A civilian [?] cargo plane crashed at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan on Monday afternoon, according to a spokesman for the "International Security Assistance Force". There was no immediate word on casualties or the cause of the crash. Zamaray Khan, the local district police chief, said only that the plane crashed on takeoff on an airport runway. Bagram is about an hour's drive north of the capital, Kabul, and is one of the two largest air bases serving coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Coalition forces rely heavily on contracted aircraft to haul troops and supplies in a nation where roadside bombs and insurgent attacks make traveling by road dangerous. The name of the plane's contracting company was not immediately available. It was the second crash in three days involving coalition aircraft in Afghanistan. On Saturday, four U.S. airmen were killed when a military turboprop plane crashed in southern Afghanistan.

The Defense Department identified the four service members as Capt. Reid K. Nishizuka, 30, of Kailua, Hawaii; Staff Sgt. Richard A. Dickson, 24, of Rancho Cordova, Calif., Capt. Brandon L. Cyr, 28, of Woodbridge, Va.; and Staff Sgt. Daniel N. Fannin, 30 of Morehead, Ky.

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency. All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader. “We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.” The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Jason Ditz: CIA’s ‘Bags of Cash’ Fueled Afghan Corruption

The City of Lincoln in the north of England. Scenic. Suburban. And suddenly a hub for Britain's war on terror. This week the government announced that it's now conducting drone attacks on Afghanistan from the base behind me - RAF Waddington - where 100 personnel are manning the hi-tech reaper drones carrying 500lb bombs and hellfire missiles.

In response to the move, hundreds of anti-war demonstrators have marched through the city to the army site. Drone Expert Chris Coles agrees - that Britain is expanding its drone project - with the help of its friends. The government defends drones. It says they save lives. It will only admit to one civilian killing. But reality on the ground speaks differently. UK insists its operations are only in Afghanistan - where British drones have flown about 45,000 hours and fired about 350 times.

Even as Americans grieve over the Boston Marathon bombings, they should know that US assassination drone strikes worldwide kill many more people weekly and continue unpunished, an analyst says. - “While we mourn the horrific events in Boston, we must remember that our government perpetrates a Boston bombing weekly in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan,” political commentator Sean McElwee says. He adds that although the White House administration alleges that it prefers trials for the rule of law, the true reason for its targeted killing program across the globe is that: it’s cleaner, simpler and less embarrassing to just off the suspected terrorists. The government uses mafia logic - why waste time and energy risking the rule of law when you can just swoop in and launch a smart bomb?

US-led foreign forces have bombed a religious school in Afghanistan's northern Balkh province, killing several people, Press TV reports. - According to police authorities, at least two people were killed in the attack. However, locals put the number at three. Five others were said to have sustained serious injuries in the assault, which has outraged local residents, as reports by police indicated that the attack had not been coordinated with Afghan security forces. In 2001, the United States, along with its allies, invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of battling terrorism. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but the country remains gripped by insecurity despite the presence of thousands of foreign troops. The United Nations has said that the number of civilians killed or injured in Afghanistan has dramatically increased in the first three months of 2013 compared to the same period last year. Many civilians have lost their lives in US-led operations in various parts of Afghanistan over the past decade, with Afghans becoming increasingly outraged at the seemingly endless number of the deadly assaults.

Afghanistan's drugs trade is flourishing - despite the eleven years that have passed since the U.S. kicked off its Operation Enduring Freedom. Even with the Taliban forced from power, the illicit industry's still killing thousands of people around the world. Maria Finoshina examines the deadly multi-million-dollar trend, which shows no signs of slowing down.

CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens
of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or
were attending funerals (All Hail the Assassin in Chief!)

“Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror,” Obama told reporters in the White House briefing room. “What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack, or why; whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual.”

There is undoubtedly a political struggle within the US government and its intelligence apparatus over how to make use of the events in Boston to advance US security policies at home and militarist policies abroad. There was an immediate campaign to place the events within the narrative of the “war on terror,” which has been used to legitimize unending militarism abroad and the dismantling of democratic rights within the United States. Media coverage has sought to connect the events with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The aim is once again to utilize the tragic events to justify the massive buildup of the government’s military, security and intelligence apparatus. The immediate response to the attacks has been a security clampdown not only in Boston, but nationwide, to condition the public for another expansion of the militarization of American society.

