Category: War Page 48 of 51

From: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny this week.

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JAMES BAMFORD: …when they’re dropping bombs on houses and neighborhoods and busting down doors and putting people into Abu Ghraib and so forth, how does that come about? Why do they bust down this door or drop a bomb on that house? And the insight he gave, I thought was very interesting. He was saying how it’s these people here that are sitting in this windowless room in the state of Georgia, near Augusta, Georgia, that are listening to these conversations in Iraq, in Baghdad, and they’re making instantaneous decisions on whether somebody is telling the truth or not. So they’re writing out these—they’re doing these transcripts, and then they’re writing these little comments saying this person here, Ali, is saying he’s going to deliver a load of melons to his cousin Mohammed tomorrow. And then you have somebody making a decision: is he telling the truth, or isn’t he? Are these melons, or possibly could they be IEDs? And if a person says, “You know, I don’t think he’s telling the truth,” there’s a good chance that that house could be blown up or that person could be put in Abu Ghraib, or whatever.

And the point that David Mufee Faulk was making was that the people that are making these decisions, these sometimes life-and-death decisions, don’t have the proper training. They’re trained for sixty-three weeks in Monterey, California in standard Arabic. And what they’re listening to a lot of times is dialects that they don’t really understand, and they’re listening for nuances that they don’t really get, and idioms and so forth. And I think it’s very dangerous, and what the point he was making was it was very dangerous for—you know, sometimes these are just people right out of high school to—that have never been out of the country, and certainly never been over to the Middle East, to make these sort of life-and-death decisions based on just hearing one conversation out of context.

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And what happened is that during the 1990s and early in the ’80s and the ’70s, the NSA used to collect information by putting out big dishes and collecting satellite communications that would come down. …

Then, in the late ’90s, things began to change, and fiber optics became a big thing for telecommunications. Fiber optics are cables in which the communications are transmitted, not electronically, but by photons, light signals. And that made life very difficult for NSA. It meant the communications, instead of being able to pick them up in a big dish, they were now being transmitted under the ocean in these cables. And the only way to get access to it would be to put a submarine down and try to tap into those cables. But that, from the people I’ve talked to, has not been very successful with fiber-optic cables. So the only other way to really do this is by making some kind of agreement with the telecom companies, so that NSA could actually basically cohabitate some of the telecom companies’ locations.

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So you have the problem of these secret rooms not just being in San Francisco, they’re throughout the network, and they’re in other parts of the country. And the American public really has no idea what’s going on, in terms of who has access to their communications, what’s being done with it. And is there somebody sitting there—as David Murfee Faulk talked about, in the NSA listening post in Georgia, are there people just sitting there listening to people’s private conversations and laughing about them?

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Yeah, I was just going to mention that it isn’t just the picking up of these conversations and listening to them and laughing about them. These conversations are transcribed. They’re—and then they’re recorded, and they’re kept forever. There’s a big building in Texas that’s being built in San Antonio that’s going to be used to house a lot of these conversations. NSA is running out of space at Fort Meade, their headquarters, so they had to expand, and they’re building this very big building. It’s reportedly going to be about the size of the Alamodome down there….

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From: ProjectCensored.org

Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

ORB’s research covered fifteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. Those not covered include two of Iraq’s more volatile regions—Kerbala and Anbar—and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work. In face-to-face interviews with 2,414 adults, the poll found that more than one in five respondents had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, as opposed to natural cause.

Authors Joshua Holland and Michael Schwartz point out that the dominant narrative on Iraq—that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility—is ill conceived. Interviewers from the Lancet report of October 2006 (Censored 2006, #2) asked Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died. Of deaths for which families were certain of the perpetrator, 56 percent were attributable to US forces or their allies. Schwartz suggests that if a low pro rata share of half the unattributed deaths were caused by US forces, a total of approximately 80 percent of Iraqi deaths are directly US perpetrated.

Even with the lower confirmed figures, by the end of 2006, an average of 5,000 Iraqis had been killed every month by US forces since the beginning of the occupation. However, the rate of fatalities in 2006 was twice as high as the overall average, meaning that the American average in 2006 was well over 10,000 per month, or over 300 Iraqis every day. With the surge that began in 2007, the current figure is likely even higher.

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From: Counter Currents

As far as I know, nobody has focused upon the real roots of the war on terror, which are also the solution to it—American-sponsored terrorism. Paid military extremist types, trained by us to carry-out attack missions upon civilians are terrorists, our terrorists. They attack civilians, often women and children, as an indirect method of warfare, to topple governments who oppose American expansion. Has anybody questioned what military challenge the world would face today, if the US suddenly stopped all of these covert programs that perpetrate most of the world’s “terrorism”?

If the CIA/Mossad simply stopped training, arming, financing and transporting the (mostly Islamic) fighters/mercenaries all over the world (as it has been deeply in the business of doing for the past thirty or more years), would world peace then break-out? If our government was not in the business of killing the people whose relatives then make war against American and allied forces, would our soldiers be fighting anywhere in the world? …

The most vital example of American state terrorism being translated into war and regime change is Pakistan, which is also currently the hottest spot in the government plan to ignite world war. It is here where you can clearly see the circular logic that fuels the terror war. American-funded “Islamists” are destabilizing Pakistan to justify American intervention to seize Pakistani nukes before the American-funded “Islamists” can get their hands on them.

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From: AlterNet

“If you don’t have money to pay bribes, you can’t get a job,” says one mechanical engineer. “I’d drive a garbage truck; I’d do anything,”

BAGHDAD — Every morning for a year and a half, Tariq Razzaq has been coming to the decrepit entrance of a neighborhood maintenance office in southern Baghdad with a single goal in mind: to get a job. Every morning, the office employees turn him down.

It’s not that Razzaq, a 29-year-old former soldier in Saddam Hussein’s army, isn’t willing to do the lowest-paid manual labor: On a rare good day, the maintenance office asks Razzaq to perform one-time jobs cleaning trash and war debris out of gutters. It’s that he doesn’t have the money to bribe his way into a job.

“It’s simple: To find a steady job you need to have connections, or pay cash,” explains Razzaq, who spends most days with a group of other unemployed men who loitering in the shadow of the maintenance office parking lot, hoping that someone would ask him to pump up his tires or wash his car. The other unemployed Iraqis nod emphatically in agreement.

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“Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. …voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

– Hermann Göring

Gilbert, G. (1995). Nuremberg Diary. New York: Da Capo Press, 278-279. ISBN 0306806614.