AOL NEWS– When it comes to measuring casualties and death rates, Pakistani computer scientist Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani is a world-class expert. His Ph.D. thesis looked at complex simulations calculating blast waves from suicide bombings, with an eye toward preventing mass casualties from such attacks.

Now Usmani, an assistant professor at Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province who recently completed five years as a Fulbright scholar in the U.S., is applying that expertise to the contentious debate over drone strikes. And his website, Pakistan Body Count, draws a striking conclusion about the unacknowledged CIA drone strikes in Pakistan: More than 90 percent of the reported casualties are civilians.

Pakistani youngsters sit beside the bloodstain wall of a house after a suspected U.S. drone missile strike in Mohammadkhel, a village in the Pakistani north Waziristan region along Afghan border, 2008.

Since the beginning of the drone attacks, Usmani estimates that over 1,200 civilians have been killed by the strikes, compared to only 30 members of al-Qaida.

Usmani brings a unique background to the work. His work on blast simulations has looked at the details of a terrorist attack that may determine who lives and who dies. He and his colleagues found, for example, that circular crowds suffer the worst in terrorist attacks (more than a 50 percent death rate), while people arranged in rows, such as at prayer in a mosque, had only a 20 percent death rate.

Read the full article about Pakistani Scholar Disputes US Drone Death Tallies.

© 2011 AOL News

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PRESS DEMOCRAT– Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, delivered her 400th speech against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the House floor Tuesday.

Woolsey, a former Petaluma city councilwoman who was elected to Congress in 1992, began by noting that her series of anti-war speeches — delivered every day Congress was in session — began in April 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq.

“And so since that day, I’ve stood here in this spot to say over and over again that these wars are eroding our spiritual core; bankrupting us morally and fiscally; teaching our children that warfare is ‘the new normal,’” she said.

Woolsey noted that the Iraq war and former President Bush were “quite popular” in 2004, but that “gradually, the tide of public opinion turned.”

Read the full article about Woolsey Gives 400th Anti-War Speech.

© 2011 Press Democrat

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TEHRAN TIMES– June marks the deadliest month in combat related fatalities for U.S. forces in Iraq since 2009 amid fears of a rise in attacks against the U.S. military.

The most recent killing of two American soldiers in northern Iraq on Sunday raised the U.S. forces’ death toll to 11 in June. Sunday’s casualties raised the total death toll for U.S. forces in Iraq to 4,463 since March 2003, according to icasualties.org.

U.S. military commanders warn that there could be a rise in attacks against U.S. troops as they prepare to withdraw from war-torn Iraq. Many of the remaining U.S. military bases in southern Iraq have faced a surge in rocket and mortar attacks, a Press TV correspondent reported on Tuesday.

Analysts believe that the prolonged presence of U.S. troops in the war-ravaged country and the U.S. military officials’ efforts to keep the troops in Iraq beyond December 2011 are the root causes of armed attacks on American soldiers.

“There are stories that the U.S. has been telling Iraqi officials that they would like to stay there a little bit longer and that they think they would need to keep the troops there a bit longer and that is I think why some of these violences are happening in Iraq,” Director of Peace Action Paul Martin said.

According to a security agreement between Baghdad and Washington, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011.

“We hear a lot about Afghanistan, but we still have 50,000 troops in Iraq and probably double that in contractors and I don’t think the American people know about that,” Martin added.

Read full article about June Deadliest Month in Iraq Since 2009.

© 2011 Tehran Times

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RAW STORY– Approximately $6.6 billion in cash was likely stolen after being flown to Iraq during the months that followed the U.S.-led invasion, Pentagon officials said recently.

Stuart Bowen, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, told The Los Angeles Times that the sum just might be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

The cash was part of a series of shipments totaling more than $12 billion, taken largely from the U.N. “oil-for-food” program and the sales of Iraqi oil. Officials in the Bush administration had hoped the massive pallets of cash would help calm Iraq’s civilian population following the chaotic and violent invasion and toppling of Saddam.

The funds — which were separate from a $53 billion appropriation Congress approved for Iraqi reconstruction efforts — were cobbled together by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before being flown to Baghdad and distributed to interim Iraqi ministers, who U.S. officials see as the most likely culprits in the theft: an allegation that’s not officially been leveled.

Read the full article about Billions Missing in Iraq May Be ‘Largest Theft of Funds in National History’.

© 2011 Raw Story

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COMMON DREAMS–  Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was canceled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars he honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

Written by Howard Zinn

© 2011 Common Dreams

Photo by flickr user Beverly & Pack