A recent report said that NATO drone strikes have once again killed a large number of civilians including 20 women and 29 children, in a remote region of Afghanistan.

The killing of civilians by drones is an explosive issue in Afghanistan and Pakistan and soon after the story emerged there was a bizarre report that General Petraeus had told Afghan government representatives that all the people killed were members of the Taliban and that he suspected that Taliban sympathizers in the village might have burned their own children in order to make the US look bad.

(The US has apologized for another appalling drone killing of nine children who had been merely gathering firewood. I shudder to think of the number of people who join terrorist groups because of their rage when members of their family and community are killed like this.)

It is always a bad sign when you accuse other people of things that would be unthinkable if said about your own group. The instinct to protect and shield one’s own children seems to be deeply held and universal, is observed in almost all species, and is supported by evolutionary theory. Harming one’s own children is the act of a psychopath and thus rare.

This is what makes Petraeus’s purported statement so offensive. Other commanders are making it even worse by claiming that burning of their children is a common practice among Afghan parents! To accuse an entire village of doing so is a sign of deep desperation and requires a very high level of proof. It is not a charge to be tossed around casually.

I have said many times before that in the immediate aftermath of a major event where a government has likely committed an atrocity, their immediate instinct is to lie their way out if it in order to gain public support, hoping that by the time the truth slowly emerges, people will have forgotten the event or at least passions will have cooled.

We saw this with the case where a US warship shot down an Iranian civilian plane killing everyone abroad. President Reagan and other officials claimed that the dastardly evil Iranian government had deliberately sacrificed their own people by dive-bombing the US warship so that it would be shot down as part of their plan to make the US look bad. This was absurd on its face and was shown later to be a flat-out lie but the US media lapped it up. After all, we like to believe that we are always good and the enemy is always evil.

Then there was the claim that Iraqi soldiers had removed incubators from Kuwait just for the sheer evil pleasure of wanting babies to die. This was also reported unquestioningly by the media but was later shown to be not only false but a deliberate lie planned and implemented by a public relations firm.

Then there was the case of the Brazilian who was shot dead by British police and where every justification given for the killing turned out to be a lie.

Stories that fit so conveniently into a narrative that saves one’s own face and demonizes the enemy have to be treated with deep skepticism. This is why, even though I think that George W, Bush and Dick Cheney are liars and responsible for war crimes, I have never taken seriously the claims of the so-called ‘truthers’ that Bush and Cheney either planned the 9/11 attack or knew about it in advance and allowed it to happen. Such extraordinary claims require a very high bar of proof and nothing close it has been provided.

As I said before, “This is why I always take initial news reports of such events with a grain of salt. I believe that all governments, without exception, lie to their people. They do this routinely and without shame. But most people are uncomfortable accepting this fact and want to believe that their government is trustworthy. And at the early stages of the events, governments and official spokespersons take advantage of people’s trust and use their dominance of the media to make sure that people’s early impressions are favorable. The only reason that governments will hesitate to lie is if the media quickly investigates the original story and gives the subsequently revealed facts as much publicity as the original stories. But as we have see, the present media have largely abdicated that role, playing it safe by simply reporting what the government says.”

It is up to us to suspend belief in obviously self-serving government claims until we see convincing proof.

To no one’s surprise, the US Supreme Court by an 8-1 margin ruled that the Westboro Baptist Church had the right to peacefully picket funerals. This was clearly the correct decision, in my opinion, and what surprises me is that there was even one dissenter (Justice Alito).

I don’t know why people keep taking this church to court. It only gives them the publicity they crave and makes them into First Amendment martyrs. Their First Amendment rights should not be violated just because we do not like what they say.

Just when I think that the Republican congressional leadership and their nutty supporters could not get any more childish, they surprise me. They are deliberately abandoning biodegradable utensils in the cafeteria (a policy implemented by the previous congress) to bring back Styrofoam, one of the most environmentally damaging materials. The press aide to the new speaker John Boehner was so proud of this move that he felt it worth sending out a tweet.

This kind of pettiness is everywhere. After ridiculing Michelle Obama’s creation of an organic garden in the White House as an example of her environmental extremism, they are now attacking her campaign against childhood obesity as an example of the Obamas’ desire for a ‘nanny state’. Really? You really oppose urging children to eat healthily and get more exercise?

I would not be surprised if she praised motherhood and apple pie, these crazy people would claim that she is an angry feminist who hates men and is also trying to destroy the peach industry.

Rumsfeld is out flogging his book and appeared with Jon Stewart. As is often the case when he interviews powerful government officials, Stewart was not at his best. I have noticed that in these situations Stewart seems to go overboard in trying to be nice to his guest and as a result they get away with claims that he should have directly confronted.
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Unless (1) there is a major catastrophe and (2) Obama badly mishandles the response to it, he is going to be re-elected easily.

Hastings reports how the US military in Afghanistan wanted to use their Psy-Ops team on visiting US politicians to get them to support the war.

The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

Like his previous article that led to the dismissal of General Stanley McCrystal, this one is proving to be another embarrassment. Glenn Greenwald reports on how the major media once again seem to feel that their role is to be defenders and protectors of the powerful, and they have turned their guns on Hastings.

Incidentally, this puts the lie to the Village media’s earlier claims that because Hastings was not deferential to the top military brass in his article on McCrystal, Hastings would never be able to get others people to talk to him.

Stephen Colbert provides an excellent synopsis of how the government is colluding with Bank of America with big law firms and corporate hackers to attack WikiLeaks and Anonymous and Glenn Greenwald.

Colbert also interviews Greenwald.

As protests escalate in countries in the middle east resulting in various degrees of repression by their authoritarian governments, a lot of nonsense is being spouted by commentators here. Juan Cole tries to set things straight by listing top the top five myths about the protests.

Meanwhile in Libya, Gadhafi seems to have gone completely berserk in his attempts to forcibly quell the protests in his country and Cole provides some insights into that situation.

Meanwhile Yemen’s leader seems to be also digging in his heels and it looks likely that he will increase his use of violence to repress protests.

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, the Iraqi defector known as ‘Curveball’ was the source of much of the false information that was used to argue that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. There were doubts from the beginning about Curveball’s veracity and plenty of reasons to doubt him but these were brushed aside in the drive to gin up support for the invasion. Curveball himself says that his German interrogators knew he was lying as early as 2000.
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Poor Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. The sudden popular uprisings against governments all over the Middle East must be causing them headaches.

When protests started against a brutal dictator they had supported for decades, like Mubarak in Egypt, they tried to appease both sides by appealing for calm and hoping that things would blow over either with minor concessions to the protestors or with a transfer of power to another authoritarian leader (like Suleiman or the military) that would continue to be a US client. The awkwardness of this attempt was clearly visible during the days of protest.

It must have been a great relief to them when protests erupted in a country like Iran where they dislike the leaders, because then they could try and restore their credibility by offering full-throated support for the democratic demands of the protestors and condemning the efforts of the Iranian government to suppress and intimidate them.
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