More Afgan Civilians Killed in Air Strikes

Barry Bearak & Taimoor Shah, New York Times 

In what has become a dolefully familiar episode, local Afghan officials reported Saturday that dozens of civilians, and perhaps a great many more, were killed during United States-led coalition airstrikes, this time in the Grishk district of the southern province of Helmand, where dozens of civilians died under similar circumstances last week.

Contacted by telephone, the mayor of Grishk, Dor Ali Shah, and tribal elders said the allied bombardment began late Friday and continued Saturday, coming soon after insurgents had attacked coalition ground forces.

“We have received differing numbers of the civilian and the militants’ casualties,” the mayor said. “We sent delegates to the site, but the area was surrounded by coalition forces. Some sources tell us the number of civilian dead is 120, others say 60, others say 35. We are actually mixed up, so we will wait to confirm.”

Haji Zahir, a tribal elder who said he had been in touch with residents of effected villages, said: “People tried to escape from the area with their cars, trucks and tractors, and the coalition airplanes bombed them because they thought they were the enemy fleeing. They told me that they had buried 170 bodies so far.”  Click here to read more in the New York Times.

As we all know by now, Ann Coulter, the foul mouthed neo-con columnist, has been escallating her already unacceptable rheoritic against John Edwards.  First there was the comment last March in which she call John a “faggot” and now just this last week she wished that John Edwards “be assassinated by a terrorist.”

Well Elizabeth Edwards held an interview with Chris Mathews on MSNBC’s Hardball.  She slammed Coulter for her unrelenting attacks on her husband. The Edwards Campaign immediately followed up by sending emails to thier hundreds of thousands of supporters.  The upshot??? They raised over $300,000 in twenty four hours with that one email.  Congratulations John and Liz!  You’re our Heros of the Democratic Party today!

Click on this link to go to the John Edwards campaign and give them a donation to commermorate Ann’s latest blasts.  Or if you are feeling more confrontational, here is a link to a Wall Street Journal blog site where you can register your opinion of Ann and/or John.

Conservative Republicans, intent on punishing illegal residents, killed the efforts at immigration reform in the U.S. Senate. This will apparently end all efforts at immigration reform until after the 2008 elections or even longer if we Democrats fail to secure the White House and shore up our Senate majority. Republican Blogs are eurphoric at the immigration defeat.  Click here to sample the NEO-con reactions.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate drove a stake Thursday through President Bush’s plan to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants, likely postponing major action on immigration until after the 2008 elections.

The bill’s supporters fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed to limit debate and clear the way for final passage of the legislation, which critics assailed as offering amnesty to illegal immigrants. The vote was 46 to 53 in favor of limiting the debate.

Senators in both parties said the issue is so volatile that Congress is highly unlikely to revisit it this fall or next year, when the presidential election will increasingly dominate American politics.

The vote was a stinging setback for Bush, who advocated the bill as an imperfect but necessary fix of current immigration practices in which many illegal immigrants use forged documents or lapsed visas to live and work in the United States.

It was a victory for Republican conservatives who strongly criticized the bill’s provisions that would have established pathways to lawful status for many of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. They were aided by talk radio and TV hosts who repeatedly attacked the bill and urged listeners to flood Congress with calls, faxes and e-mails. Click here to read more in the New York Times.

Associated Press, Jun 27th

WASHINGTON - Unease with American foreign policy and President Bush has intensified in countries that are some of the closest U.S. allies and around the globe, while Russia and China also face growing international wariness, a survey released Wednesday said.

Support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the NATO military action in Afghanistan and worldwide American efforts against terrorism have dropped since 2002, according to an international survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Views of the U.S. in much of the Muslim world remain particularly negative.

In one measure of Bush’s unpopularity, the poll showed he is less trusted on foreign policy than Russian President Vladimir Putin by allies Britain, Germany and Canada, even as faith in Putin has plummeted. About half in the U.S. say they have little or no trust in either leader’s conduct of foreign affairs.

Bush’s sagging numbers partly reflect widespread opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq. Of the countries surveyed — which included the U.S. — more people favored the removal of American forces from Iraq in all but Israel, Ghana, Kenya. Click here to read more.

By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her. “This is Dick Cheney,” said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. “I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House.”

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.  Click here to read more in the Washington Post.

Barack Obama told a Texas crowd on Sunday that he wants the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainee facility closed—a step the Bushies are considering.

The Democratic presidential hopeful pledged to work side-by-side with the rest of the world on issues like nuclear proliferation, poverty, economic development in Latin America and the violence in Darfur.

“While we’re at it,” he said, “we’re going to close Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus. … We’re going to lead by example—by not just word but by deed. That’s our vision for the future.”

Habeas corpus is a tenet of the Constitution that protects people from unlawful imprisonment. Click here to read more.

All of her life, Zoila Meyer believed she was an American. She even won election to the City Council of Adelanto.

But now she is facing a threat of deportation for illegally voting, because she never became a citizen after being brought to this country from Cuba when she was 1 year old.

“To be honest with you, I’m scared. How can they just pluck me out of my family, my kids?” the 40-year-old mother of four said in a telephone interview Friday.

“If they can do this to me, they can do it to anybody,” she said.

After Meyer was elected to the council in Adelanto in 2004, someone told officials that she was born in Cuba, prompting an investigation. Click here to read more.

Ben Fox, Associate Press, June 22nd

An Army officer with a key role in the U.S. military hearings at Guantanamo Bay says they relied on vague and incomplete intelligence and were pressured to declare detainees “enemy combatants,” often without any specific evidence. His affidavit, released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only “generic” material that didn’t hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

Despite repeated requests, intelligence agencies arbitrarily refused to provide specific information that could have helped either side in the tribunals, according to Abraham, who said he served as a main liaison between the Combat Status Review Tribunals and those intelligence agencies.

“What were purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” Abraham said in the affidavit, filed in a Washington appeals court on behalf of a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, who is challenging his classification as an “enemy combatant.”

Click here to read more about the Bush Adminstration’s abuse of our constitution.

Los Angeles Times, June 22nd

KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO forces said today they were investigating reports that 25 Afghan civilians were killed in overnight airstrikes in southern Afghanistan. The mounting civilian casualty toll in Afghanistan is dangerously eroding public support for the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

After the report of the latest deaths, Karzai told the BBC that accidental killings and injuries of civilians at the hands of coalition forces are “difficult for us to accept or understand.” The Afghan leader has repeatedly appealed to international forces to exercise greater caution during clashes in civilian areas. NATO has blamed the Taliban for intentionally using civilians as shields.

It was the second report this week of multiple civilian casualties in airstrikes aimed at insurgents. On Monday, seven children ages 10 to 16 were killed when U.S. forces bombed a compound that they said militants were using as a hide-out.

Editor’s Note: Reduced Troop Availability Has Caused Bush Administration to order the miliary to use Air Force and Navy bombing as a means of attacking Iraq and Afgan rebels. Click here to read more.