In a statement made public this weekend, the president argued that the strong International Security Assistance will transfer full responsibility in the provincial capitals of Parwan, Kapisa and Uruzgan now in charged to protect the 75 percent of the population of the country.

The transfer began on July 2011 and the two first phases led the handing over to the Afghan forces of the 50 percent control of the Afghan population.

However, new tensions emerged with the murder of the Taliban negotiator, Arsala Rahmani, and at least two soldier from the International Force Security Assistance in an attack with explosives carried out on the east of Afghanistan, the authorities reported.

There is not one shred of ethics, and not even of politics, in his attempt to justify his announced decision to veto any resolution to recognize Palestine as an independent State and member of the United Nations. Even politicians, who in no way share socialist philosophy and lead parties that were closely allied with Augusto Pinochet, are proclaiming Palestine’s right to be a member of the UN.

Barack Obama’s words on the principal matter that is being debated today in the General Assembly of that organization can only be applauded by NATO cannon, rockets and bombers.

The remainder of his speech are empty phrases, lacking any moral authority and meaning. Let us observe, for example, how these words were devoid of ideas when in the world, starved and pillaged by the transnationals and the consumerism of developed capitalist countries, Obama announces:

“To stop disease that spreads across borders, we must strengthen our system of public health. We will continue the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. We will focus on the health of mothers and of children. And we must come together to prevent, and detect, and fight every kind of biological danger — whether it’s a pandemic like H1N1, or a terrorist threat, or a […] disease.”

“We must not put off action that climate change demands. We have to tap the power of science to save those resources that are scarce. And together, we must continue our work to build on the progress made in Copenhagen and Cancun, so that all the major economies here today follow through on the commitments that were made. Together, we must work to transform the energy that powers our economies, and support others as they move down that path. That is what our commitment to the next generation demands. And to make sure our societies reach their potential, we must allow our citizens to reach theirs”

Everyone knows that the United States was not a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and that it has sabotaged all efforts to preserve humankind from the terrible consequences of climate change, in spite of being the country which consumes a considerable and disproportionate part of fuel and world resources.

Let us put on the record the idyllic words with which he would like to cajole the men of State meeting there:

“I know there’s no straight line to that progress, no single path to success. We come from different cultures, and carry with us different histories. But let us never forget that even as we gather here as heads of different governments, we represent citizens who share the same basic aspirations — to live with dignity and freedom; to get an education and pursue opportunity; to love our families, and love and worship our God; to live in the kind of peace that makes life worth living. It is the nature of our imperfect world that we are forced to learn these lessons over and over again.”

“…because those who came before us believed that peace is preferable to war, and freedom is preferable to suppression, and prosperity is preferable to poverty. That’s the message that comes not from capitals, but from citizens, from our people. And when the cornerstone of this very building was put in place, President Truman came here to New York and said, “The United Nations is essentially an expression of the moral nature of man’s aspirations.” As we live in a world that is changing at a breathtaking pace, that’s a lesson that we must never forget. Peace is hard, but we know that it is possible. So, together, let us be resolved to see that it is defined by our hopes and not by our fears. Together, let us make peace, but a peace, most importantly, that will last.”

“Thank you very much.”

Listening to them right up to the end deserves something more than gratitude; it deserves a prize.

As I have already stated, early in the afternoon, Evo Morales Ayma, president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, took to the podium; he swiftly went into the essential topics.

“…there is a clear difference in the culture of life as opposed to the culture of death; there is a clear difference in truth as opposed to falsehood, a profound difference between peace and war.”

“…I think that it will be difficult to understand each other with economic policies that concentrate capital in just a few hands. Information shows us that 1% of the world population concentrates 50% of the wealth. If such profound differences exist, how can poverty be resolved? And if we do not abolish poverty, how can a long-lasting peace be guaranteed?”

“As a child, I remember perfectly well that earlier, whenever there was a rebellion by the people against a capitalist system, against the economic models of the permanent pillage of our natural resources, the labour union leaders, the left-leaning political leaders, were accused of being communists in order to arrest them; the social forces were under military intervention: confinement, exile, massacres, persecution, imprisonment, accusations of being communist, socialist, Maoist, Marxist-Leninist. I think this has now stopped; now they no longer accuse us of being Marxist-Leninist, now they have other instruments such as drug-trafficking and terrorism …”

“…they prepare interventions when their presidents, when their governments, when their peoples are not pro-capitalist or pro-imperialist.”

“…we speak of long-lasting peace. How can there be long-lasting peace with American military bases? How can there be long-lasting peace with military interventions?”

“What is the use of this UN when a group of countries decide on interventions, on massacres?”

“If we were to want this organization, the United Nations, to have the authority to cause resolutions to be respected, then we have to start thinking about re-founding the United Nations …”

“Every year, at the United Nations decisions are made—by almost one hundred percent of the nations, except the US and Israel— to unblock, to end the economic embargo on Cuba. And who causes that to be respected? Of course, the Security Council is never going to cause that UN resolution to be respected […] I cannot understand how in an organization made up of all the countries in the world, their resolutions are not respected. What is the UN?”

“I would like to tell you that Bolivia is not turning its back on the recognition of Palestine in the United Nations. Our position is that Bolivia welcomes Palestine to the United Nations.”

“You know, dear listeners, that I come from the Indigenous Peasant Movement, and when our families talk about a company, we think that the company has a lot of money, it deals with a lot of money, that they are millionaires, and they couldn’t understand how a company asks a State to loan them money for corresponding investment.

“Therefore I say that these international financial bodies are the ones doing business through the private companies; but who has to pay for that? It is exactly the peoples, the States.”

“…Bolivia has a historic case against Chile for the return to the sea, with sovereignty to the Pacific Ocean, with sovereignty. Therefore, Bolivia has made the decision to turn to international courts in order to sue for a useful sovereign exit to the Pacific Ocean.

“The UN General Assembly Resolution 37/10 of November 15, 1982, establishes that ‘turning to an International Court of Justice to resolve litigation between States should not be considered a non-friendly act.’

“Bolivia is protected by the right and the reason of turning to an International Court because having been cut off is the product of an unfair war, an invasion. Suing for a solution on the international stage, represents for Bolivia reparation of a historical injustice.

“Bolivia is a pacifist State that favours dialogue with neighbouring countries, and therefore it keeps the channels of bilateral negotiation with Chile open, without that meaning a renunciation of its right to turn to an International Court …”

“Peoples are not responsible for cutting off Bolivia from the coast; the causes are the oligarchies, the transnationals, who took over the natural resources as they always do.

“The 1904 Treaty brought neither peace nor friendship; it resulted in the fact that for more than a century Bolivia had no access to a sovereign port.”

“…in the region of the Americas, another movement of Latin American and Caribbean countries is being born, I should call it a new OAS without the US, to free ourselves from certain impositions, fortunately, with the bit of experience we have in UNASUR. […] we no longer need, whenever a conflict between countries arises […] for them to come down from the north and from the outside to establish order.”

“I would also like to take this opportunity on a central issue: the fight against drug trafficking. The fight against drug trafficking is being used by US imperialism for clearly political aims. In Bolivia, the United States’ DEA did not fight against drug-trafficking; it controlled drug trafficking for political purposes. If there was some trade union leader, or some anti-imperialist political leader, that’s what the DEA was for: to involve them. Many leaders, many of us politicians, saved ourselves from those dirty imperialist jobs to involve us in drug trafficking. They are still trying to do that, until the present.”

“In past weeks some of the media from the United States was saying that the presidential plane was detained in the US with traces of cocaine. What a lie! They attempt to confuse the population; they try to create a dirty campaign against the government, even against the State. Nevertheless, what does the US do? It decertifies Bolivia and Venezuela. What moral authority does the US have to certify or decertify countries in South or Latin America, when the United States is the number one consumer of drugs in the world, when the United States is one of the world marihuana producers, the number one producer of marihuana in the world […] With what authority can it certify or decertify? It is another way of frightening or intimidating countries, teaching them a lesson. However Bolivia, with great responsibility, goes on fighting against drug trafficking.

“In the same report from the United States, I mean, from the US State Department, a net decrease in the production of coca growing is acknowledged; that has improved the indictment.

“But where is the market? The market is the origin of drug trafficking and the market is here. And who decertifies the US because the market hasn’t dried up?

