[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Obama, the prince of bait-and-switch

[Bill Totten]

I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family,
including six children to a US bomb - but mass murder in Afghanistan
isn't news

by John Pilger

New Statesman (July 24 2008)


On 12 July, the Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a
complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in
detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced
water. He also described the "high drama" and "meticulously practised
routine" of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine
rescuers, wrote Linklater, "saving a life took precedence over [their]
security". Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the
only mention that "47 civilians, most of them women and children, were
killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan
on Sunday".

Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British
public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family,
including six children. A 500 pound [1100 kilogram] US Mk82 bomb was
dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no "enemy" nearby.
I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused
by another "precision" bomb. Inside were nine people - his wife, his
four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband.
Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such
crimes: "Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't
happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while the Times man was
discomforted. Most were guests at a wedding party. Wedding parties are a
"coalition" speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated - at
Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the
details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New
Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project
is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to
keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan
War through the public relations facilities of the British and American
military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on
Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853
bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007.
"The most frequently used bombs," the Air Force Times reports, "are the
500 pound and 2,000 pound [4400 kilogram] satellite-guided ..." Without
this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear,
might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America's and Britain's
puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have
all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on
the CIA's payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George
W Bush's former spokesman Scott McClellan has called "complicit
enablers" - journalists who serve as little more than official
amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a "good war", the complicit
enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in
Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he
is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and,
in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more
helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans
have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral
power - because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike
Whitney put it succinctly, "bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is
the prince.

Those who write of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs,
he will be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same wilful
naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton - and Tony
Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology has
surrendered entirely to 'values' ... there are no sacred cows [and] no
fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in
search of a better Britain ..."

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead.
Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a
black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum
majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of
500 pound bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

http://www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2008/07/pilger-obama-afghanistan-news


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