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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Report From the Afghan Front
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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter!
Report From the Afghan Front
It's Obama's War and It's Going Very BadlyExclusively for CounterPunch subcribers, Patrick Cockburn files a special report from Kabul: the Taliban's tightening grip on most of the country; plumetting US popularity in a bankrupt country rotted by corruption. For fifty years, Seymour Melman waged intellectual war on Pentagon capitalism, making the case for peaceful conversion. David Price brings to light decades of FBI secret surveillance. Senator Jim Webb is launching the first determined bid in forty years to overhaul the US criminal justice system at whose call is the American gulag. Alexander Cockburn reports on the prospects for his success. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents.
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Today's Stories June 26-28, 2009 Jeffrey St. Clair June 25, 2009 Kathy Kelly Jack Bratich Wendell Potter Charles R. Larson Alan Farago Jonathan Cook Gareth Porter Bitta Mostofi / David Macaray Mark Schuller Website of the Day June 24, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Dean Baker Andy Worthington James Bovard Diana Gibson / P. Sainath Gareth Porter Robert Alvarez Dave Lindorff Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi Website of the Day
June 23, 2009 David Price Patrick Cockburn James Ridgeway / Dave Lindorff Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero Gary Leupp Brian M. Downing Robert Bryce Nicholas Dearden Yousef Munayyer Website of the Day June 22, 2009 Michael Hudson Esam Al-Amin Chris Floyd Jack Z. Bratich Atash Yaghmaian Laura Carlsen Paul Craig Roberts Vijay Prashad Fred Gardner Andy Thayer David Macaray Website of the Day
June 19 - 21, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Patrick Cockburn Al Giordano Henry A. Giroux Anthony DiMaggio Paul Craig Roberts John Ross Gareth Porter Carl Ginsburg Tommi Avicolli Mecca Joe Bageant Serge Halimi P. Sainath Jim Goodman Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Robert Fantina Harvey Wasserman Walter Brasch David Ker Thomson Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Kim Nicolini Ben Sonnenberg Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend June 18, 2009 Uri Avnery Robert Sandels / Anthony DiMaggio Robert Weissman Joshua Frank Jonathan Cook Reza Fiyouzat Norman Solomon Ali Jawad James Ridgeway Website of the Day June 17, 2009 Carl Boggs Dr. Bryant Welch Winslow T. Wheeler Liaquat Ali Khan Jonathan Cook Binoy Kampmark Karim Makdisi Dave Lindorff David Swanson Gene Marx Website of the Day June 16, 2009 Patrick Cockburn John Ross Afshin Rattansi Marc Levy Paul Craig Roberts Behzad Yaghmaian Brian M. Downing Merle Lefkoff David Macaray Robert Jensen David Swanson Website of the Day June 15, 2009 Michael Hudson Reza Fiyouzat Patrick Cockburn James Ridgeway Marjorie Cohn Rannie Amiri Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Leonard Schwartz Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day June 12-14, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Gareth Porter Mike Whitney Mark Ames Esam Al-Amin Franklin Lamb Patrick Cockburn Andy Worthington Heather Gray Felice Pace Ron Jacobs George Wuerthner Jeffrey Buchanan / David Ker Thomson Renaud Lambert Kevin Zeese David Macaray Evelyn Pringle Chris Genovali David Michael Green Brian J. Foley Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
June 11, 2009 Kathy Kelly / James Bovard Tristan de Bourbon Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Ralph Nader Harvey Wasserman Nicole Colson Mark Weisbrot Dan Bacher Website of the Day June 10, 2009 Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Jennifer Van Bergen / Douglas Valentine Kathy Kelly Paul Craig Roberts Rev. William E. Alberts Peter Lee Carol Miller Emily Ratner Robert Weissman Dave Lindorff Website of the Day June 9, 2009 Winslow T. Wheeler Mike Whitney Stan Cox Sibel Edmonds Jonathan Cook David Macaray Robert Jensen Nadia Hijab Mark Weisbrot Website of the Day June 8, 2009 John Ross Paul Craig Roberts Franklin C. Spinney Franklin Lamb Uri Avnery Jonathan Cook Eric Toussaint Jim Goodman Norman Solomon Reza Fiyouzat Website of the Day June 5 -7, 200 Alexander Cockburn George Galloway Paul Craig Roberts Jennifer Loewenstein Franklin Lamb Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Missy Comley Beattie Farzana Versey Stanley Heller John V. Whitbeck Robert Weissman Lee Sustar Dave Lindorff William Blum Ernest Callenbach / Greg Moses Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Tim Stelloh Belén Fernández David Ker Thomson Karyn Strickler Christopher Brauchli Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition The Farah BombingAirstrike Report Belies "Blame Taliban" LineBy GARETH PORTER The version of the official military investigation into the disastrous May 4 airstrike in Farah province made public last week by the Central Command was carefully edited to save the U.S. command in Afghanistan the embarrassment of having to admit that earlier claims blaming the massive civilian deaths on the "Taliban" were fraudulent. By covering up the most damaging facts surrounding the incident, the rewritten public version of the report succeeded in avoiding media stories on the contradiction between the report and the previous arguments made by the U.S. command. The declassified "executive summary" of the report on the bombing issued last Friday admitted that mistakes had been made in the use of airpower in that incident. However, it omitted key details which would have revealed the self-serving character of the U.S. command’s previous claims blaming the "Taliban" – the term used for all insurgents fighting U.S. forces - for the civilian deaths from the airstrikes. The report