“This morning, President Calderón of Mexico was saying that the drug market keeps on growing and why there are no responsibilities to eradicate the market […] Let’s wage the war under a shared co-responsibility […] In Bolivia we are not afraid and we must terminate the banking secret if we want to wage frontal war against drug trafficking.”

“…One of the crisis, besides the crisis of capitalism, is the food crisis. […] we have a little experience in Bolivia: we give loans to rice, corn, wheat and soy growers, with zero percent interest, and they can even pay back their debt with their products; we are talking about food; or soft loans to encourage production. Nevertheless, international banks never take into account the small producers, they never take into account the associations, cooperatives, who can really contribute well if given the opportunity. […] We must put an end to competitive business.

“In a competition, who wins? The most powerful, the one having the most advantages, always the transnationals. And what about the small producers? And what about that family that wants to get ahead with their own efforts? […] With competition policy we are surely never going to resolve the issue of poverty.

“But finally, to conclude this speech I would like to tell you that the crisis of capitalism can no longer be paid […] The economic crisis of capitalism is not just critical, it is structural. And what do the capitalist or imperialist countries do? They look for any excuse to intervene in a country and to take over their natural resources.

“This morning the president of the United States was saying that now Iraq was liberated, they are going to govern themselves. The Iraqis may govern themselves, but in whose hands has Iraqi oil now fallen?

“They said that autocracy has ended in Libya, that now they have a democracy; it may be a democracy, but in whose hands will Libyan oil now be? […] the bombing cannot be blamed on Gaddafi, the fault of some rebels, but it is because of the search for Libyan oil.”

“…Therefore, its crisis, the crisis of capitalism, they want to get over it, they want to fix it by taking over our natural resources, on the basis of our oil, our gas, our natural resources.

“…we have a huge responsibility: to defend the rights of Mother Earth.”

“…the best way of defending human rights is now to defend the rights of Mother Earth […] herein we have our huge responsibility to pass the rights of Mother Earth. Just 60 years ago they passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Just 60 years ago they realized in the UN that the human being has rights. After political rights, economic rights, the rights of the indigenous peoples, now we have the huge responsibility of knowing how to defend the rights of Mother Earth.

“We are also convinced that the infinite growth of the planet is unsustainable and impossible, the limit for growth is the degenerative capacity of the Earth’s ecosystems […] we make a call for […] a new decalogue of social vindications: in financial systems, over natural resources, over basic services, over production, over dignity and sovereignty, and on this basis to re-found the United Nations so that the United Nations may be the supreme authority for solving the problems of peace, poverty and the dignity and sovereignty of the peoples of the world.”

“We hope that this experience as President can be of some good for all of us, just as I am learning from many of you in order to go on working for the equality and dignity of the Bolivian people.

“Thank you very much.”

Following Evo Morales’ convincing concepts, President Mahmud Abbas of the National Palestinian Authority, who took to the podium two days later, laid out the dramatic suffering of the inhabitants of Palestine: “…the crass historical injustice perpetrated on our people, therefore it was agreed to set up the State of Palestine on just 22% of Palestine’s territory and, above all, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967. Taking that historic step, applauded by the States of the world, allowed for exceeding acquiescence in order to reach a historical compromise, that would permit peace to be achieved in the land of peace.”

“[…] Our people shall continue with their peaceful popular resistance to the Israeli occupation, their settlements and their policy of apartheid, as well as the building of the wall of racist annexation […] armed with dreams, courage, hope and slogans in the face of tanks, tear gas, bulldozers and bullets.”

“…we would like to extend our hand to the government and people of Israel for peace to be imposed, and I say to you: let us build together, in an urgent manner, a future for our children where they may enjoy freedom, security and prosperity. […] Let us build relationships of cooperation that are based on the parity, equality and friendship between two neighbour States, Palestine and Israel, instead of policies of occupation, settlements, war and the elimination of the other side.”

Almost half a century has gone by since that brutal occupation promoted and supported by the United States. However, it is barely a day since the wall was erected, monstrous mechanical machinery is destroying Palestinian homes and some young person, and even a Palestinian teenager, is wounded or killed.

What profound truths Evo’s words hold!

Fidel Castro Ruz
September 26, 2011
10:32 p.m.

The yearly event demands singular effort from those taking on the greatest of political responsibilities in many countries. For them, it constitutes a tough test; for the fans of that art, and there are many since it vitally affects everybody, it is difficult to remove oneself from the temptation of observing the interminable but educational show.

In the first place, there are infinite thorny subjects and conflicts of interests. For a great number of the participants it is necessary to take positions on events that constitute flagrant violations of principles. For example, what position to take on the NATO genocide in Libya? Would anybody like to leave proof that under their leadership the government of their country supported the monstrous crime being committed by the US and their NATO allies, whose sophisticated fighter planes, manned or unmanned, undertook more than twenty thousand attack missions on a small Third World State that has barely six million inhabitants, alleging the same reasons that were used yesterday to attack and invade Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan and which today threaten to do likewise in Syria or some other country in the world?

Was it not precisely the government of the State hosting the UN that ordered the butchery in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the mercenary attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, the invasion of Santo Domingo, the “Dirty War” in Nicaragua, the occupation of Grenada and Panama by US military forces and the massacre of Panamanians in El Chorrillo? Who promoted the military coups and genocides in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay that cost tens of thousands of deaths and disappeared? I am not speaking about things that happened 500 years ago, when the Spanish were starting the genocide in the Americas, or 200 years ago when Yankees exterminated native peoples in the United States or enslaved Africans, despite the fact that “all men are born free and equal” as the Philadelphia Declaration of Independence states. I am speaking of events that occurred in the last few decades and which are happening today.

These events have to be remembered and repeated whenever an occurrence having the importance and prominence of the meeting taking place at the United Nations where the political integrity and ethics of governments are being put to the test.

Many of these represent small and poor countries needing support and international cooperation, technology, markets and loans that the developed capitalist powers have handled at their whim.

Despite the unabashed monopoly of the mass media and the fascist methods of the United States and their allies to confuse and dupe world opinion, resistance of the peoples grows, and that can be seen in the discussions that are being produced in the United Nations.

Quite a few Third World leaders, despite the obstacles and contradictions indicated, have laid out their ideas with courage. The very voices emanating from the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean no longer bear the lackey and scandalous accent of the OAS that characterized the statements of Heads of State in past decades. Two of them have addressed that forum; both of them, Bolivarian President Hugo Chávez, a mixture of the races that make up the peoples of Venezuela and Evo Morales, pure descendent of age-old native roots, poured out their concepts at that meeting, one of them via a message and the other speaking live, in response to the speech given by the Yankee president.

Telesur broadcast the three statements. Thanks to that, from the evening of Tuesday the 20th, we were able to learn of President Chavez’ message that was thoroughly read out by Walter Martínez on his program, Dossier. Obama gave his speech on Wednesday morning as the Head of State of the UN host country, and Evo gave his speech early that same afternoon. For the sake of brevity, I shall take essential paragraphs of both texts.

Chávez was unable to personally attend the UN Summit, after 12 years of struggle, without one single day’s rest that put his life at risk and affected his health and who today is struggling in self-sacrifice for his full recovery. Nevertheless it was difficult for his courageous message to not deal with the most crucial topic at the historic meeting. I transcribe it, almost in its entirety:

“I address these words to the UN General Assembly […] to ratify, on this day and in this setting, Venezuela’s full support of the recognition of the Palestinian State: of Palestine’s right to become a free, sovereign and independent state. This represents an act of historic justice towards a people who carry with them, from time immemorial, all the pain and suffering of the world.

“The great French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, […] wrote with the full weight of the truth: The Palestinian cause is first and foremost the set of injustices that these people have suffered and continue to suffer. And I dare add that the Palestinian cause also represents a constant and unwavering will to resist, already written in the historic memory of the human condition […] Mahmoud Darwish, the infinite voice of the longed-for Palestine, with heartfelt conscience speaks about this love: “We don’t need memories/ because we carry within us Mount Carmelo/ and in our eyelids is the herb of Galilee./ Don’t say: If only we could flow to my country like a river!/ Don’t say that!/ Because we are in the flesh of our country/ and our country is in our flesh.’

