Infinite Unknown

- Why do we ignore the civilians killed in American wars? (Washington Post, Jan. 6, 2012):

As the United States officially ended the war in Iraq last month, President Obama spoke eloquently at Fort Bragg, N.C., lauding troops for “your patriotism, your commitment to fulfill your mission, your abiding commitment to one another,” and offering words of grief for the nearly 4,500 members of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq. He did not, however, mention the sacrifices of the Iraqi people.

This inattention to civilian deaths in America’s wars isn’t unique to Iraq. There’s little evidence that the American public gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where our military interventions take place. Think about the memorials on the Mall honoring American sacrifices in Korea and Vietnam. These are powerful, sacred spots, but neither mentions the people of those countries who perished in the conflicts.

The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Global News, Government, Indochina, Iraq, Korea, Military, Politics, U.S., War

See also:

- War On Drugs Revealed As Total Hoax: US Military Admits To Guarding, Assisting Lucrative Opium Trade In Afghanistan

- Opium production soars in Afghanistan: UN (AFP, Jan. 13, 2012):

VIENNA — Production of opium and the illicit crop’s value soared in Afghanistan last year, the United Nations said in a report released Thursday.

According to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, farmer income derived from Afghanistan’s opium crop in 2011 was $1.4 billion (1.09 billion euros), representing nine percent of GDP.

“Opium is therefore a significant part of the Afghan economy and provides considerable funding to the insurgency and fuels corruption,” Yury Fedotov, executive director of the UN office, said in a statement.

Afghanistan grows about 90 percent of the world’s opium. The UN said poppy-crop cultivation covered more than 131,000 hectares in 2011, up seven per cent from the previous year.

The overall opium crop increased by 61 per cent, from 3,600 metric tons in 2010 to 5,800 metric tons in 2011.

The value of the opium yield rose 133 percent from 2010, when plant diseases killed much of the Afghan crop.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Drugs, GDP, opium

YouTube Added:12.01.2012

Description:

Another scandal is erupting for U.S. forces in Afghanistan – this time in the form of a YouTube video – which appears to show American marines urinating on the corpses of Afghan fighters. The video went viral in just hours – causing outrage and revulsion among viewers. The U.S. Department of Defense has promised to investigate. Ahmed Quraishi, President of the lobbying group ‘Paknationalists forum’ thinks the accident will endanger lives of US soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

- Panetta: Apparent Marine desecration of Taliban corpses is ‘utterly deplorable’ (Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2012):

Top U.S. officials moved swiftly Thursday to try to prevent diplomatic damage and contain public disgust from the release of a video that appeared to show Marines urinating on three Afghan corpses — images that spread quickly around the globe.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he had viewed the video and considered it “utterly deplorable.” He telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai and pledged a full investigation.

Prior to the call, Karzai described the video as “completely inhumane and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.” His administration called on the U.S. military to “apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

The video, which runs for less than a minute, depicts four Marines in combat gear laughing and joking as they urinate on three male bodies. The caption refers to the corpses as “dead Talibans,” but it is unclear whether the men were civilians or fighters killed after a battle.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed “total dismay” at the behavior depicted in the recording, and said the “vast, vast” majority of American military personnel would not engage in such actions.

Warning: The video includes graphic images.

A Marine official said investigators were questioning two individuals that they had preliminarily identified as being in the video. The Marine Corps is “fairly confident” that all four are members of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the probe is underway.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Global News, Government, Military, Politics, U.S.

- New CIA Drone Bases in Afghanistan and Central Asia (Global Research, Dec. 31, 2011):

US looking for new drone bases after Pakistan’s refusal

-Including the covert base in Khost, the US has seven operational military bases located in Kandahar, Herat, Parwan, Helmand and Nimroz provinces.
With the exception of the Khost base that is under the operational command of CIA, the US Army, Air Force and Navy jointly administer the remaining six bases.

-According to officials at a diplomatic mission, the US was actively considering establishing covert military bases in Central Asia for continuing drone-hits in Pakistan but the Central Asian Republics (CARs) refused to provide launching pads owing to Russia’s pressure.

-78 drone attacks in the ongoing year have killed 607 persons including militants and civilians in the Pakistan’s tribal region while 306 drone strikes claimed 3659 lives in this region since 2004.

ISLAMABAD – The CIA-sponsored drone campaign in Pakistan‘s Northwestern Tribal region is likely to remain stalled amid the reports that the US may not find a feasible alternative venue to target Pak-Afghan borderlands after having become entangled in a deadlock with Pakistan over the Mohmand attack row.

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Tags: Afghanistan, CIA, Drones, Global News, Government, Military, Pakistan, Politics, U.S.

See also:

- ’2012: The Year That Could Bring A US Strike Of Iran’ (Haaretz) = WW III

- US Aircraft Carrier ‘Spotted’ Inside Iran Wargame Zone

- China To Protect Iran Even If It Means World War III

A handout picture from US Navy dated February 21, 2007, shows the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis as it conducts operations in the Gulf (AFP Photo / US Navy / Ronald Reeves)

- Imperial overdrive: Red alert over Iran (RT, Dec. 30, 2011):

2011 will be remembered as the year the US, Britain, France and Israel went into Imperial Overdrive in North Africa and the Middle East. Will 2012 be remembered as the year those same Western Allies unleashed World War III?

