Author: Peter Van Buren

…that works out to about 28 dead every day.

It is also an estimate, given that many areas of the country are not readily accessible, and because the death toll from the siege of Ramadi is not accounted for in the figures. More than 3.2 million Iraqis are internally displaced and/or homeless.

Iraq is now an ungoverned, failed state, a killing field on the scale of genocide.

At least 18,802 civilians were killed and 36,245 wounded in Iraq over the last 22 months, according to the UN’s Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq. Another 3,206,736 Iraqis are internally displaced, including more than one million children. The study emphasizes that these are conservative estimates. The UN also is careful to note that the number of civilians killed by secondary effects of the violence, such as lack of access to food, water or medical care, is unknown. In many areas of Iraq schools are closed and basic infrastructure is not functioning.

All that is in addition to the more than one million people already killed during the American occupation period.

Continue reading “Freedom! 19,000 Iraqi Civilians Killed in Less Than Two Years”

This one’s so funny that it must be some kind of U.S.-led initiative; I can’t believe the Afghans have this kind of a sense of humor.

But whatever the origin, Afghanistan banned the sale of imitation Kalashnikovs and other toy guns after they caused injuries to more than 100 people during the last Eid celebrations. Children toting toy guns that fire rubber or plastic pellets are a common sight in the country during Eid al-Fitr, with sales surging every year amid festivities marking the end of Ramadan.

More than 100 children and teenagers suffered eye injuries during the last round of celebrations, the interior ministry said. “We have ordered police forces to confiscate all toy guns which can lead to physical and psychological damage among people,” a ministry statement said.

Continue reading “Afghanistan Bans Toy Guns To Curb Culture of Violence”

In an Op-Ed printed in the Washington Post, former General David Petraeus says it is time to “unleash our airpower in support of our Afghan partners in the same way that we support our Iraqi and Syrian partners against extremists.”

Petraeus went on to claim:

At present, U.S. and NATO airpower in Afghanistan is used only to attack validated al-Qaeda targets, to counter specific individuals or groups who have attacked coalition forces previously and to respond directly to attacks on coalition forces. According to leaders on the ground, US and NATO forces are otherwise not allowed to attack Taliban targets. The situation appears to be in flux in regard to Islamic State elements, but through 2015, they too could be targeted only under narrow circumstances.

The former general, who lead the failed Surge in Iraq, and former head of the CIA, who was thrown out of the job after his extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell, and after his being convicted of exposing classified information, went on to say:

We have the tools in place to step up our game considerably. When combined with a motivated and competent ground force, airpower can be quite effective. This was witnessed in 2001, when US airpower and special operatives worked with the Northern Alliance to oust the Taliban from power.

Continue reading “Petraeus: ‘It’s Time To Unleash America’s Airpower in Afghanistan’”

It appears America’s military fear-mongers have just about run out of new ways to try to frighten us into submission. So the best they are able to come up with now is to say the boogie men are heading south, to the blue waters and delightful beaches of the very un-Muslim Caribbean.

Seriously. And the photo above is of an ISIS landing craft.

The number of ISIS devotees living in or coming from the Caribbean is on the rise, according to U.S. Southern Command chief General John Kelly, who oversees “security” (and paranoia) throughout South America.

Kelly said he has seen a shift in rhetoric by top ISIS leaders geared toward a “few very, very radical mosques” in the Caribbean, essentially directing would-be disciples to conduct attacks from their islands (a sort of “work from home” scheme) rather than trek to the Middle East and risk capture by law enforcement. Nonetheless, Kelly estimates that the number of radicals who left the region anyway to join ISIS has risen from 100 to 150 over the last year.

Continue reading “Top General Warns of New ISIS Threat… in Jamaica?”

Since our providers and tech makers in Silicon Valley are already deep in bed with the NSA to help spy on us, it should be little surprise that the White House now wants them to climb on board another Bill of Rights busting train and help “disrupt” ISIS online by editing the Internet.

This new strategy is based on the government’s firm belief that the real cause of radicalization is because some suburban kid reads a Tweet and then poof! skips Spring Break for jihad. The idea that the roots of radical actions lie deep and involve complex motivations, including being torqued off at bloodthirsty U.S. foreign policy, meh, let’s blame social media and that damn rock ‘n roll you kids like and use it all as a way to clamp down on political speech the government doesn’t like.

And now, mighty tech giants, you can help.

Continue reading “White House Meets With Silicon Valley Execs To ‘Disrupt’ ISIS Online”

I watched a documentary about North Korea which explained how the government there assigns a score to each citizen, based on how large a threat to the regime s/he is perceived to be. When I lived in Taiwan under a military government years ago, such a number was encoded into every national ID card. Those citizens every interaction with the government and police force was shadowed by those scores.

Same as in 21st century post-Constitutional America.

Even as our nation learned more about how our daily lives are cataloged by the National Security Agency, a new generation of technology is being used by local law enforcement that offers them unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens. Ominously, software that is part of such systems, assigns each citizen monitored a Threat Score, allegedly to alert cops enroute to a crime scene of what to expect of the once-innocent-until-proven-guilty citizen they will encounter.

Continue reading “Police Are Calculating Your ‘Threat Score’ To Decide How To Treat You”