“Against those who falsely assert that what has happened to the Palestinian people is not genocide, Deleuze himself states with unfaltering lucidity: From beginning to end, it involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed. It represents the very essence of genocide: to decree that a people do not exist; to deny them the right to existence.

“…conflict resolution in the Middle East must, necessarily, bring justice to the Palestinian people; this is the only path to peace.

“It is upsetting and painful that the same people who suffered one of the worst examples of genocide in history have become the executioners of the Palestinian people: it is upsetting and painful that the heritage of the Holocaust be the Nakba. And it is truly disturbing that Zionism continues to use the charge of anti-Semitism as blackmail against those who oppose their violations and crimes. Israel has, blatantly and despicably, used and continues to use the memory of the victims. And they do so to act with complete impunity against Palestine. It’s worth mentioning that anti-Semitism is a Western, European, scourge in which the Arabs do not participate. Furthermore, let’s not forget that it is the Semite Palestine people who suffer from the ethnic cleansing practiced by the Israeli colonialist State..”

“…It is one thing to denounce anti-Semitism, and an entirely different thing to passively accept that Zionistic barbarism enforces an apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. From an ethical standpoint those who denounce the first, must condemn the second.”

“…Zionism, as a world vision, is absolutely racist. Irrefutable proof of this can be seen in these words written with terrifying cynicism by Golda Meir: How are we to return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as people think, that there existed a people called Palestinians, who considered themselves as Palestinians, and that we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.’”

“Read and reread the document historically known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917: the British Government assumed the legal authority to promise a national home in Palestine to the Jewish people, deliberately ignoring the presence and wishes of its inhabitants. It should be added that Christians and Muslims lived in peace for centuries in the Holy Land up until the time when Zionism began to claim it as its complete and exclusive property.”

“By the end of World War II, the Palestinian people’s tragedy worsened, with their expulsion from their territory and, at the same time, from history. In 1947, the despicable and illegal UN resolution 181 recommends dividing Palestine into a Jewish State, an Arab State, and an area under international control (Jerusalem and Belem). […] , 56 percent of the territory was granted to Zionism to establish its State. In fact, this resolution violated international law and blatantly ignored the will of the vast Arab majority: the right to self-determination of the people became a dead letter.”

“…contrary to what Israel and the United States are trying to make the world believe through transnational media outlets, what happened and continues to happen in Palestine —using Said’s words— is not a religious conflict, but a political conflict, with a colonial and imperialist stamp. It did not begin in the Middle East, but rather in Europe.

“What was and continues to be at the heart of the conflict?: debate and discussion has prioritized Israel’s security while ignoring Palestine’s. This is corroborated by recent events; a good example is the latest act of genocide set off by Israel during its Operation Molten Lead in Gaza.

“Palestine’s security cannot be reduced to the simple acknowledgement of a limited self-government and self-policing in its “enclaves” along the west bank of the Jordan and in the Gaza Strip. This ignores the creation of the Palestinian State, in the borders set prior to 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital; and the rights of its citizens and their self-determination as a people. This further disregards the compensation and subsequent return to the Homeland of 50 percent of the Palestinian people who are scattered all over the world, as established by resolution 194.

“It’s unbelievable that a country (Israel) that owes its existence to a general assembly resolution could be so disdainful of the resolutions that emanate from the UN, said Father Miguel D’Escoto when pleading for the end of the massacre against the people of Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.

“It is impossible to ignore the crisis in the United Nations. In 2005, before this very same General Assembly, we argued that the United Nations model had become exhausted. The fact that the debate on the Palestinian issue has been delayed and is being openly sabotaged reconfirms this.

“For several days, Washington has been stating that, at the Security Council, it will veto what will be a majority resolution of the General Assembly: the recognition of Palestine as a full member of the UN. In the Statement of Recognition of the Palestinian State, Venezuela, together with the sister Nations that make up the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), have denounced that such a just aspiration could be blocked by this means. As we know, the empire, in this and other instances, is trying to impose its double standard on the world stage: Yankee double standards are violating international law in Libya, while allowing Israel to do whatever it pleases, thus becoming the main accomplice of the Palestinian genocide being carried out by the hands of Zionist barbarity. Edward Said touched a nerve when he wrote that: Israeli interests in the United States have made the US’ Middle East policy Israeli-centric.’”

“I would like to conclude with the voice of Mahmoud Darwish in his memorable poem On This Earth: We have on this earth what makes life worth living: On this earth, the lady of earth, Mother of all beginnings/ Mother of all ends. She was called… Palestine./ Her name later became… Palestine./ My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.’”

“It will continue to be called Palestine: Palestine will live and overcome! Long-live free, sovereign and independent Palestine!
“Hugo Chávez Frías

“President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”.

When the meeting convened the next morning his words were already in the hearts and minds of all the persons meeting there.

The Bolivarian leader was never an enemy of the Jewish people. A man with special sensitivity, he deeply detested the brutal crime committed by the Nazis on children, women and men, young and old in the concentration camps where gypsies were also victims of atrocious crimes and extermination attempts, something nobody of course remembers and is never mentioned. Likewise, hundreds of thousands of Russians perished in those extermination camps, considered to be an inferior race by Nazi racial concepts.

When Chávez returned to his country from Cuba on the night of Thursday September 22nd, he indignantly referred to the speech given by Barack Obama at the United Nations. Few times have I heard him speak with such disappointment about a leader whom he treated with determinate respect, as a victim of his own history of racial discrimination in the United States. He never thought him capable of acting as George Bush would have and he held on to a respectful memory of the words they exchanged at the Trinidad and Tobago meeting.

“Yesterday we were listening to a number of speeches, also the day before yesterday, over there at the UN, lovely speeches like the one made by President Dilma Rousseff; a highly ethical speech like the one made by President Evo Morales; a speech we might catalogue as a monument to cynicism, President Obama’s speech, is a monument to cynicism because his own face was betraying him, his own face was a poem; a man calling for peace, imagine that, Obama calling for peace, with what kind of morals? A historical monument to cynicism, that’s what President Obama’s speech was.

“Lovely speeches, guiding speeches, that’s what we were listening to: the speech by President Lugo, that of the Argentine president, setting courageous positions before the world.”

When the New York meeting convened on the morning of Wednesday, September 21st, the President of the United States, –on the tail of the words spoken by the President of Brazil which opened up discussions and after the de rigueur introduction – took to the podium and began his speech.

“Over nearly seven decades, ―he began ―, even as the United Nations helped avert a third world war, we still live in a world scarred by conflict and plagued by poverty. Even as we proclaim our love for peace and our hatred of war, there are still convulsions in our world that endanger us all.”

We don’t know when, according to Obama, the UN prevented World War III.

“I took office at a time of two wars for the United States. Moreover, the violent extremists who drew us into war in the first place — Osama bin Laden, and his al Qaeda organization — remained at large. Today, we’ve set a new direction. At the end of this year, America’s military operation in Iraq will be over. We will have a normal relationship with a sovereign nation that is a member of the community of nations. That equal partnership will be strengthened by our support for Iraq — for its government and for its security forces, for its people and for their aspirations.”

What country is Obama really talking about?

“As we end the war in Iraq, the United States and our coalition partners have begun a transition in Afghanistan. Between now and 2014, an increasingly capable Afghan government and security forces will step forward to take responsibility for the future of their country. As they do, we are drawing down our own forces, while building an enduring partnership with the Afghan people. So let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding

“When I took office, roughly 180,000 Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of this year, that number will be cut in half, and it will continue to decline. This is critical for the sovereignty of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s also critical to the strength of the United States as we build our nation at home. Moreover, we are poised to end these wars from a position of strength. Ten years ago, there was an open wound and twisted steel, a broken heart in the center of this city. Today, as a new tower is rising at Ground Zero, it symbolizes New York’s renewal, even as al Qaeda is under more pressure than ever before. Its leadership has been degraded. And Osama bin Laden, a man who murdered thousands of people from dozens of countries, will never endanger the peace of the world again.”

Who was Bin Laden’s ally, who really trained and armed him to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? It wasn’t the socialists, or the revolutionaries in any part of the world.

“This has been a difficult decade. […] But today, we stand at a crossroads of history with the chance to move decisively in the direction of peace. To do so, we must return to the wisdom of those who created this institution. The United Nations’ Founding Charter calls upon us, “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.”

