Thursday, November 6, 2008

THE DAY AFTER TheStar: "There are accusations that U.S. airstrikes struck a wedding party in southern Afghanistan Monday - killing scores of women and children and sending the bride and groom to hospital. The alleged airstrikes in the Shah Wali Kot district come only three months after the Afghan government found that a U.S. operation had killed some 90 civilians in western Afghanistan. A U.S. report said 33 civilians died in that attack." PrisonPlanet: "Northcom has announced that two more U.S. military units will be assigned for domestic homeland security missions, bringing the total number of combat ready service members operating inside the U.S. to around 4,700, as fears grow about the increasing militarization of law enforcement. The announcement follows the controversy surrounding a September 8 Army Times report (revised on September 30), which revealed that the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, fresh from combat duties in Iraq, would be operating inside America for tasks including 'civil unrest and crowd control', a detail that was later denied by Northcom despite the concession that forces would be armed with both non-lethal and lethal weapons as well as having access to tanks." WSWS: "In a remarkable speech on nuclear policy delivered October 28 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), US Defense Secretary Robert Gates painted a dire portrait of international affairs and argued that Washington should expand the doctrine of pre-emptive war formulated by the Bush administration to include possible nuclear strikes. It is widely rumored that, in the likely event that Democrat Barack Obama wins next week's US presidential election, Obama will keep Gates as defense secretary. Gates' speech, given in the waning days of the Bush presidency, has the character of a policy declaration of the next US administration. According to Gates, the US must be able to credibly threaten a nuclear holocaust against any state that 'challenges' the US in the nuclear arena or with other 'weapons of mass destruction'. By his own words, such a challenge does not require a nation to threaten to attack the US. It does not even require that a nation possess nuclear weapons or other WMD. It is enough for a nation merely to 'seek' such weapons for it to become a potential target for a preemptive 'overwhelming, catastrophic response' from the United States. Gates is filling out the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war - announced in advance of the unprovoked invasion of Iraq based on lies about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - with the proviso that a US first-strike can involve the large-scale use of nuclear weapons." TheNation: "A parallel new Bush doctrine is emerging, in the last days of the soon-to-be-ancien regime, and it needs to be strangled in its crib. Like the original Bush doctrine - the one that Sarah Palin couldn't name, which called for preventive military action against emerging threats - this one also casts international law aside by insisting that the United States has an inherent right to cross international borders in 'hot pursuit' of anyone it doesn't like. Let's take Pakistan first. Though a nominal ally, Pakistan has been the subject of at least nineteen aerial attacks by CIA-controlled drone aircraft, killing scores of Pakistanis and some Afghans in tribal areas controlled by pro-Taliban forces. The U.S. raid into Syria on October 26 similarly trampled on Syria's sovereignty without so much as a fare-thee-well. On October 24, I went to hear Mike Vickers, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, speaking at the Washington Institiute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli thinktank in Washington. He spoke with pride about the vast and growing presence of these commando forces within the U.S. military, noting that their budget has doubled under the Bush administration and that, by the end of the decade, their will more than 60,000 U.S. forces in this shadowy effort. Here are some excerpts of Vickers' remarks: 'If you look at the operational core of our Special Operations Forces, and focus on the ground operators, there are some 15,000 or so of those - give or take how you count them - these range from our Army Special Forces or our Green Berets, our Rangers, our Seals, some classified units we have, and we recently added a Marine Corps Special Operations Command to this arsenal as well. In addition to adding the Marine component, each of these elements since 2006 and out to about 2012 or 2013 has been increasing their capacity as well as their capabilities, but their capacity by a third. This is the largest growth in Special Operations Force history. By the time we're done with that, there will be some things, some gaps we need to fix undoubtedly, but we will have the elements in place for what we believe is the Special Operations component of the global war on terrorism. On any given day that we wake up, our Special Operations Forces are in some sixty countries around the world.' 11:26:08 AM

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