Tag: military

US military deaths in Afghanistan region at 491, in Iraq at 4,124

Posted on By 3arabawy

Via AP:

As of Tuesday, July 29, 2008, at least 491 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Saturday at 10 a.m. EDT.
Of those, the military reports 347 were killed by hostile action.
Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 65 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, two were the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Jordan; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Philippines; Seychelles; Sudan; Tajikistan; Turkey; and Yemen.
There were also four CIA officer deaths.

And in Iraq, AP reports that:

As of Tuesday, July 29, 2008, at least 4,124 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The figure includes eight military civilians killed in action. At least 3,361 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers.
The AP count is four fewer than the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Tuesday at 10 a.m. EDT.
The British military has reported 176 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia and Georgia, three each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Korea, one death each.
Since the start of U.S. military operations in Iraq, 30,464 U.S. service members have been wounded in hostile action, according to the Defense Department’s weekly tally.

US Imperialism

Life for Argentine Dirty War General

Posted on By 3arabawy

From the BBC…

An Argentine ex-army officer has been sentenced to life in prison for the 1977 kidnapping, torture and killing of four left-wing activists.
Luciano Benjamin Menendez, 80, was found guilty along with seven others of the crimes.
Prosecutors say the victims were dumped in the street to make it look like they died in a shoot-out.
Menendez was one of Argentina’s most feared army officers during military rule between 1976 and 1983.
The BBC’s Daniel Schweimler in Argentina says family and friends of the victims were in court, many in tears, others simply staring silently at Menendez as the verdict was read out.
He adds that hundreds of others watched on a giant screen outside the courthouse, to witness a chapter closing on one of the darkest periods of Argentine history.
Torture center
Menendez, who reached the rank of general, commanded the regional Third Army Corps for five years in the northern city of Cordoba.
He is viewed by Argentine human rights activists as a prime example of the military’s cruel rule in the 1970s and 1980s.
The left-wing activists who died in Cordoba in 1977 were Hilda Palacios, Carlos Laja, Ruben Cardozo and Humberto Brandalisi.
Prosecutors said the four were taken to a clandestine torture center and held bound and gagged for a month before being executed.
Their bodies were then dumped in the street to make it look like they had died in a battle with the authorities – a common practice at the time.

To learn more about Israel’s involvement in the Argentinian Dirty War, read this article and that one…

‘I hate soldiers. I hate to see a man with a bayonet fixed on his rifle, who can order me off the street’

Posted on By 3arabawy

John Reed, “The Worst Thing in Europe,” The Masses, March 1915:

I hate soldiers. I hate to see a man with a bayonet fixed on his rifle, who can order me off the street. I hate to belong to an organization that is proud of obeying a caste of superior beings, that is proud of killing free ideas, so that it may the more efficiently kill human beings in cold blood. They will tell you that a conscript army is Democratic, because everybody has to serve; but they won’t tell you that military service plants in your blood the germ of blind obedience, of blind irresponsibility, that it produces one class of Commanders in your state and your industries; and accustoms you to do what they tell you even in time of peace.