America Must be Stopped and Palestine Must be Free

The current world situation is unquestionably far worse than "normal". While there have always been conflicts, the world has never had a situation where one country repeatedly selects another one anywhere in the world and proceeds to utterly destroy it as the US has done with, to list a few of its victims, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. We also have the US so desperate to maintain hegemonic control of everything on earth that it is willing to push humanity to the brink of nuclear war over who controls some provinces in Ukraine or a small Chinese Island. The world has not often, if ever, seen a country like the US that murders at will and actively supports and abets a genocide as in Palestine. The world situation is most definitely far worse than "normal" right now. 

On the positive side, though, there are clear signs that the evil American empire is nearing its end. BRICS and dedollarization will neuter the US because its power is based on a house of cards (ie. the petrodollar) that will soon come crashing down once more countries follow the lead of Russia, China and Iran and overcome their dollar dependency. Without the ability to create money out of thin air based on nothing concrete, the US will not be able to bully other countries with illegal sanctions or to start horrendous wars all over the world. Just as people in the West are now seeing through (as the Global Majority has always seen) the lies-based mythology around Zionism and the Zionist regime currently occupying Palestine so are they seeing through the lies of American "exceptionalism" and the "rules-based international order", which has never actually meant anything more than "we [the US] make the rules and you [everyone else] follow the orders". Hypocrisy as an ideology cannot work forever.

The rulers have gone too far once again. In the early 20th century, with labor making gains toward a fairer and more equitable society, the Establishment needed Roosevelt to make minimal concessions in order to avoid a revolution or, worse in the eyes of the greedy rich, socialism. In the late sixties, the protest movement forced the Establishment to end a war they wanted to continue and the draft, too. Now, after 40+ years of destructive neoliberalism and 20+ years of constant war, young Americans, seeing they have no future in such a society and disgusted by what their country is doing to the Palestinians, have finally stood up to say no. I do not know if the current protest movement will last or if it can stop the genocide, but it has already helped to show to the world the utter depravity of the ruling class, the media and the rich. There is no turning back now and that is a very good thing.

Hopefully America and its "Israeli" attack dog will not nuke the world on their way out the door.

Killing Children in ‘Self Defense’

by Craig Murray

Consortiumnews.com

Nobody can tell you how many children have been killed by drone strikes or “targeted” missiles and bombings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen or Libya, writes Craig Murray.

The lives of the latest 15 Palestinian children to be murdered by Israel in Gaza, lives ripped from their small, terrified bodies with devastating violence, do not seem of much concern to the powerful in the West, or indeed anywhere. 

The BBC repeated without question Israel’s claim that its latest launch of high explosive at the Gaza concentration camp was to prevent a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians ? of which prospective attack no evidence has been produced. No Western media has asked for any. Nor has it been explained why the attack would be stopped by Israel obliterating the alleged leader in Gaza of Islamic Jihad and many innocents who chanced to be in his vicinity. 

The scenarios in which the assassination of a leader prevent an attack which is in train are Hollywood. 

The brave Daniel Hale sits in solitary confinement (euphemistically called a “Communications Management Unit) for blowing the whistle on the U.S. drone assassination programme in Afghanistan.

Hale, a drone operative, revealed that 90 percent of people killed by the drone assassination programme in Afghanistan were not the designated target, but that by default everybody killed by a drone strike was labeled an enemy combatant unless positive proof to the contrary were provided (which of course no effort was made to collect).

The extra-judicial execution of “bad guys” with no legal process is not only carried out by Israel. The U.S. and U.K. do it all the time, across the conflicts created by their own neo-imperial adventures and lust for hydrocarbons. 

Nobody can tell you how many children have been killed by drone strikes or “targeted” missiles and bombings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen or Libya. 

The total across those countries is undoubtedly tens of thousands of dead children. We, however, are apparently the good guys. All those children have been killed in our “self-defence,” just as Israel killed those children in Gaza. I do hope that helps you sleep more soundly.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.

The Names You’ll Never Know

A civilian deaths memorial could zig zag across the U.S., suggests Nick Turse. It could keep extending westwards, in a way that would spur Americans’ interest in their nation’s history and conflicts abroad.

By Nick Turse
Consortium News

As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that Aug. 29 airstrike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul’s airport. At least, that’s what the Pentagon told the world.

Within two weeks, a New York Times investigation would dismantle that official narrative. Seven days later, even the Pentagon admitted it. Instead of killing an ISIS suicide bomber, the United States had slaughtered 10 civilians: Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group; three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three children of Ahmadi’s brother Romal, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.

The names of the dead from the Kabul strike are as important as they are rare. So many civilians have been obliterated, incinerated, or — as in the Aug. 29 attack — “shredded” in America’s forever wars.

Who in the United States remembers them? Who here ever knew of them in the first place? Twenty years after 9/11, with the Afghan War declared over, combat in Iraq set to conclude, and President Joe Biden announcing the end of “an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” who will give their deaths another thought?

Americans have been killing civilians since before there was a United States. At home and abroad, civilians — Pequots, African Americans, Cheyenne and Arapaho, Filipinos, Haitians, Japanese, Germans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, and Somalis, among others — have been shot, burned, and bombed to death. The slaughter at Sand Creek, the Bud Dajo massacre, the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the My Lai massacre — the United States has done what it can to sweep it all under the rug through denial, cover-ups, and the most effective means of all: forgetting.

There’s little hope of Americans ever truly coming to terms with the Pequot or Haitian or Vietnamese blood on their hands. But before the forever wars slip from the news and the dead slide into the memory hole that holds several centuries worth of corpses, it’s worth spending a few minutes thinking about Zemari Ahmadi, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, Somaya, and all the civilians who were going about their lives until the U.S. military ended them.

Names Remembered and Names Forgotten

Over the last 20 years, the United States has conducted more than 93,300 air strikes — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen — that killed between 22,679 and 48,308 civilians, according to figures recently released by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. The total number of civilians who have died from direct violence in America’s wars since 9/11 tops out at 364,000 to 387,000, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Who were those nearly 400,000 people?

There’s Malana. In 2019, at age 25, she had just given birth to a son, when her health began to deteriorate. Her relatives were driving her to a clinic in Afghanistan’s Khost Province when their vehicle was attacked by a U.S. drone, killing Malana and four others.

