Despite fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Mogadishu, health workers have fanned out across the war-torn capital of Somalia in a three-month United Nations-backed campaign that has immunized nearly 300,000 women of child-bearing age and 288,000 children.

Another media-generated radical Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. The Imam, who communicated with Fort Hood shooting suspect Maj. Nidal Hasan and called him a hero, was once arrested in Yemen on suspicion of involvement with al-Qaida.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Expanding the war to Yemen

The Pentagon’s war on terror — does it make people in the U.S. safer?

PART 3
By Joyce Chediac
Published Feb 7, 2010 7:28 PM

Some 2,752 people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, in the airplane attacks in the U.S. Their deaths have been marked and mourned. Today just the words “World Trade Center,” “9/11” and “al-Qaida” bring to mind attacks on civilians and fear of other such attacks.

Washington has recently invoked these civilian deaths and a need to “protect American lives” to justify drone and cruise missile attacks in Yemen. A closer look, however, reveals that the U.S. government is using the 9/11 deaths as a pretext to kill civilians abroad. Pentagon attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen have killed tens of thousands of civilians.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, U.S. drones target homes and neighborhoods. Every time the Pentagon or its clients announce that drone-launched cruise missiles killed a “terrorist leader,” the cruise missiles likely killed the entire family, any visiting relatives and any close neighbors of the alleged leader.

Is the U.S. really hitting “al-Qaida operatives”?

Neither the Obama administration nor the Pentagon expresses sympathy for these civilian deaths. In the name of eliminating “al-Qaida operatives,” the Pentagon is attacking whole communities.

The U.S. media report that 30 Afghan civilians were killed the week of Jan. 11 alone. In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, cruise missiles have annihilated wedding parties. In 2009, the civilian toll in Afghanistan was the highest since the U.S. occupied that country in 2001.

Investigative journalist Allan Nairn, interviewed Jan. 6 on WBAI Radio’s “Democracy Now!” explained that the U.S. had implemented the “El Salvador Option” in Iraq. This meant copying the death squads Washington set up in Central America in the 1980s under Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s direction. This killing of local leaders is flippantly called “man hunting,” said Nairn.

The bombing of the CIA office in Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30 revealed that the CIA there was involved in assassinating local leaders. Gen. McCrystal now runs the Afghanistan war.

On Dec. 27, U.S. forces in Afghanistan’s Ghazi Khan Village dragged from their beds, handcuffed, then executed eight people they called “terrorists,” who turned out to be school children between the ages of 11 and 17. Their schoolmaster confirmed the youths’ identities and ages.

Mass outrage over the massacre sparked protests, including one of school children in Kabul demanding that the U.S. get out. The Afghans charged the international occupation forces with valuing Afghan lives less than the lives of the occupation troops.

In Yemen, a Dec. 17 attack which the pro-U.S. government claimed “killed 34 al-Qaida militants and foiled a terror plot,” really killed at least 49 civilians, including 23 children and 17 women, according to local officials. The regime also attacked a meeting planning a protest against the massacre. (Counterpunch, Jan. 15-17)

After the Dec. 30 bombing of the CIA office in Afghanistan, the Pentagon drastically increased drone attacks on villages in Pakistan, surely killing more families and hitting more wedding parties.

Killing civilians, it seems, was part of the Pentagon’s plan right from the beginning. According to Nairn, a feasibility study done by the Pentagon before the 2003 invasion of Iraq showed that of the 22 attacks planned the first day, approximately 30 civilians would be killed in each attack. The study referred to the civilian deaths as “bug splat.” This study was presented to Gen. Tommy Franks, who said to go ahead, do them all.

Some 660 civilian deaths were anticipated in the first day of the Iraq war alone. This “bug splat” was a quarter of the 9/11 casualties, on the war’s first day.

Occupation leads to suicide bombings

How would you feel if your family was murdered, their deaths treated as bug splat? What would you do? Wouldn’t you be angry?

