US court sentences kidnapped Pakistani woman

The kidnappers were US soldiers and FBI agents acting outside their jurisdiction: in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

Aafia Sidiqqi, who is a neuroscientist and hence a most unlikely "Taliban" (who are against any sort of education for women), was allegedly suspected by her captors to be an Al Qaeda sympathizer who claim that they found instructions for making bombs and New York maps in her apartment (what to me looks like the typical made-up evidence). 

Sidiqqi however she denies the accusation's claims and says that she was kidnapped and held for five years in a secret prison in Afghan soil.

According to the accusation it was then when she managed to grab one of her captors' guns but she was the only one injured in the shooting that ensued. She also denies this accusation.

Lacking any objective evidence other than the statements from the parties should cause, in good justice, an acquittal but instead she has been sentenced to what is in practice a life sentence. 

The case has caused an uproar in her native Pakistan, where people simply don't believe the accusations, specially as we all know that the "extraordinary rendition" strategy of kidnapping suspects and holding them in secret prisons in foreign soil was and still is a most disturbing reality. 

Sidiqqi declared in the trial that she is committed to World Peace:

I do not want any bloodshed. I do not want any misunderstanding. I really want to make peace and end the wars.

Campaign for the freedom of Bradley Manning

US soldier Bradley Manning is allegedly the whistleblower who unveiled a large number of secret or confidential documents that evidenced troops' total disregard for the lives of civilians, and the apparent support of Taliban guerrillas by Pakistan.

He has been compared to Daniel Ellsberg, who unveiled the so-called Pentagon Papers in the 1970s.


Antimilitarist organizations Courage to Resist, Codepink and Veterans for Peace are launching a campaign in support of this brave and bold soldier who dared to challenge authority and unveil some of the ill-guarded secrets of the imperial oligarchy.


There was already a first demonstration at Washington D.C. this past Sunday (photo above) and tomorrow there will be another one at Oklahoma City.


On August 4th, another, rather massive, demonstration was held at Quantico Base, Virginia, where the soldier is being held prisoner (photo above).

See also: Bradley Manning Suport Network.

Child soldier's confession under torture is legal evidence for USA

The outrageous case of Guantanamo Nazi prison, which has not yet been dismantled by Barack Obama in spite of his electoral promises, goes one step further as Omar Khadr is going to face a farce trial under his military captors who took him from Afghanistan when he was 15 years old.

The accusation, for which he could face a life sentence, is to throw a grenade killing a US soldier, in the context of the US/NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, of more than questionable legitimacy itself.

The only evidence: his own confession, obtained under the system of torture that is well known to operate in the colonial base in Cuba.

Under international law, child soldiers are to be considered victims.

Under any sensible law as well, confession obtained under tortures or possible tortures cannot be evidence. Otherwise it is going back to the times of the Inquisition.

However the military tribunal that is to judge Omar Khadr has accepted this only piece of "evidence" as valid. Khadr is however still hopeful that justice will prevail and rejects to enter a plea bargain.

The young Omar Khadr, now 23, has seen some of the best years of his life wasted in one of the worst prisons on Earth.

While he initially cooperated with his captors, he is now set not to accept the impositions of the farce trial and may even dismiss his military attorney out of lack of faith on the system.

The world doesn't get it, so it might work if the world sees the US sentencing a child to life in prison, it might show the world how unfair and sham this process is. And if the world doesn't see all this, to what world am I being released to? A world of hate ... and discrimination.

I hate to say this but he is damn right. It may cost him dearly but it is on this kind of fearless heroism that justice is built upon.

Source: Al Jazeera


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Update (Aug 13): Daphne Eviatar reports at the Huffington Post on the first day of the farce-trial which was suspended indefinitely (or for 30 days, not fully clear) after the defense lawyer suddenly collapsed while interrogating a witness.

It is interesting the report on the actual facts that seem to transpire in the trial: Omar Khadr was not just a minor at the time of the alleged "crime" (fighting in a war, defending his country from a foreign invasion if anything) but there is absolutely no evidence that he even fought at all. There are reports that the person who threw the grenade, killing a US soldier, was someone else and that Khadr did not even participate in the combat at all, where he had been brought by his father in a clear case of parental coercion.

They also report that he was shot in the back twice in spite of being unarmed, (i.e. a civilian minor) surviving almost miraculously. Daphne Eviatar asks: who is the real war criminal here?