And Gul Mudin. He was wounded by a grenade and shot with a rifle, one of at least three civilians murdered by a U.S. Army “kill team” in Kandahar Province in 2010.

Then there was Gulalai, one of seven people, including three women — two of them pregnant — who were shot and killed in a Feb. 12, 2010, raid by Special Operations forces in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province.

And the four members of the Razzo family — Mayada, Tuqa, Mohannad, and Najib — killed in a Sept. 20, 2015, airstrike in Mosul, Iraq.

And there were the eight men, three women, and four children — Abdul Rashid as well as Abdul Rahman, Asadullah, Hayatullah, Mohamadullah, Osman, Tahira, Nadia, Khatima, Jundullah, Soheil, Amir, and two men, ages 25 and 36 respectively, named Abdul Waheed — who were killed in a Sept. 7, 2013, drone strike on Rashid’s red Toyota pickup in Afghanistan.

Then there were 22-year-old Lul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilo Muse, who were killed in an April 1, 2018, airstrike in Somalia.

And between 2013 and 2020, in seven separate U.S. attacks in Yemen — six drone strikes and one raid — 36 members of the al Ameri and al Taisy families were slaughtered.

Those names we know. Or knew, if only barely and fleetingly. Then there are the countless anonymous victims like the three civilians in a blue Kia van killed by Marines in Iraq in 2003. “Two bodies were slumped over in the front seats; they were men in street clothes and had no weapons that I could see. In the back seat, a woman in a black chador had fallen to the floor; she was dead, too,” wrote Peter Maass in The New York Times Magazine in 2003. Years later, at The Intercept, he painted an even more vivid picture of the “blue van, with its tires shot out and its windows shattered by bullets, its interior stained with blood and smelling of death, with flies feasting on already-rotting flesh.”

Those three civilians in Iraq were all too typical of the many anonymous dead of this country’s forever wars — the man shot for carrying a flashlight in an “offensive” manner; the children killed by an “errant” rocket; the man slain by “warning shots”; the three women and one man “machine-gunned” to death; and the men, women and children reduced to “charred meat” in an American bombing.

Who were the 11 Afghans — four of them children — who died in a 2004 helicopter attack, or the “dozen or more” civilians killed in 2010 during a nighttime raid by U.S. troops in that same country? And what about those 30 pine-nut farm workers slaughtered a year later by a drone strike there? And what were the names of Mohanned Tadfi’s mother, brother, sister-in-law, and seven nieces and nephews killed in the U.S. bombing that flattened the city of Raqqa, Syria, in 2017?

Often, the U.S. military had no idea whom they were killing. It frequently carried out “signature strikes” that executed unknown people due to suspicious behavior. So often, Americans killed such individuals for little or no reason — like holding a weapon in places where, as in this country, firearms were ubiquitous — and then counted them as enemy dead.

An investigation by Connecting Vets found that during a 2019 air campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, for example, the threshold for an attack “could be met by as little as a person using or even touching a radio” or if an Afghan carrying “commercially bought two-way radios stepped into a home, the entire building would sometimes be leveled by a drone strike.”

Targeted assassinations were equally imprecise. Secret documents obtained by The Intercept revealed that, during a five-month stretch of Operation Haymaker — a drone campaign in 2011 and 2013 aimed at al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders along the Afghan-Pakistan border — 200 people were killed in airstrikes conducted to assassinate 35 high-value targets. In other words, nearly nine out of 10 people slain in those “targeted” killings were not the intended targets. So, who were they?

Even if targeting was ordinarily more accurate than during Operation Haymaker, U.S. policy has consistently adhered to the dictum that “military-age males” killed in airstrikes should automatically be classified as combatants unless proven innocent. In addition to killing people for spurious reasons, the U.S. also opted for allies who would prove at least as bad as, if not worse than, those they were fighting. For two decades, such American-taxpayer-funded warlords and militiamen murdered, raped, or shook-down the very people the U.S. government was supposedly protecting. And, of course, no one knows the names of all those killed by such allies who were being advised, trained, armed and funded by the United States.

Who, for instance, were the two men tied to the rear fender of a Toyota pickup truck in southeastern Afghanistan in 2012 by members of an Afghan militia backed by U.S. Special Operations forces? They were, wrote reporter Anand Gopal, dragged “along six miles of rock-studded road” until they were dead. Then their “bodies were left decomposing for days, a warning to anyone who thought of disobeying Azizullah,” the U.S.-allied local commander.

Or what about the 12 boys gunned down by CIA-backed militiamen at a madrassa in the Afghan village of Omar Khail? Or the six boys similarly slain at a school in nearby Dadow Khail? Or any of the dead from 10 raids in 2018 and 2019 by that same militia, which summarily executed at least 51 civilians, including boys as young as eight years old, few of whom, wrote reporter Andrew Quilty, appeared “to have had any formal relationship with the Taliban”?

How many reporters’ notebooks are filled with the unpublished names of just such victims? Or counts of those killed? Or the stories of their deaths? And how many of those who were murdered never received even a mention in an article anywhere?

Last year, I wrote 4,500 words for The New York Times Magazine about the deteriorating situation in Burkina Faso. As I noted then, that nation was one of the largest recipients of American security aid in West Africa, even though the State Department admitted that U.S.-backed forces were implicated in a litany of human-rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings.

What never made it into the piece was any mention of three men who were executed in two separate attacks. On May 22, 2019, uniformed Burkinabe troops arrived in the village of Konga and took two brothers, aged 38 and 25, away in the middle of the night. The next day, a relative found them on the side of the road, bound and executed. Most of the family fled the area. “The Army came back a week later,” a relative told me. “My uncle was the only one in our family who stayed. He was shot in broad daylight.” Such deaths are ubiquitous but aren’t even factored into the 360,000-plus civilian deaths counted by the Costs of War project, which offers no estimate for those killed in America’s “smaller war zones.”

Build the Wall!

We live in a world filled with monuments celebrating lives and deaths, trailblazers and memorable events, heroes and villains. They run the gamut from civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and women’s rights pioneers to the chieftains of the American Confederacy and Belgium’s King Leopold.

