Antiwar.com Blog

Maybe I should’ve held onto my Sunday blog posting about coalition forces killing Afghan civilians for a few days. If I had: I could’ve pointed this out as well.

So, fresh off a series of airstrikes that killed scores of civilians last week, fresh off promises of wholesale changes to policies to reduce civilian casualties in the future and, as the article points out: just one day after the US paid off the families of all those civilians that the Marines slaughtered in March… 21 more.

I hope whoever was responsible for paying them off didn’t put his checkbook away, because the indiscriminate killing of dozens of innocent villagers continues unabated.

Oh, and just in case you were keeping score: US military spokesman Major William Mitchell once again insisted that they didn’t know anything about having killed any civilians. I guess they’re always the last to know.

Scott may be on to something when he points out the “Fort Dix Six” were caught in an FBI entrapment scheme. But I have an easier time believing the government line (yeah, I know, I said it) considering that four of them are ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. I hear at least one is a KLA veteran, though I still need confirmation on that.

It is interesting how the mainstream Imperial media has called them anything but “Kosovars.” They were even called “Yugoslavs” – a category the U.S. Department of State refused to recognize even when FR Yugoslavia (a.k.a. Serbia -Montenegro) was still in existence.

There is a pattern here. A couple years back, when a Bosnian Muslim was caught plotting terrorist attacks in Sarajevo (along with a Turkish partner), he was described as “Swedish citizen of Serbian origin.” When they are supposed to be innocent victims and designated targets of sympathy, these people are “Kosovars” and “Bosnians.” When they commit crimes or are suspected of terrorism, they become “Serbian citizens” or “Yugoslavs” or some such.

I predict a wave of insistence that these four Kosovo Albanians are an aberration, that “Kosovars” really love America, and should be given independence forthwith. Because if not, why, they could turn to terrorism! Once the illusion has been created, no such pesky thing as facts can be allowed to interfere.

Maybe the “Fort Dix Six” are innocent, victims of a FBI frame-up. They should certainly get a fair trial, rather than be arraigned before secret tribunals or dragged off to Gitmo. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether the press will continue to call them “Yugoslav” or “Serbian” nationals as they do get railroaded. Can’t spoil the Myth of the Innocent, America-loving “Kosovars,” after all.

I don’t believe much in the way of assertions from the Department of Justice, but somehow this part of the LA Times coverage of the Ft. Dix “terrorist plot” rings true to me:

“A paid FBI informant was able to infiltrate the group, and began taping many conversations with the men – some by phone, others by wearing a wire.”

And this too,

“One FBI official in Washington, however, noted that there still was much not known about the men and their intentions. They allegedly had discussed trying to kill hundreds of people on the base with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

“This is some guys who wanted to get a bunch of guns and shoot up some people. When – or if – they were going to shoot, we don’t know,” said the FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.”

Sounds like more informant/provocateur driven wolf cries to me. And just in time to make an impression on Jose Padilla’s jurors too.

Maybe George Bush the Lesser (current approval rating 28%) will be able to use that great fear boost that served him so well during the campaign of 2004.

The year is 1939, and the Soviet Union has just signed a non-aggression pact called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. While the effects of this pact were myriad and far-reaching, what interests us here is the secret portion of the document dividing up the land in between the two rapidly growing empires. The tiny nation of Estonia, which only 20 years prior had successfully fought a war of independence against the Soviet Union, was handed back to the Soviets, and the Red Army marched in two months later to formally occupy and eventually annex it.

The Soviet military police were quick to root out (read: execute) opposition to their occupation, and a few months later, when the German-Soviet pact fell apart, the Red Army forced thousands of young Estonians into conscription. Estonia was the battleground of many violent German-Soviet clashes over the next few years.

Having twice fought Soviet invasions, and considering tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia in the post-war period, it is unsurprising that many people in Estonia don’t look back terribly fondly on their half century of Soviet occupation. It should not have come as a surprise then, either, when in April the Estonian government decided to move a large Soviet monument to the glories of the Red Army from the center of their capital city.

Perhaps more surprising is what happened next. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the move as ‘blasphemy’, and a resolution of the Russian Senate condemned Estonian officials as ‘neo-nazis’. All over a statue.

And that’s not all: the Russian Duma called for harsh economic sanctions and a few days later, as Moscow protesters hurled rocks at the Estonian embassy, the Russian government cut off oil and coal exports to the tiny Baltic republic. All over a statue.

And even that’s not the end of it. While Estonia and Russia continue to bicker over what ought to be a relatively minor matter, it spirals into an enormous international incident. The European Union has criticized Russia for its reaction, and NATO has warned Russia to crack down on the protesters. Russia, for its part, has lashed out at Western ‘connivance’ with Estonia.

Did I mention this whole thing is about a statue?

Geoffrey Perret discusses his new book Commander In Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future and how the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq and the consequences for Americans.

MP3 here. (16:57)

Geoffrey Perret was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He was enlisted in the U.S. Army for three years and is the author of the acclaimed books Ulysses S. Grant and Eisenhower. He lives in England with his wife.

for women. Not only are military sexual assaults on the rise (there were about 3,000 assaults reported last year–up 24%), at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs woman’s trauma recovery program in Palo Alto, Calif., 78 percent of women being treated for PTSD were admitted with military sexual trauma. It is time to quit sending women to Iraq. It is also time to quit sending men to Iraq. Let’s bring the troops home to their families now.