More Collateral Women And Children, This Time In San Diego

Grace and Rachel Yoon were killed on Monday when a fighter jet crashed into their San Diego home. Grace was 15 months old; Rachel wasn't yet two months.


Their mother, Young Mi, and her mother, Suk Im Kim, were also killed.




Dong Yun Yoon lost his daughters, his wife, and his mother-in-law, as well as his home.


According to the Los Angeles Times,

"I believe my wife and two babies and mother-in-law are in heaven with God," Yoon said at a news conference afterward. "Nobody expected such a horrible thing to happen, especially right here, our house."

Yoon said he bore no ill will toward the Marine Corps pilot who ejected safely before the jet plunged into the neighborhood two miles west of the runway at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. "I pray for him not to suffer for this action," Yoon said. "I know he's one of our treasures for our country."

One can only imagine how many treasures our country would need if any of our so-called enemies actually had an Air Force.


All these photos were published by the LA Times. You can see them and many more here.

This is us, fighting a fireball with a garden hose.

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Wrong Again! Twice! Another Look At Azizabad And Wall Street

I've made a few mistakes lately and it's time to 'fess up. I was wrong about the Azizabad massacre, and I was wrong about the Wall Street bailout, too. Oops.

The Azizabad Massacre

On August 22, an American airstrike killed more than 90 innocent people in Afghanistan. Most of them were sleeping children.

At the time, I assumed the Pentagon would write off the victims as "collateral damage" and I wrote a piece to that effect. But that didn't happen; instead our military spokesmen denied the story, saying that the airstrike had killed at least 25 "militants" and that at most five civilians had been killed.

Investigators from Afghanistan and the UN went to the scene, interviewed the survivors, looked at the graves, and confirmed the original reports. But the Pentagon stuck to its story. I wrote a second post on the attack in which I mentioned that the damage to civilians was even worse than what had been reported; I also mentioned that the word was being leaked: the Americans had been deceived. An unidentified spokesman blamed the attack on misinformation that the Americans had been given by the Taliban. But the US still didn't admit killing all those people.

Instead Pentagon spokesmen insisted that the UN and Afghan inspectors had been fooled by the survivors of the attack, who (according to the Pentagon) had made up the story about all their relatives being killed. The US even accused the survivors of fabricating evidence -- dead children in graves, and so on. No American investigator ever visited the scene, no Pentagon representative asked any questions on the ground. Instead they just told us what they wanted us to believe. And it was all a pack of lies, of course.

I say "of course" because this is only the latest in a long series of events in which Americans have killed innocent people on the ground in Afghanistan and then lied about it repeatedly. The civilian casualties and the lies intended to cover them have even caused a strain in the Afghan-US "relationship".

If this strain ever got serious it could jeopardize the entire US occupation of Afghanistan, which would be a very good thing in my opinion because the US has no business occupying Afghanistan. The bombing, invasion and subsequent occupation are war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as our crimes against Iraq have been -- though very few will say so.

But I'll say it: the war in Afghanistan would be entirely unjustified, even if the official story of 9/11 were true, which it obviously isn't.

I was still following the Azizabad story when my computer began to break down, and I didn't get a chance to follow up on my two early stories. But Carlotta Gall, veteran war reporter for the New York Times, traveled to the scene, looked at the evidence, talked to the people, and filed a report that left no doubt that the UN and Afghan investigators had been right all along, and that the Pentagon had been blowing smoke up our backsides once again -- with enormous assistance from the American "news" media.

The Times of London posted a graphic cell-phone video from the scene of the atrocity, and reported:

As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries.

Women are heard wailing in the background. “Oh God, this is just a child,” shouts one villager. Another cries: “My mother, my mother.”

The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war.

These are the images that have forced the Pentagon into a rare U-turn. Until yesterday the US military had insisted that only seven civilians were killed in Nawabad on the night of August 21.

The Times has much more to say, including:

In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.

Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.

That's a C130 in the photo, and for the war-porn shot shown here it was shooting flares. For the sleeping children, they used live ammo.

Chris Floyd picked up on Carlotta Gall's report and wrote an excellent post about it, and Glenn Greenwald read Chris and wrote a good piece about it too. Here Greenwald quotes Floyd:

The mass death visited upon the sleeping, defenseless citizens of Azizabad encapsulates many of the essential elements of this global campaign of "unipolar domination" and war profiteering: the callous application of high-tech weaponry against unarmed civilians; the witless attack that alienates local supporters and empowers an ever-more violent and radical insurgency; and perhaps the most quintessential element of all -- the knowing lies and deliberate deceits that Washington employs to hide the obscene reality of its Terror War.

Greenwald drew attention to the amazing fact that the Pentagon's story had been broadcast into America's living rooms on a daily basis by FOX News, which was featuring reports from an "independent journalist".