Who has military bases everywhere throughout the world, who is the greatest exporter of weapons, who possesses hundreds of spy satellites, who invests billions of dollars every year on military expenses?

“This year has been a time of extraordinary transformation. More nations have stepped forward to maintain international peace and security. And more individuals are claiming their universal right to live in freedom and dignity.”

Then he cites the cases of Southern Sudan and Côte d’Ivoire. He doesn’t say that in the former, the Yankee transnationals launched themselves on the oil reserves of that new country, whose president, at that very UN Assembly, said that it was a valuable resource, but would run out and he proposed its rational and best use.

Neither did Obama state that peace in Côte d’Ivoire was reached with the backing of the colonialist soldiers of an eminent member of belligerent NATO which had just dropped thousands of bombs over Libya.

A little later on he mentions Tunisia and he attributed the US with the merit of the popular movement that overthrew that country’s government, imperialism’s ally.

Even more mind-boggling, Obama would like to ignore that the US was responsible for Egypt installing the tyrannical and corrupt Hosni Mubarak government, which betrayed Nasser’s principles and allied itself with imperialism, stealing tens of thousands of millions from his country and tyrannizing that courageous people.

“One year ago ― Obama states―, Egypt had known one President for nearly 30 years. But for 18 days, the eyes of the world were glued to Tahrir Square, where Egyptians from all walks of life — men and women, young and old, Muslim and Christian — demanded their universal rights. We saw in those protesters the moral force of non-violence that has lit the world from Delhi to Warsaw, from Selma to South Africa — and we knew that change had come to Egypt and to the Arab world.”

“Day after day, in the face of bullets and bombs, the Libyan people refused to give back that freedom. And when they were threatened by the kind of mass atrocity that often went unchallenged in the last century, the United Nations lived up to its charter. The Security Council authorized all necessary measures to prevent a massacre. The Arab League called for this effort; Arab nations joined a NATO-led coalition that halted Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks”

“Yesterday, the leaders of a new Libya took their rightful place beside us, and this week, the United States is reopening our embassy in Tripoli.

“This is how the international community is supposed to work — nations standing together for the sake of peace and security, and individuals claiming their rights.”

“Now, all of us have a responsibility to support the new Libya — the new Libyan government as they confront the challenge of turning this moment of promise into a just and lasting peace for all Libyans.”

“The Qaddafi regime is over. Gbagbo, Ben Ali, Mubarak are no longer in power. Osama bin Laden is gone, and the idea that change could only come through violence has been buried with him.”

Observe the poetic form with which Obama deals with the Bin Laden affair, whatever had been responsible for this former ally, executing him by shooting him in his face in front of his wife and children and throwing his body into the sea from an aircraft carrier, ignoring the religious customs and traditions of more than a billion religious persons and the basic legal principles established by all penal systems. Such methods do not lead, nor will they ever lead, to peace.

“Something is happening in our world, —he carries on, regarding Libya ― The way things have been is not the way that they will be. Dictators are on notice. Technology is putting power into the hands of the people. The youth are delivering a powerful rebuke to dictatorship, and rejecting the lie that some races, some peoples, some religions, some ethnicities do not desire democracy.

“The promise written down on paper — “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” — is closer at hand The measure of our success must be whether people can live in sustained freedom, dignity, and security. And the United Nations and its member states must do their part to support those basic aspirations. And we have more work to do.”

Right away he starts in on another Muslim country where, as it is well-known, his intelligence services along with those of Israel, systematically murder the most distinguished military technology scientists.

He follows up with a threat on Syria, where Yankee agressivity could lead to a massacre even more horrifying than that in Libya: “today, men and women and children are being tortured, detained and murdered by the Syrian regime. Thousands have been killed, many during the holy time of Ramadan. Thousands more have poured across Syria’s borders.

“. The Syrian people have shown dignity and courage in their pursuit of justice — protesting peacefully, standing silently in the streets, dying for the same values that this institution is supposed to stand for. And the question for us is clear: Will we stand with the Syrian people, or with their oppressors? Already, the United States has imposed strong sanctions on Syria’s leaders. We supported a transfer of power that is responsive to the Syrian people But for the sake of Syria — and the peace and security of the world — we must speak with one voice. There’s no excuse for inaction. Now is the time for the United Nations Security Council to sanction the Syrian regime, and to stand with the Syrian people.”

Could it be that some country has been left out of the bloody threats made by this illustrious defender of security and international peace? Who granted such prerogatives to the United States?

“Throughout the region, we will have to respond to the calls for change. In Yemen, men, women and children gather by the thousands in towns and city squares every day with the hope that their determination and spilled blood will prevail over a corrupt system. America supports those aspirations. We must work with Yemen’s neighbors and our partners around the world to seek a path that allows for a peaceful transition of power from President Saleh, and a movement to free and fair elections as soon as possible.

“In Bahrain, steps have been taken toward reform and accountability. We’re pleased with that, but more is required. America is a close friend of Bahrain, and we will continue to call on the government and the main opposition bloc — the Wifaq — to pursue a meaningful dialogue that brings peaceful change that is responsive to the people. We believe the patriotism that binds Bahrainis together must be more powerful than the sectarian forces that would tear them apart. It will be hard, but it is possible.”

He doesn’t mention one single word about the fact that that’s where one of the largest military bases in the region is and that the Yankee transnationals control and dispose of at will the greatest oil and gas reserves of Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates.

“We believe that each nation must chart its own course to fulfill the aspirations of its people, and America does not expect to agree with every party or person who expresses themselves politically. But we will always stand up for the universal rights that were embraced by this Assembly. Those rights depend on elections that are free and fair; on governance that is transparent and accountable; respect for the rights of women and minorities; justice that is equal and fair. That is what our people deserve. Those are the elements of peace that can last.”

“…the United States will continue to support those nations that transition to democracy — with greater trade and investment — so that freedom is followed by opportunity. We will pursue a deeper engagement with governments, but also with civil society — students and entrepreneurs, political parties and the press.

“We have banned those who abuse human rights from traveling to our country. And we’ve sanctioned those who trample on human rights abroad. And we will always serve as a voice for those who’ve been silenced.”

After this long-winded speech, the distinguished Nobel Prize laureate embarks on the thorny issue of his alliance with Israel that certainly doesn’t come up among the privileged possessors of one of the most modern system of nuclear weapons and means capable of reaching distant targets. He knows full well how arbitrary and unpopular that policy is.

“I know, particularly this week, that for many in this hall, there’s one issue that stands as a test for these principles and a test for American foreign policy, and that is the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own.

But what I also said is that a genuine peace can only be realized between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. One year later, despite extensive efforts by America and others, the parties have not bridged their differences. Faced with this stalemate, I put forward a new basis for negotiations in May of this year. That basis is clear. It’s well known to all of us here. Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state. Now, I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress. I assure you, so am I. But the question isn’t the goal that we seek — the question is how do we reach that goal.

Peace is hard work. Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations — if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now

Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians — not us –- who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and on security, on refugees and Jerusalem.
Ultimately, peace depends upon compromise among people who must live together long after our speeches are over, long after our votes have been tallied.

Next, he goes on to verbosely explain and justify the unexplainable and unjustifiable.

“…There’s no question that the Palestinians have seen that vision delayed for too long. It is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of the Palestinian people that America has invested so much time and so much effort in the building of a Palestinian state, and the negotiations that can deliver a Palestinian state. But understand this as well: America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring..”

“The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland. Israel deserves recognition. It deserves normal relations with its neighbors. And friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth.

“…each side has legitimate aspirations — and that’s part of what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other’s shoes; each side can see the world through the other’s eyes. That’s what we should be encouraging. That’s what we should be promoting.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinians remain exiled from their own homeland, their homes are destroyed by monstrous mechanical machinery and an odious wall that is much higher than the Berlin Wall was, separating Palestinian from Palestinian. The best Obama might have acknowledged is that the very Israeli citizens are by now tired of the waste of resources invested in the military sphere that deprives them of peace and access to the elementary means for living. Just like the Palestinians, they are suffering from the consequences of these policies imposed by the United States and the most warlike and reactionary elements in the Zionist State.

“even as we confront these challenges of conflict and revolution, we must also recognize — we must also remind ourselves […]. True peace depends on creating the opportunity that makes life worth living. And to do that, we must confront the common enemies of humanity: nuclear weapons and poverty, ignorance and disease.”

