The story of the latest war crime in Afghanistan gets even more interesting:

The United Nations has accused the US-led forces in Afghanistan of killing civilians after a US airstrike killed some 90 people earlier.

The UN said in a statement on Tuesday that its investigators "found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men" in the western province of Herat on Friday.

The UN said that "residents were able to confirm the number of casualties, including names, age and gender of the victims," AP reported.

Let's count the lies amidst the war crimes.

The headline:

Afghan Leader Assails Airstrike He Says Killed 95

Well, he did say it. But the clear implication in the headline is that it's just his word, his allegation. The truth is actually contained in the second paragraph:

Government officials who traveled to the village of Azizabad in Herat Province on Saturday said the death toll had risen to 95 from 76.

So it wasn't Karzai who "says" that 95 people, including 50 children (!!), were killed, it's people who actually went to the site of the crime (which certainly did not include the "Mayor of Kabul").

John McCain is scoring points on Barack Obama by touting the alleged "success" of the "surge," and Obama is reduced to arguing that there hasn't been "political reconciliation" in Iraq, and that the U.S. should be focusing on escalating (a word he avoids, just as Bush and McCain avoided using it with respect to Iraq) the war in Afghanistan, and increasing the U.S. response to Iran (where Obama continues to lie by claiming that "Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons") and Russia (where Obama also lies by claiming that "There is no possible justification for Russia’s actions" - he should read this article by a Canadian professor of philosophy if he's looking for a "possible justification") and Pakistan.

Doesn't this, from an article about Cuban doctors serving abroad, say it all about the opposition to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela?

"If it weren't for the Cubans, I don't know what I'd do," said Sosnelly Zarraga, a 23-year-old cosmetics saleswoman, who was waiting for a free blood test outside a diagnostic center in Petare, one of Caracas' poorest and most violence-ridden areas. "I'd have to pay a week's salary to get the same service."

That is precisely the kind of reaction that irks Milos Alcalay, a former Venezuelan ambassador to the United States and a critic of Chávez and of the Cuban presence in his country. "The gift'' of the Cuban help to Venezuelans, he said, can only be compared to a Trojan horse.

"Behind the facade of humanitarian help comes ideology," Alcalay said. "The fact that they are here is in itself political. These doctors have become Cuba's new soldiers, like the ones who went to Angola 30 years ago, but bullets no longer work. If Cuba were to send us soldiers, Venezuelans would recoil. But who is going to refuse a doctor?"

The entire U.S. establishment is all verklempt about the presence of Russian troops in Georgia, with, as I've documented the tiniest part of on this blog, statement after statement about respecting "territorial integrity" and how "stark international aggression" was a thing of the past. And of course most people have immediately contrasted those statements with actual U.S. behavior in the case of Iraq (not so much Afghanistan, although to some of us, the hypocrisy is equally applicable in that case).

But there was another international aggression that occurred not that long ago that the U.S. not only didn't condemn, but supported (and not just verbally) - the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. Here's what the U.S. had to say about that:

Let me be the first to report the news, via Press TV:

The US has agreed to a conditional timetable for a phased withdrawal from Iraq within three years, Iraqi FM Hoshyar Zebari says.

Under the terms of a draft pact, the US combat troops will start pulling out from Iraqi main cities next summer depending on the security situation on the ground, the British Times newspaper quoted Iraqi chief diplomat Hoshyar Zebari as saying on Thursday.

Zebari said the agreement has 'no provision' for permanent US military bases in Iraq but legalizes US military presence in the country after the expiry of the UN mandate at the end of 2008.

He said when the agreement comes into force the US troops cannot unilaterally launch attacks inside Iraq, adding that deal is 'very close' to being finalized.

Coincidences never cease.

In August, 2004, Luis Posada Carriles and his associates were actually convicted and sentenced to jail in Panama for possessing many pounds (20 or 30, reports vary) of C-4 plastic explosive, planning to blow up a university auditorium containing Fidel Castro and several hundred Panamanian students. Just four months later, outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Miscoso pardoned the terrorists and released them from jail. Three of them immediately flew to Miami to a hero's welcome. Luis Posada Carriles disappeared, but less than a year later, he entered the U.S. illegally. The U.S. government tried to ignore him, but eventually they had to arrest him.