Two good antimilitarist news

Today is mildly positive for Antimilitarism:

Dutch troops move out of Afghanistan

Whatever you may think of the endless and pointless¹ Afghanistan War, one thing is clear: it is an imperialist war. The retreat of most of the Dutch force (250 soldiers will remain) marks an important turn point in the sad story of this war, where the only losers are civilians and unemployed recruits.

¹ It's pointless because only Afghans could liberate themselves from the Taliban, it's pointless because Osama and Al Qaeda are the creation of the USA with their fundamentalist-fascist allies in the region: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it's pointless because 9/11 was an insider job (most simple of all evidence: both towers and building 7 of the CIA fell as in a controlled demolition - what actually was).

Source: Gara[es]


Cluster bombs banned

Cluster bomb ban treaty becomes official after 38 countries ratified it, other 70 states have signed but not yet ratified the treaty. Cluster bombs have been heavily criticized because of being highly indiscriminate and because they leave too many unexploded fragments around that later kill children and others.

The main producers of these criminal bombs (USA, Israel, China) have not signed it but still the treaty creates a moral instrument of international law. However there are still many unregulated particularly horrible weapons like the dense inert metal (DIME) explosives used by Israel against the civilian population in Gaza last year.

Source: Gara[es]

Wikileaks' 90,000 secret documents on Afghanistan

One wonders who is going to read them all. And, hold on, there are still other 15,000 that Wikileaks and their unknown source agreed not to release just yet but when the situation in Afghanistan improves (will that ever happen?) These would seem to be the most substantial ones and I wonder who is going to leak them from Wikileaks itself and when.

En fin. The documents can be accessed at Wikileaks (if the link is not overloaded with requests) and you can also get a quicker taste of the main contents by looking at Wikileaks' media partners: Der Spiegel, The Guardian and NYT (this one is pay per view).

Of course, at the moment of writing this I have only had a quick look at the news outlets. The main revelations seem to be things that we knew already but maybe were not so strongly confirmed: Pakistani secret services help (helped?) the Taliban (DS, TG), US/NATO troops don't care about civilians (TG)and that the intelligence services are unable to process all the data they gather (DS).

Other reports deal with 'friendly fire' casualties, clashes between NATO and the Afghan security forces, Iranian secret operations across the border, unexpectedly good land-air war capability of the Taliban or the controversial 'drone' flying robots that sometimes get out of control and often are shot down and have to be rescued for fear of the technology falling in unwanted hands.

The Guardian also includes an interactive map listing a selection of more than 200 incidents. Many include police shooting demonstrators, a matter that is not addressed, as far as I can see, in any of the main articles.

I also miss key information areas, maybe withheld in the 15,000 unreleased reports or maybe too secret to have ever reached the informant. For example: what happened to Osama Bin Laden? Where is he? Is he alive or dead? Why a French snipper in the early days of the war was never confirmed to shoot down Bin Laden when he was on target? Or how reliable or corrupt is the current Afghan government? Why was actually Mc Chrystal fired? What's the diplomatic involvement/alignment of other key powers: Russia, China, India? Are there really plans to butcher Pakistan into smaller states? Who does really control the opium trade? Is it used to finance the Afghan government, the Taliban, NATO, covert operations elsewhere? Which is the reality behind Al Qaeda: does it really exist at all, who controls it?

Too many questions still unsolved. This leak, while very much welcome, seems kind of watered down: not really the information we would like to get our hands on. Truly sensitive information is being withheld or has never reached the Wikileaks headquarters at all.

Afghanistan's huge mineral riches

A. Montero at La Otra Economía reports, following a NY Times source, that Afghanistan has been found to have huge, largely undeveloped, mineral wealth, worth more than USD 900 billion.

For what I can see, about half of this value is iron, one of the most aboundant elements on Earth. However others may be less valuable in accountancy terms but more in geostrategical ones, specially now that the BRIC powers are undermining US hegemony.

One of them is niobium, used in steel alloys and high technology applications. Afghan niobium seems to be potentially worth 81 billion. More interestingly, there are only two producers of nionium nowadays: Canada and Brazil... but Brazil produces 90% of it, what makes even more important for the USA and its NATO allies (remember the recent comments of the German ex-President) to control Afghan production of such strategic mineral.

Even maybe more critical may be the various rare earth elements, whose lead producer today (by far) is China. These minerals would be worth 7.4 billion in Afghanistan. These elements are used in a variety of high technology applications.

