Another socialist blog

Philip Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, complained this week that there are large numbers of “extrajudicial” killings in Afghanistan, in plain English, murders of civilians.  While most of these are laid at the doorstep of the Taliban, the U.S.-led international military forces in the country have murdered as many as 200 Afghan civilians so far this year.

This is not a new development; there were already reports of summary executions of unarmed Afghan prisoners by American forces as early as 2002.  I’m guessing their families are unimpressed by our love of democracy.

Three children and three adults were killed by a missile strike in the village of Azam Warsak, apparently launched from an unmanned U.S. aircraft operating inside Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan.  Sources say the school was hit by “missiles,” plural, not by just a single missile, so this clearly wasn’t a case of a single missile going astray from its intended target.  The Bush administration didn’t bother to comment.  If we didn’t have enemies in that village before, presumably we do now.

Francis Boyle notes that George W. Bush knew the Afghanistan war would be illegal and simply didn’t care. Richard Clarke wrote in Against All Enemies:

When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. “No,” the President yelled in the narrow conference room, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”

It is Election Day in the United States, a day reserved for the peaceful resolution of conflicts by democratic means.

Today NPR reports that the CIA has assassinated a suspected terrorist using a missile fired from an unmanned aircraft. Assassinations are illegal under U.S. law, but the Bush Administrations claims that law doesn’t apply in wartime, and of course we’re in a state of permanent war, so the White House is asserting the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The United States is trying to get a DNA sample from the Bin Laden family. Earlier this month they killed several people with a missile fired from an unmanned aircraft, because one of them was tall (like Osama) and was treated deferentially by the others in the group. The locals say the dead were innocent villagers. The U.S. thinks they might have been al-Qaida leaders, which apparently is reason enough to blow someone up.

We are supposed to be on heightened alert today against terrorist attack, according to U.S. officials who claim to have gathered “intelligence” from the prisoners taken in Afghanistan. What they don’t say, is whether the information was extracted under torture. FBI officials are on record as having discussed illegal interrogation techniques, i.e., torture, or moving suspects to countries where torture is permitted. The veil of official secrecy prevents us from having more than suspicions, at this point. (Do YOU think our government is too principled to torture a suspect?)

Just when you think that the so-called War on Terrorism really rocks, along comes a little glimpse of what war actually means “on the ground.” Not only did U.S. forces kill and capture friendly Afghan forces in Hazar Qadam, the locals have produced physical evidence that American soldiers executed bound prisoners.