reasserted the previous claim by the U.S. command that only about 26 civilians had been killed in the U.S. bombing on that day, despite well-documented reports by the government and by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission that between 97 and 147 people were killed. The report gave no explanation for continuing to assert such a figure, and virtually admitted that it is not a serious claim by also suggesting that the actual number of civilian deaths in the incident "may never be known". The report also claimed that "at least 78 Taliban fighters" were killed. The independent human rights organisation had said in its May 26 report that at most 25 to 30 insurgents had been killed, though not necessarily in the airstrike. A closer reading of the paragraph in the report on Taliban casualties An analysis of the report’s detailed descriptions of the three separate airstrikes also shows that the details in question could not have been omitted except by a deliberate decision to cover up the most damaging facts about the incident. The "executive summary" states that the decision to call in all three airstrikes in Balabolook district on May 4 was based on two pieces of "intelligence" available to the ground commander, an unidentified commander of a special operations forces unit from the U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC). One piece of intelligence is said to have been an intercepted statement by a Taliban commander to his fighters to "mass to maneuver and re-attack" the Afghan and U.S. forces on the scene. The other was visual sighting of the movement of groups of adults moving at intervals in the dark away from the scene of the firefight with U.S. forces. A number of insurgents were said by the report to have been killed in a mosque that was targeted in the first of the three strikes. The "absence of local efforts to attempt to recover bodies from the rubble in a timely manner", the following morning, according to the report, indicates that the bodies were all insurgent fighters, not civilians. But the report indicates that the airstrikes referred to as the "second B1-B strike" and the "third B-1B strike" caused virtually all of the civilian deaths. The report’s treatment of those two strikes is notable primarily for what it omits with regard to information on casualties rather than for what it includes. It indicates that the ground force commander judged the movement of a "second large group" – again at night without clear identification of whether they were military or civilian – indicated that they were "enemy fighters massing and rearming to attack friendly forces" and directed the bombing of a target to which they had moved. The report reveals that two 500-pound bombs and two 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on the target, not only destroying the building being targeted but three other nearby houses as well. In contrast to the report’s claim regarding the earlier strike, the description of the second airstrike admits that the "destruction may have resulted in civilian casualties". Even more important, however, it says nothing about any evidence that there were Taliban fighters killed in the strike – thus tacitly admitting that the casualties were in fact civilians. The third strike is also described as having been prompted by another decision by the ground commander that a third group moving in the dark away from the firefight was "another Taliban element". A single 2,000-pound bomb was dropped on a building to which the group had been tracked, again heavily damaging a second house nearby. Again the report offers no evidence suggesting that there were any "Taliban" killed in the strike, in contrast to the first airstrike. By these signal omissions, aimed at avoiding the most damaging facts in the incident, the report confirms that no insurgent fighters were killed in the airstrikes which killed very large numbers of civilians. The report thus belies a key propaganda line that the U.S. command had maintained from the beginning – that the Taliban had deliberately prevented people from moving from their houses so that civilian casualties would be maximised. As recently as Jun. 3, the spokesperson for the U.S. command in Afghanistan, Lt. Commander Christine Sidenstricker, was still telling the website Danger Room that "civilians were killed because the Taliban deliberately caused it to happen" and that the "Taliban" had "forced civilians to remain in places they were attacking from". The central contradiction between the report and the U.S. military’s "human shields" argument was allowed to pass unnoticed in the extremely low-key news media coverage of the report. News coverage of the report has focused either on the official estimate of only 26 civilian deaths and the much larger number of Taliban casualties or on the absence of blame on the part of U.S. military personnel found by the investigators. The Associated Press reported that the United States had "accidentally killed an estimated 26 Afghan civilians last month when a warplane did not strictly adhere to rules for bombing". The New York Times led with the fact that the investigation had called for "additional training" of U.S. air crews and ground forces but did hold any personnel "culpable" for failing to follow the existing rules of engagement. None of the news media reporting on the highly expurgated version of the investigation pointed out that it had confirmed, in effect, the version of the event that had been put forward by residents of the bombed villages. As reported by the New York Times May 6, one of the residents interviewed by phone said six houses had been completely destroyed and that the victims of the bombing "were rushing to go to their relative’s houses where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way." Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006. |
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