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.

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© 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.”

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© 2011 Press Democrat

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SALON– I’ve written numerous times over the last year about rapidly worsening perceptions of the U.S. in the Muslim world, including a Pew poll from April finding that Egyptians view the U.S. more unfavorably now than they did during the Bush presidency.  A new poll released today of six Arab nations — Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco — contains even worse news on this front:

Two and a half years after Obama came to office, raising expectations for change among many in the Arab world, favorable ratings of the United States have plummeted in the Middle East, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation.

In most countries surveyed, favorable attitudes toward the United States dropped to levels lower than they were during the last year of the Bush administration . . . Pollsters began their work shortly after a major speech Obama gave on the Middle East . . . Fewer than 10 percent of respondents described themselves as having a favorable view of Obama.

What’s striking is that none of these is among the growing list of countries we’re occupying and bombing.  Indeed, several are considered among the more moderate and U.S.-friendly nations in that region, at least relatively speaking.  Yet even in this group of nations, anti-U.S. sentiment is at dangerously (even unprecedentedly) high levels.

In one sense, this is hardly surprising, given the escalating violence and bombing the U.S. is bringing to that region, its ongoing fealty to Israel, and the dead-ender support the American government gave to that region’s besieged dictators.  Though unsurprising, it’s still remarkable.  After all, one of the central promises of an Obama presidency was a re-making of America in the eyes of that part of the world, but the opposite is taking place.  

More significantly, as democracy slowly but inexorably takes hold, consider the type of leaders that will be elected in light of this pervasive anti-American hostility.  When the U.S. propped up dictators to suppress those populations, public opinion was irrelevant; now that that scheme is collapsing, public opinion will become far more consequential, and it does not bode well either for U.S. interests (as defined by the American government) or the U.S.’s ability to extract itself from its posture of Endless War in that region.  Given that it is anti-American sentiment that, more than anything else, fuels Terrorism (as the Pentagon itself has long acknowledged), we yet again find the obvious truth: the very policies justified in the name of combating Terrorism are the same ones that do the most to sustain and perpetuate it.

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Written by Glenn Greenwald

© 2011 Salon

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XINHUA– Up to 100 Iraqi lawmakers on Monday signed a document calling on the Iraqi government to demand departure of U.S. troops from the country as scheduled by the end of 2011, the Aswat al-Iraq news agency reported.

“The legislatures have signed 100 signatures, calling on the government to demand the departure of the U.S. occupation forces, in compliance with the security agreement signed between Baghdad and Washington,” the Iraqi independent agency quoted Uday Awad, a member of the Ahrar parliamentary bloc, as saying.

Awad also said that his bloc urges other Iraqi political blocs to take similar step to practice pressure on the Iraqi government to demand a complete pullout of U.S. troops from the country, agency said on its website.

Baghdad and Washington are in debate whether the U.S. troops need to extend the presence of its troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline.

U.S. military forces are to pull out completely from Iraq by the end of 2011, according to the security pact named Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which was signed late in 2008 between Baghdad and Washington.

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© 2011 Xinhua

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GUARDIAN– This week, I am sponsoring legislation in the United States Congress that will end US military involvement in Libya for the following reasons:

First, the war is illegal under the United States constitution and our War Powers Act, because only the US Congress has the authority to declare war and the president has been unable to show that the US faced an imminent threat from Libya. The president even ignored his top legal advisers at the Pentagon and the department of justice who insisted he needed congressional approval before bombing Libya.

Second, the war has reached a stalemate and is unwinnable without the deployment of Nato ground troops, effectively an invasion of Libya. The whole operation was terribly ill-considered from the beginning. While Nato supports the Benghazi-based opposition (situated in the oil-rich north-east), there is little evidence that the opposition has support of the majority of Libyans. The leading opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (which had reportedly been backed by the CIA in the 1980s), should never have launched an armed civil war against the government if they had no chance absent a massive Nato air campaign and the introduction of Nato troops. Their reckless actions, encouraged by western political, military and intelligence interests, created the humanitarian crisis that was then used to justify the Nato war campaign.

Third, the United States cannot afford it. The US cost of the mission is projected to soon reach more than $1bn, and we are already engaged in massive cutbacks of civil services for our own people.

It is not surprising that a majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents alike think the US should not be involved in Libya.

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Written by Dennis Kucinich

© 2011 Guardian

Photo by Flickr user BRQ Network