David Swanson's OP was locked over there after they decided it wasn't "confirmed", flaming assholes...He posts another story on his site to corroborate his own stuff, might not be long over there...


http://www.davidswanson.org/node/2385

Shooting Handcuffed Children

By davidswanson - Posted on 02 January 2010

By David Swanson

The occupied government of Afghanistan and the United Nations have both concluded that U.S.-led troops recently dragged eight sleeping children out of their beds, handcuffed some of them, and shot them all dead. While this apparently constitutes an everyday act of kindness, far less intriguing than the vicious singeing of his pubic hairs by Captain Underpants, it is at least a variation on the ordinary American technique of murdering men, women, and children by the dozens with unmanned drones.

Also this week in Afghanistan, eight CIA assassins (see if you can find a more appropriate name for them) were murdered by a suicide bombing that one of them apparently executed against the other seven. The Taliban in Pakistan claims credit and describes the mass-murder as revenge for the CIA's drone killings. And we thought unmanned drones were War Perfected because none of the right people would have to risk their lives. Oops. Perhaps Detroit-bound passengers risked theirs unwittingly.

The CIA has declared its intention to seek revenge for the suicide strike. Who knows what the assassination of sleeping students was revenge for. Perhaps the next lunatic to try blowing up something in the United States will be seeking revenge for whatever Obama does to avenge the victims (television viewers?) of the Crotch Crusader. Certainly there will be numerous more acts of violence driven by longings for revenge against the drone pilots and the shooters of students.

In a civilized world, the alternative to vengeance is justice. Often we can even set aside feelings of revenge as long as we are able to act so as to deter more crime. But at the same time that the puppet president of Afghanistan is demanding the arrest of the troops who shot the handcuffed children, the puppet government of Iraq is facing up to the refusal of the United States to seriously prosecute the Blackwater assassins of innocent Iraqis. Justice will not be permitted as an alternative to vengeance -- the mere idea is anti-American.

No one so much as blinks at the CIA's avowal of vengeance for the recent suicide attack, never mind the illegality, because the entire illegal war on Afghanistan/Pakistan was launched and is still maintained as a pretended act of revenge for the crimes of 9-11. Of course, we're not bombing the flight schools or the German and Spanish hotels. Of course , we admit that there are fewer than 100 members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Of course we openly seek massive permanent bases and an oil pipeline. Of course, Obama's decisions are all electoral calculations computed by the calculus of cowardice. Of course, we're prosecuting the Butt Bomber as a criminal, just as we always used to prosecute criminals as criminals. Of course, revenge would not be a legal justification for war even if we could persuade ourselves it was a sane one. But the war is publicly understood as revenge, the resistance by its victims is understood as revenge, the escalation is understood as revenge for the resistance, and an eye for an eye slowly makes the whole world blind.

But here's what we've forgotten: nothing is ever remotely as horrible as war. So, nothing can ever constitute a justification for launching or escalating or continuing a war. Dragging children out of bed and killing them is not a freak blip in the course of a war. It is war reduced to a comprehensible scale. It's less war, not worse war. Everything we are spending our grandchildren's unearned pay on, borrowed from China at great expense, all of it is for the murdering of human beings. And it will remain so for eternity, no matter how many times you chant "Support Duh Troops."

I know many soldiers and mercenaries had few other options, given our failure to invest in any other industries. I know they've been lied to. I know they're scared and tired. But they wouldn't be there if we brought them home. And I support a full investment in their physical and mental and economic recovery. What I don't support is anyone participating in these wars, and that includes every single American who is not putting every spare moment into demanding that Congress stop forking over the money.

It's blood money. It's payment for murder. It cannot be defended. It cannot be permitted. We must stop it now. We must shut down the place it comes from.

Not another dime. Not another dollar. Not another death. Not another thought of revenge.


