What Can You Buy With U.S. $50,000 Dollars : Families of 17 Slain Afghans Receive $50,000 U.S. For Each Death

Injured receive $11,000 U.S.:  Indeed what CAN you buy for $50,000?  Can $50,000 buy a mother, father, brother sister or beloved child?  Obama, U.S. government slap afghan families in the face after killing loved ones

Associated Press
By Mirwais Kahn
03/25/2012

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan —

The United States has paid $50,000 in compensation for each Afghan killed in the shooting spree attributed to a U.S. soldier in southern Afghanistan, an Afghan official and a community elder said Sunday.

$50,000 Dollars?

The families of the dead received the money Saturday at the governor's office, said Kandahar provincial council member Agha Lalai. Each wounded person received $11,000, Lalai said. Community elder Jan Agha confirmed the same figures.

They were told that the money came from U.S. President Barack Obama, Lalai said.

A U.S. official confirmed that compensation had been paid but declined to discuss exact amounts, saying only that it reflected the devastating nature of the incident. The official spoke anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the subject.

A spokesman for NATO and U.S. forces declined to confirm or deny the payments, saying that while coalition members often make compensation payments, they are usually kept private.

"As the settlement of claims is in most cases a sensitive topic for those who have suffered loss, it is usually a matter of agreement that the terms of the settlement remain confidential," Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings said.

So, Obama is now floating the incredible story that Bales, getting tired from killing, raping and burning bodies to go back to his encampment, eat, relax and perhaps get a little sleep before going back for some more killing, raping and burning bodies.  No alarm was given by the Afghans when he returned to camp for some R&R, they just sat there silently amid all the mayhem and waited for Bales to come back and commit all the destruction evident in the above image

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is accused of sneaking out of his base before dawn on March 11 then creeping into houses in two nearby villages and opening fire on sleeping families within.

Oh yeah, a regular one man Army he is:  SSgt. Robert Bales, former stockbroker and swindler, surely Bales must have perfected his killing skills driving a computer on Wall Street; indeed, a real, stone-cold killing machine capable of wiping out entire towns by himself

It was not immediately clear how much money had been paid out in all. Afghan officials and villagers have counted 16 dead — 12 in the village of Balandi and four in neighboring Alkozai — and six wounded. The U.S. military has charged Bales with 17 murders without explaining the discrepancy.


The 38-year-old soldier is accused of using his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher, to kill four men, four women, two boys and seven girls, then burning some of the bodies. The ages of the children were not disclosed in the charge sheet.

The families had previously received smaller compensation payments from Afghan officials — $2,000 for each death and $1,000 for each person wounded.

Families of the dead declined to comment on any payments by U.S. officials on Sunday, but some of them said the previous day that they were less concerned with monetary payments than with seeing the perpetrator punished.

Also Saturday, a bomb exploded in the south of the country as a foot patrol of Afghan and NATO forces was passing by the previous day, killing nine Afghans and one international service member, officials said.

The group was patrolling through Arghandab district in Kandahar province late Saturday when it was caught in the blast, said Shah Mohammad, the district administrator. Arghandab is a farming region just outside Kandahar city that has long been a bed-down area for Taliban insurgents. It was one of a number of communities around Kandahar city that were targeted in a 2010 sweep to oust the insurgency from the area.

The Afghan dead included one soldier, three police officers, four members of the Afghan "local police" — a government-sponsored militia force — and one translator, Mohammad said.

NATO reported earlier Sunday that one of its service members was killed in a bomb attack in southern Afghanistan on Saturday but did not provide additional details. It was not clear if this referred to the same incident, as NATO usually waits for individual coalition nations to confirm the details of deaths of their troops.

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IN HIGH GEAR: Advanced Preparations of U.S. - Israel War Against Iran

Obama and his regime criminals are following Bush/Cheney/Rice script for illegal Afghanistan, Iraq "wars"

Global Research
By Ben Schreiner
03/24/2012

Following the highly scrutinized meeting between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month in Washington, consensus held that Obama had managed to secure assurances from the war-hungry Netanyahu that Israel would delay a military strike against Iran till 2013. That is, till after the November U.S. presidential election.

Obama getting his marching orders from madman Netanyahu

According to the Israeli daily Maariv, this commitment of Israeli “restraint” had been bought with the sale of U.S. “advanced bunker-busting bombs and long-range refueling planes” to the Israeli Defense Forces, as al-Akhbar (3/8) reported. Needless to say, such advanced weaponry would be required in any Israeli attack on Iran.

“You shall still have your war,” Obama thus seemingly sought to convey to Netanyahu, “but only in due time.”

Since the Obama-Netanyahu summit, however, indications of such Israeli restraint have dissipated. The Israeli dogs of war are not so easily tamed. In fact, in his latest column for Bloomberg (3/19), the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reports that talk of striking Iran is once more convulsing through the Israeli political establishment. And according to Goldberg, all such discussions have assumed a rather optimistic bent.

