While the slaughter goes on in this pointless display of Marine power, civilians have been dying at American hands elsewhere in Afghanistan. On Thursday a US airstrike allegedly targeting “insurgents” ended up hitting and killing seven Afghani policemen. And yesterday, another airstrike, this time on a “convoy” of three vehicles, killed an astonishing 33 civilians and injured 12 more–and given the vicious nature of American weaponry, it’s a fair bet that many of those who were injured will end up dying of their wounds too.
February 23, 2010 | Filed under
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Just when it seemed that Republicans in America had a monopoly on Islamophobic hysteria, the Sunday Times prompted a torrent of similar hysteria in the UK by running an article in which an employee of Amnesty International — Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat — criticized the organization that employed her for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg.
February 10, 2010 | Filed under
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Congratulations to the Swiss Canton of Jura, which recently accepted the asylum claims of two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, and to the Swiss federal government for agreeing to accept Jura’s decision on Wednesday. The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs in December 2001.
February 4, 2010 | Filed under
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The Obama administration’s pact to use seven Colombian military bases accelerates “a dangerous trend in U.S. hemispheric policy.” The White House claims the deal merely formalizes existing military cooperation but the Pentagon’s 2009 budget request said it needed funds to improve one of the bases in order to conduct “full spectrum operations throughout South America” and to “expand expeditionary warfare capability.”
February 2, 2010 | Filed under
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After years of stonewalling, the U.S. Defense Department has released the names of people imprisoned at the notorious Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Made available in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the list contains the names of 645 prisoners who were detained at Bagram as of September [...]
January 22, 2010 | Filed under
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The Taliban suicide attack that killed a group of CIA agents in Afghanistan on a base that was directing US drone aircraft used to attack Taliban leaders was big news in the US over the past week, with the airwaves and front pages filled with sympathetic stories referring to the fact that the female station chief, who was among those killed, was the “mother of three children.”
January 4, 2010 | Filed under
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Amid the near-constant speculation over President Barack Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan, there appears to be virtually universal consensus that rooting out corruption has to be a top priority if the US and its NATO allies are to have a “credible partner” in the Afghan government. But corruption takes many forms and is found at many levels. To the lawyers of Human Rights First (HRF), understanding the relationship between corruption, how prisoners are treated and the rule of law is “critical to the success of any strategy” the Obama administration may decide to pursue.
November 27, 2009 | Filed under
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Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
November 24, 2009 | Filed under
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Washington has been negotiating secret and “highly sensitive understandings” with Pakistan to “provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis,” investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports. “The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust,” Hersh writes in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine.
November 8, 2009 | Filed under
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As first reported by the Associated Press, six of the remaining 13 Uighurs in Guantánamo have just arrived on the Pacific island of Palau, where they have been given new homes. The AP’s source said that, overnight, police were guarding the house where the men will live, in the heart of the capital, Koror.
October 31, 2009 | Filed under
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