Losing Sight: A 4-Year-Old Girl Was the Sole Survivor of a U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan. Then She Disappeared.

by May Jeong
The Intercept

Asadabad, the sylvan capital of Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan, has a population of half a million but the feel of a village. Little happens there without being noticed. Were you out surveying the bazaar on September 7, 2013, you might have seen eight men, three women, and four young children climb into a red Toyota pickup. Most were members of an extended family, returning home after running errands. The pickup was just large enough to accommodate the women and children, with the men piled into the back alongside the sacks of flour they had purchased. Their village, Gambir, was a 2 1/2-hour drive northwest on a rough and undulating road. The village had no electricity or running water, and whatever food that couldn’t be grown had to be brought in from town. To get a phone signal, you climbed a hill. To feel warm to the bone, you waited for spring.

1. The Valley of Death

The driver was a 26-year-old father of two named Abdul Rashid. Because the road into Pech Valley toward Gambir was famously treacherous, a kind of buddy system had developed among cab drivers. That morning, Abdul Rashid had been trying to coordinate the journey with his friend and relative, Mohibullah, but by early afternoon, he had decided to go ahead without him. The four children — including Abdul Rashid’s daughter, Aisha, age 4, and her baby brother, Jundullah, 18 months — were growing restless with the wait. Just after 3 p.m., the truck began to move.

Abdul Rashid stopped in the east end of Asadabad to pick up one last passenger, a woman traveling alone, before heading west. For the last three days, the drivers servicing the Pech had staged a strike to protest poor road conditions. September 7 was Rashid’s first day back on the job.

An hour into the journey, they entered Watapur, a district that sits along the northeastern tributary of the Pech River. Around then, the road paved by the U.S. military came to an end and the gravel path began. On occasion, the truck would get stuck in a bog, and the men would jump off to push it forward. In this way, the party continued to thread north toward Gambir. Watapur is as staggeringly beautiful as it is inaccessible, and along the way, the travelers might have seen children swimming in nearby a brook, or kites flying on the crest of a hill.

Around 5:30 p.m., not long after Abdul Rashid dropped off the lone passenger, a missile fired by a drone hit the right side of the pickup. Those who were not engulfed in the initial conflagration rushed out of the truck. Three more strikes tore through the vehicle in three-minute intervals. After a 10-minute lull, the final strike came, its shrapnel meant to kill everyone in its fragmentation radius. The strike was over in less than 20 minutes.

The landscape of Kunar, alive with thick vegetation and violence, can be hostile to outsiders. In military memoirs, of which there are many, Kunar’s Pech Valley is typically depicted as an impenetrable fortress. Often referred to as the “heart of darkness,” Pech’s capillary valleys have been the subject of much Orientalizing prose. In “Lone Survivor,” the account of a Navy SEAL operation gone awry, the Pech is described as a “dust-colored place,” where “angry, resentful men” who are “Primitive with a big P,” live in “caveman conditions.” The U.S. military made little effort to understand its area of operation when in 2003, it sent a detachment of Green Berets into the valley who spoke Korean, Mandarin, and Thai and later, conventional military units with even less local understanding.

Apart from the dense foliage, the country here is also veined with gullies flanked by rocks in shades of umber and ochre, making it difficult for troops to maintain consistent contact, let alone arrange for a helicopter landing zone. Soldiers’ accounts are replete with mentions of altitude sickness, torn knee ligaments, and twisted ankles.

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Seinfeld boosts Israel’s “shoot to kill” fantasy tours

by David Sheen
The Electronic Intifada

Jerry Seinfeld drew criticism earlier this month when it emerged that while in Israel to perform in Tel Aviv, the famous comedian visited an air force base and took his family to a tourist attraction in the occupied West Bank for ideological and military instruction.

Caliber 3, the Israeli firm that runs what Israeli newspaper Haaretz calls an “anti-terror fantasy camp” boasted about the Seinfeld family’s patronage in a Facebook post on 7 January.

“Finally we are allowed to tell you!! The legendary Jerry Seinfeld and his family were at Caliber 3 during their visit to Israel last week, they came to us for shooting training with displays of combat, Krav Maga [martial arts], assault dogs and lots of Zionism,” the post, which has since been deleted, said, according to Haaretz.

