War Glance
Using a Predator drone, the U.S. military this week fired a Hellfire missile into a crowd of suspected insurgents in Helmand province, killing 13 people and wounding three others, military officials said Tuesday. It was one of two such attacks by unmanned aircraft on the same day.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has cautioned his troops against relying on aircraft to bomb targets unless there is a clear insurgent threat, as such bombings have killed civilians and inflamed anti-American sentiment among Afghans.
The commission's report said the wording of UN resolution 1441 "cannot reasonably be interpreted (as the Dutch government did) as authorising individual member states to use military force to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council's resolutions."
This is a propaganda system at work: the choice of words and framework of logic designed to condition people into accepting certain options. In this case, the pre-determined option is a unilateral military strike on Iran either by the US or Israel. In that event, it will of course be reported by the BBC and other western media as a “pre-emptive” military measure to “prevent” Iran from attacking western interests in the region. Reported too, no doubt, will be the “collateral damage” of civilian casualties – unfortunate victims in an otherwise “just cause” to bring a “hardline regime” to abide by “international norms”. This is classic thought engineering that British political essayist George Orwell exposed so brilliantly – the official use of sanitised words to cover the sordid truth.
Contrary to repeated claims that the Iraq war did not deprive Afghan forces of necessary resources, the Army's history shows that the Bush administration "hamstrung" forces in the country, according to The New York Times.
A secret Army interrogation squad abused dozens of Iraqi prisoners, a firm of lawyers has claimed. Prisoners were hooded, held in "stress positions", denied sleep and daylight, and told their wives and mothers would be raped, the lawyers allege.
The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees at a remote outpost in southeastern Afghanistan had been invited onto the base and had not been searched, two former U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The United States has slowed down talks on a nuclear arms reduction deal with Russia in the last few days, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.