Evolution of rare earth elements' production (from Wikipedia)

Other major Afghan mineral resources are:

• Copper (worth 274 billion): relatively common but widely used. It's lead producer is Chile, followed at a distance by Peru, the USA and Indonesia.
• Cobalt (worth 51 billion): used specially in superalloys suitable for aircraft engines. Currently the main producer is DR Congo, followed at a distance by Zambia, Brazil, Cuba, Canada and Russia.
• Gold (worth 25 billion): production is quite distributed but lead by South Africa.
• Molybdenum (worth 24 billion): also used in heat resistent alloys, among other applications. The main producer is the USA, followed by Chile, China and Peru.

Also asbestos, silver, potash, aluminum and lithium are mentioned in the article as highly valuable.

While Afghan authorities seem excited about the huge potential of these resources, the fact that many of them are in unstable guerrilla areas means that they are unlikely to be exploited easily.

However it is clear that these findings provide a further reason for the USA and NATO to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely. Initially it was mostly a campaign to create a strategical base in Central Asia that would threat other powers such as China, Russia, India and Iran, while also providing potential access to Central Asian oil and gas resources (the infamous "pipelinistan" project via Baluchistan), as well as succulent benefits derived from the highly corrupting opium trade which has boomed since the US-led invasion and that Russia has denounced in strong terms recently.

It looks now like the Imperial armies will remain in Afghanistan for long. That is... unless Afghans throw them out.

Malalai Joya denounces occupation of Afghanistan

There is a very interesting interview at Voltaire Net with this Afghan MP who was suspended for her progressive views and opposition to imperialist occupation and talibanization under it.

Some excerpts follow:

The aim of the war was never to create democracy and justice nor to uproot the terrorist groups. The war’s only purpose has been to perpetuate the occupation, install military bases and safeguard the takeover of a region that has substantial natural resources.

...

Look at the UN bombardments. In May 2009 in my own province more than 150 civilians were killed.

...

The base text [of the Afghan Constitution] might very well declare equality between men and women but the country is ruled by Sharia law. The so-called democracy of the official Constitution is systematically flouted. It’s only there as a token to attract international aid, which is then usually embezzled.

Today Afghanistan is a country where women – often girls as young as 14 or 15 years – fleeing their conjugal home to escape extreme violence, are considered criminal and are imprisoned. Yes, there’s an increase in the number of girls returning to school, but the records don’t take into account the girls who have to leave school again, due to threats to their safety and pressure from their families to get married.

Suicide has become the ultimate weapon of desperate young women, who are aware that there are alternatives but know that they will never have the right to them.

...

All of the troops must leave and the militia of the warlords must be dismantled. Democracy can’t be established by an occupying force that does nothing more than spread out and strengthen the Talibanization of my country.

...

Democratic parties and associations are more often than not fighting in secret. Let’s not forget that the Constitution bans the existence of all non-religious parties whose frame of reference does not include the Qur’an.

...

There are so many faceless heroes and heroines. Their battle is in their towns and villages. Why does no single western leader recognise the existence of a progressive movement that could emerge and play a role?

Afghanistan legalizes rape within marriage

In spite of widespread condemnantion inside and outside the country, the Afghan Parliament has approved a law that allows Shia men to starve their wifes if they refuse to have sex.

This is the kind of stuff you can get with thoughtless "multiculturalism" becoming more important than human rights or mere common sense. And this is the kind of "liberation" that the oppressed women of the World can expect from the US Empire.
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NATO uses white phosphorus against civilians in Afghanistan

White phosphorus shells have fallen on civilian homes at the eastern province of Kapisa, burning and mutilating children. The foreign contingent in that area is made up of French troops with US support. NATO rejects responsability and is providing healthcare for the injured but it is clear it was not the Taliban.

Read whole story at Yahoo News. Originally found at The Angry Arabs' Comments Section.
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More Islamist abuses in Obama's Empire

Afghanistan would be laughable if it would not be for so much people suffering under the Neotaliban rule supported by the USA-NATO occupation force. The last brutality is the approval of a communalist law allowing Shia (but not Sunni) men to rape their wives once eavery four days (that's the kind of Torah mentality they have: all regulated, even sex - but of course women's opinions do not matter). This is sold as some sort of "multiculturalism" because it would acknowledge differences between Sunni and Shia sharia traditions.

Of course Afghan women do not buy. And have gone out to the streets of Kabul to protest in the weirdest kind of feminist parade I've ever witnessed (all them covering their heads and chanting "Allah u akbar": "God is great").

