Today is a day of sadness

Today I have to perform a sad duty; the funeral and commemoration of a much loved family member, the favourite aunt of my husband.

Jessy was a nurse for most of her live. She took care of war veterans of WWII and the Vietnam war in New Zealand.
She died peacefully in a hospital bed surrounded 24 hours a day in the last three days of her live by us her family. She was 91 and ready to go.
Her live had been good and full, and until the very last moment she was a strong independent woman.

So today we mourn her passing and we celebrate her live. We who have never seen a days war in our lives. We who expect to live our lives to the full with nothing other than an accident or an illness to cut short our lives.

Just imagine that. Nobody will invade our country because we are too far away from everything and we don’t live on top of oil, or something else that a country with a huge army wants, and takes what it wants without regard of who lives on top of what it wants. In fact it is quit happy to shoot, torture or kill in other horrible ways those that object to being occupied by a hostile greedy nation, that used an attack on their own soil as an excuse to invade, even though your country had nothing to do with those attacks.

Today as I grief Jessy, I leave you with the Winter soldiers of 2008, as they testify to the brutal occupation they were ordered into and had to partake in.

The Iraqis you see were not so lucky, they lived on top of oil, and America wants it, you see. Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 911, but than neither had Afghanistan, it just so happened they had stopped growing opium, and the Taliban had refused to sign a contract allowing America to build a bloody great pipeline for oil through their country.

Just imagine your favourite aunty with perhaps you favourite nephew driving her to the market because since the invasion of your country the extreme Christians in your country had taken over and deemed a woman alone in a car a sin against god (We only were allowed out alone for say the last 1oo years and we only got the voting right until much much later, and I remember when my mother wanted to learn how to drive a car she was ridiculed as were most women, because women were unfit to drive, and her wish to have her own job and earn her own money cost her, her marriage, in fact in my native Holland to this day there are numerous ultra Christian groups that forbid their women to work out of house, drive a car, go out unchaperoned by a male relative, be alone with a male in her own home without another female relative, and use her right to vote, and who consider the male to be the head of the house.) and as your favourite aunty and nephew drive through the mainstreet, the get caught up in a US raid on their city. You hear about the raid from one of your neighbours who is lucky to be alive, and your long wait begins. You hope against all hope that your aunty and your nephew (Let’s give them some names shall we, they are like us human beings, they are called Aisha and Yousef) are just stuck somewhere and you stay awake all night to see the if the light in the apartment across the street gets turned on, but it stays dark and you hope it’s just another blackout, but you know better because other apartments have their lights on, and in the morning you get out and you search hospital after hospital, morgue after morgue, and when you’re are finally lucky enough to find them, you will see their bodies riddled with bullets, and pain in their faces, and you know they died alone and all you can do is wash them and bury, that is if you are a male because as a woman in your occupied country with extremist Christians you can’t even do that, you have to stay at home and wait when and if the men will come home.

Or perhaps in Afghanistan you will be at a wedding with all your family and there is music and dance and the bride and the groom look radiant and you’re so happy because it is for the first time that you can sit with the men of your tribe because you finally old enough to be with them, and you look proudly at your your favourite aunty and she looks back at you and you can see that she is proud of you coming of age, and your father gives you his gun and you are allowed, for the first time to fire the celebratory gun shots, but than all of a sudden a US or NATO fighter jet flies over and you see with horror the sprays of bullets hitting the women, your favourite aunty pushed back by the bullets hitting her and your young favourite niece who looked so wonderful in her new dress looses half her head when a bullet hits her and the men run towards them and the second plane kills your father, your father who was also your best friend who taught you everything you know and with his gun you fire in rage after the jets who have long since gone, and when the silence returns there is only wailing and screaming and blood.

The next day we read in our corporately owned newspapers, that US jets have taken out a major Taliban leader, and only three days later on page four a small article appears correcting that story.

As I grief for my husbands favourite aunty Jessy who died peacefully surrounded by her family please give this a thought, and ask your self the question why are we involved in an illegal war of aggression, and why are none of our political leaders addressing this sad and horribly wrong issue. Because it has to stop.

For more testimonies just click on one of the videos.