In the United States, there’s no shortage of memorials and monuments commemorating America’s wars and fallen soldiers. One of the most poignant lists the names of the American military dead of the Vietnam War. Initially derided by hawkish veterans and conservatives as a “black gash of shame” and a “nihilistic slab,” it’s now one of the most celebrated monuments in Washington, D.C. More than 58,000 men and women are represented on the visually arresting black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Vietnam itself has no shortage of monuments of its own. Many are Soviet-style memorials to those who died defeating the United States and reuniting their country. Others are seldom-seen, tiny memorials to massacres perpetrated by the Americans and their allies. No one knows how many similar cenotaphs exist in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other forever-war countries, but in 2017, journalist Emran Feroz found just such a memorial in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province — a remembrance of five civilians slain in drone strikes during 2013 and 2014.

There have been other attempts to memorialize the civilian dead of the forever wars from art installations to innovative visual protests to virtual commemorations.

In 2018, after then-President Trump signed a bill approving the construction of a Global War on Terrorism Memorial, Peter Maass proposed, even if only half-seriously, that the bullet-riddled blue Kia van he saw in Iraq should be placed on a pedestal on the National Mall. “If we start building monuments that focus our attention on the pitiless killing of civilians in our wars,” he wrote, “maybe we would have fewer wars to fight and less reason to build these monuments.”

A blue Kia on the National Mall would be a good starting point. But if we’re ever to grasp the meaning of the post-9/11 wars and all the conflicts that set the stage for them, however, we may need a wall as well — one that starts at the Kia and heads west. It would, of course, be immense. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial spans a total of 400 feet. The celebrated Vietnam War photographer Philip Jones Griffiths observed that a wall for the Vietnamese dead, counting combatants, of the American War would be nine miles long.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is arrayed in a unique chronological format, but the Civilian Deaths Memorial could begin with anyone. The last civilians killed by the United States as part of its 2001 to 2021 Afghan War – Zemari Ahmadi, Zamir, Faisal, Farzad, Naser, Arwin, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, and Somaya – could lead it off. Then maybe Abdul Rashid and the 14 passengers from his red pick-up truck. Then Malana, Gul Mudin, Gul Rahim, Gulalai, Mayada, Tuqa, Mohannad, Najib, Lul Dahir Mohamed, and Mariam Shilo Muse. Then maybe Ngo Thi Sau, Cao Muoi, Cao Thi Thong, Tran Cong Chau Em, Nguyen Thi Nhi, Cao Thi Tu, Le Thi Chuyen, Dang Thi Doi, Ngo Thi Chiec, Tran Thi Song, Nguyen Thi Mot, Nguyen Thi Hai, Nguyen Thi Ba, Nguyen Thi Bon, Ho Thi Tho, Vo Thi Hoan, Pham Thi Sau, Dinh Van Xuan, Dinh Van Ba, Tran Cong Viet, Nguyen Thi Nham, Ngo Quang Duong, Duong Thi Hien, Pham Thi Kha, Huynh Van Binh, Huynh Thi Bay, Huynh Thi Ty, Le Van Van, Le Thi Trinh, Le Thi Duong, and Le Vo Danh and her unborn child, all slaughtered in the tiny South Vietnamese village of Phi Phu by U.S. troops (without any of the attention accorded to the My Lai massacre). They could be followed by the names of, or placeholders for, the remaining 2 million Vietnamese civilian dead and by countless Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis and Yemenis.

The Civilian Wall could be built in a zig-zag fashion across the U.S. with the land in its way — homes and businesses, parks and roadways — seized by eminent domain, making Americans care about civilian deaths in ways that news articles never could.

When you lose your home to a slab of granite that reads “Pequot adult, Pequot adult, Pequot child…” 500 times, you may actually take notice. When you hear about renewed attacks in Iraq or drone strikes in Somalia or a Navy SEAL raid gone awry in Yemen and worry that the path of the wall might soon turn toward your town, you’re likely to pay far more attention to America’s conflicts abroad.

Obviously, a westward-traveling wall memorializing civilian carnage is a non-starter in this country, but the next time you hear some fleeting murmur about a family wiped out by a drone strike or read a passing news story about killings by a U.S.-backed militia, think about that imaginary wall and how, in a just world, it might be headed in your direction. In the meantime, perhaps the best we can hope for is Maass’s proposal for that blue Kia on the Mall. Perhaps it could be accompanied by the inscription found on a granite slab at the Heidefriedhof, a cemetery in Dresden, Germany, the site of a mass grave for civilians killed in a 1945 U.S. and British fire-bombing. It begins: “How many died? Who knows the number?”

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony

by Paul Street
Truthdig

There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. global power--to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.

This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essay titled “How Trump Is Ending the American Era.” Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump had reduced “America’s standing and ability to influence global affairs.” He worried that Trump’s presidency would leave “America’s position in the world stunted” and an “America lacking confidence” on the global stage.

But it isn’t just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women’s March against Trump) frets that that Trump’s “America First” and authoritarian views have the world “looking for leadership elsewhere.”

“Could this be it?” Vick asks. “Might the American Century actually clock out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?”

I recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a left-liberal American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and mostly excellent and instructive volume, the author finds it “worrisome” that other nations see the U.S. “abdicating its role as the world’s leading policeman” under Trump--and that, “given what we have seen so far from the [Trump] administration, U.S. hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than it has been in a long time.”

For the purposes of this report, I’ll leave aside the matter of whether Trump is, in fact, speeding the decline of U.S. global power (he undoubtedly is) and how he’s doing that to focus instead on a very different question: What would be so awful about the end of “the American Era”?the seven-plus decades of U.S. global economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why should the world mourn the “premature” end of the “American Century”?

It would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the politically cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives outside the U.S. would feel about the end of U.S. global dominance. My guess is that Uncle Sam’s weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to world events.

According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by a wide margin.

MORE...

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.

MORE...

Why the Rise of Fascism is Again the Issue

by John Pilger
(Originally published 2015.2.26)

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

"To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.

In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten".

The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew... that if we waited one more day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.

For Obama, David Cameron and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".

Following Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, "confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency".

The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.

In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation - and the implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America's modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as "sanctions". The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.

"Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over." These were opening words of Obama's 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. "The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion," said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed - civilians and soldiers - during Obama's time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives', Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion... Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation." He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. "Every girl," recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, "could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported."

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, "there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]". Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the "threat of a promising example".

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised support for tribal "fundamentalist" groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that "the United States' larger interests... would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." The italics are mine.

The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a "freedom fighter".

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and "destabilise" the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, "a few stirred up Muslims". His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called "Operation Cyclone". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah - who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help - was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.