Who can understand this gibberish spoken by the President of the United States before the General Assembly?

He follows up with his unintelligible philosophy:

“To lift the specter of mass destruction, we must come together to pursue the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. Over the last two years, we’ve begun to walk down that path. Since our Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, nearly 50 nations have taken steps to secure nuclear materials from terrorists and smugglers”

Could there be any terrorism greater than the aggressive and bellicose policy of a country whose arsenal of nuclear weapons could destroy life on this planet several times over?

“America will continue to work for a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons and the production of fissile material needed to make them”, Obama goes on to promise us. “And so we have begun to move in the right direction. And the United States is committed to meeting our obligations. But even as we meet our obligations, we’ve strengthened the treaties and institutions that help stop the spread of these weapons. […]. The Iranian government cannot demonstrate that its program is peaceful

Back to the same old refrain! But this time Iran is not alone; it is accompanied by the Democratic Republic of Korea.

“North Korea has yet to take concrete steps towards abandoning its weapons and continues belligerent action against the South. There’s a future of greater opportunity for the people of these nations if their governments meet their international obligations. But if they continue down a path that is outside international law, they must be met with greater pressure and isolation. That is what our commitment to peace and security demands.”

To be continued tomorrow.

Fidel Castro Ruz
September 25, 2011
7:36 p.m.

“Hypocritical and manipulative” were the words used by insurgent leaders to describe NATO reports on torture in prisons in the Afghan provinces of Herat, Khost, Lagman, Kapisa and Takhar.

According to statements attributed to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, the main source of brutality, torture and tyranny is the foreign occupation forces.

The UN mission in Afgnanistan, UNAMA, says that prisoners are beaten and tortured in prisons run by the Afghan secret police, secret service and foreign advisors.

The UN report, to which the Afghan insurgency added its own remarks, forced the NATO command to investigate the claims and suspend the transfer of prisoners to prisons in those provinces.

Repeated complaints by insurgents indicate that “Department 124″ is a place where intense, sophisticated torture of alleged terrorists takes place, following direct orders from the U.S. military base in Bagram.

(Prensa Latina)

Talk about a double whammy. It was not enough for Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the United States’ credit rating; with impeccable timing, and apparently a single shot, the Taliban in Afghanistan simultaneously downgraded the empire’s colossal war machine.

As much as the US power elite refuse to accept that the US financial crisis was caused by years of George W Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and mega-corporations; massive bailouts of banks and insurance companies; and astronomic military spending on the Pentagon’s declinations of The Long War, the power elite will also refuse to acknowledge that the “new” war strategy in Afghanistan is also a failure.

Chinook down

The sound of that Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter shot down by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, on Friday, killing 38 people – including 19 US Navy SEALs and seven Afghan commandos – was the full digital sound of the empire being shocked and awed into disbelief, no matter Pentagon efforts to practically order the media “not to read too much” into the crash.

Wardak – along with neighboring Logar – is now prime Talibanistan real estate. They are entrenched, know the terrain in detail and even have time to prepare complex operations. On top of it, the Taliban are “making progress” (Pentagon jargon) not only in their public relations skills and in adapting new weapons to the battlefield, but also in the mechanics of delivering a major psychological blow to the Western occupying forces.

The SEALs are part of a humongous, 10,000-strong Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) task force, based in Afghanistan, which has been involved in as many as 70 raids a day in AfPak, capturing – according to Pentagon spin – 2,900 “insurgents” and killing more than 800 from April to July. JSOC’s global reach has been deconstructed in a piece by Nick Turse (see A secret war in 120 countries Asia Times Online, August 5).

The SEALs killed in Wardak were part of the same unit, Team 6, involved in the Abbottabad raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in early May. But instead of flying the army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment’s state-of-the-art stealth helicopters, the SEALs in Wardak were part of a rescue operation, riding a pedestrian National Guard Chinook.

As they were lifting off, they fell into a Taliban trap and were hit by a modified RPG – what the chirurgical Danger Room blog at the Wired website identified as an improvised rocket-assisted mortar (IRAM), sporting a bigger warhead than a shoulder-fired RPG.

According to Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, that was indeed “a weapon that is similar to an RPG … and we are trying to get more of this weapon”.

So assuming the IRAM – which has emigrated from the Iraqi battlefields – is now a player in Afghanistan as well, one might call it a warped return of the Stinger remix; during the 1980s Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, a major game-changer was for the US to drop hundreds of lethal Stingers into the hands of the mujahideen, wreaking havoc among the choppers of the mighty Red Army.

A close comparison between the Abbottabad and Wardak operations may raise a forest of eyebrows – apart from puncturing the myth of Navy SEALs as invincible, larger-than-life hunter-killers. In Abbottabad, as version after version of the raid was being fed to the media, it was finally established that a stealth helicopter simply “crashed”. No one knows if this was a pilot error or the helicopter was shot at.

The fact is the “crash” left an intact tail section of the stealth helicopter inside the compound – that tail section that left the Pentagon freaking out it would be “sold” to the Chinese by the Pakistanis. It’s quite a stretch to believe this crash generated no casualties – according to the Pentagon/White House spin.

And because the Bin Laden raid narrative was redacted over and over again, febrile minds are already linking these casualties to the Wardak death toll – implying the SEALs who actually died in the Abbottabad crash have now died “again” in Wardak. It doesn’t help that the initial versions of the Wardak hit (later corrected or redacted) identified the SEALs as the same ones who took part in the “kill Osama” raid.

Pass the joystick

After the Wardak hit, new Pentagon chief Leon Panetta came up with the usual “stay the course” in Afghanistan speech while corporate media regurgitated that “all foreign combat troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2014″ – when everyone knows the Pentagon will never roll over, die and accept that kind of exit.

What Wardak will do is to bolster the Pentagon’s case that the government in Kabul is mightily unprepared to maintain security across the country – no matter the fact that the majority of Afghans want foreigners out, for good. While the White House/Pentagon are singing their remixed version of The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go, all the Taliban have to do is wait and see, in silence (they hate pop music). They know that Kabul taking over national security will only bolster their strategic position.

It’s astonishing (or maybe not) that the Washington power elite simply does not register how the empire was mercilessly downgraded by the Taliban over this past month. The Taliban killed President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, drug lord and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset Ahmad Wali. They killed people at his funeral. They killed Karzai’s head of tribal relations and a member of parliament. And they killed the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Hamidi.

Not a long time ago – the autumn of 2010 – the talk was of the US/North Atlantic Treaty Organization going to take over Kandahar in a major counter-insurgency drive and win the war against the Taliban for good.

Today the claim has been laid to rest by facts on the ground. Yet its conceptual artist – in typical Washington fashion – has been kicked upstairs. In Iraq, General David Petraeus pulled an illusionist trick, convincing everyone in Washington that his 2007 surge/counterinsurgency drive was a success.

In Afghanistan, Petraeus was hit by a Hindu Kush rock on his head. Anyway, he’s been promoted to CIA chief, so others will take the blame. And while more Chinooks will go down in Afghanistan, he can at least have fun with the joystick, playfully concentrating on droning the Pakistani tribal areas to death.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan

In “Getting bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle’s New Yorker report on the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, here’s the money sentence, according to Noah Shachtman of Wired Magazine’s Danger Room blog: “The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU’s maiden venture into Pakistan, either. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.”  DEVGRU is the acronym for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, better known as SEAL Team Six (think “SEAL-mania”), the elite special operations outfit that killed bin Laden.

His assassination — and Schmidle’s piece makes clear that his capture was never an objective — brought on a blitz of media coverage.  But without reading that single, half-buried sentence, who knew that the same SEAL team had been dropped into Pakistan to do who knows what 10 to 12 times before the bin Laden mission happened?   Not most Pakistanis, nor 99.99% of Americans, myself included.  Keep in mind that this was only a team of 23 elite troops (plus a translator and a dog).  But there are now about 20,000 full-time special operations types, at least 13,000 of them deployed somewhere abroad at this moment.  In other words, we simply don’t know the half of it.  We probably don’t know the tenth of it — neither the breadth or number of their missions, nor the range of their targets.  According to Schmidle again, on the day of the bin Laden raid, special operations forces in nearby Afghanistan conducted 12 other “night raids.” Almost 2,000 of them have been carried out in the last couple of years.