After the demo they were attacked by stone-throwing super-macho counter-demonstrators (all men) that yelled "Death to the Christians' slaves". Like if Christians had not supported the same kind of patriarchal abuses in the very recent past. I was born under a Christian fundamentalist regime, I know what I am talking about: that same kind of laws allowing rape in marriage were in effect until many years after the death of Ayatollah Franco.

What I don't think that was allowed anymore back then (fascism after all is a "modern" phenomenon, even if reactionary and spiteful) was what still happens in the favorite ally of the USA in the region: the ultra-fascist mafious tyranny known as Saudi Arabia. As you surely know the situation of women's rights in the "Muslim Vatican" (with 27 million subjects and many more foreign de-facto slaves) is worse than imaginable. But you may not know that fathers can arrange marriages for their minor daughters with whomever they want, even if these girls are still as young as 8 years old. This is the case of a young girl from an impoverished family (yes there is poor people in Saudia, indeed - and not all are outcasts with foreign passports) who has been forcibly married by her father to an 80 years old pervert. The mother appealed in court, causing some controversy in the retrograde realm, but the father's decission was upheld.

And this is the kind of abuses we are asked to watch indifferent in a world that knows no real borders anymore. In these cases I always think that a little bit of Stalinism would not be in excess in such areas. It's not bigotry: I am just appalled that human rights are smashed by superstitious ideologies (aka religions). Obviously it must be Arabs who solve Arab problems and Afghans who solve Afghan problems but some internationalist support for those fighting for the rights and dignity of Humankind is never in excess. If instead of supporting the bigots and machos there, we would arm the feminists, then at least we would know we are doing something of use. But we (our governments) arm the nazis and ignore the humanists and that has no pardon.
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Afghanistan, as fundamentalist now as with the Taliban

It is surely not the only case but it is most outraging: Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh allegely downloaded an article in support of women's rights from the Internet and distributed it. In the morning of October 27th 2007 he was arrested. Then he was tortured and sentenced to death on the grounds of "blasphemy" (what the heck?). After some local and international outrage, and numerous protests in Afghanistan itself, the sentence was commuted to 20 years of prision and ratified by the Afghan supreme court.

Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh in prision

In Rebelión, his brother dennounces the hypocritical Western support for a regime that is full of religious fanatics, corrupt, obscurantist and totalitarian. He dennounces that the "talibanists" (as to make a difference with the armed opposition talibans) control the government in Kabul and the provinces and that all the Western intervention has done virtually nothing in favor of the human rights of the Afghan people.

I wonder if that is the reason why the USA and its NATO vassals are losing the war after all: their inability to deliver consistently with their discourse.
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Chossudovsky claims USA behind Mumbai attacks

Finally a decent answer to the cui bono? question that any intelligent person should ask in these cases. I won't claim it's the only possible one but it makes some sense, what is interesting in itself, and it's signed by a respectable analyst who has been claiming for years that Bin Laden is nothing but a puppet of US intelligence, as I do believe too.

Link: India's 9/11. Who was behind the Mumbai attack? Washington is fostering political divisions between India and Pakistan, by M. Chossudovsky.

The Canadian author claims that the USA exerts much more control over the dark alleys of Pakistani intelligence agency than the new civilian government (that obviously was not interested at all in such attack but rather in improving the relations with its neighbours) and that the main reason for the attack is to sabotage the Indian-Pakistani diplomatic improvements (divide et impera), promote further internal ethnic tensions in both countries and justify even further the intervention in Afghanistan (already declared primary goal by the new Emperor Barack I) and neighbouring Pakistani tribal areas. He also claims that the FBI, along with British M16 and Israeli Mossad, is manipulating the investigation and that, as happened with the Bali attacks, the true masterminds of the crime will never been found.
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Narcotraffic centered in the USA and US protectorates

Interesting article at Rebelión by P. Siris (in Spanish). The author, based on figures of the UN office on Drugs and Crime, notices that USA is by large the greatest consumer of cocaine (45% of the world total) and also a major producer of illegal drugs like marihuana (20% of the world's total, using more land than for maize).

Even more significatively, Siris notices that the number of drug seizures in the North American country has dropped massively in the last decade and now only ammounts to 24% of the world's total, very low considering the huge relevance of the USA as drugs' consumer. Furthermore, the vast majority of world's cocaine production (60%) happens in Colombia, a US protectorate (and certainly not in jungle areas controlled by the guerrilla), while almost all global opiate production is in Afghanistan (96%) , another US occupied country.