The "blowback" of Operation Cyclone and its "few stirred up Muslims" was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer's message was and remains: "You are with us or against us."

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and "collateral damage". In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians ("gooks") were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.

Today, the world's greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama's victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA "kill list" presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each "hit" is registered on a faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".

"For goose-steppers," wrote the historian Norman Pollack, "substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception." This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the "tragedy" of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places - just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood's violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, 'American Sniper', which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a "patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days".

There are no heroic movies about America's embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens - as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include  Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry". If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe - with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism". It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading "neo-con" luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney. 

Nuland's coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea - illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 - voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion". The Nato commander, General Breedlove - whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - announced that 40,000 Russian troops were "massing". In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine - a third of the population - have long sought a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history". In the American and British media, this was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint".

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army".  There were "individual citizens" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev's Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for "full scale war" with nuclear-armed Russia.

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established... If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason."

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack... In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons." In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. "Putin must be stopped," said the headline. "And sometimes only guns can stop guns." He conceded that the threat of war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that "America has the best kit".

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones." He lauded Blair as a "Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote, "Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran."

The outbursts - or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" - are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: "The F-35. GREAT For Britain". This American "kit" will cost British taxpayers ￡1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world.  In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas "investment". She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son is on the board of Ukraine's biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine's rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine's mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia's long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.

Rocket's Red Glare

by Mr. Fish

Truthdig

Robert Fisk: Bombs make no moral distinctions where they fall

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

To Mannheim for its annual film festival and I am gripped by Armadillo, a documentary on a Danish NATO unit in Afghanistan, real bullets whizzing past one of the bravest directors of photography in the world, real soldiers falling wounded, one with a Wilfred Owen pallour of death on his face.

But he survives. Others don't. After storming a Taliban position, the Danes find at least three Afghans, apparently still alive. There is a crack of gunfire and they are dead. "We eliminated them in the most humane way possible," one of the Danes says afterwards, right there on the soundtrack.

I am stunned. The words "war crimes" are in my mind. Then I stumble out into the cold afternoon to walk back to my hotel past the back of the 19th-century Kunstalle and there are shrapnel gashes up the red stone walls, deep wounds in the brickwork of the school next door, a slash in the basement window casing. Was this from the British fire raid of 1940, or the first attempt to raze the city on 16 April 1943, or the American raids of 1944? Well protected with underground bunkers, only 1,700 Germans were killed here, a mere 0.6 per cent of its residents. War crimes?

I find a small bookshop in a bleak, freezing street – the 1950s block architecture proves how much of this city much we destroyed – and I ask for a history of Mannheim in the Second World War. My request is received without emotion by a stooped, middle-aged man who brings me two beautifully produced volumes – "the last we have," he says – and I buy them at once: Mannheim under the Dictator and Mannheim in the Second World War, both produced with photographs and documents from state and city archives. I flip open the second book and there is a nurse bending over a carbonised corpse. Three women lie on their backs, all in coats; obviously caught in the open, perhaps during the great raid of 5-6 September 1943, in which 414 residents were killed. Two of them are elderly, one of them a much younger woman with high cheekbones and closed eyes.

Opposite is a page of death notices in the Neue Mannheimer Zeitung – like all papers in Germany, controlled by the Nazi party – printed a few days after the raid. Heinz Laubenstein was five when he was killed, his sister Ruth was 17, their father and mother, Hans and Bienchen, were 36 and 35. Katherina Witwe was 68, Berta Werle was 29. Anna Schindler was 56, her husband Anton eight years older. A victim of the 1944 bombing, a gaunt woman – her face like a skull – staring wildly, helped by a civil defence worker and a man who may be her husband clutching a ragged child, stands amid rubble. The Nazis liked to emphasise their own civilian suffering; and they gloated over their enemies. An amateur photograph shows two captured Allied fliers hiding their faces from the camera, trailed by two grinning schoolboys on bicycles; another shows a smouldering British Hereford bomber that has crashed plumb into the middle of a street across the Rhine in Ludwigshafen.

I prowl through the pages, searching for the faces of wartime Mannheim. I try to guess whether they are Nazi party members or not before reading the captions and – amazingly – I always get it right. The smug, fat, dark – yes, sinister – faces all turn out to be Nazis. The gentler, more intelligent faces are always those of old Social Democrats, of Jews and Communists. But I almost make one mistake. There is a photo of a young schoolboy in the 1920s, Gustav Adolf Scheel, again with bicycle, a pleasant but unsmiling face, harmless enough,dressed in a double-breasted jacket. Then I flip the page, add 20 years, and sitting in front of me is a mean-faced bully of a man in uniform, eagle and death's head on his cap, high leather boots. Pleasant young Gustav has turned into an SS officer in the Alpenland.

Hour after hour I read these books, and this has a strange effect. There is Hitler arriving at the small Mannheim airport that I passed in the tram yesterday. There is Goebbels in the opera house near the water tower where I have coffee every morning. There is the very same tower draped with a mighty Swastika. And there is a photograph of a dignified Jewish businessman confronting a bespectacled Nazi officer, whole family pictures of doomed Jews, sitting round a table, many of the pictures horribly torn and crushed. The Mannheim history books duck nothing. There is a whole chapter on the Holocaust.

There was even a baby resistance in Mannheim. A Gestapo photograph shows the tiled wall of a public lavatory on which someone has scribbled in a plaster join the words: "Hitler Shuft" – "Hitler is a gangster." And there is one, most moving letter from a Mannheim communist, whose childish roneo-published anti-Nazi tracts earned him a death sentence. Thirty-six year old Jakob Faulhaber was allowed a last letter, hitherto untranslated into English, to his wife Emma at their home at No 34 Hubenstrasse. "My loved ones," he writes on 14 September 1942, "now the decision has been taken, and everything we tried to do has failed. Our appeal has been denied and all our hope is at an end. When I think back on my life, it was a little too short – but it was worth it to have lived such a life. You all know that I always lived for my ideals and I'm a strong enough person to die for them ... Last greetings to all who were close to me in my life. What is it to live?" Jakob Faulhaber was hanged next day in Stuttgart.