“One conclusion key officials have reached,” Goldberg writes, “is that a strike on six or eight Iranian facilities will not lead, as is generally assumed, to all-out war.”

Obama will purposely place U.S. aircraft carriers and other naval ships at extreme risk in the hope that one will be sunk in Persian Gulf with all hands, sparking WWIII and giving him and his criminal regime an excuse to attack Iran

We learn further that Israeli officials interpret Obama’s claims of “having Israel’s back” as meaning that even in the event of an Israeli strike against Iran in the face of U.S. protest, “Obama would move immediately to help buttress Israel’s defenses against an Iranian counterstrike.”

All this leaves Goldberg to assess that Israel shall ultimately strike Iran. As he writes, “I’m highly confident that Netanyahu isn’t bluffing—that he is in fact counting down to the day when he will authorize a strike against a half-dozen or more Iranian nuclear sites.”

Iran has stated it will retaliate if attacked by Israel, U.S.

This unnerving assessment mirrors that held by another favored media conduit for Israeli propaganda, Ronen Bergman, who after similarly speaking with senior Israeli leaders earlier this year, concluded in the New York Times Magazine (1/25) that, "Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012."

Notably, Goldberg’s Bloomberg piece appeared the very day the New York Times (3/19) reported on a secret U.S. war game held earlier this month. The war game reportedly simulated an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. And as the Times reported, the exercise “forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead.”

If Obama/Netanyahu attack Iran Americans will be experiencing a lot more of this...

(The report did not specify to any detail on the expected regional war unleashed by an Israeli strike. Nor did the paper mention any projection of potential Iranian casualties. But why would they? After all, as U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks averred back in 2002: “We don’t do body counts.”)

And of course, where there is smoke, there is fire.

..... and this

Indeed, for the Times ominously noted that a similar exercise took place back in December 2002—at the time simulating a potential invasion of Iraq. And mere months later, as Peter Symonds, writing at the World Socialist Web Site (3/21), reminds us, “US President George Bush unleashed the illegal US-led war of aggression that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and devastated much of the country.”

Hence amid its war gaming, the Pentagon continues to accelerate its naval build-up in the Persian Gulf, according to the Los Angeles Times (3/17) and other outlets. The Times writes:

The Navy will add four more mine-sweeping ships and four more CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters with mine-detection capability. The Navy is also sending more underwater unmanned mine-neutralization units to the region.

The U.S. presently has three aircraft carriers (the USS Carl Vinson, the USS John Stennis, and the USS Abraham Lincoln) and their accompanying striker groups on patrol in the Persian Gulf. And lest one forgets, the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet remains stationed in Bahrain.

Coinciding with this massive accumulation of military hardware assembled at Iran’s door has been an escalation of U.S. threats of military assault. In fact, according to the Russian daily Kommersant, the U.S. has indirectly sent a warning to Tehran that the upcoming six-party talks on Iran’s nuclear program, to be held April 15 in Turkey, represent Tehran’s “last chance” to avoid a U.S. military strike. As the Christian Science Monitor (3/14) reports, “US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a UN Security Council session on March 12 to deliver that tough missive to Tehran.”

President Obama personally conveyed much the same message in a joint press conference held with British Prime Minister David Cameron earlier this month. As the president stated, “the window for solving this issue [the Iranian nuclear crisis] diplomatically is shrinking.”

Such talk of a shrinking diplomatic window comes as it is confirmed--yet again--that Iran is not even pursuing nuclear weapons. “Despite saber-rattling from Jerusalem,” the Associated Press (3/18) reports, “Israeli officials now agree with the U.S. assessment that Tehran has not yet decided on the actual construction of a nuclear bomb.”

Likewise, Reuters states (3/23), "Current and former U.S. officials say they are confident that Iran has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of U.N. nuclear inspections.”

Meanwhile, the Iranian government has continued to declare its disdain for nuclear weapons. Speaking in late April, Ajatollah Ali Kahamenei reconfirmed his fatwa against nuclear weapons, declaring in part: "We believe that using nuclear weapons is haraam and prohibited and that it is everybody’s duty to make efforts to protect humanity against this great disaster.” And in an interview with German television earlier this month, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad similarly declared that nuclear weapons "belong to the past."

That said, the French news agency AFP (3/20) reports that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has warned that if Iran were to be attacked, it would have no choice but to develop nuclear weapons. As Lavrov stated, "I am almost certain that such a decision will surely be taken after (any) strikes on Iran,"

But, as it ought to be abundantly clear, the present standoff with Iran is motivated not by its imagined nuclear weapons program. Rather, the menace of nuclear proliferation is but a veil used by the militarist regimes residing in the U.S. and Israel to obscure their insatiable appetites for war. And as history has proven, this appetite is unmoved by official state intelligence, let alone a regard for human life.

No doubt then, dark days lie ahead.

