Just Foreign Policy News
August 12, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
To Live Within Our Means, Let’s Leave Iraq Like We Promised
While Washington wallows in debt hysteria, the Pentagon tries to keep 10,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq indefinitely. Some Members of Congress have a different idea: let’s leave Iraq in December, when we promised to do so.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/to-live-within-our-means-_b_925563.html
*Take Action: Urge Your Rep. to Support the Lee Bill
Representative Barbara Lee has introduced legislation that would prevent the Pentagon from keeping thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq by cutting off funds for the war after December 31, 2011. Urge your Representative to co-sponsor the Lee bill.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/obamaextendsbushwar
Robert Greenwald: War Budget Cuts Possible If We Counter Contractors’ Multimillion-Dollar Campaign Spending
Brave New Foundation is launching a campaign to expose war contractor lobbyists working to stop the Pentagon from being cut as part of debt reduction.
http://warcosts.com/
3rd GOP Presidential Republican Debate – Ron Paul on Iran vs. Santorum
Ron Paul denounces the 1953 coup that overthrew Mossadeq and installed the Shah – and the Republican crowd goes wild.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAXBevBcwHU
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Palestinian President Abbas has told the PLO he will not back down from seeking recognition for Palestine at the UN, write Marc Gopin and Aziz Abu Sarah in +972. Abbas announced that 122 nations are already in favor of the draft submitted to the UN [a 2/3 majority of the 193 UN member states – 129 – are needed to pass a resolution in the General Assembly – JFP.] Abbas called on Palestinians to take to the streets to support the diplomatic initiative in "Arab Awakening" demonstrations against the occupation.
2) The AFL-CIO has condemned the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a "militarization of our foreign policy" and a "costly mistake," writes Tom Hayden in the Huffington Post. The AFL-CIO is expected to decide this week on messaging and resources to implement its statement.
3) As many as 168 children have been killed in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan during the past seven years, the Telegraph reports. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 2,292 people in Pakistan have been killed by US drone strikes, including as many as 775 civilians.
4) The CIA claims that there has been not one "non-combatant" killed in the past year, notes Clive Stafford Smith in the Guardian. The BIJ’s study is everything that the CIA version of events is not: transparent, drawn from as many credible sources as possible and essentially open. "The injured who survive with their severed limbs, they often tell me, ‘you cannot really call me lucky’," says the lawyer for a teenager who lost both his legs in a drone strike. "This is not London or Islamabad. There are no facilities for the disabled in Waziristan; such people can have zero opportunities ahead of them in life."
5) A test flight of an experimental "Prompt Global Strike" aircraft ended prematurely when it lost contact and crashed into the sea, the Los Angeles Times reports. Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer and expert in space security, questioned whether the program could survive upcoming cuts in Pentagon spending. "All of this money is being spent to kill someone very quickly," he said. "All that seems to have come out of it is that the technology is costly and difficult to achieve."
6) An Air Force official said the service has slashed by 10 percent the costs to use its Global Hawk unmanned aircraft, weeks after senators sharply questioned the price, The Hill reports. Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information said the GAO should examine the claim. The Pentagon’s testing and evaluation office says the Global Hawk program’s overall price tag is $8.6 billion.
Afghanistan
7) The US will remain in control of Afghanistan’s highest-profile prison well beyond January 2012, missing a key milestone in the plan to transfer judicial and detention operations to Afghans, the Washington Post reports. The US will now not relinquish authority at Parwan until at least 2014, the Post says. The existence of the U.S. military prison near Bagram Airfield has long been seen by Afghans as a sign of imperial overreach. Parwan now holds 2,600 inmates. Most have been held without trial.
Among the "reforms" the Afghans are proposing to meet U.S. standards for a handover is the establishment of a national security court that could detain suspected insurgents indefinitely without trial, just like the U.S., the Post says. Human Rights First says Parwan’s U.S.-military-run detainee review board "fails to provide detainees with an adequate opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they are collaborating with insurgents and present a threat to U.S. forces."
8) Insurgent attacks have killed nine NATO service members in the past two days in Afghanistan, AP reports. So far this year, 378 American and other NATO service members have died in the war in Afghanistan.
9) Just months after pulling out of a remote slice of eastern Afghanistan dubbed the "Valley of Death," U.S. troops are back, AP reports. The Pech Valley has claimed the lives of more than 100 U.S. soldiers by some estimates.