International troops in Afghanistan

Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on Afghanistan was launched following the Taliban government’s 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a collapse in opium production in excess of 90 percent.

The following report, which accuses the United States of using military transport planes to ship narcotics out of Afghanistan confirms what is already known and documented regarding the Golden Crescent Drug Trade and its insiduous relationship to US intelligence.

Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan.

Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonnes of opium last year, enough to make 93 per cent of the world’s heroin supply.

Could it be that the American military in Afghanistan is involved in drug trafficking? Yes, it is quite possible, according to Russia’s Ambassador to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov.

Commenting on reports that the United States military transport aviation is used for shipping narcotics out of Afghanistan, the Russian envoy said there was no smoke without fire.

“If such actions do take place they cannot be undertaken without contact with Afghans, and if one Afghan man knows this, at least a half of Afghanistan will know about this sooner or later,” Kabulov told Vesti, Russia’s 24-hour news channel. “That is why I think this is possible, but cannot prove it.”

Afghan narcotics are an extremely painful issue for Russia. They first hit the Russian market during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s when Russian soldiers developed a taste for Afghan heroin and smuggled it back to Russia.

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Women’s lives worse than ever

And here is me thinking we were there to help those poor supressed women, Sounds like we succeeded, eh?

By Terri Judd
Monday, 25 February 2008

Grinding poverty and the escalating war is driving an increasing number of Afghan families to sell their daughters into forced marriages.

Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation – burning themselves to death – or severe self-harm.

Six years after the US and Britain “freed” Afghan women from the oppressive Taliban regime, a new report proves that life is just as bad for most, and worse in some cases.

Projects started in the optimistic days of 2002 have begun to wane as the UK and its Nato allies fail to treat women’s rights as a priority, workers in the country insist.

The statistics in the report from Womankind, Afghan Women and Girls Seven Years On, make shocking reading. Violent attacks against females, usually domestic, are at epidemic proportions with 87 per cent of females complaining of such abuse – half of it sexual. More than 60 per cent of marriages are forced.

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Afghanistan sitting on a gold mine: minister

Of course, thats why the Americans wanted it, duhhh.

KABUL (AFP) – Afghanistan is sitting on a wealth of mineral reserves — perhaps the richest in the region — that offer hope for a country mired in poverty after decades of war, the mining minister says.

Significant deposits of copper, iron, gold, oil and gas, and coal — as well as precious gems such as emeralds and rubies — are largely untapped and still being mapped, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel told AFP.

And they promise prosperity for one of the world’s poorest countries, the minister said, dismissing concerns that a Taliban-led insurgency may thwart efforts to unearth this treasure.

Already in the pipeline is the exploitation of a massive copper deposit — one of the biggest in the world — about 30 kilometres (20 miles) east of Kabul.

“There has not been such a big project in the history of Afghanistan,” Adel said.

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Civil war fear as Afghans ponder arrest of warlord

By Jerome Starkey

AN INVESTIGATION into claims a notorious Afghan warlord led a drunken raid on his neighbour’s home, kidnapped its occupants and slapped the owner’s wife are threatening to split the country’s key power brokers along ethnic lines and plunge its only peaceful region into civil war.

The whisky-swilling warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum was stripped of his position as the army’s chief of staff yesterday, amid allegations he had laid siege to a rival commander’s home in Kabul.

A spokesman for the interior ministry said: “There is no doubt it was an illegal act.”

But the ministry has passed responsibility for the investigation to the attorney-general.

Gen Dostum’s allies in the Northern Alliance – which includes the country’s senior vice-president – have threatened to break away from Kabul if the prosecutor’s office pushes ahead with plans to bring him to justice.

The Uzbek commander allegedly led more than 50 armed militiamen in the booze-fuelled attack against the neighbour – one of his former lieutenants.

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Taliban defeat will take years: US general

And here was me thinking we beat the buggers in the first month of occupation.

MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan (AFP) – It will take “a few years” to defeat the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, the top US general in the country said Tuesday, reiterating US support for the fight.

Major General David Rodriguez, head of the US-led coalition force, said the US military would stay in the country “as long as they are needed.”

“We definitely think it will take a few years for the Afghan people and the Afghan leaders supported by the coalition forces to defeat them,” he said in a response to a question from a journalist.

