NATO Forces Kill Four More Afghan Schoolchildren

Afghan officials said Tuesday that NATO forces shot dead four Afghan school students, but NATO said those killed were Taliban militants and their associates.

The incident happened around three kilometres south of Khost city, the capital of the south-eastern province of Khost, on Monday night, Mubarez Mohammad Zadran, a spokesman for the provincial governor, told the German Press Agency dpa.

He said all the deceased were civilians who were driving in a vehicle that failed to stop at military checkpoint. 'We condemn the attack,' he said.

The Education Ministry said in a statement that the four dead were students, aged 11 to 17. The ministry condemned the attack.'

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Afghan Fury After Nato Troops Open Fire on Bus Full of Civilians, Killing Four People

International troops opened fire on a bus carrying Afghan civilians today, killing four people and setting off anti-American protests by furious locals.

Witnesses said the bus, which was travelling in Kandahar province's Zhari district, had pulled over to allow an American convoy to pass when gunfire broke out.

The shooting left another 18 people wounded, 12 of whom were taken to a military hospital.'

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NATO Won't Destroy Afghan Poppy Fields

NATO has rejected an appeal made by Russia for eradication of opium fields in Afghanistan, arguing that the sole source of income in the region cannot be removed.

Addressing a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on Wednesday, head of Russia's Federal Drug Control Agency (FSKN) Victor Ivanov said "Afghan opiates led to the death of 1 million people by overdose in the last 10 years, and that is United Nations data. Is that not a threat to world peace and security?"

The Russian official tasked NATO forces with "normalizing the situation in Afghanistan" which includes "the elimination of drug production".'

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Evidence Mounts NATO Report Lied on Afghan Civilian Killings

The February 12 night raid against a house party in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province remains shrouded in mystery, but NATO’s official story appears to be crumbling as even NATO officials concede that the claims made were not strictly true.

NATO’s official statement claimed at the time that the raid on the home led to a “fire fight” against “several insurgents” who were killed, before NATO made a “gruesome discovery” of bound and gagged bodies in a nearby room.

NATO is conceding now that all of the slain people were civilians killed in the raid. NATO communications direct Rear Admiral Greg Smith also admitted that they had no real evidence that the men slain at the home had ever fired a shot against the NATO forces.'

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NATO Waging Undeclared War on Russia: Moscow

Moscow says the United States and NATO's inaction in fighting drug trafficking in Afghanistan, translates into an "undeclared war" against Russia.

Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin slammed the alliance for its loose surveillance on drug trafficking out of Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported on Friday.

Afghanistan produces some 90 percent of the world's opium. The Afghan drugs enter Russia and Central Asia before reaching Western Europe.'

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Europe's Pacifism Undermining NATO, Gates Says

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates says Europe's growing aversion to military force means the NATO alliance is facing a crisis.

Addressing NATO officers at the National Defense University in Washington on Tuesday, Gates said that European countries' chronically low defense spending is damaging operations in Afghanistan.

"Right now, the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems," the US defense secretary said in a blunt message.

He went on to say that public and political opposition to the military has grown so great in Europe that it is directly affecting operations in Afghanistan.'

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Descent Into Barbarism: The US and NATO Wage War on the World

The argument is won: capitalism as an effective system to organise society and provide for human needs has expired. The evidence is conclusive. Trillions of dollars to kickstart the economy in the US and Europe may have given an ephemeral lease of life to the financial class to spin the casino wheel once again, but it is more apparent by the day that the tentative “recovery” has spluttered to a standstill. Gridlocked by unprecedented levels of personal and national debts, the engine of production – the real economy – is in a state of rigor mortis.

This collapse has been a long time in the making. Decades of easy credit was up to now a way for the ruling class – government, corporations, financial institutions – to let the majority of workers subsidise the chronic loss in their livelihoods, which have been drained since the mid-1970s by the oligarchy’s self-aggrandisement from wage cutting, regressive taxation and public spending cuts. The political class – whether liberal or conservative, right or left – have facilitated this giant wealth-siphoning process.'

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When Israel Joins NATO

Israel wants to be a member of NATO. It no longer looks down its nose at military alliances. It no longer wants to stay away from Western military arrangements. It wants in.

A majority of Israelis believe NATO membership would boost Israel's security as well as NATO's strategic power. Interestingly enough, there has been no Arab reaction to Israel's desire to join NATO, no Arab attempt to block the move, and no preparations to deal with its consequences.'

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NATO Admits Opening Fire on Civilians

NATO acknowledged on Friday that the US-led forces had opened fire on civilians, injuring five people during anti-American protests in Afghanistan's Helmand province.

Officials say the anti-American protests, that took place at the gates of a military base in the Garmsir district of Helmand province on Wednesday, was initially sparked by reports that US troops had desecrated the Holy Qur'an.'

