U.S. helicopter believed shot down in Afghanistan; 2 killed

The U.S. believes one of its armed helicopters was shot down over Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing both crew members on board, a U.S. military official said.

"It is likely that the helo today was brought down due to enemy small arms and RPG fire," the official said. The chopper was a U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance helicopter. It went down over Ghazni province.

In a statement, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the downing of the helicopter, saying a rocket was used.

"After the rocket hit it, the helicopter came down and took fire," said an e-mail sent by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/06/world/asia/afghanistan-us-troops/index.html

Its ridiculous.

SOB

And another righteous snippet on those peaceful of organizations the taliban, please notice they kidnapped the good looking women for sex slavery.

In a major effort to retake the Shomali plains from the United Front, the Taliban indiscriminately killed civilians, while uprooting and expelling the population. Among others, Kamal Hossein, a special reporter for the UN, reported on these and other war crimes. The city of Istalif i. e. was home to more than 45,000 people. In Istalif the Taliban gave 24 hours notice to the population to leave, then completely razed the town leaving the people destitute.[28][152]

In 1999 the town of Bamian was taken, hundreds of men, women and children were executed. Houses were razed and some were used for forced labor.[153] There was a further massacre at the town of Yakaolang in January 2001. An estimated 300 people were murdered, along with two delegations of Hazara elders who had tried to intercede.[10]

By 1999, the Taliban had forced hundreds of thousands of people from the Shomali Plains and other regions conducting a policy of scorched earth burning homes, farm land and gardens.[28]

Human trafficking

Several Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders ran a network of human trafficking, abducting women and selling them into sex slavery in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[154] Time Magazine writes: "The Taliban often argued that the brutal restrictions they placed on women were actually a way of revering and protecting the opposite sex. The behavior of the Taliban during the six years they expanded their rule in Afghanistan made a mockery of that claim."[154]

The targets for human trafficking were especially women from the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Some women preferred to commit suicide over slavery, killing themselves. During one Taliban and Al-Qaeda offensive in 1999 in the Shomali Plains alone, more than 600 women were kidnapped.[154] Taliban as well as Arab and Pakistani Al-Qaeda militants forced them into trucks and buses.[154] Time Magazine writes: "The trail of the missing Shomali women leads to Jalalabad, not far from the Pakistan border. There, according to eyewitnesses, the women were penned up inside Sar Shahi camp in the desert. The more desirable among them were selected and taken away. Some were trucked to Peshawar with the apparent complicity of Pakistani border guards. Others were taken to Khost, where bin Laden had several training camps." Officials from relief agencies say, the trail of many of the vanished women leads to Pakistan where they were sold to brothels or into private households to be kept as slaves.[154]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Human_rights_abuses

The men in the wedding party were Taliban so it's ok. All civilian men that are killed are identified as Taliban so it doesn't look quite so evil, we are good Christian people and we kill in the name of our God. Shame about the women and children, but hey! that's what happens when you get invaded, get over it, we are only trying to improve your living conditions lol!

A van carries dead bodies of children killed in a NATO airstrike at a village in Logar province, south of Kabul, on June 6, 2012.

From dreams to drones: who is the real Obama?

Who is the real Obama?


BARACK Obama, according to Foreign Policy, ''has become George W. Bush on steroids''. Armed with a ''kill list'', the Nobel peace laureate now hosts ''Tuesday terror'' meetings at the White House to discuss targets of drone attacks in Pakistan and at least five other countries. One of the latest of these killed 17 people near the border with Afghanistan on Monday.

Unlike the slacker Bush, who famously disdained specifics, Obama routinely deploys his training in law. Many among the dozens of ''suspected militants'' massacred by drones this week in north-west Pakistan are likely to be innocent. Reports gathered by non-government organisations and Pakistani media about previous attacks speak of collateral damage running into hundreds, and deepening anger and hostility to the United States. No matter: in Obama's legally watertight bureaucracy, drone attacks are not publicly acknowledged; or if they have to be, civilian deaths are flatly denied and all the adult dead categorised as ''combatants''.