These are staggering figures.  And since we didn’t know that U.S. special operations forces were secretly conducting Pakistan missions in such numbers, it might be worth asking what else we don’t know.  Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to the press in 2002 about the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, made a famous (or infamous) distinction among “known knowns,” (things we know we know), “known unknowns” (things we know we don’t know), and “unknown unknowns” (things we don’t know we don’t know).  How apt those “unknown unknowns” turn out to be when it comes to the ever-expanding special operations forces inside the U.S. military.

Think of them, in fact, as the unknown unknowns of twenty-first century American warfare.  Fortunately, thanks to TomDispatch regular Nick Turse, we now have a far better idea of the size and scope of the global war being fought in our name by tens of thousands of secret warriors fighting “in the shadows.”  Tom

A Secret War in 120 Countries
The Pentagon’s New Power Elite
By Nick Turse

Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission.  Now, say that 70 times and you’re done… for the day.  Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries.  This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight.  It was atypical.  While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency.  By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120.  “We do a lot of traveling — a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently.  This global presence — in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged — provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

The Rise of the Military’s Secret Military

Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987.  Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate.  Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions.  Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions.  These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists.  Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens.  It has been operating an extra-legal “kill/capture” campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.”

This assassination program has been carried out by commando units like the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force as well as via drone strikes as part of covert wars in which the CIA is also involved in countries like Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen.  In addition, the command operates a network of secret prisons, perhaps as many as 20 black sites in Afghanistan alone, used for interrogating high-value targets.

Growth Industry

From a force of about 37,000 in the early 1990s, Special Operations Command personnel have grown to almost 60,000, about a third of whom are career members of SOCOM; the rest have other military occupational specialties, but periodically cycle through the command.  Growth has been exponential since September 11, 2001, as SOCOM’s baseline budget almost tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion.  If you add in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8 billion in these years.  Not surprisingly, the number of its personnel deployed abroad has also jumped four-fold.  Further increases, and expanded operations, are on the horizon.

Lieutenant General Dennis Hejlik, the former head of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command — the last of the service branches to be incorporated into SOCOM in 2006 — indicated, for instance, that he foresees a doubling of his former unit of 2,600.  “I see them as a force someday of about 5,000, like equivalent to the number of SEALs that we have on the battlefield. Between [5,000] and 6,000,” he said at a June breakfast with defense reporters in Washington.  Long-term plans already call for the force to increase by 1,000.

During his recent Senate confirmation hearings, Navy Vice Admiral William McRaven, the incoming SOCOM chief and outgoing head of JSOC (which he commanded during the bin Laden raid) endorsed a steady manpower growth rate of 3% to 5% a year, while also making a pitch for even more resources, including additional drones and the construction of new special operations facilities.

A former SEAL who still sometimes accompanies troops into the field, McRaven expressed a belief that, as conventional forces are drawn down in Afghanistan, special ops troops will take on an ever greater role.  Iraq, he added, would benefit if elite U.S forces continued to conduct missions there past the December 2011 deadline for a total American troop withdrawal.  He also assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that “as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at Somalia.”

During a speech at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Special Operations and Low-intensity Conflict Symposium earlier this year, Navy Admiral Eric Olson, the outgoing chief of Special Operations Command, pointed to a composite satellite image of the world at night.  Before September 11, 2001, the lit portions of the planet — mostly the industrialized nations of the global north — were considered the key areas. “But the world changed over the last decade,” he said.  “Our strategic focus has shifted largely to the south… certainly within the special operations community, as we deal with the emerging threats from the places where the lights aren’t.”

To that end, Olson launched “Project Lawrence,” an effort to increase cultural proficiencies — like advanced language training and better knowledge of local history and customs — for overseas operations.  The program is, of course, named after the British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”), who teamed up with Arab fighters to wage a guerrilla war in the Middle East during World War I.  Mentioning Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, and Indonesia, Olson added that SOCOM now needed “Lawrences of Wherever.”

While Olson made reference to only 51 countries of top concern to SOCOM, Col. Nye told me that on any given day, Special Operations forces are deployed in approximately 70 nations around the world.  All of them, he hastened to add, at the request of the host government.  According to testimony by Olson before the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, approximately 85% of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.  The others are scattered across the globe from South America to Southeast Asia, some in small numbers, others as larger contingents.

Special Operations Command won’t disclose exactly which countries its forces operate in.  “We’re obviously going to have some places where it’s not advantageous for us to list where we’re at,” says Nye.  “Not all host nations want it known, for whatever reasons they have — it may be internal, it may be regional.”

But it’s no secret (or at least a poorly kept one) that so-called black special operations troops, like the SEALs and Delta Force, are conducting kill/capture missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, while “white” forces like the Green Berets and Rangers are training indigenous partners as part of a worldwide secret war against al-Qaeda and other militant groups. In the Philippines, for instance, the U.S. spends $50 million a year on a 600-person contingent of Army Special Operations forces, Navy Seals, Air Force special operators, and others that carries out counterterrorist operations with Filipino allies against insurgent groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf.

Last year, as an analysis of SOCOM documents, open-source Pentagon information, and a database of Special Operations missions compiled by investigative journalist Tara McKelvey (for the Medill School of Journalism’s National Security Journalism Initiative) reveals, America’s most elite troops carried out joint-training exercises in Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Germany, Indonesia, Mali, Norway, Panama, and Poland.  So far in 2011, similar training missions have been conducted in the Dominican Republic, Jordan, Romania, Senegal, South Korea, and Thailand, among other nations.  In reality, Nye told me, training actually went on in almost every nation where Special Operations forces are deployed.  “Of the 120 countries we visit by the end of the year, I would say the vast majority are training exercises in one fashion or another.  They would be classified as training exercises.”

The Pentagon’s Power Elite

Once the neglected stepchildren of the military establishment, Special Operations forces have been growing exponentially not just in size and budget, but also in power and influence.  Since 2002, SOCOM has been authorized to create its own Joint Task Forces — like Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines — a prerogative normally limited to larger combatant commands like CENTCOM.  This year, without much fanfare, SOCOM also established its own Joint Acquisition Task Force, a cadre of equipment designers and acquisition specialists.

With control over budgeting, training, and equipping its force, powers usually reserved for departments (like the Department of the Army or the Department of the Navy), dedicated dollars in every Defense Department budget, and influential advocates in Congress, SOCOM is by now an exceptionally powerful player at the Pentagon.  With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops.  Since 2001, SOCOM’s prime contracts awarded to small businesses — those that generally produce specialty equipment and weapons — have jumped six-fold.

Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, but operating out of theater commands spread out around the globe, including Hawaii, Germany, and South Korea, and active in the majority of countries on the planet, Special Operations Command is now a force unto itself.  As outgoing SOCOM chief Olson put it earlier this year, SOCOM “is a microcosm of the Department of Defense, with ground, air, and maritime components, a global presence, and authorities and responsibilities that mirror the Military Departments, Military Services, and Defense Agencies.”

Tasked to coordinate all Pentagon planning against global terrorism networks and, as a result, closely connected to other government agencies, foreign militaries, and intelligence services, and armed with a vast inventory of stealthy helicopters, manned fixed-wing aircraft, heavily-armed drones, high-tech guns-a-go-go speedboats, specialized Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as well as other state-of-the-art gear (with more on the way), SOCOM represents something new in the military.  Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as “the president’s private army,” today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive’s private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans.  Once “special” for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.

That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows.  Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral Olson: “I am convinced that the forces… are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer.”

Recently at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum, Olson offered up similarly gilded comments and some misleading information, too, claiming that U.S. Special Operations forces were operating in just 65 countries and engaged in combat in only two of them.  When asked about drone strikes in Pakistan, he reportedly replied, “Are you talking about unattributed explosions?”

What he did let slip, however, was telling.  He noted, for instance, that black operations like the bin Laden mission, with commandos conducting heliborne night raids, were now exceptionally common.  A dozen or so are conducted every night, he said.  Perhaps most illuminating, however, was an offhand remark about the size of SOCOM.  Right now, he emphasized, U.S. Special Operations forces were approximately as large as Canada’s entire active duty military.  In fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the nations where America’s elite troops now operate each year, and it’s only set to grow larger.