Mexico
10) The official National Human Rights Commission says Mexican police and soldiers regularly burst into homes, plant evidence and take people’s possessions, AP reports. It said the violations have increased as Mexico’s war against drug cartels has grown more intense. Complaints about such searches are on pace to set a record this year, AP says.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) President Abbas calls for a Palestinian spring in September
Dr. Marc Gopin and Aziz Abu Sarah, +972, Friday, August 12 2011
http://972mag.com/president-abbas-calls-for-a-palestinian-spring-in-september/
[Abu Sarah is a columnist for Al Quds; Gopin and Abu Sarah work with the center for conflict resolution at George Mason and with the Middle East Justice and Development Initiative.]
In his speech to the Central Council of the PLO in Ramallah, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced his strategy to end the occupation. The President stressed in his speech that he will not retreat from seeking recognition of the Palestinian state from the United Nations. Abbas had been under enormous pressure to withdraw the request for recognition of a Palestinian State on borders of June 1967. He announced that 122 nations are already in favor of the draft submitted to the UN. Concerning US opposition, he referred to the fact that this has not been communicated in a formal manner.
President Abbas surprised many of his listeners when he spoke about another element of his strategy. Perhaps for the first time Abbas highlighted clearly his vision of the Palestinian people’s active participation to achieve the dream of a Palestinian state. He called upon the Palestinian people to go out to the streets and demonstrate in an Arab-style revolution:
"I insist on popular resistance, and insist it is an unarmed popular resistance so no one misunderstand us. We follow the example demonstrated in the Arab Awakening, which says, ‘Selmiya, Selmiya’, ‘Peaceful, Peaceful.’"
[…] The Israeli Defense Ministry is preparing to invest in new weapons to suppress the demonstrators, the equivalent of twenty-two million U.S. dollars. The Israeli government is worried about the possible expansion of popular resistance and its implications for the sustainability of the Occupation. This is exactly as it should be, and the worries should increase dramatically so that it creates an intense Israeli national debate.
It is important for the popular resistance movement to show strong restraint against the provocations of the Israeli soldiers in demonstrations. As President Abbas said in his speech, the victory of the Popular Resistance is through its commitment to the values of peaceful resistance.
2) AFL-CIO Opposes Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq as "Costly Mistake"
Tom Hayden, Huffington Post, 8/11/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/aflcio-opposes-wars-in-af_b_924788.html
"There is no way to fund what we must do as a nation without bringing our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. The militarization of our foreign policy has proven to be a costly mistake. It is time to invest at home" – AFL-CIO Executive Council, Aug. 3, 2011
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/08032011.cfm
In a major victory for the progressive movement, the AFL-CIO has condemned the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a "militarization of our foreign policy" and a "costly mistake." The statement, adopted August 3, is the most forthright in the history of a labor movement marked by pro-war allegiances for many decades. It reflects a deep sentiment among working families, estimated at 80 percent opposition by one longtime labor official in Washington D.C. Much credit goes to the patient bottom-up organizing by U.S. Labor Against the War and others, who solicited endorsements from hundreds of locals and mobilized labor contingents at countless rallies across the country.
The AFL-CIO officially opposed the Iraq war at its 2005 convention. But the organization was supportive of Afghanistan, or at least reluctant to oppose the administration’s policy until recently. For example, at a closed meeting last year, the labor federation refused to participate in a large Washington march if the demands included withdrawal from Afghanistan. Peace advocates were disappointed, but speakers like Harry Belafonte proceeded to attack the war policy in any event, to cheers from thousands of marchers.
The San Francisco labor federation, led by Tim Paulson, has long advocated that the national federation oppose the interventionist wars on the basis of their economic cost. That position prevailed in a discussion of 30-some local labor leaders in the week before the Aug. 3 executive council meeting. According to Paulson, who was there, the inclusion of the anti-war statement was "first and foremost a product of the disastrous budget debate that led to the debt ceiling deal." The Afghanistan war cost is over one trillion taxpayer dollars, not including long-term costs for veterans’ health care.
In the advisory committee meeting, Paulson said, "we really struggled over ways to take back the jobs debate and needless to say, the subject of how the largest part of our massive debt comes from our foreign policy made its way prominently back on the table. Our advice to the executive officers included exiting the wars."
It is known that Rep. Barbara Lee, a leader of the Democratic peace forces in Congress, also called AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in February with a plea to support the majority of House Democrats demanding a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan. In the same month, the Democratic National Committee, which includes a heavy labor representation, unanimously passed a resolution calling for a more rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan with a transfer of dollars to job creation.
The AFL-CIO is expected to decide this week on messaging and resources to implement its statement.
