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by Muriel Kane, Raw Story

From the point of view of civil libertarians, the Obama administration has been an exercise in frustration, with every hopeful sign followed by failures to live up to its own promises.

The ACLU has just issued a report (pdf), titled “Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration,” which focuses on this pattern of inconsistency.

“The administration has displayed a decidedly mixed record,” explains ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romaro, “resulting, on a range of issues, in the very real danger that the Obama administration will institutionalize some of the most troublesome policies of the previous administration — in essence, creating a troubling ‘new normal.’”

mash-up from HuffPo…

The White House veto threat, combined with a GOP filibuster, was enough to defeat the funding bill in the Senate. On July 22nd, the Senate sent the stripped-down war funding bill back to the House, leading to Tuesday’s showdown. Nine years into the war, the Senate approved funding on a voice vote….

[UPDATE: So much for that. Only 102 Democrats joined a dozen Republicans and the war money passed, 308-114.]

… “Once again, war is being paid for with a credit card while investments in our children’s future are tossed aside. These investments — $10 billion for teacher jobs, $1 billion for summer youth employment, $5 billion for Pell grants, $701 million for border security — were cut from the war funding bill coming to the House floor despite being fully paid for and not adding to the budget deficit,”

Rockets Hit House Full of Hiding Civilians

by Jason Ditz, AntiWar

Following up on reports emerging over the weekend, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office is confirming that a NATO attack in Sangin District of the Helmand Province struck a houseload of civilians hiding from a nearby battle, and that at least 52 civilians were killed.

The Karzai government has promised an investigation into the killings of the civilians, which were said to have included a large number of women and children, a number of wounded civilians were also reported in the tiny village.

(Task Force 373 – think “Caravan of Death”  (Chile), “Escuadrón de la Muerte ” (El Salvadore), “Battalion 316″  (Honduras), “Contras” (Nicaragua), and SAVAK in Iran.. the list goes on and on… )

by Alex Lantier, WSWS

On Sunday, the WikiLeaks web site posted 91,731 American military documents on the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009. The release was timed to coincide with articles on these revelations in the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, all of which had received the documents several weeks ago.

The documents make clear that the occupation of Afghanistan is a filthy imperialist war. Popular resistance and protest demonstrations are drowned in blood, US death squads operate at will under a media blackout, and Washington and NATO collaborate with a narrow elite of corrupt warlords and Afghan officers.