Currently located in the settlement of Efrat, Caliber 3 says it was founded in 2002 by Colonel Sharon Gat and “works in close cooperation” with the Israeli army.

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The Firebombing of Tokyo

by Rory Fanning
Jacobin
Originally published 2015.3.9

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo, World War II’s deadliest day. More people died that night from napalm bombs than in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But few in the United States are aware that the attack even took place.

The lack of ceremonies or official state apologies for the firebombing is unsurprising considering that many Americans see World War II as the “just war” fought by the “greatest generation.” These labels leave the war and the atrocities Americans committed during it largely untouched by critique.

The little that is available to study on the firebombing, at least here in the US, is told from the perspective of American crewmen and brass, through usually biased American military historians. Those seeking better understanding of the March 9 tragedy must wade through reams of history primarily devoted to strategy; the heroics of American soldiers; the awesome power behind the bombs unleashed that day; and a cult-like devotion to the B-29 Superfortress, the plane that dropped the napalm over Tokyo and the atomic bombs, and was the inspiration for George Lucas’s Millennium Falcon.

The overriding narrative surrounding the events of March 9, 1945 is that the American pilots and military strategists such as Gen. Curtis LeMay, the architect of the firebombing, had no other option but to carry out the mission. The Americans had “no choice” but to burn to death nearly one hundred thousand Japanese civilians.

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US media reverse Ahed Tamimi’s reality

by Michael F. Brown
Electronic Intifada

When 16-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi stood up to Israeli occupation soldiers, she couldn’t have known just how much of her story mainstream US media would cut away and twist.

Salient facts, like how Ahed has spent her entire life under military occupation and Israel’s near-fatal violence against her cousin, were either ignored outright or downplayed. Others, such as the indisputable reality that Palestinian land is being stolen by Israel, were treated as if they were simply matters of opinion.

Some in the US press even presented Ahed as the aggressor, rather than the Israeli forces she challenged through mild physical contact.

Ahed’s use of slapping, kicking and angry rhetoric received more attention from David M. Halbfinger in The New York Times and especially from Dana Dovey in Newsweek than the much more harmful Israeli resort to violence, theft and seemingly permanent occupation.

The shocking photo of Muhammad Fadel Tamimi, Ahed’s 15-year-old cousin, and his misshapen head published in a 5 January Haaretz article by Gideon Levy and Alex Levac stands in stark contrast to the solitary sentence Halbfinger allotted Muhammad’s shooting in a 22 December article one week after the confrontation.

Halbfinger dispenses with Muhammad’s severe injury by stating in the 13th paragraph: “The latest incident, filmed in the family’s backyard, occurred within hours after a cousin of Ms. Tamimi’s was shot in the face with a rubber bullet, and it was streamed live on Facebook.”

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You Don’t Need a Telescope to Find a ‘Shithole Country’

by Chris Hedges
Truthdig

I covered the war in El Salvador for five years. It was a peasant uprising by the dispossessed against the 14 ruling families and the handful of American corporations that ran El Salvador as if it was a plantation. Half of the population was landless. Laborers worked as serfs in the coffee plantations, the sugar cane fields and the cotton fields in appalling poverty. Attempts to organize and protest peacefully to combat the huge social inequality were met with violence, including fire from machine guns mounted on the tops of buildings in downtown San Salvador that rained down bullets indiscriminately on crowds of demonstrators. Peasant, labor, church and university leaders were kidnapped by death squads, brutally tortured and murdered, their mutilated bodies often left on roadsides for public view. When I arrived, the death squads were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month.

An insurgent army arose, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (known by the Spanish-language abbreviation FMLN), named for the leader of a peasant uprising in 1932 that was crushed through the slaughter of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, many of them killed in summary executions. The FMLN seized huge parts of the country from the corrupt and demoralized military. In the fall of 1983, the rebels, supplied with weapons from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were on the verge of capturing the country’s second largest city. I did not, at first, travel with the army. It was too dangerous. It was far safer to go into combat with the FMLN. Without outside intervention, the rebels would have seized control of El Salvador within months and ousted the oligarchs.

