By Debra Sweet
ACTION required: Hundreds of people helped focus World Can’t Wait’s work over the next period by taking this SURVEY. If you haven’t, please take a few minutes. We are compiling the responses, and will they will be used in the effort to re-ignite the antiwar movement. Deadline: Friday, July 31.
Several people me this disturbing Associated Press story: Soldiers in Colorado slayings tell of Iraq horrors. "Soldiers from an Army unit that had 10 infantrymen accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after returning to civilian life described a breakdown in discipline during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered civilians, a newspaper reported Sunday.
Some Fort Carson, Colo.-based soldiers have had trouble adjusting to life back in the United States, saying they refused to seek help, or were belittled or punished for seeking help. Others say they were ignored by their commanders, or coped through drug and alcohol abuse before they allegedly committed crimes, The Gazette of Colorado Springs said. The Gazette based its report on months of interviews with soldiers and their families, medical and military records, court documents and photographs…"
Arguments over why the US should stop occupying Afghanistan:
We keep encountering the argument that the US military occupation of Afghanistan has to continue to save the women there, an idea begun by the Bush regime. Everything we’ve been studying shows that Afghan women are now in worse conditions than even under the Taliban.
Here is an opinion by a former member of the Afghan Parliament: The Big Lie of Afghanistan By Malalai Joya in the Guardian, UK: "So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists.
A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation. This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.
See a new section of Rethinking Afghanistan by Robert Greenwald on women in Afghanistan.
And, for those who argue that releasing photos of detainee abuse endangers the US military, as the Obama administration argues, an interview by Glen Greenwald with Jonathan Horowitz, who finds that Afghanis are most angered by the civilian deaths caused by US bombing, and the indefinite detentions at Bagram. They know what the US forces have been doing to detainees; it’s the US population who is mostly ignorant of the abuse.