Sept. 12, 2008 will mark the 10th anniversary of the unbelievably unjust imprisonment of the Cuban Five in U.S. prisons, imprisoned for having the temerity (and the bravery) to actually prevent acts of terrorism being committed against their country by right-wing, U.S.-government-backed gangs of terrorists based in the United States. Gangs who, by the way, have also killed people right here in the United States (with one of the rare such thugs actually convicted and jailed, Eduardo Arocena, now having a pardon request hand-carried to George Bush by none other than Joe Lieberman). Two of the Cuban Five have been deprived not only of their liberty, but also of even the sight of their wives for almost the full ten years, with the United States outrageously violating all norms of international law and common decency by refusing to grant visas to their wives. You can send an email protesting this injustice here.

Ever since President Franklin Roosevelt's State of the Union address, Americans have talked about the "Four Freedoms" - freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In recent days (and probably for much longer, but it seems to have been really noticeable in recent days), George Bush has repeatedly talked about only two freedoms, as he did today in China:

"We must...continue to be candid about our belief that all people should have the freedom to say what they think and worship as they choose."

[There have been numerous other posts on the anthrax question, I'm not linking to them here, but I acknowledge them collectively]

So the scientist at (surprise!) the U.S. Army's largest bioweapons lab (billed, in the usual Orwellian way, as a "defense against bioweapons" lab) suspected of killing five people with anthrax attacks has killed himself. A very important article from Glenn Greenwald today reminds us that the anthrax attacks, long since almost totally forgotten by the government and media, were no minor issue, but instrumental in panicking the country into accepting an attack on Iraq in response to 9/11. The letters themselves included language like "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." intended to point the finger directly at Arab terrorists (which, to the perverse amongst us including myself, said loud and clear that was not the source).

All the news agencies are leading with this statement:

The next president will inherit a record budget deficit of $482 billion, according to a new Bush administration estimate released Monday."

But in typical media fashion, they act as stenographers to power first, and reporters of the truth only later, if at all. The AP article linked above finally gets around in its seventh paragraph to the full story:

The administration actually underestimates the deficit, however, since it leaves out about $80 billion in war costs. In a break from tradition — and in violation of new mandates from Congress — the White House did not include its full estimate of war costs.

Who said this?

"Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I'll do the trick myself if some one else doesn't get at it.

"Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity . . . the trick [is], you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it. . . . This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of—it is so wasteful. . . . When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power."

The Washington Post reports:

President Bush's decision to shift policy and send a senior U.S. envoy to nuclear talks with Iran this weekend was made after increasing signs that Iran was open to possible negotiations and that international sanctions were having an impact on the Islamic republic, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Really? Let's start with the second.

I've been thinking some more about the New Yorker cover and the question of satire (my first post is below). Long-time readers may recall that we've had disagreements here over Stephen Colbert, whose "satire" I have claimed is often not (although I feel that less so recently than I did a year or two ago).

Expanding on things I've written before, here's my working definition, which applies to Colbert and the New Yorker: if the only thing that distinguishes alleged "satire" from an original is the source, it isn't satire, it's "imitation." It may or may not be funny, but it isn't satire.

If you could take a transcript of a Colbert interview, hand it to Bill O'Reilly, and have him read it without batting an eye, then it wasn't satire - it was imitation.

In the news again is the story of a young Canadian, Omar Khadr, captured and tortured in Afghanistan and Guantanamo by the U.S. The news is about a video which shows his interrogation, and about the sleep deprivation technique involving moving him from cell to cell every three hours. But once again, as when his story was in the news in March, what caught my eye wasn't the specifics of his torture, but the circumstances of his capture, so let me just repeat what I wrote back then:

You don't believe me? How else could you read this?

Forty-three nations, including Israel and Arab states, pledged Sunday to work for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction...

In a final declaration, Israel, Syria, the Palestinians along with countries across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa agreed to "pursue a mutually and effectively verifiable Middle East Zone free of weapons of mass destruction."

Under the fraudulent headline "Put War Powers Back Where They Belong," two war-mongers, James Baker and Warren Christopher, propose an equally fraudulent replacement for the War Powers Act. They start with another fraudulent statement:

Our Constitution ambiguously divides war powers between the president (who is the commander in chief) and Congress (which has the power of the purse and the power to declare war).

But the "commander-in-chief" doesn't decide what wars to fight, any more than generals do. The commander in chief and generals decide how to fight wars. What wars are to be fought is unambiguously the province of Congress, which has the sole power to declare war.

Iran test fired some missiles yesterday. Naturally, their preparation to defend themselves against the attacks which are openly discussed by ruling circles in Israel and the United States is portrayed as a belligerent move. Turning the world on its head, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says, ""Those who say that there is no Iranian missile threat against which we should build a missile defense system perhaps ought to talk to the Iranians about their claims." Their claims? Their claims are that they are prepared to respond to any attack with a counterattack, not exactly the most surprising of claims.