But, far to the north, was a shithole country ruled by a former B-list movie actor who had starred in “Bedtime for Bonzo” and who was in the early stages of dementia. This shithole country, which saw the world in black and white, communist and capitalist, was determined to thwart the aspirations of the poor and the landless. It would not permit the profits of its companies, such as United Fruit, or the power of the pliant oligarch class that did its bidding in El Salvador, to be impeded. It had disdain for the aspirations of the poor, especially the poor of Latin American or Africa, the wretched of the earth, as writer Frantz Fanon called them, people who in the eyes of those who ruled the shithole country should toil in misery all their lives for the oligarchs and the big American companies allied with them. Let the poor, brown and black people go hungry, watch their children die of sickness or be murdered. Power and wealth, those who ruled this shithole country believed, was theirs by divine right. They, as the lords of shithole-dom, were endowed with special attributes. God blessed shithole countries.

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Gaza girls score for freedom

by Amjad Ayman Yaghi
The Electronic Intifada

Aseel Nawas is passionate about football. After school and homework, the first thing this 15-year-old will do is catch up on the latest football news, especially about Real Madrid, her favorite team.

And she plays. Every Monday and Thursday, Aseel trains for the Khadamat al-Nuseirat junior women’s team in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.

“I used to play football with my friends in the neighborhood,” Aseel told The Electronic Intifada in explaining a passion that started when she was 8. “Football is the best thing that has happened to me and I wish one day that I can go to Brazil where women can play freely.”

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My Daughter, These Are Tears of Struggle

Ahed Tamimi's father: I'm proud of my daughter. She is a freedom fighter who, in the coming years, will lead the resistance to Israeli rule

by Bassem Tamimi
Haaretz

This night too, like all the nights since dozens of soldiers raided our home in the middle of the night, my wife Nariman, my 16-year-old daughter Ahed and Ahed’s cousin Nur will spend behind bars. Although it is Ahed’s first arrest, she is no stranger to your prisons. My daughter has spent her whole life under the heavy shadow of the Israeli prison — from my lengthy incarcerations throughout her childhood, to the repeated arrests of her mother, brother and friends, to the covert-overt threat implied by your soldiers’ ongoing presence in our lives. So her own arrest was just a matter of time. An inevitable tragedy waiting to happen.

Several months ago, on a trip to South Africa, we screened for an audience a video documenting the struggle of our village, Nabi Saleh, against Israel’s forced rule. When the lights came back on, Ahed stood up to thank the people for their support. When she noticed that some of the audience members had tears in their eyes, she said to them: “We may be victims of the Israeli regime, but we are just as proud of our choice to fight for our cause, despite the known cost. We knew where this path would lead us, but our identity, as a people and as individuals, is planted in the struggle, and draws its inspiration from there. Beyond the suffering and daily oppression of the prisoners, the wounded and the killed, we also know the tremendous power that comes from belonging to a resistance movement; the dedication, the love, the small sublime moments that come from the choice to shatter the invisible walls of passivity.

“I don’t want to be perceived as a victim, and I won’t give their actions the power to define who I am and what I’ll be. I choose to decide for myself how you will see me. We don’t want you to support us because of some photogenic tears, but because we chose the struggle and our struggle is just. This is the only way that we’ll be able to stop crying one day.”

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And if Ahed Tamimi Were Your Daughter?

How is it that Israelis are totally indifferent to the plight of the blond girl behind bars who could easily be their child?

by Gideon Levy
Haaretz

For the past two weeks, she has burst into Israelis’ living rooms every few days through another perfunctory report on the extension of her arrest. Once again, we see the golden curls; once again, we see the Botticelli figure in the brown Shin Bet security service uniform and the handcuffs, looking more like a girl from Ramat Hasharon than a girl from Nabi Saleh.

Yet even Ahed Tamimi’s “non-Arab” appearance hasn’t managed to touch any hearts here. The wall of dehumanization and demonization that has been built through vile campaigns of incitement, propaganda and brain-washing against the Palestinians has trumped even the blonde from Nabi Saleh.

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