Here's a London times article about the same:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece

From The Times
December 31, 2009
Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children
Afghan protesters shout slogans during a protest in Kabul

(/Ahmad Masood/Reuters)

The report into the deaths has provoked demonstrations
Jerome Starkey In Kabul

American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.

“This was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been developing information against for some time,� said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted that “the facts about what actually went down are in dispute�.

The allegations of civilian casualties led to protests in Kabul and Jalalabad, with children as young as 10 chanting “Death to America� and demanding that foreign forces should leave Afghanistan at once.

President Karzai sent a team of investigators to Narang district, in eastern Kunar province, after reports of a massacre first surfaced on Monday.

“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,� a statement on President Karzai’s website said.

Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, said that US soldiers flew to Kunar from Kabul, suggesting that they were part of a special forces unit.

“At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village,� he told The Times. “The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire.� Mr Wafa, a former governor of Helmand province, met President Karzai to discuss his findings yesterday. “I spoke to the local headmaster,� he said. “It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack.�

In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. “Seven students were in one room,� said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.�

A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their school books covered in blood,� he said.

more at link above


Swanson posted more here:

http://davidswanson.org and here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7381479

You almost have to speak in code over there anymore. I posted in a thread where the OP asked what it means to "support the troops" given all the atrocities WE'RE committing.

When I went back to check replies to my post, the entire thread had been disappeared.

I wouldn't be surprised if acceptable subjects are soon going to be limited to what's the best way to make corn casserole. As soon as anything even remotely anti-status quo gets posted, the clean-up crew comes out. Pavulon did David's thread almost single-handedly.

I hope David Swanson knows that there are a lot of us who greatly appreciate his efforts.

these sorts of things will continue. There has never been a time in the history of the USA when this sort of crime has not been common. The USA is a murdering nation; it is how it was founded; it is how it has grown; it is how it has maintained itself. There was never a time when the USA did not murder, rob, steal, rape, maim, and butcher anyone and everyone where any amount of profit was in the offing. It is what the USA does,; it is who the citizens of the USA are. If the citizens were not that way, how is it that the government continues in this traditional murderous path. I agree that the USA must be stopped, but this behavior is not an aberration, it is American...


ETA: Asking the US congress to stop the murdering is like asking Al Capone to stop the bootlegging...

He's getting a good following there and the discussions are focused. He loves to add people to his friend list, so if you (or anyone) are on Facebook just find him and send a request. He's up to 4214. DU can't keep a good man down.

Justice will be non existent...

you'll see he's well supported...

Of course the history of the US is one 300 year misbegotten killing spree, but pretty much ANY time you have military campaigns you get this shit.

When you send troops somewhere to occupy and kill and wreak utter devastation, unbridled atrocities are nearly guaranteed to follow.

Thats part of what makes it so horrific. I've heard it suggested that the Civil War was the first historic example of this kind of civilian brutality on a widespread scale, but I don't know. War was certainly hell well before that time. But at the same time, theres no doubt that war converged with mass terror in the 20th century.

Funny thing on DU. If you mention that the "Founding Fathers" were hardly untainted exemplars of "progressive" ideals you will get alot of flak. Mainly apologetics for Jefferson and lectures about how much of a populist Thomas Paine was. Other than some halfwit concept of the enduring ideal of "Democracy" a positive defense is never mounted.

The actual relationship of the "Founding Fathers" as a group to the rest of the US population (ie aristocrats) is never examined. The paper thin depth of their ideals behind simple and unadultered self-interest and the seamy origins they drew them from (ie John Locke and so on) tend to stay perched well in the background as well

The genocide they were plotting against the native population in the name of expanstion certainly never comes up. Nor the fact that the much celebrated "Revolution" was more of a hostile takeover than an acutal victory for "the people".

Meanwhile, the complete lack of even pretend democracy for those without property or women or blacks gets swept under the rug of "well, blacks and whites used the same courts!". Silly me, I forgot that de facto segregation was ok as long as it was enshrined into law.

Liberalism ends neither with a whimper or a bang but mealy-mouthed protestations defending their fucked version of morality and the system that said morality exists to ideologically prop up.