An insurgency led by the Taliban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001, has been growing in the past two years with a spike in suicide attacks and roadside bombings.

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Top US Lawyer And UNICEF Data Reveal Afghan Genocide

By Dr Gideon Polya08 February, 2008
Countercurrents.org

The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 with the ostensible excuse of the Afghan Government’s “protection” of the asserted Al Qaeda culprits of the 9/11 atrocity that killed 3,000 people. In the light of as many as 6.6 million post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan as of February 2008 (see below), it is important to consider the major problems with this Bush-ite and neo-Bush-ite version of events as summarized below:

1. The US has a long history of “questionable” excuses for war e.g. the explosion of the Maine (the Spanish-American War), the sinking of the US arms-carrying Lusitania (entry into World War 1), the Pearl Harbor attack with now recognized US foreknowledge (entry into World War 2), North Koreans provoked into invading their own country (the Korean War), the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin incident (the Vietnam War; recently similarly but unsuccessfully attempted in the Persian Gulf as an “excuse” to attack Iran) and the extraordinary 1,000 post-9/11 lies told by Bush Administration figures, most notoriously about non-existent Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (the Iraq War; post-invasion excess deaths now about 1.5-2 million).

2. The US supported and funded Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the late 1970s to the early 1990s associated with its anti-Soviet policies (see William Blum’s “Rogue State”).

3. Oil- and hegemony-related plans for the invasion of Afghanistan were all ready to go before 9/11.

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NATO winning battles, losing Afghanistan

We all knew this of course. You cannot win a war as a foreign invader in a country like Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran for that matter. But that doesn’t matter to the Bush Cabal. When the wars end as all wars must end they will have made all the money they wanted to make and the Taliban will rule again in Afghanistan and Iraq will be brought back to the dark ages and if Bush and Cheney et al get their way Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan will suffer the unimaginable consequences of the the unbridled use of nuclear arms.

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NATO Genocide in Afghanistan

By Ali Khan

30/01/08 “ICH” — — Ali Khan argues that the internationally recognized crime of genocide applies to the intentional killings that NATO troops commit on a weekly basis in the poor villages and mute mountains of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban.

Sloganeers, propagandists and politicians often use the word “genocide” in ways that the law does not permit. But rarely is the crime of genocide invoked when Western militaries murder Muslim groups. This essay argues that the internationally recognized crime of genocide applies to the intentional killings that NATO troops commit on a weekly basis in the poor villages and mute mountains of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban, a puritanical Islamic group. NATO combat troops bombard and kill people in Taliban enclaves and meeting places. They also murder defenseless Afghan civilians. The dehumanized label of “Taliban” is used to cloak the nameless victims of NATO operations. Some political opposition to this practice is building in NATO countries, such as Canada, where calls are heard to withdraw troops from Afghanistan or divert them to non-combat tasks.

Dehumanization

In almost all NATO nations, the Taliban have been completely dehumanized — a historically-tested signal that perpetrators of the crime of genocide carry unmitigated intentions to eradicate the dehumanized group. Politicians, the armed forces, the media, and even the general public associate in the West the Taliban with irrational fanatics, intolerant fundamentalists, brutal assassins, beheaders of women, bearded extremists, and terrorists. This luminescent negativity paves the way for aggression, military operations, and genocide. Promoting the predatory doctrine of collective self-defense, killing the Taliban is celebrated as a legal virtue. To leave the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, says NATO, is to leave a haven for terrorism.

A similar dehumanization took place in the 16th and 17th centuries when NATO precursors occupied the Americas to purloin land and resources. The killings of native inhabitants were extensive and heartless. Thomas Jefferson, the noble author of the Declaration of Independence, labeled Indians as “merciless savages.” President Andrew Jackson pontificated: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms.” Promoting the predatory doctrine of discovery, the United States Supreme Court later ratified the pilgrims’ crimes, holding that “discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title (to land). ([T]he Indians were fierce savages…To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness.”

The predators have not changed their stripes a bit. They come, they demonize, they obliterate. They do all this in the name of superior civilization.

