kerkko.fi

Recently deployed to participate in counterinsurgency operations outside of Kabul, 19-year-old Pvt. Robert Welsh told reporters Monday that for as long as he can remember, he has wanted to serve his country by fighting in Afghanistan.

"My most vivid childhood memories are of seeing the war on TV and imagining one day I'd be able to grow up and come over here to fight for my country," said Welsh, who has followed the U.S. struggle against the Taliban for more than half his life and once spent recesses at school make-believing he and his fellow third-graders were fighting the war on terror.

"I honestly never thought I'd get the chance to participate all these years later, but here I am." Welsh went on to say that while he doesn't want to get his hopes up, he remains cautiously optimistic that his own children will one day follow in his footsteps by fighting in Afghanistan.

The Obama administration is unable to show that the billions of dollars spent in the war on drugs have significantly stemmed the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States, according to two government reports and outside experts. "We are wasting tax dollars and throwing money at a problem without even knowing what we are getting in return," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who chairs the Senate subcommittee that wrote one of the reports. "I think we have wasted our money hugely," agreed Bruce Bagley, who studies US counter-narcotics efforts and chairs international studies at the University of Miami. "The effort has had corrosive effects on every country it has touched."

The reports criticize the government's growing use of contractors, which were paid more than USD 3 billion to train local prosecutors and police, help eradicate fields of coca, operate surveillance equipment, and otherwise battle the widening drug trade in Latin America. The majority of US counter-narcotics contracts are awarded to five companies: DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC. DynCorp received the largest total, USD 1.1 billion. Among other jobs, the US contractors train local police and investigators, provide logistical support to intelligence collection centers, and fly airplanes and helicopters that spray herbicides to eradicate coca crops grown to produce cocaine.

Shortly after taking office oin January 2005, US President Barack Obama ordered CIA director Leon Panetta to make the killing or capture of Osama bin Laden, leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, the top priority of the US war against Al-Qaeda.

Last week, President Obama authorised an operation to "get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice," the President said in a speech on 1 May 2011. A small team of Americans carried out the operation, and after a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden.

Despite President Obama's assertion that "justice has been done," the operation failed to capture bin Laden and bring him to a court of law. Bin Laden was thus never tried or found guilty of the crimes he was accused of and took responsibility for.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead

"Diary" is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of late war photographer Tim Hetherington's work. He made the film as an attempt to locate himself after ten years of reporting. It is a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.

The chronic crisis in the cocoa industry has contributed to Côte d’Ivoire's slide into civil war in two ways. First, and most significant, the persistent poverty and stagnation causes war. Second, the ethnic tensions, which arose in the cocoa industry itself, gave unscrupulous politicians the chance to make a bad situation even worse, for their personal gain.

At the moment, the world cocoa price in London is high, roughly CFA 1,600 per kilo. The farmers are lucky if they get half of it for their sacks of beans. The Ivorian agents of Cargill, ADM, and Barry Callebaut offer much less than the world price. The corrupt government takes a big bite in "official" taxes. Finally, the farmers pay bribes at police roadblocks.

Côte d’Ivoire over the past decades has done just about everything mainstream Western economists suggested -- and it remains trapped in poverty. The country concentrated on growing and exporting products it was "good" at, cocoa and also coffee, instead of trying to industrialize. But the chronically low world prices for these products kept the country poor.

With better prices -- a little more like what protected and subsidized farmers in the US and Western Europe earn -- millions in the cocoa-growing regions of Côte d’Ivoire could have started to consume more themselves, which in turn would have promoted local industries, reduced unemployment, and gradually raised the country's standard of living.

Every time those in the more prosperous parts of the world buy chocolate, we are exploiting the people who produce it. As long as we continue to tolerate this injustice, there will be no peace in Côte d’Ivoire. The crisis in Côte d’Ivoire is representative of deeply rooted structural problems in many other African nations.

The photo shows General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, arm outstretched, shooting a prisoner who looked like a civilian, though he was actually a Viet Cong guerrilla. The man who was shot was Bay Lop, who had beheaded people, gunned down policemen, and killed the family of one of General Loan’s friends. That does not necessarily justify what Loan did, but when stripped of context, it looked like someone from the South Vietnamese national police gunning down some helpless guy, and that was not the case. Bay Lop was the leader of a sophisticated assassination team that was attempting to knock off all the top leaders [of South Vietnam], and General Loan was on their list.

The Finnish government continues to receive unsatisfactory answers from Afghanistan as to why President Karzai ordered the release of five Afghan men convicted in June 2007 for detonating a roadside bomb that killed a Finnish peacekeeper. Unofficial reports from Afghanistan-based Finnish officers all seem to point to corruption that may include top Karzai government officials.

Finnish military and civilian officers in Afghanistan have pieced together a picture of what they believe really happened. The information they have gathered points to probable prisoner mistreatment before the sentencing and corruption in connection with the pardon, perhaps even on the highest level. Most disturbing of all, money changed hands in connection with the pardon.

The search for a plausible answer in this case stems from a desire to ensure that the event does not prompt negative public opinion toward the ISAF mission. Finland has been engaged in a public debate over whether to increase its commitments in Afghanistan. Clearly, the Defence and Foreign Ministry officials do not want the freeing of a peacekeeper's killers to become part of the debate.

Gunmen kidnapped a 28-year-old woman who was the sole police officer in the Mexican town of Guadalupe, close to the violent northern border city of Ciudad Juarez. Unidentified gunmen set Erika Gandara's home ablaze before abducting her. She was the last police officer in Guadalupe after her colleagues either resigned and fled or were killed. Guadalupe, population 9,000, is in an area used by traffickers to smuggle drugs into the United States. The town is just up the road from the town of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, where a 20-year-old college student and mother named Marisol Valles took over as police chief in October.

http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/YearInPhotos10/year-in-photos-2010.html

Before I was in the Army, I never thought I would kill anyone, and even after I was in the Army, but before I went to Iraq, I never thought I would intentionally kill a civilian. When I was in Iraq, something happened to me that I can only explain by saying that I lost my mind. At some point while I was in Iraq, I stopped seeing Iraqis as good and bad, as men, women, and children. I started seeing them all as one, and evil, and less than human. When that happened, any natural, learned, or religious morality, that normally would have stopped this, was gone. [...] I see now that war is intrinsically evil, because killing is intrinsically evil. And, I am sorry I ever had anything to do with either.

~ Steven Green

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/05/28/statement.pdf