Fuck America

pretty much nuked Germany. But it took a bunch of just so contingencies to fall in line and make that fiasco possible.Things are much more efficient these days. With the possible exception of war during the Enlightenment, when great care was taken not to fuck up the means of production, it was a crap shoot at best, anything but boxcars or snake-eyes gonna fuck you up.

According to historian Jacques Barzun - percentage of casualties in wars who were civilians before 1900 - 10%, and after 1900 - 90%.

The Civil War -

Union General Ambrose Burnside intentionally shelled the town of Fredericksburg in the battle of Fredericksburg - unusual thing to do then.

Grant shelled Vicksburg.

Sherman is blamed for burning Atlanta and Columbia, but in both cases retreating Confederate troops burning supplies and ammunition at the very least contributed to the destruction.

Sherman's march wasted the countryside in Georgia and burned plantation mansions in South Carolina.

Toward the end of the war, Sheridan wasted the Shenandoah valley, burning everything, on orders from Grant.

But then I also recall reading that Sherman was originally decommisioned because he was considered insane and/or too bloodthirsty.

I can't see that Fredericksburg would be a model for anything Sherman did and have never heard that before. Grant's march on Vicksburg is what he said gave him the idea for the march through Georgia.

What was learned from Fredericksburg was the futility of frontal assaults on entrenched positions. As Sherman moved South from Chattanooga, he executed a series of flanking movements rather than attacking the Confederates head on.

Sherman said in the first few months of the war that it would take 500,000 troops and 4 years to put down the rebellion. Everyone else thought it would be over quickly with far less troops. That was the evidence for his "insanity" and he was relieved of command.

before. Stories of civilians - women and children - shut-up in barns or other big buildings and burned to death, that sort of thing. But it is seldom that a state appears to be founded for the distinct purpose of genocide (maybe that is where American exceptionalism comes from, eh?)...

the expansion of capital markets. Granted its about a 90% correspondence with genocide.

One thing I've wondered is this: since WWII capital movement has been highly restricted and largely controlled by the US through the IMF and the World Bank. That allowed the US to, in a sense, act in the interest of "global" capital since it basically WAS global capital. But depending on how you slice it, that either already has changed or is in the process of rapidly ceasing to be true.

It seems to me the implications are profound

My brother is a Civil War afficiando of sorts so I am going by what he has told me, but my memory of it is (obviously) a bit hazy.

That's pretty fucking good.

I'm stealin' some o' that shit. I'll tell 'em KOBH sent me.

Right on bro'

!

Early in the war the two armies were meeting out in the open and slugging it out face to face as had always been done. The Confederates perfected entrenched defensive positions (the Union was obliged to go on the offensive, since a "tie" would mean that the Confederates would win.) As the war went on and weapons improved (rate of fire, range and accuracy) headlong charges became suicidal. That led to trench warfare in Europe. Germany used "blitzkrieg" tactics with mechanized and highly mobile forces to punch through entrenched positions, wreak havoc behind enemy lines and overwhelm the British and French. The Red Army solved that challenge, first by retreating and drawing the Germans in farther and farther from their supply bases rather than trying to hold entrenched positions, and then by counter-attacking with massive pincer movements, encircling the German troops and keeping on the move.

From the beginning of the Civil War, Confederate cavalry was raiding Union supply depots far behind Union lines. Initially this was to make up for Confederate shortages of supplies, to capture food and weapons, but soon destroying rather than taking enemy supplies and attacking transportation became an important part of the raids. Sherman, and then later Grant, intentionally went after supplies, manufacturing and transportation to cripple the ability of the Confederates to sustain the war, and that idea led to the "total war" ideas in the next century.

Other innovations from the Civil War (new or first used extensively): ironclad battleships, rifled barrels, gun sights, movement of troops by rail, aerial observation (by balloon), submarines, repeating weapons, tanks (mule powered and not very effective), the use of telegraph for orders and reports. Prussian military attache von Moltke watched it all and took careful notes.