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Afghanistan — the next disaster

By Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
After six plus years, the war in Afghanistan drags on. The media occasionally cites casualties, but if it doesn’t involve National Football League veteran Pat Tillman’s execution by his own comrades, Afghanistan gets sparse attention. A few stories feature the growing number of Afghan and Iraq War vets on American streets. But the aspiring candidates ignore such “blowback.” Instead, they demonstrate verbal aggression, a characteristic thought necessary for victory. “We’ve got to get the job done there [Afghanistan],” Barack Obama asserted without specifying what the “job” is. (AP, Aug 14, 2007)
Obama called for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and sending them to “the right battlefield,” Afghanistan and Pakistan. To pressure Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to act against terrorist training camps, Obama would use military force — if he became President — against those “terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans.” (Bloomberg, Aug 1, 2007)
In mid January, Bush dispatched 3,200 additional marines to Afghanistan. Curiously, the uncurious media didn’t ask why U.S. and NATO forces continue to fight there. Nation Building? With little or no budget for reconstructing the country?

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Just who is buying all that Afghan opium?

Recent gyrations in supply of opium from Afghanistan, with no corresponding difference in supply of illicit heroin on our streets, suggest an unknown customer snapping up the bulk of it

By Kevin Potvin

In 1999, Afghan poppy farmers accounted for 75% of global opium production, producing about 4,000 tons. In 2000, the Taliban government, four years consolidating their power after dispatching the last of the exhausted warlords in 1996, clamped down and reduced Afghan production to nearly nothing. They had eradicated poppy production completely in the nine-tenths of the country they effectively governed and vowed to never allow poppy growing again.

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More than half of Afghanistan ‘under Taliban’

By Kim Sengupta

Published: 22 November 2007

 

More than half of Afghanistan is back under Taliban control and the Nato force in the country needs to be doubled in size to cope with the resurgent group, a report by the Senlis Council think-tank says. A study by the group found that the Taliban, enriched by illicit profits from the country’s record poppy harvest, had formed de-facto governments in swathes of the southern Pashtun belt.

The Afghan government and its Nato allies strongly deny the Senlis version of what is taking place in the country and say the extent of alleged Taliban control – 54 per cent – is a major exaggeration. In particular, British troops in Helmand have, in recent months, recovered territory lost to the Islamist group.

But senior defence sources say that a lack of frontline combat forces has meant that areas clawed back from the Taliban often cannot be held and have to be retaken after costly and fierce fighting. There is also an acknowledgement that the dangers on the ground have meant that aid efforts are being stymied.

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From CIA Jails, Inmates Fade Into Obscurity

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 27, 2007; ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush announced that the CIA’s overseas secret prisons had been temporarily emptied and 14 al-Qaeda leaders taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But since then, there has been no official accounting of what happened to about 30 other “ghost prisoners” who spent extended time in the custody of the CIA.

Some have been secretly transferred to their home countries, where they remain in detention and out of public view, according to interviews in Pakistan and Europe with government officials, human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees. Others have disappeared without a trace and may or may not still be under CIA control.
The bulk of the ghost prisoners were captured in Pakistan, where they scattered after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Among them is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a dual citizen of Syria and Spain and an influential al-Qaeda ideologue who was last seen two years ago. On Oct. 31, 2005, the red-bearded radical with a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head arrived in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, unaware he was being followed.

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Our sentiments exactly.

Afghanistan: Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA

“An American counternarcotics official was killed and two other Americans wounded in a suicide bombing in western Afghanistan today, while heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police continued in two southern provinces, officials said,” reports the New York Times. “We confirm that a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement, working for the police training program in Herat was killed in a vehicle-borne I.E.D. attack,” Chris Harris, an American Embassy spokesman, told the newspaper. After this mention, the Times moves on to detail the increasing violence between Afghan puppet police and “militants,” that is to say Afghans fighting against the occupation of their country, an entirely natural occurrence.

Of course, the Times does not bother to mention that the Afghan opium trade–in fact much of the opium trade in the so-called “Golden Crescent” (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan)–was cultivated and nurtured by the United States government and the CIA, leading to countless cases of miserable heroin addiction in America and Europe. Reading the Times, we get the impression the Taliban–at one time sponsored by the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence services, so long as they were kicking Russian hindquarter–are responsible for the opium trade all on their lonesome. As usual, the Times twists the story through omission.