It turned out that the "independent journalist" was none other than Oliver North, the convicted serial liar who was a useful tool of evil back in the days of the "Iran/Contra Scandal".

How quaint: a scandal!

To think there could even be one of those in these post-9/11 days. Sigh.

Greenwald also quoted Dan Froomkin quoting George Bush:

"Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths. This has been the case throughout the history of warfare. Our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life. Every grieving family has the sympathy of the American people."

Froomkin's comment:

It's a bit hard to convince people that our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life when we don't even acknowledge them.

He's playing on understatement, of course. It's not "a bit hard". It's impossible.

The photo of the injured Afghan boy comes to us courtesy of the AP via Froomkin's post at Nieman Watchdog.

Now I'm thinking back to the Bush quote:

Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths.

He didn't actually use the term "collateral damage" but he said virtually the same thing. So maybe I wasn't entirely wrong after all. But all those people are still dead.

And, unless I am much mistaken, they're dead because Americans called in an airstrike based on a tip they got from the "enemy". It's utterly preposterous, and despicable, and much worse than I originally thought it could be. Fool me once ...

The Wall Street Bailout

... fool me twice!

I was also wrong about the Wall Street bailout. On Sunday, I wrote a brief post congratulating my fellow citizens on our purchase of "toxic waste" "worth" $700 billion, and now it turns out that the purchase is off, or at least it has been delayed, after the House of Representatives refused to pass a bill backed by the President and the House leaders of both parties.

The vote was 228 to 205 against the bill, and the bipartisan breakdown is instructive: 65 Republicans and 140 Democrats voted for the bailout, while 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted against it.

In other words, more than 67% of the Republicans voted against the measure, while nearly 60% of the Democrats voted for it.

The Republicans have usually voted together, especially when the twice-unelected president has expressed firm views. And Bush has made his support of this bailout proposal very clear.

So there's no question that the president has been rebuffed by his own party on this matter. But -- as Chris Floyd points out -- this is not news; last month the big elephants didn't even let the little chimp speak at their convention.

Meanwhile, the donkey house leadership -- exemplified by Miss Impeachment-Is-Off-The-Table, Nancy Pelosi -- despite their best efforts, could only muster 60% of their "colleagues" in support of this obviously criminal president. So Pelosi has not only shown her truly treasonous colors once again; she's been rebuffed by a significant portion of her own party as well.

Nonetheless, House leaders and presidential mouthpieces say, they will try again to get this bill passed, perhaps later in the week. So the deal is not undone yet, and my reporting may have been more "premature" than "wrong".

Or it could be that, like the Azizabad story, the reality is much worse than my early reports indicated.

As it was becoming evident that the congress would not pass the bailout measure, the Federal Reserve announced that it

will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system...

There's no congressional vote on that, my friends, and we're not getting any toxic waste in return. It's just the first of many donations that will be made in rapid succession, unless I am very wrong.

The purpose of this particular transfusion is to

settle the funding markets down, and allow trust to slowly be restored between borrowers and lenders

as Bloomberg helpfully explains.

And that's the end of reality as a motive force, as far as I can tell.

The best way to restore trust between borrowers and lenders would be to resume the enforcement of laws against predatory lending practices, and to let the firms that have made too many bad investments disappear.

Arthur Silber, who has been digging very deeply into this story lately, reports that "the crisis" may cost as much as $5 trillion before they stop throwing money at it. Of course, by that time, things will be much worse than they are now.

And there's the rub.

The bailout is not a solution to the problem. It could never be a solution and it could never be taken seriously as a potential solution, for the simple reason that the problem is insoluble.

It's not even one problem. It's a tangled mess of problems, some of which were almost certainly created deliberately by our government and its best friends, primarily in order to separate us from our money.

The problems include: an insane level of military spending; repeated cuts to the funding of our social systems and physical infrastructure; excessive tax cuts, especially for the excessively rich; extreme deregulation, especially of the financial "industry"; the movement of formerly American industries to foreign countries; increasing global population; limited global resources; increasing destruction of our natural environment; and the strain of committing multiple war crimes simultaneously. All these forces acting together mean that things are getting more expensive, and that we are becoming less able to afford them.

We can't change any of this by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks that have done the worst job of managing their investments, no matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars we give them.

Thus the "solution" cannot work; it doesn't even begin to address the problem; its only possible purpose is to steal your money and give it to some of the people who are most responsible for the mess we're in today.

So why would we do it?

Gimme an "F". Gimme an "E". Gimme an "A". Gimme an "R". What's that spell?

Some of the details in this NYT piece could be classified under "blackmail" ... or "extortion" ... or "terrorism". Like this:

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., appearing at the White House late Monday afternoon, warned that the failure of the rescue plan could dry up credit for businesses big and small, making them unable to make payrolls or buy inventory. Vowing to continue working with Congress to revive the rescue plan, Mr. Paulson said it was “much too important to simply let fail.”