­It is not news anymore to say that the West will soon attack Iran, maybe Syria. They have been threatening to do that for years now, certainly ever since the failed Israeli invasion into Southern Lebanon in mid-2006, when they were routed by Hezbollah.

So what is different today? For starters, general circumstances have changed dramatically in the Region. Genuine popular dissent inside key Muslim countries has been used by the Western Allies to train, fund and arm local criminal and terrorist organizations, dubbed “freedom fighters”, as their proxies.

Country after country has fallen victim to the CIA’s, MI6’s and Mossad’s “dirty tricks departments”, and other Western-style terrorist organizations. Results range from moderate “regime change” in Tunisia and Algeria; via horrendous “violence by our boys” in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain; all the way to outright military attack, civil war and political assassination. Such as the one in Libya, where Hillary Clinton boisterously laughed when she learned Muammar Gaddafi had been murdered live on TV by “her thugs”.

The whole region has been set on fire. Not that other regions of the world are not on fire too; however the pyrotechnics used by the Global Power Elite vary in nature in each geography. For example, Europe, the US and Britain are being set alight using financial terrorism resembling a neutron bomb, which kills people off while leaving assets and banks standing.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Bilderberg, CFR, CIA, Council on Foreign Relations, Global News, Government, Iran, Iraq, Libya, MI6, Middle East, Military, Mossad, NATO, Pakistan, Politics, U.S.

- The Globalization of War: The “Military Roadmap” to World War III (Global Research, Dec. 18, 2011)

Tags: 1984, Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Dictatorship, Fascism, Global News, Government, Irag, Military, NATO, New World Order, Pakistan, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.S., War, WW III

Military Air Drops Fuel Barrels to Avoid Dangerous Convoys

- U.S.’s Afghan Headache: $400-a-Gallon Gasoline (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2011):

OVER EASTERN AFGHANISTAN—Parachuting a barrel of fuel to a remote Afghan base takes sharp flying skills, steady nerves and flawless timing.

It also costs a lot of money—up to $400 a gallon, by military estimates.

But the Pentagon is stuck with the expense for the foreseeable future, especially given the recent deterioration in U.S.-Pakistani relations.

“We’re going to burn a lot of gas to drop a lot of gas,” said Capt. Zack Albaugh, a California Air National Guard pilot deployed with the 774th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron. He spoke just before a recent mission to supply a remote base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, scene of cross-border rocket attacks that have heightened regional tensions this fall.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Global News, Government, Military, Obama administration, Politics

- Afghan woman to be freed from jail after agreeing to marry rapist (Guardian, Dec. 1, 2011):

President intervenes in case of 19-year-old woman who has spent two years in jail after reporting rape by a relative

Tags: Afghanistan, Global News, Government, Hamid Karzai, Politics, Rape, Society, Women

Pass the ball

- War on drugs revealed as total hoax – US military admits to guarding, assisting lucrative opium trade in Afghanistan (NaturalNews, Nov. 16, 2011:

Afghanistan is, by far, the largest grower and exporter of opium in the world today, cultivating a 92 percent market share of the global opium trade. But what may shock many is the fact that the US military has been specifically tasked with guarding Afghan poppy fields, from which opium is derived, in order to protect this multibillion dollar industry that enriches Wall Street, the CIA, MI6, and various other groups that profit big time from this illicit drug trade scheme.

Prior to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Afghanistan was hardly even a world player in growing poppy, which is used to produce both illegal heroin and pharmaceutical-grade morphine. In fact, the Taliban had been actively destroying poppy fields as part of an effort to rid the country of this harmful plant, as was reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on February 16, 2001, in a piece entitled Nation’s opium production virtually wiped out (http://news.google.com/newspapers?n…).

But after 9/11, the US military-industrial complex quickly invaded Afghanistan and began facilitating the reinstatement of the country’s poppy industry. According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), opium cultivation increased by 657 percent in 2002 after the US military invaded the country under the direction of then-President George W. Bush (http://www.infowars.com/fox-news-ma…).

CIA responsible for reinstating opium industry in Afghanistan after 9/11

More recently, The New York Times (NYT) reported that the brother of current Afghan President Hamid Karzai had actually been on the payroll of the CIA for at least eight years prior to this information going public in 2009. Ahmed Wali Karzai was a crucial player in reinstating the country’s opium drug trade, known as Golden Crescent, and the CIA had been financing the endeavor behind the scenes (http://www.infowars.com/ny-times-af…).

“The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liaison with NATO occupation forces and the British military,” wrote Prof. Michel Chossudovsky in a 2007 report, before it was revealed that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll. “The proceeds of this lucrative multibillion dollar contraband are deposited in Western banks. Almost the totality of revenues accrue to corporate interests and criminal syndicates outside Afghanistan” (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/A…).

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Tags: Afghanistan, CIA, Drugs, Global News, Government, heroin, MI6, Military, opium, Politics, U.S.

- Pakistan permanently closes borders to Nato after air strike (Telegraph, Nov. 28, 2011):

Pakistan has permanently closed its borders to Nato convoys supplying international troops in Afghanistan, according to the country’s interior minister, following an air strike that killed 24 soldiers at the weekend.

The announcement came as the Pakistan army claimed the attack lasted almost two hours and continued even after commanders at the bases pleaded with coalition forces to stop.

Closing the crossings will choke off almost half of all supplies destined for the Nato-led force — including British troops.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Global News, Government, Military, NATO, Obama administration, Pakistan, Politics, U.S.