[…]
3) 168 children killed in drone strikes in Pakistan since start of campaign
As many as 168 children have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan during the past seven years as the CIA has intensified its secret programme against militants along the Afghan border.
Rob Crilly, Telegraph (UK), 5:37PM BST 11 Aug 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8695679/168-children-killed-in-drone-strikes-in-Pakistan-since-start-of-campaign.html
Islamabad – In an extensive analysis of open-source documents, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 2,292 people had been killed by US missiles, including as many as 775 civilians.
The strikes, which began under President George W Bush but have since accelerated during the presidency of Barack Obama, are hated in Pakistan, where families live in fear of the bright specks that appear to hover in the sky overhead.
In just a single attack on a madrassah in 2006 up to 69 children lost their lives.
Chris Woods, who led the research, said the detailed database of deaths would send shockwaves through Pakistan, where political and military leaders repeatedly denounce the strikes in public, while privately allowing the US to continue.
"This is a military campaign run by a secret service which raised problems of accountability, transparency and you have a situation where neither the Pakistanis nor Americans are clear about any agreements in place and where the reporting is difficult," he said. "All of this means that when things go wrong there is simply no redress for the families of those who have been mistakenly killed."
[…]
4) The civilian victims of the CIA’s drone war
A new study gives us the truest picture yet – in contrast to the CIA’s own account – of drones’ grim toll of ‘collateral damage’
Clive Stafford Smith, Guardian, Thursday 11 August 2011 20.30 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/11/civilian-victims-cia-drones
[…] This week, a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism gives us the best picture yet of the impact of the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan. The CIA claims that there has been not one "non-combatant" killed in the past year. This claim always seemed to be biased advocacy rather than honest fact. Indeed, the Guardian recently published some of the pictures we have obtained of the aftermath of drone strikes. There were photos of a child called Naeem Ullah killed in Datta Khel and two kids in Piranho, both within the timeframe of the CIA’s dubious declaration.
The BIJ reporting begins to fill in the actual numbers. It’s a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought, including an estimated 160 children overall. This study should help to create a greater sense of reality around what is going on in these remote regions of Pakistan. This is precisely what has been lacking in the one-sided reporting of the issue – and it doesn’t take an intelligence analyst to realise that vague and one-sided is just the way the CIA wants to keep it.
The BIJ’s study is everything that the CIA version of events is not: transparent, drawn from as many credible sources as possible and essentially open. It is clear about where its material comes from and what the margin of error may be. You should look, and you should engage, not just with the bare numbers, but also some of the stories: the attack on would-be rescuers by drones that had lingered, circling over the site of a previous strike, and opened fire – on the cruel assumption that any Good Samaritan must be a Taliban Samaritan; or the teenager who lost both legs when his family home was hit.
Sadaullah was 15 when the missiles, aimed at a militant leader who was never there, struck a family gathering, killing his wheelchair-bound uncle and two cousins. When he woke up in hospital, he was missing both legs and an eye. "The injured who survive with their severed limbs, they often tell me, ‘you cannot really call me lucky’," says his lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar. "This is not London or Islamabad. There are no facilities for the disabled in Waziristan; such people can have zero opportunities ahead of them in life."
The primary question the CIA should answer is how it comes to be conducting an undeclared and illegal war in Pakistan, which is nominally a US ally. But beyond this, every time we read news of the latest drone strike in Pakistan, we need an honest assessment of the civilian casualties – and of whether we feel comfortable with an unaccountable spy agency carrying out killings on a military scale (the CIA’s strikes now outweigh the firepower used in the opening round of the Kosovo war).
[…]
5) Falcon hypersonic vehicle test flight fails
Engineers and scientists monitoring the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, which was designed to fly at 20 times the speed of sound, lost contact with the vehicle midway through a scheduled 30-minute flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-vandenberg-hypersonic-aircraft-20110812,0,6403143.story
A test flight of an experimental aircraft traveling at 20 times the speed of sound ended prematurely Thursday morning when the arrowhead-shaped vehicle failed and stopped sending back real-time data to engineers and scientists who were monitoring the mission.
The unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, was meant to test new technologies that could give the Pentagon the capability to deliver non-nuclear military strikes anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.
But the Falcon’s test flight ended prematurely and it plunged into the Pacific Ocean. It was the second and last scheduled flight for the Falcon program, which began in 2003 and cost taxpayers about $320 million. Both flights failed to go the distance.