Were some of the other Mannheimers "just like us", decent men and women who risked life for freedom, who responded to daily bombing in a way remarkably similar to that of Londoners in the 1940-41 Blitz, who wrote "Business as usual" on their shops? There is a snapshot of massive ruins in Mannheim and a hoarding which says: "...and despite all! Mannheim is a still a living city." But it was put there by the Nazis. The people, the Volk – and you can see them walking to work between smashed tenements – did not erect posters; they wrote their names and addresses on their ruined homes so that when their husbands and brothers and lovers came back from the front – if they did come back – they could find their families. Some of these men were war criminals in a most deliberate way, decimating entire peoples. But they also killed wounded soldiers, just as we did in Normandy. And in Afghanistan. And we knew, of course, when we bombed Mannheim, that we would kill a Heinz, a Ruth, a Berta and an Anna amid the destruction of the city's factories.

War crimes? Of course, we can all make moral assessments. Eliminated in the most humane way... The Taliban are not as bad as the Nazis. But they are much worse than the Danes. Isn't that right? What is this life?

Do you Mr. Jones?

by Mr. Fish

The charge of the media brigade

by John Pilger

The New Statesman

Behind the Pentagon’s façade of honourable motives for invading other countries lies a history of promoting violence and covering up atrocities with wars of misinformation. Next stops: Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea.

Washington: The TV anchorwoman was conducting a split-screen interview with a journalist who had volunteered to be a witness at the execution of a man on death row in Utah for 25 years. "He had a choice," said the journalist, "lethal injection or firing squad." "Wow!" said the anchorwoman. Cue a blizzard of commercials for fast food, tooth whitener, stomach stapling, the new Cadillac. This was followed by a reporter in Afghanistan sweating in a flak jacket. "Hey, it's hot," he said on the split screen. "Take care," said the anchorwoman. "Coming up" was a reality show in which the camera watched a man serving solitary confinement in a prison's "hell hole".

The next morning I arrived at the Pentagon for an interview with one of President Barack Obama's senior war-making officials. There was a long walk along shiny corridors hung with pictures of generals and admirals festooned in ribbons. The interview room was purpose-built. It was blue, ice cold, windowless and featureless except for a flag and two chairs: props to create the illusion of a place of authority. The last time I was in a similar room at the Pentagon, a colonel called Hum stopped my interview with another war-making official when I asked why so many innocent civilians were being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was in the thousands; now it is more than a million. "Stop tape!" he had ordered.

Information warriors

This time there was no Colonel Hum, merely a polite dismissal of soldiers' testimony that it was a "common occurrence" that troops were ordered to "kill every motherfucker". The Pentagon, says the Associated Press, spent $4.7bn in 2009 alone on public relations: that is, winning the hearts and minds not of recalcitrant Afghan tribesmen, but of Americans. This is known as "information dominance" and PR people are "information warriors".

American imperial power flows through a media culture to which the word imperial is anathema. Colonial campaigns are really "wars of perception", wrote the present commander, General David Petraeus, in which the media popularise the terms and conditions. "Narrative" is the accredited word because it is postmodern and bereft of context and truth. The narrative of Iraq is that the war is won, and the narrative of Afghanistan is that it is a "good war". That neither is true is beside the point. They promote a "grand narrative" of a constant threat and the need for permanent war. "We are living in a world of cascading and intertwined threats," wrote the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, "that have the potential to turn our country upside down at any moment."

Friedman supports an attack on Iran, whose independence is intolerable. This is the psychopathic vanity of great power that Martin Luther King described as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world". He was then shot dead.

The psychopathic is applauded across popular, corporate culture, from the TV death watch of a man choosing a firing squad over lethal injection to the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker and a new acclaimed war documentary, Restrepo. The directors of both films deny and dignify the violence of invasion as "apolitical". And yet, behind the cartoon façade is serious purpose. The US is engaged militarily in 75 countries. There are said to be as many as 900 US military bases across the world, many at the gateways to the sources of fossil fuels.

But there is a problem. Most Americans are opposed to these wars and to the billions of dollars spent on them. That their brainwashing so often fails is America's greatest virtue. This is frequently due to courageous mavericks, especially those who emerge from the centrifuge of power. In 1971, the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which put the lie to almost everything two presidents had claimed about Vietnam. Many of these insiders are not even renegades. I have a section in my address book filled with the names of former CIA officers who have spoken out. They have no equivalent in Britain.

Imperialism's face

In 1993, C Philip Liechty, the CIA's operations officer in Jakarta at the time of Indonesia's murderous invasion of East Timor, described to me how President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had given the dictator Suharto a green light, secretly supplying the arms and logistics he needed. As the first reports of massacres landed on his desk, Liechty began to turn. "It was wrong," he said. "I felt badly."

Melvin Goodman is now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He was in the CIA for more than 40 years and rose to be a senior Soviet analyst. When we met the other day, he described the conduct of the cold war as a series of gross exaggerations of Soviet "aggressiveness" that wilfully ignored the intelligence that the Soviets were committed to avoid nuclear war at all costs. Declassified official files on both sides of the Atlantic support this view. "What mattered to the hardliners in Washington," Goodman said, "was how a perceived threat could be exploited." The present secretary of defence, Robert Gates, as deputy director of the CIA in the 1980s, was one of those who had hyped the "Soviet menace" and is, says Goodman, doing the same today "on Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran".

Little has changed. In America, in 1939, W H Auden wrote:

As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives [. . .]
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong

Rioters vent fury at US after Nato troops kill Afghan civilians on bus

by Julius Cavendish

The Independent

Protesters take to streets in Kandahar after attack kills four and leaves 18 wounded

Nato's hopes for winning over the Afghan population in the south of the country ahead of a massive new military campaign took a major blow yesterday when Nato soldiers opened fire on a civilian bus in Kandahar City and killed four passengers.

Eighteen passengers were also injured in the shooting, which sparked riots in Kandahar. Hundreds of protesters burned tyres, chanted "Death to America! Death to Karzai! Death to this government!" and blocked the main road out of the city.

The timing could hardly have been worse, with tensions already rising ahead of a summer offensive designed to bring the city and its surrounds back under the control of the Western-backed government in Kabul.

Nato and Afghan officials said the incident occurred shortly before dawn but accounts of what happened diverge. One passenger, interviewed in hospital, said the bus had pulled over to allow a Nato convoy to pass. "They just suddenly opened fire, I don't know why," said Rozi Mohammad, whose eye was swollen shut and face and clothes were matted with blood. "We had been stopped and after that I don't know what happened."

