[Marxism] Obama picks up where Bush left off

[Nasir Khan <naskha3@xxxxxxxxx>]

By Mike Whitney | Counterpunch, May 15 – 17, 2009

Barack Obama is aggressively stepping up the war in Afghanistan. He’s
intensified the cross-border bombing of Pakistan and he is doubling
the number of U.S. troops to 68,000 by 2010. He’s also a strong
proponent of pilotless drones even though hundreds of civilians have
been killed in bombing raid blunders.

On May 4, 2009, 143 civilians were killed in a bombing raid in Bala
Baluk, a remote area south of Herat. Obama brushed off the incident
with terse apology never intimating that the US policy for aerial
bombardment would be reviewed to avoid future mishaps. Patrick
Cockburn gave a summary of the incident:

I did not meet survivors but I did talk to a reliable witness, a radio
reporter called Farooq Faizy, who had gone to Bala Baluk soon after
the attack happened. He (had) some 70 or 80 photographs and they bore
out the villagers’ story: there were craters everywhere; the villages
had been plastered with bombs; bodies had been torn to shreds by the
blasts; there were mass graves; there were no signs of damage from
bullets, rockets or grenades.

US military spokesmen denied the news reports and concocted a wacky
story about Taliban militants rampaging through the village hurling
grenades into buildings. It was a ridiculous narrative that no one
believed. The facts have since been verified by senior government
officials, high-ranking members of the Afghan military and
representatives of the Red Cross. The United States military killed
143 unarmed villagers and then they tried to cover it up with a lie.
None of the victims were fighters. After the bombing, the villagers
loaded body parts onto carts and took them to the office of the
regional governor who confirmed the deaths. The photos of
grief-stricken Afghans burying their dead have been widely circulated
on the Internet.

>From Reuters:

Ninety-three children and 25 adult women are among a list of 140 names
of Afghans who villagers say were killed in a battle and U.S. air
strikes last week, causing a crisis between Washington and its Afghan
allies.

Full article: 
http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com/2009/05/obama-picks-up-where-bush-left-off.html

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