The fatal blast took place in a village in the northeastern Kunar Province.
The attack follows a surprise visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Kabul, to take part in a meeting aiming at finding a political solution to substitute the decade-long US-led war in Afghanistan.
The killing of civilians by foreign forces has dramatically intensified anti-American sentiments in Afghanistan.
Estimates put the number of the war-related deaths in Afghanistan at around 5.6 million. The fatalities have reportedly been caused, besides violence, by hunger, deprivation, and other instances of adversity generated by the US-led invasion and occupation of the country.
Just recently Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded that the US-led NATO force provide an explanation for the killing of three members of a family in an operation in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday in the Chaki Wardak district of Wardak Province.
Insecurity continues to climb across Afghanistan despite the presence of nearly 150,000 US-led forces in the war-ravaged country. Source
‘Afghans will stand by Pakistan in war’
“God forbid, if a war erupts between Pakistan and the United States, we (Afghanistan) will stand by Pakistan,” Karzai told Pakistan’s Geo television network in an interview broadcast on Saturday, Reuters reported.
Karzai also said that if Pakistan is ever attacked by another country and needs help, “Afghanistan will be there with you. Afghanistan is a brother.”
The Afghan president stated, “Afghanistan will never forget the welcome, the hospitality, the respect, and the brotherhood showed by the Pakistani people towards the Afghan people.”
Karzai added, “Anybody that attacks Pakistan, Afghanistan will stand with Pakistan. Afghanistan will be a brother of Pakistan. Afghanistan will never betray a brother.”
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani recently urged US officials to stop accusing Islamabad and threatening it with unilateral military action.
During a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Islamabad on Thursday, October 20, Gilani raised the objection and stated that the United States must use the bilateral forum to voice any complaints.
Meanwhile, Pakistani Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has cautioned the United States against launching a unilateral ground operation in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.
In a closed door briefing on Tuesday, October 18, Kayani told Pakistani lawmakers, “Any such attack by US forces from across the Afghan border would prove 10 times harder than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Reports that US troops are massing in Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan have raised concern in Pakistan that the US might be planning an attack on North Waziristan.
The US recently began pressing Pakistan to take military action in North Waziristan against the Taliban-linked Haqqani network.
The Haqqani group has been accused of attacking the US Embassy in Kabul and carrying out a truck bombing on a NATO outpost that injured over 70 US soldiers in September.
Some US officials have accused Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence, of supporting the Haqqani group, but Pakistan vehemently denies the charges.
US-Pakistan relations are already strained over the civilian casualties caused by the non-UN-sanctioned US drone attacks, which Pakistan has repeatedly condemned as violations of its sovereignty.
The aerial attacks, initiated by former US President George W. Bush, have escalated under President Barack Obama’s administration.
Tension between Islamabad and Washington increased following a secret US attack in Pakistan that allegedly killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May. Source
Have to say however that Bin Laden died in December of 2001.
‘Pakistan blocking attacks against Iran’
October 22 2001
“Due to the long border between Iran and Pakistan, enemies have constantly tried to take advantage of regional issues, but [their efforts] have been foiled because of the vigilance of the two countries,” Ali Abdollahi was quoted by IRNA as saying on Saturday.
Speaking on the sidelines of the 7th Iran and Pakistan security session in Tehran, Abdollahi said the vigilance of both countries has prevented terrorist groups from attacking Iran from Pakistan in the past 11 months.
The seventh session of the special security committee of Iran and Pakistan was held in the Iranian Interior Ministry attended by the security and police officials of both countries on Saturday.
During the meeting, the two sides discussed expansion of security cooperation in fighting terrorism and organized crime, border security, drug trafficking, kidnapping, arms smuggling, human trafficking, illegal immigration, and police cooperation.
The Pakistani delegation, which arrived in Tehran on Friday, will meet with Iran’s Interior Minister Mohammad Mostafa Najjar Sunday.
The two sides are expected to sign a security agreement. Source
The value of Iran-Turkey trade transactions hit $9.245bn during the first seven months of current Iranian year (started March 21).
The figure indicates a 70.19 percent increase compared to the same period the previous year.
The figure was $5.432bn in the first seven months of 2010 and the total value rose to $10.687bn in the same year.