But Nato said that the bus accelerated as it approached a slow-moving convoy searching for roadside bombs. In the darkness soldiers only saw a large vehicle approaching them at speed and, after trying to warn it off with hand signals and flares, opened fire.

"Perceiving a threat when the vehicle approached once more at an increased rate of speed the patrol attempted to warn off the vehicle with hand signals prior to firing upon it. Once engaged, the vehicle then stopped," Nato said. It added that it had dispatched an "incident assessment team" to find out what happened.

Inside the city, protesters slammed not just Nato but also President Hamid Karzai for failing to stand up to the foreign forces. "The Americans are constantly killing our civilians and the government is not demanding an explanation," said Mohammad Razaq, a local resident. "We demand justice from the Karzai government and the punishment of those soldiers responsible."

Mr Karzai, who has in fact repeatedly criticised Nato for killing civilians, said: "This shooting involving a civilian bus violates Nato's commitment to safeguard civilian life."

The incident was a stark reminder of the difficulties facing US General Stanley McChrystal, the top Nato commander in Afghanistan, who is grappling with a counter-insurgency doctrine that calls for Nato troops to protect Afghan civilians. Since taking command last year, he has issued tighter rules of engagement and kept a constant stream of communication about the need to keep civilian casualties as low as possible.

In a video conference taking questions from troops earlier this year, General McChrystal said with some frustration, "We've shot an amazing number of people" who were not, in fact, threats. In February, he apologised to the Afghan people after a Nato airstrike killed 27 civilians. A separate strike in February killed five civilians suspected of planting roadside bombs close to the scene of Monday's incident.

Kandahar Mayor Gulam Hamidi said the blowback from civilian casualties was obvious. "I've told the Americans and Nato that people are very angry about these kinds of attacks," he said.

In a separate incident soon after the shooting, a Taliban suicide squad attacked the provincial headquarters of the secret police, a heavily defended compound in Kandahar City. Two of the bombers were killed in a 45-minute battle and a third was captured after being injured by security forces.

Nine civilians including a teacher and five children were wounded in the fighting. According to the UN, the Taliban was responsible for 67 per cent of civilians killed in Afghanistan last year.

The story of Christmas – and how it was ruined by Australia

by Kathy Marks

The Independent

Christmas Island was once called the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. But a detention centre for asylum-seekers is threatening its rare crabs – and enraging the locals.

Until September 2001 Christmas Island, an Australian external territory in the Indian Ocean, was known only for its annual migration of native red crabs. Then John Howard's right-wing government deployed the SAS to prevent the Tampa, a Norwegian tanker, from docking with its cargo of shipwrecked asylum-seekers, and the island became a symbol of Australia's refugee crackdown.

Eight-and-a-half years on, a Labor government is in charge, but Christmas Island – the rugged tip of an extinct volcano, 1,600 miles north-west of Perth – is in the spotlight again. An immigration detention centre built there after the Tampa scandal is overflowing following a flurry of boat arrivals, and with an election due later this year, the former British colony finds itself once more a political football.

Last week the Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, closed the door to Sri Lankans and Afghans, announcing that no new refugee claims would be processed for three to six months. He cited improved security in the two countries; however, cynics noted the timing of the move, which followed the interception this year of 38 boats in Australian waters, and revelations that Christmas Island is full.

The isolated tropical island, an Australian possession since 1958, was once known as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean because of its profusion of endemic species. Now it has a darker reputation, to the dismay of its 1,200 residents. Some locals – outnumbered nearly three to one by asylum-seekers and Immigration Department staff – can no longer afford rents. The price of food has skyrocketed.

At Flying Fish Cove, the main bay, children bodyboard in the shallow, crystal clear waters as giant frigate birds wheel overhead, waiting to swoop down on a fishermen's catch. It's an idyllic scene – apart from the Australian Navy ship just offshore and the blue-shirted security staff waiting on the jetty for the latest batch of gaunt-looking men, women and children plucked from crowded boats.

Residents – mostly descendants of indentured workers brought over from China and South-east Asia in the late-19th century to work in the island's phosphate mines – have grown accustomed to the almost daily ritual enacted at the cove.

The unscheduled visitors are transported to shore by barge, then transferred to school buses on the jetty and whisked to one of two detention centres. The main facility – situated on a bleak plateau, surrounded by jungle, at the island's north-west extremity – is for single men. Women and children are held in a separate, unfenced camp.

The island, a 45-minute flight from Jakarta, is the centrepiece of an immigration policy described by Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as "tough but humane". Soon after coming to power, he jettisoned Mr Howard's more extreme measures, including dispatching asylum-seekers to the Pacific nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea for processing, and granting refugees five-year rather than permanent visas.

However, as a sop to public opinion, and to dispel the impression of being "soft" on border protection, the government has continued to keep boat people off the mainland. Everyone picked up in Australian waters is taken to Christmas Island. It's an expensive sop: the main detention centre, North West Point, cost A$400m (£242m) to build, and, according to Oxfam, it costs A$1,830 a day to keep a detainee there, compared with A$238 in Sydney.

Locals have come to accept the prison camps, but many remain unhappy. "This is an incarnation of Christmas Island I don't approve of," says Simon Prince, who runs a dive operation. "But we don't get a say. My opinion is that these are people needing our help. I've been involved in rescues [at sea] in the past, and generally they've got a tragic story to tell."

North West Point, a 20-minute drive from residential areas, was supposed to accommodate at most 800 people; currently more than 2,000 are held on the island, with the overflow in prefabricated huts and air-conditioned tents. The facility is surrounded – for reasons that are unclear, in such a remote spot – by a tall metal fence. Islanders call it "that place" or "the dark side".

"Look," says Gordon Haye, Christmas's one taxi driver, swerving to avoid a red crab, "here's the A$50m recreation centre they built as a bribe to put that monstrosity [North West Point] up there." His figures might be inflated – the centre actually cost about A$8m – but there is no mistaking his bitterness towards the Australian government.

Mr Haye says the price of everything has shot up, thanks to the presence of 800 immigration officials, security guards, interpreters and medical staff. "My brother and his son are living in a little shed because they can't afford a house," he says. "I know of a family with two kids living in a laundry at the back of someone's house." Staff at the small hospital are struggling to cope, and waste and sewage services are overloaded.

