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Photo by John Pavelka | CC BY 2.0

The first pathetic pieces of wreckage from North Korean fishing boats known as “ghost ships” to be found this year are washing up on the coast of northern Japan. These are the storm-battered remains of fragile wooden boats with unreliable engines in which North Korean fishermen go far out to sea in the middle of winter in a desperate search for fish.

Often all that survives is the shattered wooden hull of the boat cast up on the shore, but in some cases the Japanese find the bodies of fishermen who died of hunger and thirst as they drifted across the Sea of Japan. Occasionally, a few famished survivors are alive and explain that their engine failed or they ran out of fuel or they were victims of some other fatal mishap.

The number of “ghost ships” is rising with no fewer than 104 found in 2017, which is more than in any previous year, though the real figure must be higher because many boats will have sunk without trace in the 600 miles of rough sea between North Korea and Japan.

The reason so many fishermen risk and lose their lives is hunger in North Korea where fish is the cheapest form of protein. The government imposes quotas for fishermen that force them to go far out to sea. Part of their catch is then sold on to China for cash, making fish one of the biggest of North Korea’s few export items.

The fact that North Korean fishermen took greater risks and died in greater numbers last year is evidence that international sanctions imposed on North Korea are, in a certain sense, a success: the country is clearly under severe economic pressure. But, as with sanctions elsewhere in the world past and present, the pressure is not on the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who looks particularly plump and well-fed, but on the poor and the powerless.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doctors Without Borders Calls U.S. Report on Afghan Hospital Bombing ‘Shocking’

November 26, 2015

Doctors Without Borders Calls U.S. Report on Afghan Hospital Bombing ‘Shocking’

CNN

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday that “human error” was a factor in the Oct. 3 bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 30 civilians and left 37 wounded. In a statement, Doctors Without Borders, which had previously called the attack a probable war crime, said the report was “shocking” and left “more questions than answers.”

Gen. John F. Campbell said the strike was “tragic, but avoidable.” Human errors compounded by technical malfunctions onboard the AC-130 attack aircraft caused the strike, he said, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon in a video broadcast from Kabul.

The military investigation found that the “cause of this tragedy was … avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures,” Campbell said.

Campbell addresses reporters in this CNN video:

From the Los Angeles Times:

The medical facility was misidentified as a target by U.S. military personnel who believed they were striking a different building several hundred meters away where there were reports of Taliban fighters, he said. The hospital was on the military’s so-called “no-strike list.”

Campbell did not identify the names or number of individuals suspended and did not say whether they would face disciplinary or criminal charges. Decisions on whether to prosecute will be made by the U.S. Special Operations Command, officials said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Snowden Has A Simple Solution To Get To The Bottom Of The US Afghan Bombing “War Crime”

October 7, 2015

Snowden Has A Simple Solution To Get To The Bottom Of The US Afghan Bombing “War Crime”

Overnight, Medecins Sans Frontiers, or the “Doctors without Borders” medical group which suffered a tremendous loss of life at the hands of US bombardment this past Saturday, stepped up its criticism of what it has previously called a US “war crime.”

As Reuters reports, earlier today it called for an independent international fact-finding commission to be established to investigate the U.S. bombing of its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which it deems a war crime, and which it would use to decide whether or not to file criminal charges, although it was unclear against whom precisely: perhaps 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama?

Why independent: because as MSF said “we cannot rely on internal investigations by U.S, NATO and Afghan forces.”

Instead, the medical charity said that the commission, which can be set up at the request of a single state under the Geneva Convention, would gather facts and evidence from the United States, NATO and Afghanistan. MSF said it sent a letter on Tuesday to the 76 countries who signed up to the additional protocol of the Geneva Convention that set up the standing commission in 1991.

There is one problem: neither the United States nor Afghanistan are signatories and Francoise Saulnier, MSF lead counsel MSF, said that the consent of the states involved is necessary.

Good luck getting it.

Assuming the US does “agree” to comply with this fact-finding mission, we expect the full data dump – after all the necessary scrubbing of the evidence of course – to take place, some time in 2019.

