An Anonymous Comrade says, "This is a personal testimony written by a U.S. citizen living in India.
It's long, and emotional but definitely worth reading..."

Dear friends,



Everything I hear from "back home" suggests that visual images of the pale
corpses of seven (need I say civilian?) babies and children killed two
days ago by yet another US "smart bomb" explosion in residential Kabul are
not making it onto American television screens. Nor the visual coverage of
Jalalabad, Kabul and Kandahar hospitals presently flooded with innocent
Afghan civilians burned, maimed, disfigured and dying from direct US bomb
explosions on their homes. Nor the picture of an orphaned Afghan baby
whose face is half skin, half shrapnel from a US bomb, that greeted me on
the Telugu news station (not a CNN affiliate) when I woke up this morning.



Everything I hear coming out of the US seems to support Harper's Magazine
publisher John Macarthur's recent comment that the current US aggression
in Afghanistan is "the most censored war." When I turn on CNN (we do have
a television in the flat where I live in Hyderabad, but the neighborhood
monkeys sometimes tear up the wires, so it doesn't always work), I see
affirmation of that which is rapidly making the US "free press" the shame
of the international media community. Parochialism of fantastic
proportions, 10 second soundbytes at the expense of context and substance,
all-terror-all-the-time (as one friend of mine put it), and most insidious
in the current context, shameful dependence on and uncritical acceptance
of Pentagon handouts instead of substantial, critical coverage of the
ground situation in Afghanistan.