Washington and the Pentagon know full well that their wars will fuel resistance. They have heard it from their own think tanks and academics. Robert Pates of the University of Chicago, a leading bourgeois expert on suicide bombings and a political conservative, called suicide bombings “a consequence of occupation.”

The Rand Corporation, a major ruling-class think tank, said in a 2008 report, “U.S. policymakers should end the use of the phrase ‘war on terrorism’ since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al-Qaida.”

If there is no “battlefield solution” to terrorism, who gains from the $1.05 trillion spent so far on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Who benefits from the $700 billion slated this year for the military, with $75 billion specifically earmarked for “the war on terrorism”?

These U.S. wars are not about protecting people in the U.S. They are about getting new sources of profits for the oil companies and Wall Street corporations. U.S. oil companies want Iraqi oil, the huge untapped reserves in Yemen, and to run a pipeline through strategic Afghanistan from the vast oil wealth in the former Soviet Asian republics.

Meanwhile, the mercenary company Blackwell, along with Bechtel, Halliburton and General Electric, to name a few, have reaped billions of dollars in profits from contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More than 5,000 U.S troops, sons and daughters of the working class, have died in Iraq and Afghanistan securing profits and strategic advantage for the corporations. Are they “bug splat” too?

Do Pentagon actions make workers safer at home?

Tens of millions of people in the U.S. are consumed with fear — fear of home foreclosures, of long-term unemployment and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children. People are afraid to get sick because they have no health insurance, or the insurance they pay for might not cover their illness or medications.

The banks finance the Pentagon’s military adventures abroad, and get their cut from corporate war profiteers. The banks gambled on real estate and left millions of working-class households in ruin. Now that the government has bailed them out, the same banks refuse to let workers renegotiate their mortgages, while they give themselves big fat bonuses.

The jobs, homes, savings, health care and retirement funds that have been lost were not taken away by Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, al-Qaida in Yemen, or by Iran, Syria, Hamas or Hezbollah. They are not our enemy.

The greed of these banks and corporations has caused many, many times more death and misery than any so-called threat from al-Qaida.

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Ivory Coast reggae artist Alpha Blondy will participate in a project to support relief efforts in the Caribbean nation of Haiti which was hit by a 7.0 earthquake on January 12, 2010. Other cultural workers involded will include Papa Wemba and Baba Maal.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

African singers to raise money for Haiti

10 Feb 2010 15:52:16 GMT
Source: Reuters

DAKAR, Feb 10 - West and Central African singing stars will record a song in early March in the Senegalese capital Dakar to raise money for victims of last month’s earthquake in Haiti, the musical project’s leader said on Wednesday.

More than 200,000 people were killed and a million left homeless when a magnitude 7.0 quake struck the poor Caribbean country on Jan. 12. Since then, a mass of international relief efforts have been launched.

In the most recent African aid initiative, dozens of singers, among them internationally known names including Senegalese vocalists Youssou Ndour and Baba Maal, Ivorian reggae artist Alpha Blondy and Congolese musicians Lokua Kanza and Papa Wemba, will gather in Dakar from March 1-6 to record a song, all proceeds from which will go to Haitians.

“We have seen many solidarity actions from other parts of the world, we too have to do our share,” singer and project coordinator Coumba Gawlo Seck told Senegalese television after a meeting with Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade.

Mali and Guinea will also be represented musically, while Coumba Gawlo said a mega-concert in Dakar will be organised to raise more money for Haitians.

Soon after the earthquake, Wade grabbed international headlines but surprised many in his own country by proposing the creation of a new African state to resettle homeless Haitians, comparing the idea to the 1948 birth of the state of Israel.

(Reporting by Diadie Ba; Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Paul Casciato)

The latest round of United Nations-backed talks between the parties in the dispute over the status of Western Sahara kicked off today in New York state.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed his concerns about recent developments in Sri Lanka, where a defeated presidential candidate has been arrested and Parliament dissolved, to the leader of the South Asian country and announced plans to dispatch his top political official to the island nation for further dialogue.