Intentional attacks on civilian populations were rare in the Civil War, and most fighting was out in the field away from towns and cities.

Grant, with Sherman as his subordinate, couldn't get at Vicksburg and the guns of Vicksburg prevented Union boats from going up and down the Mississippi and also provided a point for bringing supplies to the Confederate troops from Texas and Arkansas. To get at Vicksburg, Grant abandoned his supply lines, hoping to move fast and live off the land. That was the lesson that Sherman says he learned from the campaign and that he applied in the march through Georgia. However, Grant was going after Pemberton's army around Vicksburg and only laid siege to the town and shelled it when Pemberton withdrew into the town, and did not try to intentionally wreck the manufacturing, transportation and farming infrastructure. When Sherman's troops reached Jackson in their pursuit of the Confederates, they burned and destroyed factories and that may have led Sherman to do that more systematically later in Georgia.

troops and 4 years, rather morbid curiosity here, how close was he? I know close years wise, but the troop number, seems a little low? horrifically...

At least 618,000 died in the Civil War and maybe as many as 700,000.

1,556,678 men fought for the Union army (population of the North at the beginning of the war was about 22 million.) 650,000 were casualties - battle deaths and wounds and death from disease.

1,082,119 men fought for the Confederacy (white population of the South at the beginning of the war was about 5 million.) There were an estimated 360,000 casualties.

Civil War deaths - 618,000 - 700,000

WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Mexican War, Revolutionary War, Spanish-American War, War of 1812 combined deaths - 650,000. (405,000 of those in WWII.)

Length of the war:

April 12th, 1861 - Attack on Fort Sumter
April 9th, 1865 - Lee's surrender at Appomattox

man, these days the deaths ain't so high, but the casualties gotta be a lot worse...ptsd taking the prize...

:)

50 million died in WWII, mostly civilians.

PTSD in both the Civil War and WWI was horrendous - wasn't called that of course.

Improved med evac and trauma response and treatment has meant more survive with horrendous injuries now then was true in the Civil War.

Sherman was teaching in Louisiana when the war broke out. He knew the mood, and warned that it would be much harder to stop the Confederacy than people imagined. Most thought it would last 30 days and be over with one grand battle. In the North the people thought the Southerners were bluffing. In the South the people thought the Yankees had no stomach for a fight.

Korean, Vietnamese, Iraq, Cambodia, and so on deaths? Not to mention Africa or anything before WWII. Its got to be so skyhigh as to be unbelievable.

who cuts a pretty convincing Mr Nice Guy himself ;)

You mean killed by US military action, rather than merely US personnel killed in action? Easy to find the latter - called "noble sacrifice" - not so easy to find the former = called "regrettable" and commonly ten to a thousand times higher than the latter.

Are US Forces Executing Kids in Afghanistan? Americans Don't Even Know to Ask

The Taliban suicide attack that killed a group of CIA agents in Afghanistan on a base that was directing US drone aircraft used to attack Taliban leaders was big news in the US over the past week, with the airwaves and front pages filled with sympathetic stories referring to the fact that the female station chief, who was among those killed, was the “mother of three children.”

But the apparent mass murder of Afghan school children, including one as young as 11 years old, by US-led forces (most likely either special forces or mercenary contractors working for the Pentagon or the CIA), was pretty much blacked out in the American media. Especially blacked out was word from UN investigators that the students had not just been killed but executed, many of them after having first been rousted from their bedroom and handcuffed.

Here is the excellent report on the incident that ran in the Times of London (like Fox News, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication) on Dec. 31:


Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children

By Jerome Starkey in Kabul

American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.

“This was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been developing information against for some time,” said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted that “the facts about what actually went down are in dispute”.

The article goes on to say:

In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster [of the local school] said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. “Seven students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their school books covered in blood,” he said.