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Afghan Says Army Will Need Help Until 2024

President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday that Afghanistan would not be able to pay for its own security until at least 2024, underscoring his government’s long-term financial dependence on the United States and NATO even as President Obama has pledged to begin withdrawing American troops in 2011.'

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Holbrooke Says Handling of Afghan War Shameful

Special US envoy Richard Holbrooke conceded on Wednesday that the US-led coalition in Afghanistan has neglected the country.

Holbrooke, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in an interview with Germany's daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the US and its NATO allies have to start institution-building from scratch nine years after the invasion.

"The whole thing was uncoordinated and did not get us very far. The upshot is that in the ninth year of the war we are starting from scratch," Holbrooke said, while acknowledging that cooperation between allies had been chaotic throughout the war.'

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NATO's Secret Transatlantic Bond: Nuclear Weapons In Europe

Is Italy capable of delivering a thermonuclear strike? Could the Belgians and the Dutch drop hydrogen bombs on enemy targets?...Germany's air force couldn't possibly be training to deliver bombs 13 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, could it?

The above is from the opening paragraph of a feature in Time magazine's online edition of December 2, one entitled "What to Do About Europe's Secret Nukes."

In response to the rhetorical queries posed it adopts the deadly serious tone befitting the subject in stating, "It is Europe's dirty secret that the list of nuclear-capable countries extends beyond those — Britain and France — who have built their own weapons. Nuclear bombs are stored on air-force bases in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands — and planes from each of those countries are capable of delivering them." '

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NATO Sends Threatening Signals to Karzai

NATO suggests that the 'credibility' of the re-instated Afghan administration depends on Kabul submission to the alliance's military pursuits in the war-ravaged country.

NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance would seek to refresh its understanding with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, AFP reported on Friday.

Under the bilateral agreement, the US-dominated body keeps, and intends to increase, its more than 100,000-strong force in the war-torn country.'

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Black Sea Wars

What is Saakashvili up to? He seems intent on provoking a new crisis to force NATO to stand with him and bring the United States in on his side – against Russia. Ultimate goal: Return the issue of his lost provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia back onto the world’s front burner.

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Afghanistan: Coalition Forces Attack Hospital

On Wednesday evening September 2 at 10 pm coalition vehicles drove up at SCA’s Hospital in Shaniz, Wardak province along the main highway from Kabul to Ghazni. They entered the hospital compound, reportedly without giving any reason or justification for entering the hospital compound. They searched all rooms, even bathrooms, male and female wards. Rooms that were locked were forcefully entered and the doors of the malnutrition ward and the ultrasound ward were broken by force to gain entry. Upon entering the hospital they tied up four employees and two family members of patients at the hospital. SCA staffs as well as patients (even those in beds) were forced out of rooms/wards throughout the search.

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US and NATO Plan to Carve Up the Caucasus

War clouds refuse to disperse a year after Georgia waged war against Russia. On the anniversary of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s ill-fated invasion of South Ossetia 8 August, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev warned: “Georgia does not stop threatening to restore its ‘territorial integrity’ by force. Armed forces are concentrated at the borders near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and provocations are committed,” including renewed Georgian shelling of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali.

What is the result of the Ossetia fiasco? Did Russia “win” or “lose”? Has it put paid to NATO expansion? What lessons did Saakashvili and his Western sponsors learn? Analysts have been sifting through the rubble over the past few weeks.

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NATO's War Plans For The High North

Since the beginning of the year the United States and NATO have repeatedly indicated in both word and deed their intention to lay claim to and extend their military presence in what they refer to as the High North: The Arctic Circle and the waters connecting with it, the Barents and the Norwegian Seas, as well as the Baltic.

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US Using White Phosphorus In Afghanistan

Life as 8-year-old Razia knew it ended one March morning when a shell her father says was fired by Western troops exploded into their house, enveloping her head and neck in a blazing chemical.

Now she spends her days in a U.S. hospital bed at the Bagram airbase, her small fingernails still covered with flaking red polish but her face an almost unrecognisable mess of burnt tissue and half her scalp a bald scar.

"The kids called out to me that I was burning but the explosion was so strong that for a moment I was deaf and couldn't hear anything," her father, Aziz Rahman, told Reuters.

"And then my wife screamed 'the kids are burning' and she was also burning," he added, his face clouding over at the memory.

The flames that consumed his family were fed by a chemical called white phosphorous, which U.S. medical staff at Bagram said they found on Razia's face and neck.

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Kosovo War was Not Just, nor Successful

Nato's attack on Yugoslavia was in flagrant breach of our charter obligations and thus an act of aggression. Far from stopping Serbian ethnic cleansing, it provided the excuse and motive for accelerating it: Kosovo Albanians started to be driven out of their country only after the Nato bombing began.

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