Sighted on Christmas Day 1643 by a British naval captain, William Mynors, the island was not settled until 1888, when the British realised it contained rich phosphate deposits. Today its three principal residential precincts – Poon Saan (mainly Chinese), Kampong (mainly Malay), and Settlement (mainly European) – reflect its mixed ethnic heritage, as do the Buddhist and Taoist temples, the bright green mosque and the signs in three languages.

Phosphate is still the biggest employer, but mining has been on the wane for years, and an application for new leases – which would involve the destruction of pristine rainforest – is expected to be rejected.

The search is on for something to fill the gap, but Christmas has a history of grand projects that, for a while, seemed to offer economic salvation. A casino popular with Indonesian high-rollers, including cronies of Tommy Suharto, the dictator's son, closed in 1998 after just five years. Plans for a satellite launch pad never got off the ground, and the site has since been swallowed by jungle. Some believe eco-tourism represents the future of the island, which has one roundabout, one set of traffic lights and, instead of a newspaper, a blackboard on which public notices are scrawled – until a tropical downpour washes them away.

For now, though, the industry is tiny, and Linda Cash, marketing manager of the tourism association, sighs when asked about the challenges of promoting the place. "Most people in Australia have got a very skewed view of Christmas Island," she says.

So, for the moment, the refugee business is keeping Christmas afloat. "We have a detention economy on the island," says Gordon Thomson, president of the shire council. "It employs more than 100 people here, so it's our second largest employer."

The staff from outside, flown in at considerable expense to Australian taxpayers, are disliked locally not only for driving up prices, but also for killing native crabs. As well as the red crabs which carpet roads and beaches during their migration from the rainforest to the ocean, Christmas is home to 20 other species, including the robber or coconut crab – the world's largest land invertebrate.

Eaten to extinction, or close to, in many places, the outlandishly sized robber crabs – some as big as small dogs – are protected on Christmas. However, 190 of them have been killed by cars this year, and residents blame outsiders speeding up and down the road to North West Point.

The Tampa crisis is credited with helping Mr Howard to win the 2001 election. Mr Rudd is widely expected to be re-elected, with or without a crackdown. But his new hardline stance will doubtless help – although the numbers of people seeking asylum in Australia are minuscule compared with those in Europe, and 90 per cent arrive by air, not boat.

On Christmas, some yearn for more innocent times. "Everyone thinks of detention now when they think of Christmas Island," says Mr Prince, the dive operator. "I would like the place to be known for what it's best for: as a pristine wilderness, both above and below the water, and as one of the last frontiers of nature."

The island by numbers

2,800 Immigration officials, guards and asylum-seekers on the island

1,200 Estimated permanent population

190 Rare robber crabs to be hit by cars on the island's roads this year, a toll local people blame on outsiders

£242m Estimated cost of construction for the main detention centre

£1,100 Daily cost of holding a detainee on Christmas Island, according to Oxfam

£143 Daily cost of holding a detainee in Sydney

1,600 Distance in miles from the island to Perth, the closest Australian city

13,507 Visas granted by the Australian government to refugees in 2008-09. Of those, 11,010 were granted to those held offshore

US special forces 'tried to cover-up' botched Khataba raid in Afghanistan

by Jerome Starkey

Times Online

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.

“Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.

The Kabul headquarters of General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces, claimed originally that the women had been “tied up, gagged and killed”.

A senior Afghan official involved in a government investigation told The Times: “I think the special forces lied to McChrystal.”

“Why did the special forces collect their bullets from the area?” the official said. “They washed the area of the injuries with alcohol and brought out the bullets from the dead bodies. The bodies showed there were big holes.”

The official, who asked not to be named until the results of the investigation have been made public, said that the assault force sealed off the compound from 4am, when the raid started, to 11am, when Afghan officials from Gardez were finally allowed access to the house.

At least 11 bullets were fired during the raid, the investigator said, and the shooting was carried out by two American gunmen positioned on the roof of the compound. Only seven bullets were recovered from the scene.

“I asked McChrystal, ‘why did the Americans clean some of the bullets from the area?’ They don’t have the right to do that,” the official said.

Haji Sharabuddin, the head of the family who were attacked, told The Times last month that troops removed bullets from his relatives’ bodies, but his claims were impossible to verify. The hallway where four of the five victims were killed had been repainted and at least two bullet holes had been plastered over.

Video footage of the raid’s aftermath, collected by Afghan investigators, shows close-up shots of one man’s bloodstained and punctured torso and walls with blood on them. The Afghan official’s conclusion that the bullets were removed is based on the testimony of survivors, analysis of the photographs and the missing bullets.

Nato promised a joint forensic investigation in a statement issued after the raid, but Rear Admiral Greg Smith, the coalition’s director of communications in Afghanistan, said that this had proved impossible because the bodies were buried the same day in accordance with Islamic custom.

Instead Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior sent its top criminal investigator from Kabul, and a Canadian brigadier-general led a separate military inquiry.

The Afghan investigation differed in one respect from The Times’ findings. Survivors told this newspaper that Saranwal Zahir, the police officer’s brother, was shot when he tried to shout that his family was innocent. The women, who were crouching behind him, were killed in the same volley of fire. Afghan investigators believe that Mr Zahir was carrying an AK47 and wanted to avenge his brother’s killers. The women were clustered around him, trying to pull him inside the house, when the second US gunman opened fire, killing all four of them.

Footage collected by the Afghan team also shows a man in United States Army uniform taking pictures of the bodies. The findings have not been made public. The Interior Ministry is expected to pass a report to the Attorney-General’s office, which will decide whether or not it can press criminal charges.

The family had more than 25 guests on the night of the attack, as well as three musicians, to celebrate the naming of a newborn child.

“In what culture in the world do you invite ... people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” asked the senior official. “The dead bodies were just eight metres from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.”

In a statement yesterday, Brigadier-General Eric Tremblay, a Nato spokesman, said: “We deeply regret the outcome of this operation, accept responsibility for our actions that night, and know that this loss will be felt forever by the families.

“The force went to the compound based on reliable information in search of a Taleban insurgent, and believed that the two men posed a threat to their personal safety. We now understand that the men killed were only trying to protect their families.”