The investigation found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to 17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said. He said that six of the students were at high school and two were at primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews.

Compare this article to the one mention of the incident which appeared in the New York Times, one of the few American news outlets to even mention the incident. The Times, on Dec. 28, focusing entirely on the difficulty civilian killings cause for the US war effort, and not on the allegation of a serious war crime having been committed, wrote:

Attack Puts Afghan Leader and NATO at Odds

By Alissa J. Rubin and Abdul Waheed Wafa

KABUL, Afghanistan — The killing of at least nine men in a remote valley of eastern Afghanistan by a joint operation of Afghan and American forces put President Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at odds on Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or Taliban insurgents.

In a statement e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai condemned the weekend attack and said the dead had been civilians, eight of them schoolboys. He called for an investigation.

Local officials, including the governor and members of Parliament from Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office was still investigating the killings and that outstanding questions remained, including why the eight young men had been in the same house at the time.

“There are still questions to be answered, like why these students were together and what they were doing on that night,” Mr. Ziayee said.

A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s.

According to the NATO official, nine men were killed. “These were people who had a well-established network, they were I.E.D. smugglers and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition forces in those areas,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

“When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.’s,” the official added.

While the article in the New York Times eventually mentions the allegation that the victims were children, not “men,” it nonetheless begins with the unchallenged assertion in the lead that they were “men.” There is no mention of the equally serious allegation that the victims had been handcuffed before being executed, and the story leaves the impression, made by NATO sources, that they were armed and had died fighting. There is no indication in the Times story that the reporters made any effort, as the more enterprising and skeptical London Times reporter did, to get local, non-official, sources of information. Moreover, the information claiming that the victims had been making bombs was attributed by Rubin and Wafa, with no objections from their editors in New York, to an anonymous NATO source, though there was no legitimate reason for the anonymity (“because of the delicacy of the situation” was the lame excuse offered)--indeed the use of an anonymous source here would appear to violate the Times’ own standards.

It’s not that in American newsrooms there was no knowledge that a major war crime may have been committed. Nearly all American news organizations receive the AP newswire. Here is the AP report on the killings, which ran under the headline “UN says killed Afghans were students”:

The United Nations says a raid last weekend by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students.

The Afghan government says that all 10 people killed in a village in Kunar province were civilians. NATO says there is no evidence to substantiate the claim and has requested a joint investigation.

UN special representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement Thursday that preliminary investigation shows there were insurgents in the area at the time of the attack. But he adds that eight of those killed were students in local schools.

Once again, the American media are falling down shamefully in providing honest reporting on a war, making it difficult for the American people to make informed judgements about what is being done in their name.

Let’s be clear here. If the charges are correct, that American forces, or American-led forces, are handcuffing their victims and then executing them, then they are committing egregious war crimes. If they are killing children, they are committing equally egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific. This incident, if true, would actually be worse than the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during the Vietnam War. In that case, we had ordinary soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of several low-ranking officers in the heat of an operation, shooting and killing women, children and babies. But in this case we appear to have seasoned special forces troops actually directing the taking captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room, and spraying them with bullets, execution style.

Given the history of the commanding general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who is known to have run a massive death squad operation in Iraq before being named to his current post by President Obama, and who is known to have called for the same kind of tactics in Afghanistan, it should not be surprising that the US would now be committing atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is going to be conducted, though, the US media should be making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.

On January 1, the London Times’ Starkey, in Afghanistan, followed up with a second story, reporting that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is calling for the US to hand over the people who killed the students. He also quoted a “NATO source” as saying that the “foreigners involved” in the incident were “non-military, suggesting that they were part of a secret paramilitary unit based in the capital” of Kabul. Starkey also quotes a “Western official” as saying: “There’s no doubt that there were insurgents there, and there may well have been an insurgent leader in the house, but that doesn’t justify executing eight children who were all enrolled in local schools.”

Good enterprise reporting by the London Times and its Kabul-based correspondent. Silence on these developments in the US media.