Americans have yet to grapple with what it means to have a “special” force this large, this active, and this secret — and they are unlikely to begin to do so until more information is available.  It just won’t be coming from Olson or his troops.  “Our access [to foreign countries] depends on our ability to not talk about it,” he said in response to questions about SOCOM’s secrecy.  When missions are subject to scrutiny like the bin Laden raid, he said, the elite troops object.  The military’s secret military, said Olson, wants “to get back into the shadows and do what they came in to do.”

Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, and investigative journalist. The associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a new senior editor at Alternet.org, his latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books). This article is a collaboration between Alternet.org and TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Nick Turse

In an address remarkable for its brevity, President Barack Obama essentially announced success, lectured Afghanistan on its responsibilities to secure its territory, and noted upcoming troop withdrawals.

Anyone who has lived through past U.S. wars abroad has heard similar statements before, but I doubt they’ve heard what Obama said before: that the U.S. is “not an empire.”

That’s surely news to dozens of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which have had their leaders chosen, armed or replaced on American whims.

This is not the end, but it is the beginning of the end.

And it ends not that differently from that of the former Soviet occupation, albeit slower, for both empires were drained of wealth and will.

In the wake of the earth shaking economic fall of late 2008, the U.S. was left with limited resources. Also, recent polls have shown that support has been dwindling for the continuing war effort.

With an election coming, among dramatically high unemployment levels, military draw downs might re energize disaffected Democratic voters.

The President suggested Al Qaeda’s crippling and the Taliban’s humbling the latter being brought to the bargaining table.

But the Taliban is far from humbled. For just a month ago they hit one of Afghanistan’s largest cities, immobilized it for 30 hours, and attacked important military and governmental targets with ease.

Using suicide bombers and small arms, several dozen men hit the governor’s palace, police headquarters, the transportation police headquarters and several military buildings.

One observer of the strike in Kandahar said shell casings hit the streets like “hail after a storm.”

Kandahar is more than a big city: it’s the biggest in southern Afghanistan and a major NATO base.

One Kandaharian asked, “How are they able to occupy nearby buildings and stage themselves so they can shoot on the governor’s office and N.D.S. department? (NDS is the Afghan intelligence agency – its CIA) Answering  his own question, Kandahar’s Mohammed Umar Sathi suggested, “Either the security forces are incompetent, or they have no coordination among each other.”*

The Taliban are itching for the hour of American withdrawal, at which time will come a reckoning.

Empires, like individuals, can tire.

It was not for naught that Afghanistan has been called, “the graveyard of empires.”

Before reading this article, try to answer this question: How many military bases does the United States have in other countries: a) 100; b) 300; c) 700; or d) 1,000.

According to the Pentagon’s own list PDF, the answer is around 865, but if you include the new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan it is over a thousand. These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country’s territory. In other words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup.

The old way of doing colonialism, practiced by the Europeans, was to take over entire countries and administer them. But this was clumsy. The United States has pioneered a leaner approach to global empire. As historian Chalmers Johnson says, “America’s version of the colony is the military base.” The United States, says Johnson, has an “empire of bases.”

These bases do not come cheap. Excluding U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States spends about $102 billion a year to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies. And in many cases you have to ask what purpose they serve. For example, the United States has 227 bases in Germany. Maybe this made sense during the Cold War, when Germany was split in two by the iron curtain and U.S. policy makers sought to persuade the Soviets that the American people would see an attack on Europe as an attack on itself. But in a new era when Germany is reunited and the United States is concerned about flashpoints of conflict in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it makes as much sense for the Pentagon to hold onto 227 military bases in Germany as it would for the post office to maintain a fleet of horses and buggies.

Drowning in red ink, the White House is desperate to cut unnecessary costs in the federal budget, and Massachusetts Cong. Barney Frank, a Democrat, has suggested that the Pentagon budget could be cut by 25 percent. Whether or not one thinks Frank’s number is politically realistic, foreign bases are surely a lucrative target for the budget cutter’s axe. In 2004 Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the United States could save $12 billion by closing 200 or so foreign bases. This would also be relatively cost-free politically since the locals who may have become economically dependent upon the bases are foreigners and cannot vote retribution in U.S. elections.

Yet those foreign bases seem invisible as budget cutters squint at the Pentagon’s $664 billion proposed budget. Take the March 1st editorial in the New York Times, “The Pentagon Meets the Real World.” The Times‘s editorialists called for “political courage” from the White House in cutting the defense budget. Their suggestions? Cut the air force’s F-22 fighter and the navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer and scale back missile defense and the army’s Future Combat System to save $10 billion plus a year. All good suggestions, but what about those foreign bases?

Even if politicians and media pundits seem oblivious to these bases, treating the stationing of U.S. troops all over the world as a natural fact, the U.S. empire of bases is attracting increasing attention from academics and activists–as evidenced by a conference on U.S. foreign bases at American University in late February. NYU Press just published Catherine Lutz’s Bases of Empire, a book that brings together academics who study U.S. military bases and activists against the bases. Rutgers University Press has published Kate McCaffrey’s Military Power and Popular Protest, a study of the U.S. base at Vieques, Puerto Rico, which was closed in the face of massive protests from the local population. And Princeton University Press is about to publish David Vine’s Island of Shame–a book that tells the story of how the United States and Britain secretly agreed to deport the Chagossian inhabitants of Diego Garcia to Mauritius and the Seychelles so their island could be turned into a military base. The Americans were so thorough that they even gassed all the Chagossian dogs. The Chagossians have been denied their day in court in the United States but won their case against the British government in three trials, only to have the judgment overturned by the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. They are now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.

American leaders speak of foreign bases as cementing alliances with foreign nations, largely through the trade and aid agreements that often accompany base leases. Yet, U.S. soldiers live in a sort of cocooned simulacrum of America in their bases, watching American TV, listening to American rap and heavy metal, and eating American fast food, so that the transplanted farm boys and street kids have little exposure to another way of life. Meanwhile, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, local residents and businesses often become economically dependent on the soldiers and have a stake in their staying.

These bases can become flashpoints for conflict. Military bases invariably discharge toxic waste into local ecosystems, as in Guam where military bases have led to no fewer than 19 superfund sites. Such contamination generates resentment and sometimes, as in Vieques in the 1990s, full-blown social movements against the bases. The United States used Vieques for live-bombing practice 180 days a year, and by the time the United States withdrew in 2003, the landscape was littered with exploded and unexploded ordinance, depleted uranium rounds, heavy metals, oil, lubricants, solvents, and acids. According to local activists, the cancer rate on Vieques was 30 percent higher than on the rest of Puerto Rico.

It is also inevitable that, from time to time, U.S. soldiers–often drunk–commit crimes. The resentment these crimes cause is only exacerbated by the U.S. government’s frequent insistence that such crimes not be prosecuted in local courts. In 2002, two U.S. soldiers killed two teenage girls in Korea as they walked to a birthday party. Korean campaigners claim this was one of 52,000 crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Korea between 1967 and 2002. The two U.S. soldiers were immediately repatriated to the United States so they could escape prosecution in Korea. In 1998, a marine pilot sliced through the cable of a ski gondola in Italy, killing 20 people, but U.S. officials slapped him on the wrist and refused to allow Italian authorities to try him. These and other similar incidents injured U.S. relations with important allies.

The 9/11 attacks are arguably the most spectacular example of the kind of blowback that can be generated from local resentment against U.S. bases. In the 1990s, the presence of U.S. military bases near the holiest sites of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia angered Osama bin Laden and provided Al Qaeda with a potent recruitment tool. The United States wisely closed its largest bases in Saudi Arabia, but it opened additional bases in Iraq and Afghanistan that are rapidly becoming new sources of friction in the relationship between the United States and the peoples of the Middle East.

Its “empire of bases” gives the United States global reach, but the shape of this empire, insofar as it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated and anachronistic holdover from the Cold War. Many of these bases are a luxury the United States can no longer afford at a time of record budget deficits. Moreover, U.S. foreign bases have a double edge: they project American power across the globe, but they also inflame U.S. foreign relations, generating resentment against the prostitution, environmental damage, petty crime, and everyday ethnocentrism that are their inevitable corollaries. Such resentments have recently forced the closure of U.S. bases in Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Kyrgyzstan, and if past is prologue, more movements against U.S. bases can be expected in the future. Over the next 50 years, I believe we will witness the emergence of a new international norm according to which foreign military bases will be as indefensible as the colonial occupation of another country has become during the last 50 years.