Ben Schreiner is freelance writer based in Oregon. He may be reached at bnschreiner@gmail.com.

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The 5^th Estate.

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This news site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.  We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

 

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Aide says former Vice President Dick Cheney had Heart Transplant

Real issue here is U.S. taxpayers paid for the transplanted heart keeping this War Criminal cyborg alive, when there are thousands of needy children waiting YEARS for a transplant; only positive note here is he may be alive for his War Crimes trial

Associated Press
03/25/2012

WASHINGTON —

Former Vice President Dick Cheney had a heart transplant Saturday and is recovering at a Virginia hospital, his office said.

War Criminal Cheney get's taxpayer financed heart ahead of children

An aide to Cheney disclosed that the 71-year-old, who has had a long history of cardiovascular trouble including numerous heart attacks, had been waiting for a transplant for more than 20 months.

“Although the former vice president and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift,” aide Kara Ahern said in a written statement that was authenticated by several of the Republican politician’s close associates.

Cheney was recovering Saturday night at the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., after surgery earlier in the day.

The former vice president suffered a heart attack in 2010, his fifth since the age of 37. That year, he had surgery to have a small pump installed to help his heart keep working. It was one of the few steps left, short of a transplant, to stay alive in the face of what he acknowledged was “increasing congestive heart failure.”

Necrotic, War Criminal Kissinger long overdue for dirt nap

The pump, called a left ventricular assist device, is mainly used for short periods to buy time for potential transplant candidates awaiting a donor organ. The fact that doctors resorted to it illustrated the perilous condition he was in.

In July 2007, he had had a minor surgical procedure to replace a device that monitored his heartbeat. Nearly 20 years earlier, in 1988, Cheney had had quadruple bypass surgery, and had two artery-clearing angioplasties and the operation to implant the device.

In 2005, Cheney had six hours of surgery on his legs to repair a kind of aneurysm, and in March 2007, doctors discovered deep venous thrombosis in his left lower leg. An ultrasound a month later showed the clot was getting smaller.

In January 2011, Cheney said he was getting by on a battery-powered heart pump, which made it “awkward to walk around.” He also said he hasn’t made a decision yet on a transplant, but that “the technology is getting better and better.”

Cheney received heart ahead of thousands of needy children

Cheney said then that he’d “have to make a decision at some point whether I want to go for a transplant.”

Cheney served as former President George W. Bush’s vice president for eight years, from 2001 until 2009. Cheney was a lightning rod for criticism during Bush’s presidency, accused by opponents of often advocating a belligerent U.S. stance in world affairs during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The 5^th Estate.

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This news site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.  We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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Global oil price may hit $240 if Iran closes Hormuz: IHS

Double the price and you might be near the real amount; for the oil company thieves it's open season on gasoline consumers

PRESS TV
03/24/2012

A leading US-based energy consulting firm says oil price may hit $240 a barrel and economic growth may fall by over 25 percent if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz in reaction to the Western sanctions. 

 

Iran has stated it will close Persian Gulf if attacked

Analysts at IHS Global Insight also told reporters that Iran can easily close the strategic strait and disrupt global oil supplies for up to three months by laying mines that the US and its allies would have to find and remove, USA Today reported.

“If Iran actually moves to close the Strait of Hormuz, crude oil prices may soar to $240 a barrel for some time,” said Sara Johnson, senior research director for Global Economics at IHS.

She added that oil prices may stay as high as $160 in the second quarter of the year before reverting to somewhere around $120.

Such an oil shock, Johnson stated, can bring back gas lines in much of the world, and shave next year’s global economic growth to 2.6 percent from a current forecast of 3.6 percent.

“If it [oil price] did hit $240 [a barrel], you're looking at about a doubling of where gas prices are now; and the US [gas price] is at $4 [a gallon]," said Jim Burkhard, managing director of the global oil group at IHS CERA, the firm's energy-research arm. 

The expert stated that the impact would be so large as the global oil supplies are so tight.

“The world has only between 1.8 million and 2.5 million barrels per day of unused production capacity, down from 6.2 million in 2009. Tight inventories magnify the impact of any interruption in crude from nations around the Strait [of Hormuz],” Burkhard added. 

Oil companies have demonstrated just exactly how far they can be trusted

The US and the European Union (EU) have imposed tough sanctions against Iran, since the beginning of 2012, to block the country’s oil exports and penalize other states for importing the Iranian crude. 

BP destroyed the Gulf of Mexico

They claim that Iran's nuclear energy program includes a military component, ignoring the fact that International Atomic Energy Agency has never been able to prove a military diversion in Iran's nuclear energy program despite meticulous inspections.

Tehran has threatened that if Iran's oil exports are cut, the country may take retaliatory steps, including the closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz through which a daily total of 15-17 million barrels of oil pass.

SS/PKH/AZ 

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The 5^th Estate.

Images:  Google royalty free unless otherwise attributed.

This news site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.  We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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