Obama himself signed off on one execution knowing it would also kill innocent family members. He has also made it ''legal'' to execute Americans without trial and expanded their secret surveillance, preserved the CIA's renditions program, violated his promise to close down Guantanamo Bay, and ruthlessly arraigned whistleblowers.

Not only is civil rights activist Cornel West, Obama's most prominent black intellectual supporter, appalled, but also the apparatchiks of Bush's imperial presidency such as former CIA director Michael Hayden. Perhaps it is time to ask again: who is Barack Obama? And how has Pakistan featured in his world view?

The first question now seems to have been settled too quickly, largely because of the literary power of Obama's speeches and writings. His memoir, Dreams from My Father, was quickened by the drama of the self-invented man from nowhere - the passionate striving, eloquent self-doubt and ambivalence that Western literature, from Stendhal to Naipaul, has trained us to identify with a refined intellect and soul. Not surprisingly, Obama's careful self-presentation seduced some prominent literary fictionists, inviting comparisons to James Baldwin.

Later biographies of Obama, published after he became president, have complicated the picture of him as the possessor of diversely sourced identities (Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii, Harvard). David Maraniss' new biography shows that at college the bright student from Hawaii's closest friends were Pakistanis, and he carried around a dog-eared copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

But Obama also began early, as one girlfriend of his reported to her diary, to ''strike out'', ''shedding encumbrances, old images''. ''Do you think I will be president of the United States?'' he asked a slightly bemused Pakistani friend, who then witnessed ''Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself from the Pakistanis as a necessary step in establishing his political identity''.

''For years,'' Maraniss writes, ''Obama seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective. But to get to where he wanted … he had to change.'' Obama's Pakistani friend recalls: ''The first shift I saw him undertaking was to view himself as an American in a much more fundamental way.''

In an incorrigibly right-wing political culture, this obliged Obama to always appear tougher than his white opponents. During his 2008 presidential debates with John McCain, Obama often startled many of us with his threats to expand the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan. More disquietingly, he claimed the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, who partnered Richard Nixon in the ravaging of Cambodia, paving the way for Pol Pot, while still devastating Vietnam.

It can't be said Obama didn't prepare us for his murderous spree in Pakistan. It is also true that drone warfare manifests the same pathologies - racial contempt, paranoia, blind faith in technology and the superstition of body counts - that undermined the US in Vietnam.

The White House has been used before to plot daily mayhem in some obscure, under-reported corner of the world. During the long bombing campaign named Rolling Thunder, President Lyndon Johnson personally chose targets in Indochina, believing that ''carefully calculated doses of force could bring about desirable and predictable responses from Hanoi''.

A weak Pakistan, its rulers bribed and bullied into acquiescence, is the easier setting for a display of American firepower. In ways his Pakistani college friends couldn't have foreseen, their country now carries the burden of verifying Obama's extra-American manhood, especially at election time.

Obama was quick to say sorry to Poland last week for saying ''Polish death camps'' rather than ''death camps in Poland'' in a speech. But he refuses to apologise for the American air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November last year. Widespread public anger has forced Pakistan's government to block NATO's supply routes to Afghanistan; any hint of infirmity on the sensitive issue of sovereignty is likely to strengthen some of the country's nastiest extremists. Thus, the few possibilities of political stability in a battered country are now hostage to Obama's pre-election punitiveness.

Certainly, Obama's political and personal journey now evokes less uplifting literary comparisons. For, nearly four years after his ecstatically hailed ascension to the White House, Obama resembles Baldwin much less than he does Kipling and other uncertain children of empire who, as Ashis Nandy writes in The Intimate Enemy, replaced their early identifications with the weak with ''an unending search for masculinity and status''.

''We're killin' 'em! We're killin' 'em all!'' Bush exulted, according to Bob Woodward, during his last months in office. And now another man sits in the White House, surveying his own kill lists and plotting re-election, after having already pulled off the cruellest political hoax of our times.

GUARDIAN

Indian author Pankaj Mishra's books include Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond. His new work, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, will be published in August.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/from-dreams-to-drones-who-is-the-real-...

Who is the REAL Obama?

He's an evil little bastard, isn't he? An evil little bastard with a Nobel Peace prize lol