The Reagan Wars in Central America achieved its primary aims, leaving in its wake a culture of terror that domesticated the expectations of the majority and undermined aspirations towards alternatives antagonistic to those of the powerful.Last week in Afghanistan, a CIA station was blown up by a Jordanian suicide-bomber, killing 8 agents (including the station chief) and wounding many others. From within our US corporate media prison, we "understood" this terrible event as just another example of raghead life-hatred, jealousy of all things American, sexual dysfunction, and anti-democratic Evil-Doing. CIA Director Leon Panetta:
The officers were doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism.Barack Obama:
The officers were part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life.Doug Valentine has been one of our bravest war correspondents, intensely and brilliantly un-embedded. His Vietnam War Trilogy (The Phoenix Program, TDY, and Hotel Tacloban) remains one of the best understandings of that genocide. His more recent masterpiece is the two-volume history of the American drug wars: Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack.
Valentine has now investigated the background to last week's CIA bombing and it truly is a trip into the fantastic. It seems the attack on the CIA station was payback for the deliberate death-squad murders, in the middle of the night, of eight Afghan schoolboys, ages 11 to 17. The boys were all asleep when the cadre of American executioners broke into their home, woke up and handcuffed the boys, then shot each one in the head. Others in the house, or nearby, were also executed.
Eight teenage schoolboys. A helicopter lands two kilometers from the village. The operation is carried out. The American "soldiers" return to base. (Was this another Blackwater hit?)
Valentine's investigation:
On New Year’s Day, Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Pamela Constable began to fill in some of the blanks that the initial propaganda had ignored. Warrick and Constable reported that the CIA officers were “at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by the agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”If this is what is required to protect "our way of life," then our way of life must end.
In the past year, those strikes have killed more than 300 people (perhaps as many as 700) who are invariably described by the U.S. news media as suspected “militants,” “terrorists” or “jihadists" -- or as collateral damage, people killed by accident.
There is never any distinction made between Afghan nationalists fighting the U.S.-led occupation of their country and real terrorists who have inflicted intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political objective (the classic definition of terrorism).
Indeed, despite the U.S. news media’s frequent description of the Dec. 30 attack on the CIA officers as “terrorism,” it doesn’t fit the definition since the CIA officers were engaged in military operations and thus represented a legitimate target under the law of war, certainly as much so as Taliban commanders far from the front lines.
Many U.S. press accounts also have suggested that the suicide attack was in retaliation for drone strikes on Taliban forces. But there is now some speculation that the suicide bomb attack on the CIA personnel may have been payback for the Dec. 27 killing of 10 people in Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern Afghan province of Kunar.
The 10 Afghanis were shot to death during a raid by American commandos, apparently a Special Forces unit.
The commandos, often Green Berets or Navy SEALs detailed to the CIA’s Special Activities Division, operate outside traditional legal restrictions on warfare. During the post-9/11 “global war on terror,” these teams have engaged in kidnappings, killings and executions of suspected “terrorists,” “insurgents” and “militants.”
NATO spokesmen initially labeled the 10 victims in Ghazi Khan as “insurgents” or at least relatives of an individual suspected of belonging to a “terrorist” cell that manufactured improvised explosive devices used to kill U.S. and NATO troops and civilians.
But later reports from Afghan government investigators and townspeople identified the dead as civilians, including eight students, aged 11 to 17, enrolled in local schools. All but one of the dead came from the same family.
According to a Dec. 31 article published by the Times of London, the American-led raid faces accusations “of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them. … Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.”
An official statement posted on Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s Web site said government investigators who were dispatched to the scene concluded that the raiding party “took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead.”
Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, told The (UK) Times that the U.S. unit flew by helicopter from Kabul, landing about two kilometers from the village.
“The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire,” said Wafa, a former governor of Helmand province. “It’s impossible they [the victims] were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent.”
The Times also quoted the school’s headmaster as saying the victims were asleep in three rooms when the raiding party arrived. “Seven students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.
“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him, they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”
The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said, adding that six of the students were in high school and two were in primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews.
A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their school books covered in blood,” he said, according to The Times.
The Afghan National Security Directorate, which usually is a compliant outlet for CIA communiqués, said "international forces from an unknown address came to the area and without facing any armed resistance, put ten youth in two rooms and killed them.”
Protests over the killings erupted throughout Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, as well as in Kabul. Hundreds of protesters demanded that American occupation forces leave the country, and that the murderers be brought to justice.
Why murder eight sleeping schoolboys in the middle of the night? Because they can. And because it will -- they think -- teach the Afghan people that resistance is futile and Occupation is forever. Just as they thought in 'Nam.
Give or take a million casualties, this will work out the same way.
Amy Goodman has more:
UPDATE:
Two suspected US drone missile strikes killed at least 12 people Wednesday in an area of Pakistan's volatile northwest teeming with militants suspected in a recent suicide attack that killed eight CIA employees in Afghanistan, intelligence officials said.Get that: "the lawless North Waziristan tribal area." The United States murders a dozen people from the air, in a sovereign country with which the US is at peace.
The lawless North Waziristan tribal area hit Wednesday is home to several militant groups that stage cross-border attacks against coalition troops, including the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network. Counting the latest strikes, suspected US drones have attacked North Waziristan four times since the CIA bombing a week ago, killing at least 20 people.
Guess the law pertains only to sand niggers.