Turkish Statistical Institute predicted the trade exchanges between the two countries would exceed $15bn this year. Source
Iran’s Relationship with Turkey and Pakistan are going well.
The Problem for Pakistan and Iran is the US/Israeli conflicts.
Pakistanis protest Clinton’s visit, They are protesting the Drone strikes. They don’t want the US anywhere near them. They want like many of the US to mind their own business and stay home.
October 21 2011
They also protested the Drone strikes back in April 2011
They wee also out protesting in February 2011
The US is not wanted in Pakistan.
The US is not wanted in Afhghanistan
The US is not wanted in Iraq
Gee I guess when you kill millions of people no one wants you around. Genocide is what it is called. That is what the US/NATO did in Afghanistan and Iraq and now probably in Libya.
The DU left by all the bombs that were dropped will kill innocent people for many years to come.
The Legacy left by US/NATO is the death of millions.
The US and NATO are worse then Hitler.
Much worse the Gaddafi.
Definitely worse the Saddam.
When will the leaders be charged with war crimes, Genocide and crimes against humanity.
Where are the Nuremberg trials they all bragged about?
Are these crimes not large enough to prosecute.
They destroyed hospitals, schools, water, food, killed civilians by the millions.
Over a million and a half in Iraq and that doesn’t include those who died of hunger and those who are dieing from illness caused by DU etc.
Probably the total number who died would be about 5 or 6 million due to US/NATO intervention.
If these are not crimes, then the world has become a very sick place.
- (Afghanistan ) A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words
- (Libya 1) A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words
- A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan
- Abu Ghraib Prisoners
- Afghanistan and Iraq Military Casualties
- Devastation in Iraq
- Gaza : A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
- Images if Iraq Democracy
- Images of Iraq Falluja massacres Made by USA
- Images of Iraq War Crimes
- Iraq Freedom!!!
- Iraq USA did it in Najaf, Baghdad, Kufa 08/2004
- Iraq War Images
- Iraq: USA Terror On Al Falluja ( 7 days = 850 killed more than 1500 wounded )
- Massacre of Gaza and Lebanon
- US Air strike on Iraqi civilians Tall Afar, Falluja, Samarra, Baghdad
The gift of death that keeps on killing.
War “Pollution” Equals Millions of Deaths
Why: War in Iraq and Afghanistan
UN Member States Must Demand Action Against NATO War Crimes
Over 800 Bodies Dumped in Libyan Cemetary by Rebels
Criminal State – A Closer Look at Israel’s Role in Terrorism/NATO and US supporting the Rebels who are actually terrorist on the US/NATO Terrorist list. I thought the war was against terrorist not to help them. I guess they have been helping the Terrorists all along. Anything to keep the wars going for the profiteers.
The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated
Now the CIA also have all the Heroin they want as well.
The CIA loves drugs they war the world worst drug dealers.
Afghanistan: Troops Guarding the Poppy Fields
American Police State, The – David Wise
Boomerang – Mark Zepezauer
Blowback – Christopher Simpson
Blowback – Chalmers Johnson
Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI
Challenging the Secret Government – Post-Watergate Investigation of CIA & FBI
CIA Diary – Philip Agee
CIA’s Greatest Hits – Mark Zepezauer
Cocaine Politics – Peter Dale Scott
Covert Action – the Roots of Terrorism – ed. E. Ray & W. Schaap
Deadly Deceits – Ralph McGehee
In Search of Enemies – John Stockwell
JFK – The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy – L. Fletcher Prouty
Lawless State, The – Morton Halperin
Predatory States – Operation Condor in Latin America – J. Patrice McSherry
Safe For Democracy – the Secret Wars of the CIA – John Prados
Secret Government, The – Bill Moyers
Secrets – CIA’s war at home – Angus Mackenzie
Secret Team, The – the CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World – L. Fletcher Prouty
War At Home – Brian Glick
Challenging the Secret Government – K Olmsted
Who Killed JFK ?
