mick silver
17th May 2010, 08:56 PM
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175243/ ... Yawn…
How Many Times Have You Seen This Headline?
By Tom Engelhardt
After a week away, here’s my advice: in news terms, you can afford to take a vacation. When I came back last Sunday, New Orleans was bracing for tough times (again). BP, a drill-baby-drill oil company that made $6.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and lobbied against “new, stricter safety rules†for offshore drilling, had experienced an offshore disaster for which ordinary Americans are going to pay through the nose (again). News photographers were gearing up for the usual shots of oil-covered wildlife (again). A White House -- admittedly Democratic, not Republican -- had deferred to an energy company’s needs, accepted its PR and lies, and then moved too slowly when disaster struck (again).
Okay, it may not be an exact repeat. Think of it instead as history on cocaine. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, already the size of the state of Delaware, may end up larger than the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, and could prove more devastating than Hurricane Katrina. Anyway, take my word for it, returning to our world from a few days offline and cell phone-less, I experienced an unsettling déjÃ*-vu-all-over-again feeling. What had happened was startling and horrifying -- but also eerily expectable, if not predictable.
And, of course, when it came to our frontier wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- you remember them, don’t you? -- repetition has long been the name of the game, though few here seem to notice. With an immigration crisis, Tea Partying, that massive oil spill, and a crude, ineptly made car bomb in Times Square, there’s already enough to worry about. Isn’t there?
All-Volunteer Wars
Still, there was this headline awaiting my return: “Afghan lawmaker says relative killed after U.S. soldiers raided her home.†Sigh.
After nine years in which such stories have appeared with unceasing regularity, I could have written the rest of it myself while on vacation, more or less sight unseen. But here it is in a nutshell: there was a U.S. night raid somewhere near the Afghan city of Jalalabad. American forces (Special Operations forces, undoubtedly), supposedly searching for a “Taliban facilitator,†came across a man they claimed was armed in a country in which the unarmed man is evidently like the proverbial needle in a haystack. They shot him down. His name was Amanullah. He was a 30-year-old auto mechanic and the father of five. As it happened, he was also the brother-in-law of Safia Siddiqi, a sitting member of the Afghan Parliament. He had, as she explained, called her in a panic, thinking that brigands were attacking his home compound.
And here was the nice touch for those U.S. Special Operations guys, who seem to have learning abilities somewhat lower than those of a hungry mouse in a maze when it comes to hearts-and-minds-style counterinsurgency warfare. True, in this case they didn’t shoot two pregnant mothers and a teenage girl, dig the bullets out of the bodies, and claim they had stumbled across “honor killings,†as Special Operations troops did in a village near Gardez in eastern Afghanistan in March; nor did they handcuff seven schoolboys and a shepherd and execute them, as evidently happened in Kunar Province in late December 2009; nor had they shot a popular imam in his car with his seven-year-old son in the backseat, as a passing NATO convoy did in Kabul, the Afghan capital, back in January; nor had they shadowed a three-vehicle convoy by helicopter on a road near the city of Kandahar and killed 21 while wounding 13 via rocket fire, as U.S. Special Forces troops did in February. They didn’t wipe out a wedding party -- a common enough occurrence in our Afghan War -- or a funeral, or a baby-naming ceremony (as they did in Paktia Province, also in February), or shoot up any one of a number of cars, trucks, and buses loaded with innocent civilians at a checkpoint.
In this case, they killed only one man, who was unfortunately -- from their point of view -- reasonably well connected. Then, having shot him, they reportedly forced the 15 inhabitants in his family compound out, handcuffed and blindfolded them (including the women and children), and here was that nice touch: they sent in the dogs, animals considered unclean in Islamic society, undoubtedly to sniff out explosives. Brilliant! "They disgraced our pride and our religion by letting their dogs sniff the holy Koran, our food, and the kitchen," Ms. Siddiqi said angrily. And then, the American military began to lie about what had happened, which is par for the course. After the angry legislator let them have it (“...no one in Afghanistan is safe -- not even parliamentarians and the president himselfâ€) and the locals began to protest, blocking the main road out of Jalalabad and chanting “Death to America!,†they finally launched an investigation. Yawn.
click link for full story
How Many Times Have You Seen This Headline?
