Stephen Lendman

[PHOTO: A Palestinian boy drinks from a water tap as others wait to fill up water containers in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008. The Gaza Strip's water provider on Wednesday urged the area's 1.5 million people to boil their drinking water, citing a dire shortage of chlorine as a result of an Israeli economic blockade. The chlorine shortage is another addition to Gaza's water woes. Most residents don't have regular water supplies because of a shortage of diesel, used to pump water. (AP Photo/ Eyad Baba)]

This article follows an August 6 one discussing Palestinians Denied Access to Water, found through THIS link.

It explained how Israel exploits Palestinian water resources, using most of it, forcing them to find ways to get by. Water, of course, is essential to life, rights to it natural and usufructuary. Belonging to everyone as part of the commons, it must be used, not owned or abused, an essential truth Israel corrupts.

On August 5, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) published the latest in its "Narratives Under Siege" series, titled "There's Something in the Water: The Poisoning of Life in the Gaza Strip."

"THIS BEACH IS POLLUTED" signs dot Gaza City beaches, posing serious health hazards because of daily raw sewage dumped into the Mediterranean Sea through 16 discharge sites along the coast. Yet thousands fill them despite the dangers, including children, taking advantage of one of their few sources of respite - available, convenient, and free, but not safe.

For Gazans, the sea is part of their lives - to fish, gather with family, swim, and for children, play in the sun on hot days, a joy this writer recalls growing up on America's Atlantic coast. Summers were always the best time. The memories remain.

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Ghali Hassan

Afghanistan dead children, women and men killed by Western
governments, UK, Canada, US NATO attack, dropping bombs on
innocent people. The deadliest incident occurred while several
dozens defenseless villagers including children and women,
fearing the US savage invaders’ air strikes, gathered in Hajji Mo-
hammad Husain house. The US inhumane terrorists’ helicopters
dropped bombs on the house and surrounding areas, taking merci-
lessly the lives of scores of innocents civilians. Photo: RAWA/
[The WE!]

"We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a real threat to our force." ~ General Stanley McChrystal, former U.S.-NATO commander in Afghanistan

The U.S.-led war on Afghanistan is like the U.S.-led war on Iraq; to destroy the country and to indiscriminately kill large numbers of Afghan civilians. The aim is to terrorise the civilian population into submission using the so-called “War on Terrorism” as a cover-up for a U.S.-led war of terror.

According to media reports, the number of Afghan civilians killed by U.S.-NATO troops has more than doubled this year. U.S.-NATO forces killed seventy-two civilians in the first three months of 2010, compared to twenty-nine during the same period in 2009. At least 6000 civilians were killed in 2009. While Western media often blames the “Taliban”, Afghan media sources and few Western media outlets continue to report crimes committed by U.S.-led NATO forces. The following are selected cases as part of an ongoing bloodbath in Afghanistan.

On 27 December 2009, “American Special Forces” with helicopters landed at Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern Province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them were school students in grades six, nine and ten, and one of them was a guest, the rest from the same family. They handcuffed them before murdering them in cold blood, according to a statement on U.S.-installed “President” Hamed Karzai’s website. According to Jerome Starkey of The Times (31 December 2009):

“At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village. [...] The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire.” (See also, Nieman Watchdog).

As always, U.S.-NATO officials have denied civilians were killed, but Afghan investigators said nearly all those killed were school-age boys. A statement released by Hamid Karzai’s office said that a unit of U.S.-NATO forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village and took ten people from three homes shot them dead.

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Alex Lantier

"The US government is now accusing Pakistan, whom it publicly recognizes as one of its main allies, of supporting Afghan forces fighting the US. These accusations underscore the basic hypocrisy of the US intervention in Afghanistan. It is not about fighting right-wing Islamism or terrorism, but defending major US strategic interests and controlling the balance of power in the fast-developing Asian continent."

WikiLeaks recently posted 91,731 American military documents on the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009. The release was timed to coincide with articles on these revelations in the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, all of which had received the documents several weeks ago.

The documents make clear that the occupation of Afghanistan is a filthy imperialist war. Popular resistance and protest demonstrations are drowned in blood, US death squads operate at will under a media blackout, and Washington and NATO collaborate with a narrow elite of corrupt warlords and Afghan officers.

The documents were released as the Afghan government confirmed that NATO rocket fire last week killed more than 50 civilians, largely women and children, in the Sangin district of Helmand Province. The attack was one of the worst since the May 2009 Gerani air strike, in neighboring Farah province, which killed 140 civilians, including 93 children and 28 women.

The WikiLeaks documents confirm the massive scale of US-NATO repression. By the American military’s own classification, which downplays the role of US and NATO troops, the release includes 13,734 reports of “friendly action” by US-NATO forces. The number of Afghan attacks—there are 27,078 reports of “enemy action” and 23,082 of “explosive hazards”—shatters claims that the Afghan resistance is the product of a few Al Qaeda terrorists. There are 237 reports of popular demonstrations against the US occupation or US-controlled Afghan authorities.

These documents themselves are reportedly only a small selection of millions of US files uploaded to WikiLeaks databases. What has already been released, however, makes clear that the US military sees Afghan casualties as unimportant, to be dealt with primarily by relying on the Western media to conceal the scope of the killing from the populations in NATO countries and internationally.

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