MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviews UCLA geography professor Thomas Gillespie (6:17):
Go here if video fails to play.
Parachinar was a haven used by the US created mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, governed the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) similar to the Swat Valley in Pakistan, which has restored Sharia Law.
Oddly, this is one of the areas that neither the Bush nor the Obama administration have been bombing in their War of Terror:
“If he’s still alive, he honestly could be sitting there right now,” says Thomas Gillespie, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of geography at UCLA. “It is still the safest tribal area and city in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of northwest Pakistan and one of the only tribal areas that the US has not bombed with its unmanned Predators.”
(Even as Gillespie said this, US drones conducted their first ever Predator strike in Kurram Agency on Monday killing 30, and possibly lending some credence to the theory. The researchers advocate that the US first investigate — but not bomb — the three buildings.)
This comes as Pres. Obama begins the Afghan surge sending 17,000 more troops into Afghanistan, the International Commission of Jurists single out the US and the UK as having “actively undermined” international law and human rights in the War of Terror, Pakistan continuously objects to Mr. Obama’s misguided massive attacks within their border, and the UN reports that civilian deaths in Afghanistan rose 40% in 2008.
The danger of little things like the mainstream misuse of the word ‘liberal’ is when a cult of personality surrounds someone viewed as one and his evil wars become “good wars” in the Newspeak.
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