Boston Globe: Image shows suspect carrying, perhaps dropping, black bag
Politico: Reports: Suspect identified in Boston Marathon bombing
PressTV: Obama lied about targets of drone strikes: report
Tony Cartalucci: Boston Highlights the Illusion of Terror & Security

Reader Comment (Russia Today): Boston blank: No suspects, no motives over deadly bombings - Like the FBI-CIA-NSA-TSA-DHS-Nazi Bastards-Pedophiles are going to find evidence against themselves...?

PressTV: ‘False-flag’ meme goes mainstream on Boston Marathon bombings - On September 11th, 2001, the US media began chanting “Bin Laden” in unison almost from the moment the attack was reported. The possibility that US government insiders had orchestrated the attack - in order to blame Muslims, launch wars on Muslim countries, and seize near-absolute power - was never mentioned. But after the Boston bombings of April 16th, 2013, even the corporate monopoly media could no longer ignore the possibility of a false-flag attack. Yahoo News asked “Who's behind the Boston Marathon bombings?” and offered 4 theories: (1) Islamic jihadists, (2) Right-wing militia types, (3) the government, and (4) a criminally-insane lone wolf. Numbers (1), (2), and (4), of course, are the usual suspects. But including (3) “the government” on the suspects list is unprecedented for a mainstream news story reporting on a domestic terror incident.

CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens
of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or
were attending funerals (All Hail the Assassin in Chief!)

A media report reveals that the administration of President Barack Obama has fabricated lies and misled the American public about its ongoing controversial drone war.

Leaked intelligence files uncovered by McClatchy Newspapers showed that during 2006-2008 and 2010-2011, the CIA’s Predator and Reaper assassination drones targeted and killed senior leaders of al-Qaeda and allied groups, as well as hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghani, Pakistani and unidentified militants who posed no immediate threat to the US. The US newspaper noted that Washington secretly conducted drone strikes on suspected insurgents who were not listed on any US terrorist list, on alleged organizations that did not exist at the time of 9/11, and on unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters”. The report also added that many civilians including women and children were also killed in the deadly strikes.

A report by the Washington-based New America Foundation said that there have been 350 US drone strikes since 2004, most of them during President Obama's terms in office. The foundation has put the death toll between 1,963 and 3,293, with 261 to 305 civilians killed. According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 2,627 and 3,457 people have been killed by US drones in Pakistan since 2004, including between 475 and nearly 900 civilians.

Daily Mail: Pentagon officials 'don't know MOST of the people who are killed in their drone strikes'

Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show. “It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.” Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

Afghan officials say at least 11 children have been killed in an air strike carried out by the US-led forces in the country’s eastern province of Kunar, Press TV reports.

Kunar provincial officials said on Sunday that at least two Afghan women were also killed in the air raid which took place in the town of Shigal in the Kunar Province where American forces are stationed. Local officials say a U-S military advisor has also been killed in a joint ground military operation by Afghan and foreign soldiers. US-led forces claimed that the attack had been carried out "to target a local Taliban commander".

RAWA: NATO airstrike kills 18, including 10 children in Afghanistan - Afghan officials said strikes happened overnight in Kunar province, during a joint operation between Afghan and NATO troops against Taliban fighters. There were conflicting figures of the death toll with other news agencies. Wasifullah Wasifi, the spokesman for the Kunar governor, confirmed the attack to Al Jazeera but gave a different death toll. "We confirm a raid done by Afghanistan's intelligence service in the district of Shigal. In this raid, the security forces killed 20 Taliban in which 10 of them are very senior Taliban members," he told Al Jazeera. He told AFP news agency said at least 10 children were killed in the strike in Shigal while euters news agency reported six Taliban fighters as being among those killed in the air strikes.

Thomas Gaist: NATO strike kills 10 Afghan children after week of bloody fighting
BBC: Afghan children 'killed by Nato air strike in Shigal'
Associated Press: Afghan villagers flee their homes, blame US drones
PhotoBlog: Afghan villagers flee their homes, blame US drones
Living Under Drones (Website)

The attacker stabbed Cable in the neck during a meeting in Nangarhar Province. Cable was outside and reportedly playing with children who had come to the site when the attack occurred, and the assailant escaped. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid identified the attacker as a 16-year-old named Khalid, saying he was acting on his own in the killing but had since joined the Taliban after fleeing the scene. Today’s revelations are a stark change from the Pentagon’s initial statement on the matter, which claimed he was killed in combat with “enemy forces.”