Supporters of the bill had argued that it was necessary to avoid a collapse of the economic system, a calamity that would drag down not just Wall Street investment houses but possibly the savings and portfolios of millions of Americans. Moreover, supporters argued, a lingering crisis in America could choke off business and consumer loans to a degree that could prompt bank failures in Europe and slow down the global economy.

And this:

Stock markets plunged as it appeared that the measure would go down to defeat, and kept slumping into the afternoon when that appearance became a reality. By late afternoon the Dow industrials had fallen more than 5 percent, and other indexes even more sharply. Oil prices fell steeply on fears of a global recession; investors bid up prices of Treasury securities and gold in a flight to safety. [...]

House leaders pushing for the package kept the voting period open for some 40 minutes past the allotted time at mid-day, trying to convert “no” votes by pointing to damage being done to the markets, but to no avail.

and this:

The United States Chamber of Commerce vowed to exert pressure, warning in a letter to members of Congress that it would keep track of who votes how. “Make no mistake,” the letter said. “When the aftermath of Congressional inaction becomes clear, Americans will not tolerate those who stood by and let the calamity happen.”

I've got news for you: The calamity is already happening, Americans have stood by and watched it develop for years without doing anything about it, and it's going to continue regardless of whether or not the federal government gives a few criminal banks more of our money than anyone can possibly imagine.

I've got more news for you: a scoop before its time, if you will...

Electing John McCain won't solve the problem.

Electing Barack Obama won't solve it either.

Now What?

I can't shake the feeling that these two stories are tied together in ways that transcend the obvious "WP was wrong".

For instance, I wonder whether a nation which tolerates -- not to say thrives on -- deliberate lies about the people it has killed, could possibly deserve anything other than a full-spectrum economic meltdown.

The USA has been attacking defenseless countries for generations.

What goes around, comes around.

And it's been a long time coming.

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Children Killed By U.S. Airstrike In Afghanistan Were Guilty Of Sleeping

They had come together for a solemn occasion. But they had no idea how solemn the occasion would become.

An old friend, a friend of their families, a friend of the local police, had died some months ago, and they were preparing for a memorial service.

Los Angeles Times:

The head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Ahmad Nader Nadery, has confirmed reports that a memorial ceremony was being held for a militia commander allied with the police [...], and relatives and friends from outside the area were staying overnight in the village.

The adults were tending fires, cooking the next day's meal. The children were sleeping.

International Herald Tribune:

[Mohammad Iqbal ] Safi, the member of Parliament, said the villagers had been preparing for a ceremony the next morning in memory of a man who died some time before. Extended families from two tribes were visiting the village and there were lights of fires as the adults were cooking food for the ceremony, he said.

Then the bombs started falling. American bombs. NATO in name only. American.

Washington Post:

At least 90 percent of all aircraft being used in the Afghan war belong to U.S. forces operating under their own command structure.

"Civilian deaths are not a NATO problem," said Marc Gerlasco, a military analyst at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

"Civilian casualties are primarily being caused in airstrikes in support of the counterterrorism mission that the United States is running completely separate from the NATO-run counterinsurgency conflict," said Gerlasco, who has compiled a report on civilian deaths from airstrikes to be published next month.

When the bombing finally stopped, seven or eight homes had been destroyed and many others had been damaged.

Los Angeles Times:

"The destruction from aerial bombardment was clearly evident with some seven to eight houses having been totally destroyed and serious damage to many others," the [UN] statement said.

Washington Post:

Gerlasco said the amount of bombs dropped by U.S. airstrikes in June (317,000 pounds) and July (270,000 pounds) is equivalent to the total tonnage dropped in 2006.

The vast majority of the strikes, Gerlasco said, are unplanned missions called in by U.S. Special Operations ground forces fighting Taliban units or because a "target of opportunity" is located through on-the-ground intelligence.

Unlike in Iraq, where U.S. forces frequently use 250-pound bombs to make attacks more precise, Gerlasco said American troops in Afghanistan "are still using a lot of" 2,000-pound bombs.

By the time the sun came up the next morning, more than seventy people were dead.

At least ninety have died thus far, from this one attack.

Los Angeles Times:

The United Nations said Tuesday that "convincing evidence" exists that an American-led operation killed 90 civilians.

And two-thirds of them were children.

International Herald Tribune:

Mohammad Iqbal Safi, head of the parliamentary defense committee and a member of the government commission, said the 60 children were aged from 3 months to 16 years old and that they were killed as they slept. "It was a heartbreaking scene," he said.

Heartbreaking.

Boston Globe:

Ghulam Azrat, 50, the director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he collected 60 bodies Friday morning after the bombing.