By Tom Engelhardt
After a week away, here’s my advice: in news terms, you can afford to take a vacation. When I came back last Sunday, New Orleans was bracing for tough times (again). BP, a drill-baby-drill oil company that made $6.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and lobbied against “new, stricter safety rules†for offshore drilling, had experienced an offshore disaster for which ordinary Americans are going to pay through the nose (again). News photographers were gearing up for the usual shots of oil-covered wildlife (again). A White House -- admittedly Democratic, not Republican -- had deferred to an energy company’s needs, accepted its PR and lies, and then moved too slowly when disaster struck (again).
Okay, it may not be an exact repeat. Think of it instead as history on cocaine. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, already the size of the state of Delaware, may end up larger than the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, and could prove more devastating than Hurricane Katrina. Anyway, take my word for it, returning to our world from a few days offline and cell phone-less, I experienced an unsettling déjÃ*-vu-all-over-again feeling. What had happened was startling and horrifying -- but also eerily expectable, if not predictable.
And, of course, when it came to our frontier wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- you remember them, don’t you? -- repetition has long been the name of the game, though few here seem to notice. With an immigration crisis, Tea Partying, that massive oil spill, and a crude, ineptly made car bomb in Times Square, there’s already enough to worry about. Isn’t there?
All-Volunteer Wars
Still, there was this headline awaiting my return: “Afghan lawmaker says relative killed after U.S. soldiers raided her home.†Sigh.
After nine years in which such stories have appeared with unceasing regularity, I could have written the rest of it myself while on vacation, more or less sight unseen. But here it is in a nutshell: there was a U.S. night raid somewhere near the Afghan city of Jalalabad. American forces (Special Operations forces, undoubtedly), supposedly searching for a “Taliban facilitator,†came across a man they claimed was armed in a country in which the unarmed man is evidently like the proverbial needle in a haystack. They shot him down. His name was Amanullah. He was a 30-year-old auto mechanic and the father of five. As it happened, he was also the brother-in-law of Safia Siddiqi, a sitting member of the Afghan Parliament. He had, as she explained, called her in a panic, thinking that brigands were attacking his home compound.
And here was the nice touch for those U.S. Special Operations guys, who seem to have learning abilities somewhat lower than those of a hungry mouse in a maze when it comes to hearts-and-minds-style counterinsurgency warfare. True, in this case they didn’t shoot two pregnant mothers and a teenage girl, dig the bullets out of the bodies, and claim they had stumbled across “honor killings,†as Special Operations troops did in a village near Gardez in eastern Afghanistan in March; nor did they handcuff seven schoolboys and a shepherd and execute them, as evidently happened in Kunar Province in late December 2009; nor had they shot a popular imam in his car with his seven-year-old son in the backseat, as a passing NATO convoy did in Kabul, the Afghan capital, back in January; nor had they shadowed a three-vehicle convoy by helicopter on a road near the city of Kandahar and killed 21 while wounding 13 via rocket fire, as U.S. Special Forces troops did in February. They didn’t wipe out a wedding party -- a common enough occurrence in our Afghan War -- or a funeral, or a baby-naming ceremony (as they did in Paktia Province, also in February), or shoot up any one of a number of cars, trucks, and buses loaded with innocent civilians at a checkpoint.
In this case, they killed only one man, who was unfortunately -- from their point of view -- reasonably well connected. Then, having shot him, they reportedly forced the 15 inhabitants in his family compound out, handcuffed and blindfolded them (including the women and children), and here was that nice touch: they sent in the dogs, animals considered unclean in Islamic society, undoubtedly to sniff out explosives. Brilliant! "They disgraced our pride and our religion by letting their dogs sniff the holy Koran, our food, and the kitchen," Ms. Siddiqi said angrily. And then, the American military began to lie about what had happened, which is par for the course. After the angry legislator let them have it (“...no one in Afghanistan is safe -- not even parliamentarians and the president himselfâ€) and the locals began to protest, blocking the main road out of Jalalabad and chanting “Death to America!,†they finally launched an investigation. Yawn.
click link for full story