Month: December 2015

“I feel very angry, but I don’t want anything from the U.S. military,” said Khalid Ahmad, a 20 year old pharmacist who survived the US bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz on the 3^rd of October, “God will hold them accountable.”

The actions of the US military elicit the same contempt from Khalid and many ordinary Afghans as the actions of the Taliban or the ISIS.

Khalid was a little wary when Zuhal, Hoor and I were introduced to him in a ward of Emergency Hospital in Kabul, where he has been recuperating from a US shrapnel injury to his spine that nearly killed him.

But, immediately, I saw his care for others. “Please bring a chair for him,” Khalid told his brother, not wanting me to be uncomfortable in squatting next to him, as we began our conversation in the corridor space outside the ward.

Continue reading “Kunduz MSF Hospital US Bombing Survivor, ‘I want my story to be heard.’”

President Obama’s address to the nation last night urged Americans to not give in to fear, all the while he stoked fear of terrorist threats all around. He outlined four components to his strategy to fight terrorism that looked like what he had been doing all along, seemingly to no avail. He praised American exceptionalism. Then he said he wanted to take the guns from Americans on the government “no-fly” list — even though we know that due to government incompetence thousands are on the list with no ties to terrorism whatsoever. More on Obama’s sly propagandism on today’s Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Here is a condensed version of President Obama’s speech from the Oval Office on Sunday night, unofficially translated into plain English:

I kind of realize we can’t kill our way out of this conflict with ISIL, but in the short term hopefully we can kill our way out of the danger of a Republican victory in the presidential race next year.

As a practical matter, the current hysteria needs guidance, not a sense of proportion along the lines of what the New York Times just mentioned in passing: “The death toll from jihadist terrorism on American soil since the Sept. 11 attacks – 45 people – is about the same as the 48 killed in terrorist attacks motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing extremist ideologies…. And both tolls are tiny compared with the tally of conventional murders, more than 200,000 over the same period.”

While I’m urging some gun control, that certainly doesn’t apply to the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs and their underlings have passed all the background checks they need by virtue of getting to put on a uniform of the United States Armed Forces.

As much as we must denounce the use of any guns that point at us, we must continue to laud the brave men and women who point guns for us – and who fire missiles at terrorists and possible terrorists and sometimes unfortunately at wedding parties or misidentified vehicles or teenagers posthumously classified as “militants” after signature strikes or children who get in the way.

Continue reading “Obama’s Speech, Translated Into Candor”

Mustafa Abd-al-Qawi Abd-al-Aziz al-Shamiri was captured in 2002 and believed then to be a major al Qaeda facilitator or courier, or maybe a trainer, according to the Department of Defense.

He was interrogated “vigorously” and when he did not admit to those activities and did not supply detailed, high level information on al Qaeda, was thrown away, without charge, into America’s offshore penal colony at Guantanamo Bay.

For 13 years.

Now, desiring after 13 years to reduce the prison population at Gitmo, the Department of Defense says al-Shamiri’s imprisonment was all a simply mistake of confused identity. In the Kafkaesque world America created post-9/11, al-Shamiri could not answer his torturers because he had no knowledge of what they were demanding from him. His silence was taken as insolence, and he was punished accordingly.

For 13 years.

Al-Shamiri is now age 37. He spent about one third of his entire life in Gitmo because of a mistake. And if somehow you are not human enough to be moved by that alone, perhaps you can care about the $2.7 million per prisoner per year it costs the U.S. to keep a person in Guantanamo.

For 13 years, the cost was $35 million (+ a life.)

Continue reading “After 13 Years in Gitmo, Pentagon Says Detainee Is Case of ‘Mistaken Identity’”

My deepest sympathy for the family of Ezra Schwartz. My deepest sadness that some lives are more valued than others.

Dave Zirin, @edgeofsports tweet, Nov.23, 2015. The only tweet I found questioning the appropriateness of the Patriot’s moment of silence.

In a brazen attempt to conflate the struggle between Palestinians and Israeli Jews with random terrorist political violence in the consciousness of the American public, the New England Patriots recognized Ezra Schwartz in a brief ceremony before a Monday Night Football game. (See video here.) On November 23^rd, a crowd of 70,000 stood in honor of Schwartz while they and millions of viewers were told that he was among

… the many who have recently lost their lives in senseless terrorist attacks abroad. Last Thursday, this reality struck close to home when 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz, a native of Sharon, Massachusetts and a huge Patriots fan, was gunned down nearly 5500 miles from home, while studying abroad. At this time, we would like to honor Ezra Schwartz and the hundreds of victims like him with a moment of silence.

The following day the ceremony was featured on Channel 2 News in Israel. (An article on the Channel 2 News website (Hebrew) and the video of the ceremony with Hebrew subtitles can be viewed here.)

Continue reading “Remembering Ezra Schwartz: A Hasbara Story”

In an astonishingly short time, the ill-considered decision of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to ambush a Russian jet has had far reaching consequence far beyond those apparent in the initial days following the fatal attack. (For the situation in the immediate aftermath of the Su-24 downing, see my “‘With Us or with the Terrorists’: It’s Clear Which Side Turkey Is On”.)

The fundamental problem with U.S. policy in seeking to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq (let’s remember that ISIS was originally just an al-Qaeda offshoot) and other jhadists is that the US is still taking its cues from regional allies who are essentially on the other side: with the terrorists, not against them. (Combining journalism and analysis with political activism, on December 2 I launched on the White House site a petition to “LIST ERDOGAN’S TURKEY AS STATE SPONSOR OF TERRORISM; VOID US ALLIANCE WITH TURKEY”. In only one day, the petition collected well over 100 signatures. This is more than two thirds of the number needed in the first month to keep this petition as a publicly posted black eye for Turkey on the official White House website.)

This means above all Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and significantly Qatar and other Gulf States (United Arab Emirates, Kuwait). As long as they are willing to dump money and weapons into the hands of jihadists in the hope of overthrowing the secular, nationalist Syrian government and replace it with a sectarian, Sunni, Sharia-ruled state – and the US (that is, the Obama administration) is unwilling to break with them and tell them to stop it – it’s hard to see how this conflict can be resolved by negotiation.

Continue reading “How Erdogan’s Adventurism Has Opened a Fissure Within NATO and in US Presidential Politics”