The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost American taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion in the long run, according to a new study by the Harvard University. - The report that was released on Thursday has taken into account the medical care of injured war veterans and expensive repairs to US military force worn out by over a decade of fighting, The Washington Post reported. Linda J. Bilmes, a public policy professor, wrote in the report, “As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives.” “The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come,” Bilmes noted.

McClatchy: Iraqi oil: Once seen as U.S. boon, now it’s mostly China’s

Defense Ministry Insists Everyone Slain Was 'Taliban'. - Local police are confirming that a NATO-led night raid against the Logar Province left at least five civilians, including four children dead, and a number of others wounded. Logar official Rais Seddiq confirmed that two of the slain civilians were killed immediately, and that three others died of their wounds in the hospital. The confirmation sparked an angry reaction from the Afghan Defense Ministry.

The Bundeswehr (German armed forces) have killed several “insurgents” in Afghanistan with the use of a US drone. The drone was deployed on November 11, 2010 in the Chahar Dara district. At that time, “four suspected anti-government troops were killed” as part of air support for ground troops, the news weekly Der Spiegel has reported in its latest edition. The case has been kept secret by the German defence ministry for almost two and a half years. The ministry only felt compelled to admit the incident because of a parliamentary question asked by Social Democratic Party (SPD) deputy Hans-Peter Bartels, and then only in a confidential statement. For the first time, it has been acknowledged by the government that drones have been deployed to kill Afghans at Germany’s behest. Until now, the public has only been aware that the Bundeswehr procured an armed drone for the first time in 2009, used at the time to destroy a weapons cache, but not deployed against people.

Almost 21 tons of heroin have been seized in an operation in eastern Afghanistan , the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN) said on Tuesday. “An operation was carried out yesterday in the province of Nangarhar, during which several drug production labs were destroyed and almost 21 tons of heroin seized,” FSKN head Viktor Ivanov said. He said FSKN officers had taken part in the “unique operation.” “Twenty-one tons is, in essence, the annual volume of drugs brought into Russia,” Ivanov said. The Pajhwok Afghan News agency said five heroin producing laboratories were destroyed by security forces during an operation in the Sherzad district of eastern Nangarhar province on Monday. Several people were arrested, the agency said, citing officials.

As the US military continues to court scrutiny regarding drone use, the Air Force has stopped sharing information on the number of drone strikes in Afghanistan. Going one step further, it has removed those statistics from prior reports on its website. - The Air Force's Central Command began keeping track of drone weapon releases in October 2012, according to the Air Force Times. The move was described at that time as a bid to “provide more detailed information on [drone] ops in Afghanistan,” said Central Command spokeswoman Capt. Kim Bender, the magazine reports. Statistics were recorded as part of the policy for November, December and January. But when February's numbers were published on March 7, there was only a blank space where the drone statistics were normally placed.

The US military's Special Operations commander is asking lawmakers to lift restrictions that keep American forces from training foreign units with records of human rights violations. He says the US needs to engage such forces "more than ever before." - The restrictions, written by Democratic Vermont Senator Jim Leahy, ban funding that would be used to train foreign military units if they are linked - through credible evidence - to serious human rights violations.

One of the major metrics for the decade-long Afghanistan war is seriously flawed. Rather than fix the problem, the U.S.-NATO military command in Kabul has decided that you simply shouldn’t see the data. - Late last month, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) conceded that it misreported the 2012 statistics on Taliban attacks. Its explanation was that a data-entry error had discounted attacks reported by Afghan forces - so much so that a statistically insignificant change in the level of so-called “enemy initiated attacks” became a 7 percent decline from 2011 levels. ISAF’s response, the Associated Press recounts, is to end public reporting on enemy-initiated attacks. It’ll still record attack levels, according to spokesman Jamie Graybeal, but it won’t publish any of the data it collects - all because it’s [allegedly] losing confidence in the veracity of its information.

Halliburton Co. (HAL) and KBR Inc. are entitled to the same legal protection as U.S. armed forces when serving as military contractors, a judge ruled, dismissing claims over so-called burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. - U.S. District Judge Roger Titus threw out 57 consolidated lawsuits against the companies brought mainly by military personnel who claim they suffered damaging health effects from exposure to the contractors’ pits, where items including medical waste, paints and pesticides are burned in war zones.

“The critical interests of the United States could be compromised if military contractors were left ‘holding the bag’ for claims made by military and other personnel that could not be made against the military itself,” Titus said in a decision released yesterday in Greenbelt, Maryland. The remedy for the allegedly injured service members is through military and legislative processes, not the courts, Titus said.

