Afghan 'Dirty War' Escalates

[laststeamtrain]

Afghan 'Dirty War' Escalates

By Douglas Valentine (Douglas Valentine is author of The Phoenix Program--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program)
January 4, 2010

On Dec. 31, I listened in dismay as an NPR “terrorism” expert condemned the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan as especially hideous because the CIA victims were spreading economic development and democracy in the area as members of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).

Less surprising but no less disingenuous were the comments of CIA Director Leon Penetta who said the dead CIA officers were “doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism." And President Barack Obama’s depiction of the CIA officers as "part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life."

On New Year’s Day, Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Pamela Constable began to fill in some of the blanks that the initial propaganda had ignored. Warrick and Constable reported that the CIA officers were “at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by the agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

In the past year, those strikes have killed more than 300 people (perhaps as many as 700) who are invariably described by the U.S. news media as suspected “militants,” “terrorists” or “jihadists" -- or as collateral damage, people killed by accident.

There is never any distinction made between Afghan nationalists fighting the U.S.-led occupation of their country and real terrorists who have inflicted intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political objective (the classic definition of terrorism).

Indeed, despite the U.S. news media’s frequent description of the Dec. 30 attack on the CIA officers as “terrorism,” it doesn’t fit the definition since the CIA officers were engaged in military operations and thus represented a legitimate target under the law of war, certainly as much so as Taliban commanders far from the front lines.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/010410b.html