHQ) 
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