Andrew Farley, KBR’s executive vice president and general counsel, said in an e-mailed statement that the company is pleased by the ruling, especially its emphasis on non-judicial means of redress. “We look to the courts to continue this positive trend in other pending cases,” Farley said.

American military creating an environmental disaster in Afghan countryside (Part 2 of 3)(Part 3 of 3)

The perpetrators were reportedly Taliban infiltrators, retaliating for atrocities and crimes by Afghan police. - Several members of the Afghan Local Police, trained and armed by the United States, drugged 17 of their fellow police officers before executing all of them, according to Afghan officials. “The attackers poisoned the dinner food of the other officers, shot them at close range to ensure they were dead, stole their weapons and fled after setting a police vehicle on fire,” reports The New York Times.

New York Times: 20 Afghan Police Officers Killed in 2 Attacks, Including a Mass Poisoning

Pentagon retracts 'Taliban attacks down 7 percent' false claim - The American-led military coalition in Afghanistan backed off Tuesday from its claim that Taliban attacks dropped off in 2012, tacitly acknowledging a hole in its widely repeated argument that violence is easing and that the insurgency is in steep decline. In response to Associated Press inquiries about its latest series of statistics on security in Afghanistan, the coalition command in Kabul said it had erred lied in reporting a 7 percent decline in attacks. In fact there was no decline at all, officials said.

The claim that Taliban attacks are dropping in Afghanistan, the single piece of data backing up NATO claims of “progress” in the protracted occupation and indeed the centerpiece of President Obama’s re-election campaign speeches related to foreign policy, has turned out to be completely false, Pentagon officials admitted today. The data, which seems to have formed the basis for much of NATO’s occupation strategy, was [allegedly] the ultimate result of a “clerical error” that officials attributed to the Afghan military turning in certain forms late. Officials [now claim] that the revised data shows attacks approximately flat, but they have simply removed all the old reports based on the false data and haven’t replaced them with anything since then.

As US troop levels are reduced and troops are actually now banned from at least one province, the occupation of Afghanistan is said to be “transitioning.” But to what, exactly? - The figures on 2012 attacks suggest that increasingly, Afghanistan is becoming a “drone war,” with a 72 percent increase in the number of drone strikes inside Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012, meaning drones now account for 12 percent of all air strikes in the occupied nation. Officials attributed the growth in the number of drone strikes to an increase in the number of armed drones in Afghanistan, which suggests that so long as they have the weapons they’re going to find a way to use them. Though still a small number overall, drone strikes are killing several times more civilian bystanders than in recent years as well.

The Afghan government has demanded the withdrawal of all US Special Forces on Sunday from the Wardak and Logar provinces within two weeks, accusing them of “harassing, torturing and murdering innocent civilians.” - A further statement released by the Afghan president’s office said that the decision to expel them was made by the National Security Council. “After a thorough discussion, it became clear that armed individuals named as US Special Force[s] stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people," it said.

Alex Lantier: Afghan regime accuses US forces of torturing, murdering civilians
Washington Post: Karzai orders U.S. Special Operations forces out of key Afghan province

US War Criminal Obama awarded the "Presidential Medal of Freedom" to Jewish War Criminal Peres last June. Now Obama will receive a medal of "presidential honor" on his upcoming visit to the Zionist entity. Peres received his medal for Cast Lead and Pillar of Cloud and Obama will receive his for helping Peres murder people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. - Very honorable indeed!

Barack Obama will become the first serving U.S. president to receive Israel's presidential medal, from his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres on a visit to the Jewish state next month, Peres's office said on Monday.

"President Obama has made a unique and meaningful contribution to strengthening the state of Israel and the security of its people," it said in a statement. "Barack Obama is a true friend of the state of Israel and has been since the beginning of his public life. As president of the United States he has stood beside Israel in times of crisis," it added. Israel's presidential medal of distinction is awarded to individuals or organizations who have contributed to "Israeli society" and "Israel's image" in the world. The White House has not announced specific dates for the Obama visit, his first to Zionist entity Occupying Palestine, as president. [Zionist] media reports and a Palestinian official have said that it will run from March 20-22 and take in talks with both [Zionist] and Palestinian leaders [stooges] in Jerusalem and Ramallah. The White House has kept expectations deliberately low, saying Obama has no plans to use the trip to push new proposals to break the more than two-year deadlock in [the so-called] peace talks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his talks with Obama would focus on Iran's nuclear program [not on Israel's], the conflict in [war on] Syria and long-stalled "peace talks" with the Palestinians.