For now, however, the MSF is not backing down: “If we let this go, we are basically giving a blank check to any countries at war,” MSF International President Joanne Liu told a news briefing in Geneva. “There is no commitment to an independent investigation yet.”

MSF is in talks with Switzerland about convoking the international commission of independent experts.

“Today we say enough, even war has rules,” Liu said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

U.S. Bombing of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan Was No Accident – “It Was the Target”

October 7, 2015

U.S. Bombing of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan Was No Accident – “It Was the Target”

In particular, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) quickly publicized numerous facts that cast serious doubt on the original U.S. claim that the strike on the hospital was just an accident. To begin with, the organization had repeatedly advised the U.S. military of the exact GPS coordinates of the hospital. They did so most recently on September 29, just five days before the strike. Beyond that, MSF personnel at the facility “frantically” called U.S. military officials during the strike to advise them that the hospital was being hit and to plead with them to stop, but the strikes continued in a “sustained” manner for 30 more minutes.

– From Glenn Greenwald’s article: The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification

By now, all of you will have read about the U.S. military’s recent bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. What you may not be aware of, is how much the official story has changed in the days since this inexcusable act of barbarism became public.

Doctors Without Borders has been calling the attack a “war crime,” which to the average American sounds outlandish and impossible. The justification for this claim is simple — that the airstrike wasn’t an accident at all, and that the U.S. military intentionally targeted the hospital. As the days go by, it becomes increasingly clear that this is indeed the case, and the Pentagon is now scrambling to justify the intentional targeting of a hospital.

As Glenn Greenwald reports at the Intercept:

When news first broke of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its official statement suggested: an airstrike it carried out in Kunduz “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” Oops: our bad. Fog of war, errant bombs, and all that.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Confronting a Very Dark Chapter

August 4, 2015

Confronting a Very Dark Chapter

This week marks the 70^th anniversary of a very dark chapter of human history, the U.S. incineration of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a war crime that has been rationalized in popular U.S. history, writes Gary G. Kohls.

August 6, 2015, is the 70^th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a civilian city that had minimal military value despite the claims of President Harry Truman when he announced the event to the American people.

An estimated 80,000 innocent civilians plus 20,000 weaponless young Japanese conscripts died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing raid. Hundreds of thousands more suffered slow deaths and disabilities from agonizing burns, radiation sickness, leukemia, anemia, thrombocytopenia and untreatable infections. Another shameful reality was the fact that 12 American Navy pilot POWs, their existence well known to the U.S. command prior to the bombing, were instantly incinerated in the Hiroshima jail on that fateful day.

The Japanese survivors and their progeny suffered a fate similar to the survivors and progeny of America’s “Atomic Soldiers,” who were exposed in the line of duty to the hundreds of nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s or to the depleted uranium that the U.S. military has used in the two Gulf Wars. These groups were afflicted with horrible radiation-induced illnesses, congenital anomalies, genetic mutations, immune deficiencies, cancers and premature deaths.

The whole truth about the Hiroshima slaughter – the first of only two cases of nuclear bombs being dropped in wartime, with the second coming only three days later at Nagasaki – has been heavily censored and mythologized ever since. In 1945, war-weary Americans accepted the propaganda that the bombings were necessary to shorten the war and prevent what U.S. officials claimed could be the loss of a million U.S. soldiers during a November 1945 invasion of Japan.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

War crime: NATO deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure

May 16, 2015

War crime: NATO deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure

The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, writes Nafeez Ahmed. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself. Since then, the country’s water infrastructure – and the suffering of its people – has only deteriorated further.

The deliberate destruction of a nation’s water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a genocidal strategy.

Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change.

But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built and maintained over decades to overcome this problem was targeted and disrupted by NATO.

During the 2011 military invasion, press reports surfaced, mostly citing pro-rebel sources, claiming that pro-Gaddafi loyalists had shut down the water supply system as a mechanism to win the war and punish civilians.

This is a lie.

But truth, after all, is the first casualty of war – especially for mainstream media journos who can’t be bothered to fact-check the claims of people they interview in war zones, while under pressure from editors to produce copy that doesn’t rock too many boats.

Critical water installations bombed – then blamed on Gaddafi

It was in fact NATO which debilitated Libya’s water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory in Brega.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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