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Is the CIA helping itself to the Afghan heroin harvest?

Nick Possum
Whispers from the Mean Streets
October 22, 2007

No names, no pack drill, like we used to say in the army, but I had a client who wanted me to look into some aspects of the world heroin trade.

I googled a bit, and made a few phone calls and began to have disturbing suspicions.

Since the fall of the Taliban regime, which had seriously honoured an agreement to close down the trade, heroin production in Afghanistan has surged. In 2006 there was a 50 per cent increase in the poppy harvest and it created a new record for world production, my contact in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told me. Afghanistan now accounts for 92 per cent of the world’s illicit production. She expected it would take another leap upwards this year.

So where is the stuff ending up? So far, not in Australia, but that’s only a matter of time. Once again, the streets of Western Europe and Russia are awash with the stuff and that fact got me thinking about the CIA.

The espionage game provides a powerful motive, superbly trained teams and the perfect cover for large-scale drug smuggling. It’s hardly a secret that, in the past, the CIA has partaken of the feast and, collectively, it couldn’t give a damn if the stuff gets dumped on the despised nations of ‘Old Europe’.

The US clandestine agencies are a sprawling brotherhood of silence and trust. And it isn’t just the huge bureaucracy of the CIA itself. Now, there’s also a freelance parallel universe of ‘special forces’ and ‘security contractors’ – created by the neocons for their War on Terror – doing everything from assassinations to ‘interrogation’. No mainstream politician wants to know what these people are doing in their name.

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Private US military contractors move into Helmand

By Kim Sengupta in Kabul

Published: 14 October 2007

 

Large numbers of US private military personnel are expected to arrive in Helmand, the focal point of British involvement in Afghanistan, as part of a new effort to promote reconstruction and development in the war-torn province.

The US has contributed the largest sum to the new aid effort, over $200m. But British officials striving to win “hearts and minds” in the conflict against the Taliban have expressed concern over the potential influx of military contractors, amid a continuing furore over the shooting of civilians in Iraq by Blackwater.

As Nato troops reclaim territory from the Taliban, the movement has increasingly resorted to suicide attacks and roadside bombings. “The worry is that there will be a blast, and some contractors will panic and open fire, as happened with Blackwater in Baghdad. That is the very last thing that Helmand needs at the moment,” said a Western diplomat.

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Afghanistan ‘is going down fast’

THE bloodshed in Afghanistan has reached levels not seen since the 2001 invasion as anger at bungling by an ineffective Government in Kabul and its foreign backers stokes support for the Taliban and other extremist groups.The death of Trooper David Pearce underlines the rising dangers for Australia’s 1000 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them deployed in the Taliban’s southern heartland — a region some of Canberra’s NATO allies consider too dangerous to fight in.

“This place can only go up or down, and it’s going down fast, which is something the international community simply will not understand,” said a security analyst who has been working in and out of Afghanistan for 30 years.

Almost six years after the hardline Islamist Taliban were ousted, their insurgency is gaining strength, fuelled by resentment at NATO bombing of civilians, billions of dollars of wasted aid, a lack of jobs and record crops of opium, the raw material for heroin.

The fighting is spreading to places once relatively safe, including the capital and the western and northern parts of the country.

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Kabul rejects US pleas to spray opium poppies

Renewed American efforts to persuade the Afghan government to use crop dusters against poppy production have failed, despite Washington dispatching a top scientist to advocate the safety of spraying herbicides.Charles Helling met representatives of the Afghan ministries of counter-narcotics, health, and rural rehabilitation on Sunday to discuss fears over the side effects of glyphosate, one of the most effective methods for the mass eradication of opium poppies. Kabul, however, remained unconvinced.

“We have rejected the spraying of poppy in Afghanistan for good reasons: the effect on the environment, other smaller crops and on human genetics,” the acting minister for counter-narcotics, General Khodaidad (who uses only one name), told the Guardian. “It was a very friendly discussion, but it is difficult to change our mind,” he added.

The US maintains that the herbicide is safe for the environment and the local population. It says the misgivings of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, are based on myth and Taliban disinformation.

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