The Secret Wars of the CIA – John Stockwell
The National Endowment for Democracy page
History of CIA tyranny
Articles
The CIA’s Worst Kept Secret – Gehlen Org (5/01)
CIA clears itself of drug charge
Project X, drugs and death squads
The CIA and the crack cocaine epidemic in America
Time to abolish the CIA
The CIA out of control — the Guatemala lesson
Admissions and omissions – the CIA in Guatemala
Former CIA operative talks about CIA in Latin America
CIA death squads in Latin America
Reagan’s legacy — 8 years of CIA covert action
CIA and Indonesian massacre in 1965
Believe it or not… the CIA answers some questions
CIA’s operating procedure
CIA’s Drug Connection
Still Seeing Red – CIA fosters death squads in Colombia
The Corruption of Covert Actions
Establishment Newspapers Do Damage Control for the CIA
CIA’s Drug Confession
The Chile Coup — The U.S. Hand
Inside U.S. Counterinsurgency: A Soldier Speaks
CIA, Cocaine, and Death Squads
Pulling Back the Veil on Condor
Organized Crime, The CIA and the Savings and Loan Scandal
CIA outrages in Chile
CIA Admits Tolerating Contra-Cocaine Trafficking in 1980s
The ClO without the CIA:Inside the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center
Secrets R US
CIA gave $10 million to Peru’s spymaster Montesinos
Jim Garrison, KGB, & CIA – by Oliver Stone
Official Reveals Budget for U.S. Intelligence (11/05)
U.S. Leaders are Using Pinochet’s Playbook (12/05)
The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack (11/06)
CIA-assisted plot to overthrow Laos foiled (6/07)
The CIA’s ‘Family Jewels’ – still evil after all these years (6/07)
The Life and Times of the CIA – review of the book – Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner by Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch (7/07)
R.J. Hillhouse “Outsourced” – National Security Contracted to Private Firms – interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, July 26, 2007
“Thousands” Illegally Rendered By Bush Administration for Interrogation, Torture (11/07)
Ex-Italian President: 9/11 inside job run by CIA & Mossad (12/07)
“Operation Condor” Was No Mystery to Washington (1/08)
Gladio – Death Plan For Democracy (2/08)
The CIA Is More Active Than Ever In Venezuela (5/08)
The Assassination Bureau – Killing Hope, Sowing Terror (7/09)
The CIA’s Ghosts of Tegucigalpa [Honduras] (7/09)
The CIA, licensed to kill (8/09)
Are (US) Presidents Afraid of the CIA? (12/09)
The End Of History
By Paul Craig Roberts
October 20, 2011
Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?
If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.
With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s.
Washington has revived the Great Power Game and is vying with China. Whereas China brings Africa investment and gifts of infrastructure, Washington sends troops, bombs and military bases. Sooner or later Washington’s aggressiveness toward China and Russia is going to explode in our faces.
Where is the money going to come from to finance Washington’s African Empire? Not from Libya’s oil. Big chunks of that have been promised to the French and British for providing cover for Washington’s latest war of naked aggression. Not from tax revenues from a collapsing US economy where unemployment, if measured correctly, is 23 percent.
With Washington’s annual budget deficit as huge as it is, the money can only come from the printing press.
Washington has already run the printing press enough to raise the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) to 3.9% for the year (as of the end of September), the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W) to 4.4% for the year, and the producer price index (PPI) to 6.9% for the year.
As statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) has shown, the official inflation measures are rigged in order to hold down cost of living adjustments to Social Security recipients, thus saving money for Washington’s wars. When measured correctly, the current rate of inflation in the US is 11.5%.
What interest rate can savers get without taking massive risks on Greek bonds? US banks pay less than one-half of one percent on FDIC insured savings deposits. Short-term US government bond funds pay essentially zero.
Thus, according to official US government statistics American savers are losing between 3.9% and 4.4% of their capital yearly. According to John Williams’ estimate of the real rate of inflation, US savers are losing 11.5% of their accumulated savings.
As retired Americans receive no interest on their savings, they are having to spend down their capital. The ability of even the most prudent retirees to survive the negative rate of interest they are receiving and the erosion by inflation of any pensions that they receive will come to an end once their accumulated assets are exhausted.
Except for Washington’s favored mega-rich, the one percent that has captured all of the income gains of recent years, the rest of America has been assigned to the trash can. Nothing whatsoever has been done for them since the financial crisis hit in December 2007. Bush and Obama, Republican and Democrat, have focused on saving the 1 percent while giving the finger to the 99 percent.
Finally, some Americans, though not enough, have caught on to the flag-waving rah-rah “patriotism” that has consigned them to the trash bin of history. They are not going down without a fight and are in the streets. Occupy Wall Street has spread. What will be the fate of this movement?
