War Glance
The Obama administration does not intend to send a witness to testify at a Senate hearing next week on the legality of the U.S. targeted killing program, the White House said Wednesday.
The decision illustrates the limits of President Barack Obama’s pledge in his State of the Union speech on Feb. 12 to provide greater transparency into top-secret drone operations that have killed thousands of suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
Obama won't send witness to Senate to explain legality of drone war
Pentagon reportedly gave Afghan contracts to Taliban
A Pentagon audit indicates that due to a lack of oversight, some Afghan contracts went to the Taliban. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction compiled the audit report.
The SIGAR audit detailed that the agency found significant weaknesses in the oversight intended to keep the U.S. Department of Defense from giving contracts to Taliban and other terrorists, adding that that the Pentagon is failing to implement fail-safes designed to prevent contracts from being given to terrorists, or following up on them afterwards to apprehend them.
U.S. secret: CIA collaborated with Pakistan spy agency in drone war
Even as its civilian leaders publicly decried U.S. drone attacks as breaches of sovereignty and international law, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency secretly worked for years with the CIA on strikes that killed Pakistani insurgent leaders and scores of suspected lower-level fighters, according to classified U.S. intelligence reports.
Dozens of civilians also reportedly died in the strikes in the semi-autonomous tribal region of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan that is a stronghold of al Qaida, Afghan militants, other foreign jihadists and a tangle of violent Pakistani Islamist groups.
Afghan children 'killed by Nato air strike in Shigal'
Up to 12 civilians - 10 children and two women - are reported to have been killed in a Nato air strike in eastern Afghanistan. A further six women are believed to have been injured in the incident in Shigal district, Kunar province.
Villagers and officials told the BBC that the casualties were inside their homes when they died. Nato confirmed that "fire support" was used in Shigal after a US civilian adviser died in a militant attack.
How the Pentagon Corrupted Afghanistan
America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and various oil companies, as well as a set of mercenary rent-a
-gun outfits like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy that came into their own in this period. It took the plunge into Iraq in March 2003, sweeping those corporations and an increasingly privatized military in with it. In the process, Iraq would become an example not of the free market system, but of a particularly venal form of crony capitalism (or, as Naomi Klein has labeled it, “disaster capitalism”).
The message sent by America's invisible victims
The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television.
The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark.
Afghan minister: Give NATO the boot
A former Afghan warlord turned government minister said the country should not agree to further U.S.-led military operations there.
Water and Energy Minister Mohammad Ismail Khan, marking the ninth anniversary of his son's death, told residents in the city of Herat that NATO forces in the country are not making things any safer and leaders should seek to end deals with nations that intend to "dominate" Afghanistan, Khaama Press said Saturday.
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