Antiwar.com Original
Originally posted at TomDispatch.
As his time in office ends in a mob invasion of the Capitol and an avalanche of pardons for his pals and cohorts, Donald Trump also pardoned four American guards from the former private security company Blackwater (run by Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos), part of a convoy that sprayed Baghdad’s Nisour Square with a devastating wave of gunfire and grenades in September 2007. In that unprovoked massacre, 14 civilians died, including a nine-year-old boy, and 17 more were wounded. The four perpetrators were later convicted of first-degree murder or manslaughter in an American court (with Iraqi
“This is a different kind of war, which we will wage aggressively and methodically to disrupt and destroy terrorist activity,” President George W. Bush announced a little more than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. “Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated. Other victories will be clear to all.”
This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the war on terror, including America’s undeclared conflict in Afghanistan. After that war’s original moniker, Operation Infinite Justice, was nixed for offending Muslim sensibilities, the Pentagon rebranded it Operation Enduring Freedom. Despite neither a clear victory, nor the slightest evidence that enduring freedom had ever been imposed on that country, “U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan ended,” according to the Defense Department, in 2014. In reality, that combat simply continued under a new name, Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, and grinds on to this very day.
Investigative reporting details massacres, reign of terror by U.S.-backed death squads in Afghanistan
By Brett Wilkins, CommonDreams.org
The Americans, said the head of one provincial government, ‘step on all the rules of war, human rights, all the things they said they’d bring to Afghanistan,’ and are ‘conducting themselves as terrorists.’
An extraordinary investigation by Australian journalist Andrew Quilty published Dec. 18 by
The Intercept reveals U.S.-backed Afghan government paramilitary death squads have been waging a campaign of terror targeting civilians including children in Wardak province as part of the American military occupation of the nation that began nearly two decades ago.
The natural gas storage report from the EIA for the week ending December 11th indicated that the quantity of natural gas held in underground storage in the US had decreased by 122 billion cubic feet to 3,726 billion cubic feet by the end of the week, which left our gas supplies 284 billion cubic feet, or still 8.3% higher than the 3,442 billion cubic feet that were in storage on December 11th of last year, and 243 billion cubic feet, or 7.0% above the five-year average of 3,483 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have been in storage as of the 11th of December in recent years..the 122 billion cubic feet that were drawn out of US natural gas storage this week was less than the average forecast from an S&P Global Platts survey of analysts who had expected a 127 billion cubic foot withdrawal, but was higher than the average withdrawal of 105 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have typically been pulled out of natural gas storage during the same week over the past 5 years, and the