Will the snow and ice of cold weather end the protests, or send them into public buildings? How long will the local authorities, subservient to Washington as they are, tolerate the obvious signal that the population lacks any confidence whatsoever in the government?
If the protests last, especially if they grow and don’t decline, the authorities will infiltrate the protestors with police provocateurs who will fire on the police. This will be the excuse to shoot down the protestors and to arrest the survivors as “terrorists” or “domestic extremists” and to send them to the $385 million dollar camps built under US government contract by Cheney’s Halliburton.
The Amerikan Police State will have taken its next step into the Amerikan Concentration Camp State.
Meanwhile, lost in their oblivion, conservatives will continue to bemoan the ruination of the country by homosexual marriage, abortion, and “the liberal media.” Liberal organizations committed to civil liberty, such as the ACLU, will continue to rank a woman’s right to an abortion with defense of the US Constitution. Amnesty International will assist Washington in demonizing its next target for military attack while turning a blind eye to the war crimes of President Obama.
When we consider what Israel has got away with, being as it is under Washington’s bought protection–the war crimes, the murders of children, the eviction in total disregard of international law of Palestinians from their ancestral homes, the bulldozing of their houses and uprooting of their olive groves in order to move in fanatical “settlers,” the murderous invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the wholesale slaughter of civilians–we can only conclude that Washington, Israel’s enabler, can get away with far more.
In the few opening years of the 21st century, Washington has destroyed the US Constitution, the separation of powers, international law, the accountability of government, and has sacrificed every moral principle to achieving hegemony over the world. This ambitious agenda is being attempted while simultaneously Washington removed all regulation over Wall Street, the home of massive greed, permitting Wall Street’s short-term horizon to wreck the US economy, thus destroying the economic basis for Washington’s assault on the world.
Will the US collapse in economic chaos before it rules the world?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch. He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution. He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions. Source
The Son of Africa Claims a Continent’s Crown Jewels
By John Pilger
October 19, 2011
On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only “engage” for “self-defence”, says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.
Obama’s decision is described in the press as “highly unusual” and “surprising”, even “weird”. It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and “protect” Indonesia, which President Nixon called “the region’s richest hoard of natural resources …the greatest prize”. Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America’s subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually “self defence” or “humanitarian”, words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.
In Africa, says Obama, the “humanitarian mission” is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA), which “has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa”. This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa’s most venal tyrant.
Obama’s other justification also invites satire. This is the “national security of the United States”. The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has few than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US “national security” usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda’s “president-for-life” Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military “aid” – including Obama’s favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America’s latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.
However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American “threat”. When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, “Asymmetric threats … asymmetric threats”. These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.
Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and Nato backed the “rebels” with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning “genocide” in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west’s “humanitarian intervention” was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the “rebel” National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production “in exchange” (the term used) for “total and permanent” French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in “liberated” Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!”
The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the 19th century.
Like the “victory” in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified “pro-Gaddafi” fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, “celebrate”. According to General Petraeus, there is now a war “of perception … conducted continuously through the news media”.
For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s “defence strategy” plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.
That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the “Son of Africa”, is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray. Source
Transitional leader declares Libya ‘liberated’
Oct. 23, 2011
BENGHAZI, Libya — Libya’s transitional leader has declared liberation of the country, three days after the death of its leader of four decades, Moammar Gadhafi.
Mustafa Abdul-Jalil also told thousands of supporters at a ceremony on Sunday that Islamic Sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation in the country and that existing laws that contradict the teachings of Islam would be nullified. In an address that set an Islamist tone for post-Gadhafi Libya, he said new banks would be set up to follow the Islamic banking system, which bans charging interest.
“This revolution was looked after by God to achieve victory,” he told the crowd. Source
Sharia law- There goes women rights
Recent
Violence erupts as general strike shuts down Greece
World Wide Occupy Wall Street Protests updated.
Pentagon Insider Says Green Light On Israel/USA To Strike Iran Within 2 Weeks
Wall Street and Greek protests spread to Brussels
We fabricated drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas, former NYPD detective testifies
Wall Street/Washington Protesters an Inspiration to Behold
Cost of war to Libyans about $200 Billion
Did You Know 