"We put the bodies in the main mosque," he told the Associated Press by phone. "Most of these dead bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them."
...

An AP photographer who visited Azizabad yesterday said he saw at least 20 graves, including some graves with multiple bodies in them. He said he saw about 20 houses that had been destroyed.

It's the sort of damage that can't easily be undone. But that hasn't stopped the Afghan army from trying.

Boston Globe:

Azrat said villagers threw stones at Afghan soldiers when the troops tried to give food and clothes to them. He said the soldiers fired into the crowd and wounded eight people, including one child critically injured.

"The people were very angry," he said. "They told the soldiers, 'We don't need your food; we don't need your clothes. We want our children. We want our relatives. Can you give it to us? You cannot, so go away.' "

Washington Post:

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said military commanders in Afghanistan continued to believe that the attack in Herat "was a legitimate strike on a Taliban target."

Sure it was. A legitimate strike. A Taliban target. Yessir. What-ever-you-say, sir.

An anonymous spokesman blamed the result on bad intelligence -- from the Taliban!

Washington Post:

A U.S. official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban has become adept at spreading false intelligence to draw U.S. strikes on civilians. "The fact is that the Taliban now has pretty good insight into where we're picking up information and how we're developing it into actionable intelligence," the official said. "They've figured out a way to misguide us."

It's the Taliban's fault if we bombed innocent women and children. We would never do such a thing on our own. Would we?

They just gave us some bad information, did they? And we believed them, did we?

They called an airstrike on their own people -- innocent sleeping children -- just for some publicity?

Yeah, sure!

What kind of sick mind would even think of something like that?

Oops! That's easy.

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"Collateral" Women And Children: Airstrike Kills 76 Civilians In Afghanistan

When you're busy exporting "democracy", this sort of thing happens from time to time.

Coalition air strikes kill 76 Afghan civilians: government

KABUL, Aug 22 (AFP) - An operation by international forces in western Afghanistan Friday killed 76 civilians, most of them women and children, the Afghan interior ministry said, announcing it had opened an investigation into the incident.

Military spokesmen call it "collateral damage", which is sufficiently vague to cover all manner of atrocities. And I use the word "cover" advisedly.

Since the dead people were not legitimate military targets, it would have been a war crime to obliterate them on purpose. So the word "collateral" -- literally: "off to the side" -- in this instance is probably supposed to mean "unintended". And the implication is meant to be, "Oops!" In other words, that's how they keep the killers out of prison.

On the other hand, "collateral" can also mean "off to the side" as in "subordinate" or "meaningless". So when we hear the deaths of innocent foreigners described as "collateral damage", the message is effectively, "It doesn't matter; get used to it". In other words, "... or you could be next!"

But when the citizens of an occupied country strike against the occupying foreigners, that's called "terrorism".

“In its struggle against terrorism, France has just been hard hit,” Mr. Sarkozy said in a statement. He arrived in Kabul on Wednesday, according to Reuters, a trip he made to reassure French troops that “France is at their side.”

But Mr. Sarkozy said France would not be deterred from its Afghan mission, where 3,000 troops are serving in a NATO force of more than 40,000 soldiers from nearly 40 nations.

“My determination is intact,” he said. “France is committed to pursuing the struggle against terrorism, for democracy and for freedom. This is a just cause; it is an honor for France and for its army to defend it.”

Barack Obama wants to end the war in Iraq, as he explained in the New York Times last month, in a piece called "My Plan for Iraq".

He wants to do this by moving the war to Afghanistan. And for once he's speaking clearly about it:

I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.
...

Ending the war [in Iraq] is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters ...

... and more collateral damage, too.

Let me tell you, brother,
You can't have one without the other!

~~~

UPDATE: The Americans are denying everything, of course. According to the AP, they say they killed 30 militants -- and no civilians.

And according to The Independent, the coalition of the killing can't get their story straight:

the coalition denied killing civilians. It said 30 militants had been killed ...

A spokesman for the defence ministry in Kabul said US special forces and Afghan troops had struck against a commander named Mullah Sidiq. "Twenty-five Taliban were killed, including Sidiq and another commander," said a spokesman General Zaher Azimi. "Five civilians were killed."

But a statement from the Interior Ministry told a different tale:

"Seventy-six civilians, most of them women and children, were martyred today in a coalition forces operation in Herat province," the statement said.

Coalition forces bombarded the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat province on Friday afternoon, the ministry said. Nineteen victims were women, seven were men, and the rest were children under 15, it said.

The AP ran a photo [republished here] which purports to show the arms and ammunition recovered from the scene after the "30 militants" were killed. Count the rifles: one, two, three, four, five. This in a country where virtually every adult male carries a Kalashnikov. An impressive haul, indeed.

Given the track records of the parties involved, I'm not thinking about changing my headline.

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