Meanwhile, it has been a week now since the New York Times reporters Rubin and Wafa made their first flawed and embarrassingly one-sided report on the incident, and there has been not a word since then about it in the paper. Are Rubin and Wafa or other Times reporters on the story? Will there be a follow-up?

On the evidence of past coverage of these US wars and their ongoing atrocities by the Times and by other major US corporate media news organizations, don’t bet on it. You’ll do better looking to the foreign media for real information about a story like this.

By the way, given that we’re talking the allegation of a serious war crime here, it is important to note that, under the Geneva Conventions, it is a legal requirement that the US military chain of command immediately initiate an official investigation to determine whether such a crime has occurred, and if so, to establish who was responsible and bring them to justice. One would hope that the commander in chief, President Obama, would order such an inquiry.

Any effort to prevent such an inquiry, or to cover up a war crime, would be a war crime in itself. We just had one administration that did a lot of that. We don’t need another one.

Editorial Comment:

As a teenager, I spent a year going to school in Darmstadt, in what was then West Germany. I used to have many discussions with German friends about how Germans could have allowed Nazism to happen, and how anyone could have allowed the kinds of atrocities which we Americans learned that German soldiers had committed during the war--the destroying of entire towns when one partisan fired on a German soldier, the killing of prisoners of war, etc. Of course we know now that Americans too committed equally heinous war crimes, culminating in the use of the two atomic bombs against civilian targets, not to mention the firebombing of Darmstadt itself by the Brits. But the larger point at the time was, how could Germans, who are decent people for the most part, have allowed the horror of Nazism to happen?

Now we are confronted yet again with an example of American military forces (and it matters not a whit whether they are uniformed regular soldiers or paid mercenaries who executed those Afghan kids) apparently committing exactly the type of atrocity for which the German Waffen SS was known. And whether or not the charges are true, there is enough evidence at this point, with the special UN representative in Afghanistan saying it happened, for us to believe it probably did happen. Yet there has not been one editorial in the US media calling for an open investigation into this alleged atrocity. No Americans are marching in the street demanding answers. Obama, whose daughter Malia is 11--the same age as the youngest of the slain boys--has not said a word, although Afghan students are demonstrating en masse, and burning him in effigy because of this latest outrage.

So what makes us Americans any better than the Germans of 1940? In a way, we are really worse. It would have taken considerable courage, as my German friends have pointed out, to take a stand against German atrocities in 1940, when such a stand could mean arrest, imprisonment and even execution, even execution of one's family. No such risks are faced by Americans who take a stand against American atrocities. Here one faces, at most, social ostracism or a minor citation for arrest at a protest.

We are, as a nation, only as good as our worst behavior and our worst impulses, and can be judged by how we respond to them when they are manifested in our name. And right now, Americans aren't looking very good at all.

PS: Kudos to David Swanson of the website www.afterdowningstreet.org, for bringing attention to this story.

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/440

hope this update was shared elsewhere...thanks for sharing it here...

Where'd that unappreciated prophetess get to?? I offer myself as sock puppet....just have to make an illegible rant once in a while...dang, I'm disappointed...

put her down in a hurry.

Onwards...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7404307

of them crosschecking usernames vs previously banned users and also crosschecking the emails used to register in addition to the IP. They're thorough.

could one conceivably register from a public library with a different email, and still be able to use a computer with a banned IP?

if they banned the specific IP of one computer mabye. But they probably know that and therefore ban a whole range of IPs which means you wouldn't be able to post from any of the computers in the library.

But thats all speculative on my part and I don't think they IP ban on the first offense. So a different email might be enough so long as it isn't terribly similar to the previous email (they seem to be really vigilant on that front)

Google for public proxies. There are many such services.

I'm wondering for others, but, who knows...happens to the best of us...(maybe that's what keeps me unbanned...)

The IP is associated with a location on the network, not the machine.

Since I changed from Verizon to the local cable company, do I have a different IP?