With 7.8 million people in Niger - or three fifths of the population - facing moderate to severe food insecurity, the United Nations and its non-governmental organization (NGO) partners today appealed for international aid to help the Government of the impoverished West African country overcome imminent shortages.

Today’s stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: a New Scientist reporter’s big fat geek wedding, why the Nobel foundation said no to reform, and south America’s troglodyte bird

Latest word is that the eurozone group is holding an emergency video conference this afternoon to discuss Greece’s economic situation and possible ways to go ahead with a much anticipated (read: much feared) bailout of the country. This morning’s press reports noted that eurozone countries had decided “in principle” to provide financial assistance to Athens, with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble telling officials in Berlin that there “was no alternative” to a rescue plan.

Ahead of tomorrow’s summit of EU leaders, we have published a new briefing looking at 10 different ways in which Greece can be bailed out. At the moment, some sort of eurozone credit facility or an IMF-style ‘euro fund’ seem to be the frontrunners. However, it’s unclear whether these two options are actually legal under the EU Treaties ‘no bailout‘ and ‘no credit facility‘ clauses. (in fact, of the 10 possible bailout scenarios we looked at, only one - early payments of structural funds - is unambiguously legal under the EU treaties).

Obviously lots of issues are on the table at the moment, but at least three consequences of a bailout are worth hammering home.

First, as has been widely documented and argued, watering down the EU’s ‘no bailout’ clause and the ‘no credit facility’ clause creates moral hazard of unprecedented proportions, and has previously been fiercely resisted by a whole range of EU politicans and central bankers - particularly in Germany. Former Chief Economist at the ECB, Otmar Issing, has said that this would spell an end to “the political stability of the monetary union”. He said that, in order for financial discipline to prevail, every member state must be responsible for its own debt and deficits: “without this there would be no end”, he said.

Secondly, short term measures will not address the structural lack of competitiveness that affects not only Greece, but also countries such as Spain and Portugal. In order for the differences in competiveness within the eurozone to be addressed, a one-off bailout would need to be followed by continuous financial transfers from the poorer bloc to the richer bloc within the eurozone. Indeed, there would be no end.

There’s no public mandate or support for establishing a formal system of fiscal transfers - polling by Open Europe shows that 70% of Germans are against using taxpayers to bail out another member state. This means that eurozone countries are stuck in a very tricky dilemma: either accept continual strains on the eurozone, stemming from the weakness of Greece and others, or pursue a policy of closer economic integration, for which there’s no public support.

Some key people in Brussels now seem to be set on the latter alternative. Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has already said he plans to interfere more in national economic policies, stating that “economic policy isn’t a national, but a European matter. No modern economy is an island. When a member state doesn’t make reforms, others suffer because of that.”

Likewise, EU President Herman Van Rompuy has said, “Whether it is called coordination of policies or economic government” only the European nations working together are “capable of delivering and sustaining a common European strategy for more growth and more jobs…Recent developments in the euro area highlight the urgent need to strengthen our economic governance”.

Former European Commission President Romano Prodi once said that a future crisis could be exploited to radically speed up the pace of economic union: “The euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments. It is politically impossible now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created.”

It seems Barroso and Van Rompuy are intent on proving him right.

For the immediate short term purpose of helping out Greece, as we argue in our briefing, the simplest and most sensible option would be to go to the IMF. The Swedes and the UK reportedly both want it but it seems as though the eurozone standard-bearer, Germany, is too proud to contemplate this route.

So integrationist politicians now see in the financial crisis and the introduction of the Lisbon Treaty a chance to take a quantum leap towards a common economic government in the EU and it seems Germany may bee too proud to stand in their way.

Hollywood actress and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie is in Haiti where she met with survivors of last month's devastating earthquake as well as some of the local and international aid workers assisting in the relief effort.