Robert Fisk: Glossy new front in battle for hearts and minds

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Once it was grainy video footage on websites. Now the Taliban believes its best chance of winning the propaganda war lies in a magazine

It's sleek, it's glossy, it's in eloquent Arabic, Pashto and Dari, and it pours derision on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan; it is the brand new propaganda wing of the Taliban: not just internet video of attacks on the western armies in Helmand and Kandahar, but professionally produced magazines, carrying stories of the Taliban's own "martyrdom" operations and the names of its dead fighters. For once, the cliché "well-oiled publicity machine" is correct.

Nureddin – or Abu Ahmed, as he preferred to be called, to denote that he is Ahmed's father – is one of the creators of Al-Samoud, which roughly translates as "Resistance" or "Stay Put!" The latest front page of the Taliban's monthly Arabic-language house magazine is adorned with photographs of a grim-faced General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, and the headline: "A surprise is awaiting the enemy in Helmand." Inside, an editorial asks: "Is the battle of Marja as decisive as they claim?" while an article on casualties is accompanied by a coloured photograph of a British military cortège passing through the village of Wootton Basset.

Abu Ahmed is from Logar province in Afghanistan but his Arabic is fluent and his arguments straightforward. "In the West," he says to me, "they say they have freedom of speech – so why shouldn't we have freedom of speech?" We are talking over lunch in the weird company of three pink storks and a peacock that prowl the Afghan-Tajik-Uzbek restaurant in Islamabad where he has chosen to meet me, wearing a white robe, a white cap and a carefully combed beard.

His spectacles give him a student's complexion, his arguments are exceptionally dry. When I ask him why he doesn't produce an English edition of Al-Samoud and sell it to the 150,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan, he shakes his head with the words: "They are seeing everything live and they would have no time to read it – they are too busy fighting for their lives."

Al-Samoud and the Taliban's three other magazines in Pashto and Dari – the bi-monthly Morchel ("Trench"), Saraq ("Flame") and Shahamak ("Dignity") – are obviously produced on modern presses, although Abu Ahmed will not reveal their location. I suspect they are in Pakistan and receive a sharp look by way of reply. But they reveal two new characteristics: an almost obsessive attention to detail, and the new name of the Taliban. The group now calls itself the "Islamic Emirate". That's the original name of the country the Taliban governed until 2001, and its readoption is an attempt to free itself from the thieves and mafiosi in Afghanistan who call themselves "Taliban" but who have nothing to do with Islam or hostility to the Western forces in the country. Al-Samoud describes itself as "the Islamic monthly magazine published by the media centre of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan". The Taliban distribute it across the Arab Gulf.

Abu Ahmed believes that the "Islamic Emirate's" magazines will continue in their own right after Western forces leave Afghanistan. "Whenever we get news, we do not rush it into print," he says. "We are checking this news with our sources in different provinces. Most of us are young people, doing different jobs – for the political as well as the military side of our organisation, although we are not fighters. As you know, the media is controlled by the West – so we decided to try and counter their propaganda. Of course, we also follow what their military says: details of their operations, attacks, and details of what they are going to do next – this is very interesting to us."

The "Islamic Emirate's" internet "Shariah radio" is also part of Abu Ahmed's remit: tough, hard-edged programmes intended to appeal to rural Afghans. "We have proved that Afghans can adjust themselves to learning about the situation," he says. "Most of our websites are run by professionals. That's why the Americans have tried to block them so many times, using different "gates" in Afghanistan and other areas – but we have been able to unblock them every time."

Abu Ahmed admits that illiteracy presents a major problem – he doesn't mention, of course, that the Taliban made a major contribution to this by banning female education – but says that Afghans who can read pass on the information in the magazines to all members of their families. He says that women are now involved in the magazines' production and in the military struggle. "From our point of view, a woman is the property of one person – if she is my wife, she is mine. But our women are cleaning the Kalashnikovs, carrying ammunition. In Kandahar, they are carrying mines under their burqas because that way they cannot be checked."

Al-Samoud in many ways mimics Western propaganda. The "military commander" in Helmand, for example, is quoted as saying that "the mujahedin (holy warriors) are fighting the enemy in Marja with high spirits". The latest issue carries special features on the 20th anniversary of the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, an interview with the rebel commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and America's use of dogs to torture prisoners (a practice employed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison). One story claims that US servicewomen are used to abuse and humiliate Taliban prisoners. There are even profiles of hundreds of Taliban "martyrs" – identifying, for the very first time, with names and photographs, those who have died fighting Nato. Saad al-Haq (code-named "Jenaan"), for example, died in a follow-up attack against the Kandahar Nato base on 20 March 2008. Mullah Abdel Manon was killed on 14 September of the same year "in a martyrdom attack" against the same "Crusader fort". Maulawi Abdul Salam died last year during an attack on the fort of Zaal in Moudiriya.

Oddly, Al-Samoud even names its editorial board – Hamidullah Amin is the "president of the board of publishing", and Ahmed Shah Halim is the chief editor, assisted by three journalists, Ikram Maiwandi, Salahedin Momand and Arfan Balchi. Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai keeps a keen eye on the Taliban's propaganda. "Their magazines and websites are targeted at different audiences," he says. "They are keen to tell of their battlefield achievements – that is how they will impress their donors. Their articles didn't used to be so good, but they've improved tremendously. Now they are very well written, though of course one-sided. Nowadays, the magazines even contain poetry."

The propaganda wing of the Taliban calls itself the "Information and Cultural Department" which is run by Abdul Hai Mutmain from Zabul. He was once head of the Taliban's "information department" in Kandahar where, though not a minister, he was close to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. "The Americans say they came to save Afghanistan from war," Abu Ahmed continues. "But this war is only harvesting our civilians. The Americans are coming with their war planes and killing civilians. The Americans see everything from the sky – surely they can tell the difference between two or three cars of civilians and military targets? So this means they are either doing it deliberately or they do not know how to fight."

And as the peacock on the lawn tries to attack the remains of our food, Abu Ahmed adds his own personal warning. "My father and grandfather told me: 'You have to fight the Russians'. Now I tell my son: 'You must fight the Americans'. The first thing we teach our children is 'Allah'. The second is fighting the Americans. As for the British, they are making the same mistakes they made before – they will experience a second Maiwand."

Afghan forces routed a British army at Maiwand in the Second Afghan War. Only later, however, does Abu Ahmed tell me that his son is just three years old. By the time he grows up, I ask him, doesn't he think the Nato forces will have left Afghanistan? In return, I get a thin-lipped smile and a raising of eyebrows. I suspect that means they will be staying.