27 July, 2010 — URUK Net
Helmand residents accuse Nato of deliberate attack on civilians
Jon Boone in Kabul and Ali Safi in Kandahar
July 27, 2010 – Survivors of an alleged Nato rocket attack on a small town in Helmand, which the Afghan government says killed 52 civilians, spoke today of their anger at what they claim was a deliberate air strike, despite coalition denials. The incident is alleged to have taken place last Friday in Regey, in the volatile Sangin district of Helmand. News of it came as a deluge of leaked US army documents about previously unreported civilian killings threatens to ruin Nato’s attempts to persuade Afghans that it takes innocent deaths seriously. Many residents of the town say they believe the strike, which they say was a missile attack on a mud house where people were hiding from nearby fighting, was deliberate. “The foreign forces could see us,” said Haji Abdul Ghafar, a 38-year-old farmer who had fled to Regey from a nearby village. “We were not in any hideouts. The Americans can see tiny things on the ground, but they could not see us. I think they bombed us on purpose.”…
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Do drone attacks make life and death worth less?
Jonathan Cook
July 27, 2010 – The thousands of US officer reports from Afghanistan appearing on Wikileaks yesterday show how technology can imperil a military’s secrecy and operations. But there is another side to that relationship. The technologies used by militaries to kill by remote control, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated and prevalent, are transforming warfare. A senior United Nations official recently warned of the emergence of a “PlayStation mentality to killing”, conjuring up an image of armies on the battlefield being replaced by unseen, nerdy teenagers spraying bullets and missiles with joysticks as wantonly as they already do when playing video games. Israel is one of the pioneers of these technologies. The first remote-controlled machines were surveillance aircraft built to fly over Lebanon in the early 1980s, as Israel invaded and then occupied the country for 20 years. Today Israel is the world leader in developing and selling unmanned aerial vehicles – or drones, as they have come to be called…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=68349
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MichaelKenny 16:27 on July 28, 2010 Permalink
“It looks like Medvedev has opted for US empire even as it implodes”. Precisely! What he has not done is to “opt for the US empire, even as it implodes” That comma makes all the difference. The American Empire is indeed imploding and the hyenas are starting to smack their lips. Russia intends to get its share of Uncle Sam’s inheritance, but I don’t see what ground there is to suppose that the Russians will be in any way fooled. They, no doubt, take the US defeat in Afghanistan for granted (who doesn’t?) and all the talk about a “Euro-Atlantic community” is just a smokescreen to fool the few surviving cold warriors. What’s being proposed is logical and actually is in everybody’s interest, including the interest of the US. In other words, what’s changing is that the US is ceasing to subordinate its own interests to those of Israel and, at that point, acting like a normal country, it is able to find mutually convenient accommodations with other normal countries. I would tie all this in with the new-found support on the Israeli right for the one-state solution, the growing concern in the US with the economy and the growing identification of the alliance with Israel as the source of the country’s problems.