Nevertheless, the USA dares to patronize countries like Bolivia, Venezuela and Myanmar (Bolivia and Myanmar are secondary producers of coca and opium respectively, Venezuela is not any major producer of anything) on this issue, while ignoring the Colombia, Peru (second global producer of coca and cocaine) and Afghanistan, as well as other major hubs of drug trafficking like Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, the European Union and the very United States.

Siris argues that the USA is not just the largest drug consumer of the world but that it also controls the production of most of these substances and is the benefitiary of the benefit in the narcotraffic business.

Afghan death sentence for downloading feminist materials

Just another example that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was right (and that Osama and the CIA are hateful): a young Afghan man, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh was sentenced to death in a five minute fundamentalist "trial", where he was not allowed to defend himself. This happened some nine months ago, when he downloaded feminist material from the Internet, act that was considered as "blasphemy" (it would be laughable, would not be so serious). Since then, he has been jailed and awaits either presidential pardon or execution.

Sayad Kambaksh, victim of Islamic fascism

Source: BBC News.

The article is titled "Blasphemy case shows Afghan divide" but what it actually says is that there is no such divide: that the government, the tribunals, the religious leaders and all effective social actors are extremely fundamentalist and support this kind of criminal nonsense.

This is the kind of societies that the USA and its allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as NATO, are promoting in the "Muslim World": fundamentalist regimes that represent no advance, no reform, no progress - but the opposite. Fascist puppet states ruled by fanaticism and idiocy. Typical colonial medievalist protectorates.

When in 1979, the Soviet Union, called by the legitimate government, intervened in Afghanistan against the fundamentalists, there was a mediatic uproar against them. Not just that, the "Western World" (together with Saudia and Pakistan) put all means to make sure that a laicist solution would not be implemented and that the fundamentalist fascists would succeed. This only happened when that short-sighted drunkard oportunist who was Boris Yeltsin removed Russian support for the Socialist Afghan regime.

The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan began in 1978 a process of radical reforms: It moved to suppress religion, replacing religious and traditional laws with secular and Marxist ones. Men were obliged to cut their beards, women couldn't wear a burqa, and mosques were placed off limits. It carried out an ambitious land reform, waiving farmers' debts countrywide and abolishing usury - intended to release the poorer farmers from debt peonage. (...) Free emergency medical care was introduced. A mass literacy campaign was begun, 5000 unemployed university graduates being recruited as teachers. By the end of 1979, 600 new schools had been built, many of them in rural areas, and up to 500,000 adult Afghans were attending basic literacy classes (another 500,000 had enrolled but dropped out). Working hours were reduced, low-paid workers were given higher wages and trade unions were legalised for the first time in Afghanistan's history. The government also made a number of decrees on women’s rights, banning forced marriages, giving state recognition of women’s right to vote, and introducing women to political life (source: Wikipedia). Which is the kind of illustrated reforms that could have placed the backward Central Asian state in the path of modernization and freedom.

But our leaders did not want that: they prefered to finance some Saudian silverspoon known as Osama Ben Laden (or maybe better Bin Ladin, "Bin Laden" in pop culture) and make sure that Afghanistan would remain the most obscurantist country in the World (along with some Arab states). Later they decided to remove him and place another fundamentalist, Hamid Karzai, as puppet leader.

And now what? It's just crazy: we are throwing stones against our own roof, cutting the grass under our feet, feeding fascism just because some ill-measured geostrategical bet! Suicidal!

US terrorism

Just read at BBC (link 1, link 2) that a woman has spent five years in a secret US prision, apparently in Afghanistan. She has been accused in the past of links to Al Qaeda but none of those accusations stand now when she's going to face trial. After being kidnapped for five years by US forces, and probably tortured, she has been brought to trial in the USA accused only of assault while in custody.

Aafia Sidiqui could face 20 years if convicted. Nobody is going to judge the people who kidnapped her: neither the US soldiers, nor the US president who approved all those terrorist operations, nor the Pakistani or Afghan collaborators.

Where is democracy and human rights? Where is justice? We are falling through a deep dark pit of lack of ethics that can only end with the collapse of our civilization. Who sows terror, harvests horror.

How are we going to get out of this hole of shit? I have no trust in US or European leadership but neither in the leadership of other great powers. You look around and you see only a handful of Latin American leaders (and the movements behind them) with some common sense. That's all.