My story Troubled Galaxy Destroyed dreams: Re: [bangla-vision] Today's LUV NEWS--Patrick Cockburn: Who Killed 120 Civilians? The US Says It's Not a Story

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Jodda Mitchell <jadamirada@yahoo.com> wrote:

OBAMA ANNOUNCES HEALTH CARE PLAN TODAY

President Obama is expected to announce his health care plan today and it is expected to please the Medical Mafia (insurance companies, private hospitals and Big Pharma).

There is a complete corporate news blackout of the major controversy-- the fact that not-for-profit health care is the choice of most Americans and will be kept "off the table" by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, who has people arrested if they try to bring it up before his committee.

We are about to get a major scam laid on us today. The only way President Obama can keep the for-profit system to satisfy the Medical Mafia which finances our elections, and save $2 trillion, as he says he will, is to cut back on what little health care still trickles down to the public. Crap is crap, and you can't "streamline" it.

NO MORE AL QAEDA?

"The chief of the U.S. Central Command says al-Qaida no longer is operating in Afghanistan," begins a report in Huffington Post this morning.

How often do we hear from corporate media that al Qaeda is our enemy in Afghanistan? We found the LA Times reported as recently as March, a story beginning "Al Qaeda has expanded its presence in Afghanistan."

Of course, true or not, al Qaeda is needed as a bogyman to provide a casus belli for war funding, including largess to the Nuclear Mafia so that they may continue to finance our elections.

REFUSENIKS IN ISRAEL

Yesh Gvul (Hebrew: יש גבול, can be translated as "there is a limit" as "the border exists", or as "enough is enough") is a movement founded in 1982, by combat veterans, at the outbreak of the Lebanon War, who refused to serve in Lebanon and has expanded its opposition to the war in Lebanon to the negation of service in the occupied territories, reflected in the current Yesh Gvul slogan:

"We don't shoot, we don't cry, and we don't serve in the occupied territories!"

They are one of many peace groups in Israel which are completely censored out of US corporate media.

Currently Yesh Gvul sees its main role as "backing soldiers who refuse duties of a repressive or aggressive nature" with both moral and financial assistance. Here is their web site, which includes the statement:

We, candidates for service and soldiers in the IDF, men and women, as responsible citizens,

hereby declare that we will take no part in the continued oppression of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, and we will not participate in policing actions or in guarding the settlements.

To read or watch corporate media, one might get the impression that everyone in Israel wants to kill Arabs, take their land, and believe it to be justified.

What passes for journalism in our mass media is disgraceful. These "reporters" put microphones in front of official sources and call it "news." Our major US print and electronic media are reporting the big Afghanistan story of 120 innocents killed from the viewpoint of the Pentagon, looking no further.

Glenn Greenwald has a blockbuster story this morning about how US corporate media attack other nations for their treatment of journalists, but ignore arrests of journalists by our government in keeping the American public in the dark. This is essential to information control.

Since the Bush Wars began, we at LUV News have relied on a number of sources for what is really happening, often journalists who are native speakers, but when those are not available, we do like to go to old fashioned journalists who do the dirty work and go out into the communities to gather facts.

Patrick Cockburn is as good as any journalist in the mass media. Of course, if he wrote in this country he would be fired by now, because he tends to tell the truth no matter whose ox is gored --Jack

Who Killed 120 Civilians? The US Says It's Not a Story

by Patrick Cockburn

Herat is cut off from the rest of the planet. This was once one of the great cities of the world, an imperial capital drawing its wealth from trade along the Silk Road with Iran, the rest of Afghanistan and central Asia. Above the 800-year-old mosque in the city centre are minarets covered in blue and green mosaics which soar above one of the most magnificent monuments of the Islamic world.

But today Herat is cut off even from the rest of Afghanistan. I flew there because it was too dangerous to come by road. We turned right out of the battered-looking airport because, had we turned left down the main road towards Kandahar, we would soon have been in Taliban-controlled territory. The road going east to Bamyan and Kabul is risky for the same reasons.

Herat itself is peaceful compared to the rest of Afghanistan. There are police in their dark grey uniforms and forage hats checking cars, but they are relaxed and don't look as if they are expecting trouble. There are more new buildings than in Kabul, but on many construction sites work seems to have stopped.

I met Obaidullah Sidiqi, a local businessman, at a picnic lunch in a well-watered orchard, full of mulberry and apple trees and honeysuckle, which he owns not far from the airport road. An attractive aspect of Afghanistan never mentioned in war reporting is the Afghan love of flowers. Even in front-line positions soldiers dig small trenches, fill them with water and plant geraniums.