The Declaration of Independence criticizes the British “for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” and “for protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States.” Fine words! The United States should start taking them to heart.

(Author & journalist)

With the death of Osama bin Laden, there is a perfect opportunity for the Obama administration to bring to an end the decade-long “War on Terror” by withdrawing from Afghanistan and closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The justification for both the invasion of Afghanistan (in October 2001) and the detention of prisoners in Guantánamo (which opened in January 2002) is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, just three days after the 9/11 attacks.

Under the AUMF, the President is “authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

In 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court confirmed that the AUMF also authorizes the detention of those held as a result of the President’s activities, although, as law professor Curtis Bradley explained last week on the Lawfare blog, “Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion in Hamdi made clear that the Court was deciding only the authority to detain in connection with traditional combat operations in the Afghanistan theater.” Bradley also noted, “As for the proper length of detention, O’Connor largely avoided the question, although she did refer to the traditional ability under the international laws of war to detain individuals until the ‘cessation of active hostilities.’”

With bin Laden’s death, the route should now be open for the President to assert that he has used “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” and to get out of the unwinnable morass that is the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan.

Moreover, with a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the justification for holding men at Guantánamo would also vanish, and the government would have the opportunity to return to the detention policies that served everyone perfectly well before the 9/11 attacks: prosecuting those involved with alleged terrorist activities in federal court, and holding soldiers as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, and freeing them at the end of hostilities.

That, however, is too sensible a suggestion for those who, rather than accepting bin Laden’s death as the logical end of a decade of “war” that has been both ruinously expensive and morally and legally disastrous, and that has also led to a chronic loss of life, want exactly the opposite: a springboard for an even bigger “War on Terror,” and a cynical excuse to keep Guantánamo open forever.

On the first point, with reference to the AUMF, a version of the 2012 defense bill, which is currently before the House Armed Services Committee, and which is known as the “Chairman’s mark,” because of the role played in its development by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon, proposes updating the AUMF rather than scrapping it, to “reflect,” as Spencer Ackerman explained in an article for Wired, “that the al-Qaeda of the present day is way different than the organization that attacked the US on 9/11.” Ackerman added, “While the original Authorization tethered the war to those directly or indirectly responsible for 9/11, the new language authorizes ‘an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces,’ as ‘those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens.’”

Rep. McKeon has been arguing since last fall that Congress needs to approve, or disapprove of America’s current state of war,  but such a revision to the AUMF — potentially expanding the “War on Terror,” with the explicit approval of Congress, into Pakistan, Yemen, or anywhere the President perceives a threat and wishes to act — is “a big expansion of executive authority,” in Spencer Ackerman’s words, and, according to Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University, is close to “terrorism creep,” It is also, In Greenberg’s opinion, hasty. Before thinking about expanding the “War on Terror,” she explains, the US “need[s] to absorb first what the death of bin Laden means. We need to stop and think and re-think. The idea that we’re going to keep reacting and not have a thoughtful time out is just unacceptable.”

From my point of view, the proposal for the AUMF, as well as opening up new “battlefields” without necessary scrutiny, also breathes new life into a problem that has plagued the “War on Terror” from the beginning, and that should now be coming to an end, rather than being indefinitely sustained: the confusion of the Taliban, fighting a military conflict in Afghanistan (and in the Pashtun parts of Pakistan) with al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization.

This failure to distinguish between the Taliban and al-Qaeda has bedevilled those held at Guantánamo, who were labeled as “enemy combatants” and easily dressed up as terrorists, as the recent release by WikiLeaks of classified military documents relating to the prisoners has shown, when, in fact, the prison has never held more than a few dozen prisoners genuinely accused of involvement with terrorism. As a result, the prison has largely been responsible for demonizing soldiers instead of terror suspects, and this remains as true today, with 172 men still held, as it was when Guantánamo opened.

Despite the new proposal for the AUMF, it is by no means certain that the Obama administration wants a new Authorization. In the wake of bin Laden’s death, John Brennan, the President’s advisor on homeland security and counterterrorism, suggested that bin Laden’s death and the pro-democracy revolts in the Middle East were the beginning of the end for al-Qaeda, and Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, is also resistant. In March, he told the House Armed Services Committee that the 2001 AUMF was “sufficient to address the existing threats I’ve seen.”

The administration’s main problem with the proposal for a new version of the AUMF may relate more to Guantánamo, whose closure remains an objective of the administration, as Attorney General Eric Holder explained in the wake of bin Laden’s death, than to military operations in general. The proposal for a new AUMF “would keep Guantánamo Bay open practically forever,” in Spencer Ackerman’s words, because it reintroduces military assessments regarding the threat level posed by the prisoners, prevents the resettlement of prisoners in the US (even if a review panel assesses that they are not a threat), makes it almost impossible to transfer prisoners to other countries, and prevents the administration from buying or adapting a facility to hold Guantánamo prisoners in the US — mostly replays of the abominable additions to this year’s defense spending bill, but with the “military assessments” as a bonus.

Moreover, Rep. McKeon and his supporters are not the only lawmakers intent on keeping Guantánamo open, even though the object of most of the interrogations over the last nine years — Osama bin Laden — is now dead. On May 11, six Senators — the Republicans Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte, Scott Brown, Saxby Chambliss and Marco Rubio, plus Joe Lieberman — introduced the “Detaining Terrorists to Secure America Act,” based on a right-wing response to bin Laden’s death, which, in defiance of expert testimony by numerous interrogators over the last two weeks, relies on a false belief that detention in CIA “black sites,” the use of torture and the existence of Guantánamo all contributed to locating bin Laden.

This mistaken approach to intelligence gathering ignores the truth — that interrogators using lawful, non-coercive methods did not need torture, “black sites” or Guantánamo to secure the necessary information. In fact, Guantánamo, a prison in which randomly seized prisoners were subjected to years of coercion until they told lies about each other, is the opposite of the targeted, specific intelligence from a handful of significant prisoners that was needed to begin the long process of finding bin Laden.

Even so, in comments after the proposed legislation was announced, Sen. Chambliss, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, focused specifically on Guantánamo, with the purpose of keeping it open forever and using it for the detention and interrogation of new prisoners, claiming, “The events of last week underscore the importance of information we obtain for detainees, particularly those at Guantánamo Bay.” He added, “For months, we have been asking administration officials where we could hold detainees we may capture. This legislation provides an answer and gives us the chance to gather actionable intelligence to keep our country safe.”

Sen. Chambliss also drew on discredited claims, emanating from the Pentagon, in which it has been claimed, without evidence, that 1 in 4 of the 600 prisoners released from Guantánamo — an impossible total of 150 prisoners — have “returned to the battlefield,” or engaged in terrorist activities against the US. “[A]s recidivism rates are more than 25 percent,” Sen. Chambliss said, “we cannot afford to let more dangerous detainees return to the fight.”

Like the amendments to the 2012 defense bill in the House of Representatives, the “Detaining Terrorists to Secure America Act” would also prohibit the transfer of any prisoner to any facility on the US mainland, preventing the President from closing it, while, as the Senators hope, adding to its population.

With all this opposition, it is difficult to see how the “peace dividend” that should result from bin Laden’s death can be realized, but that, of course, is no reason for opponents of war, of arbitrary detention and torture, of pointless and ruinously expensive foreign policies and counter-terrorism policies to give up. On the contrary, it is time for us to speak up louder than ever.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Sponsored by the World Peace Council and the Cuban Movement for Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples, the forum will analyze the disastrous consequences of military bases for the sovereignty of the peoples.

The meeting brings together representatives from 36 nations, included Cuba, which for more than a century has repudiated the U.S. military presence in the Guantanamo region of Caimanera.

The event, which concludes Thursday, will advocate world peace and oppose the military invasions of Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Delegates will gather today in the Mariana Grajales Revolution Square in Guantanamo to receive information about life in Cuba’s easternmost province.

Thursday’s agenda will take place in the town of Caimanera, which borders the military base imposed on Cuba since 1903 by the United States against the will of the island’s people and government.

(Published Guerrilero.cu)