Mr Sidiqi, after 16 years in construction, part of it for the Save the Children Fund and partly on his own account, explained that business in Herat faces unique difficulties. For instance, last year he had contracts under way which he could only visit in disguise. One was for the construction of a school in Shindand district in the south of Herat province, a Pashtun area where the Taliban are strong. Mr Sidiqi, like most people in Herat, is a Tajik. Overall, the Taliban rebellion is confined to the Pashtun, the community to which 42 per cent of Afghans belong, while in the past the Tajiks, who make up 27 per cent of the population, have been the core of the anti-Taliban opposition.

"I wanted to see how work was going at the school, but I did not dare go as myself," Mr Sidiqi told me. "So I grew my beard longer and pretended to be one of my drivers." He also had to go disguised to visit a road his company is building in Badghis province to the north-east of Herat, again in an area where the Taliban are strong. In fact, not all the danger comes from the Taliban - though it is always blamed on them - as there are plenty of bandit gangs in the mountains.

Overall, Mr Sidiqi said this year was better than last, though he did not sound completely confident that it was going to stay that way. He said that 200 local factories had shut, and Iran, where so many Afghans used to go to work, was issuing very few visas. Within Afghanistan there was pervasive corruption with the award of a contract usually determined by the size of the bribe offered to the officials in charge.

I was sympathetic to Mr Sidiqi's difficulties in moving around the country except by plane, because I faced the same problem. I had gone to Herat because last Monday US aircraft had attacked several villages in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, which is immediately to the south of Herat. The local governor and surviving villagers said that more than 120 civilians had been killed. The US military denied that anything like that number had died and, if they had, it was the Taliban who had done it by hurling grenades into houses.

The problem was that Bala Baluk is in a Pashtun area where the Taliban are reputed to be strong. Back in Kabul Pashtuns told me that it was unfair to equate them with the Taliban, but in reality there are few Taliban who are not Pashtun. It was too dangerous to go directly to Bala Baluk, so the next best thing was to find a survivor or an eyewitness. I thought that some of the worst injured might be in Herat hospital, as the best in the area. But there turned out to be only 14 wounded and these were in Farah hospital. This could have meant that there were fewer dead than the Afghans were saying, or that the bombardment was so intense that all had been killed.

I did not meet survivors but I did talk to a reliable witness, a radio reporter called Farooq Faizy, who had gone to Bala Baluk soon after the attack happened. He said that police and soldiers nearby were frightened of the Taliban and told him it was too dangerous to go on, but he spoke to some village elders, telling them: "Talk to us and we will tell the world." He says he was none too sure who was in control of the three villages - Gerani, Gangabad and Khoujaha - that had been hit and he was careful about what he said. But he did take some 70 or 80 photographs and they bore out the villagers' story: there were craters everywhere; the villages had been plastered with bombs; bodies had been torn to shreds by the blasts; there were mass graves; there were no signs of damage from bullets, rockets or grenades.

I suspected that the US military's claim that the Taliban had run through the village hurling grenades, supposedly because they had not been paid their cut of profits from the opium poppy crop, was just a delaying tactic. Usually the US military delays admission of guilt until a story has gone cold and the media is no longer interested. "First say 'no story'," runs an old PR adage, "and then say 'old story'." By the end of the week the US was admitting that the grenade-throwing Taliban story was "thinly sourced".

Another thesis was that fighting had taken place 500 metres from the villages, and the Taliban had retreated through them, leading to the airstrikes. Farooq Faizy said he had seen signs of fighting in the shape of two burned-out Afghan army or police vehicles and a destroyed US Humvee, but they were seven or eight kilometres away from the site of the bombing. He had taken photographs of them showing the destroyed Afghan vehicles - Ford pick-ups with a machine gun mount over the bonnet. It seemed likely that this was the fight that had led to the Afghan army and their US advisers asking for air support. What the Americans never explain in Afghanistan or Iraq is why they are using weapons designed for world war three against villages that have not left the Middle Ages - which makes heavy civilian casualties inevitable.

Back in Herat, Mr Sidiqi was none too sympathetic about what had happened to the people of Bala Baluk. Like many Afghans, he felt that it was the weakness of the government, not the strength of the Taliban, which was the problem. Furthermore he felt, and this is surely true, that "neither Pakistan nor Iran wants a strong Afghanistan".

© 2009 Independent/UK

Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, Patrick Cockburn was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting. His book on his years covering the war in Iraq, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.

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