The failure of the Falcon’s test flights doesn’t bode well for the Pentagon and the Obama administration, which were hoping to harness the hypersonic technology for use with 21st century ballistic missiles.
The plan is known as Prompt Global Strike, which the government hopes to field by 2015.
The administration requested $204.8 million for the effort in the upcoming budget year, and the Falcon is just one of an array of technologies in the works to accomplish the concept. But like the Falcon, none of the other projects has achieved much success.
[…] Despite the failures, the Pentagon believes that hypersonic vehicles are the best hope for replacing nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles as a way to hit a target in an hour or less – without launching World War III.
"The whole idea is that the military has time-sensitive information and needs to deliver a strike immediately," said Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer and expert in space security. "The only vehicle that the military currently has in its inventory with that kind of capability is" an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Other methods of hitting a distant target, cruise missiles and long-range bomber planes, take hours to reach their destination.
When pressed for an example, military officials point to an instance in 1998 when the U.S. military tried – and failed – to kill Osama bin Laden. Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea lobbed cruise missiles at training camps in Afghanistan, hitting their targets – 80 minutes later. By then, bin Laden was gone.
But now bin Laden is dead, which caused Weeden to question whether the funding would continue to flow for the technology amid the federal budget crisis.
"All of this money is being spent to kill someone very quickly," he said. "All that seems to have come out of it is that the technology is costly and difficult to achieve."
6) Following Criticism, Official Says Spy Plane Costs Are Dropping
John T. Bennett, The Hill, 08/11/11 01:39 PM ET
http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/defense-homeland-security/176497-after-senate-criticism-official-claims-global-hawk-costs-are-dropping
An Air Force official said the service has slashed by 10 percent the costs to use its Global Hawk unmanned aircraft, a revelation that comes weeks after senators sharply questioned the price to operate the spy plane fleet.
The costs of operating the unmanned aircraft "are coming down," Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Thomas, the service’s Global Hawk functional manager, told The Hill on Wednesday at a Washington conference. When pressed, Thomas said officials have wrung up to 10 percent from the Global Hawk program’s operating costs.
Thomas questioned the Pentagon’s own initial cost estimates for the program.
"It’s a complex system and we’re not always sure how much it’s going to cost," he said. "For example, in 2002, it was supposed to cost $10 million a copy – but no one knows where that number came from. Somebody said, ‘It was supposed to cost $10 million,’ and we went back and tried to find out who said that. There was no rigor, no data behind that.
[…] The new cost projection comes just weeks after the Senate Armed Services Committee slammed the price of the Global Hawk program. The declaration also comes as the Pentagon is looking for ways to find $350 billion in savings over a decade, while bracing for the possibility of nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the same period.
[…] According to a report from the Senate committee, Pentagon data show "the average hourly cost per flight hour of the Global Hawk is approximately $35,000 as compared to a cost of approximately $31,000 for the U–2."
[…] But after numerous breaches of program cost projections that have been revised repeatedly, should such declarations from Pentagon officials about the unmanned aerial vehicle program be believed?
"This is precisely the kind of assertion and promise that should be the subject of independent audit and/or evaluation by an agency like [the Government Accountability Office], which has access to data records in DOD," Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer now with the Center for Defense Information, said Thursday. "Until then, the promise should be understood as from an interested party."
[…] The Pentagon’s testing and evaluation office in a recent report also highlighted the Global Hawk program’s price tag, saying its overall cost is $8.6 billion. Some independent cost estimates are even larger.
[…].
Afghanistan
7) Afghan prison transfer delayed
Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, Friday, August 12, 12:05 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/afghan-prison-transfer-delayed/2011/08/12/gIQApCGMBJ_story.html
Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan – The United States will remain in control of Afghanistan’s highest-profile prison well beyond January 2012, missing a key milestone in the plan to transfer judicial and detention operations to Afghans, U.S. military officials say.
The transfer of the prison and its burgeoning population of detainees had been regarded as a critical marker of the war’s endgame – a sign that Afghan officials are ready to inherit institutions essential to the nation’s future.
But U.S. officials decided that the Afghan legal system is still too weak to permit the hand-over of the Parwan Detention Center, even after the United States spent millions attempting to improve the country’s judiciary. The United States will now be unable to relinquish authority at Parwan until at least 2014, just as the last foreign troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan.
[…] The existence of the U.S. military prison near Bagram Airfield, about 30 miles north of Kabul, has long been seen by Afghans as a sign of imperial overreach, and it has been singled out for criticism by President Hamid Karzai.
The U.S. military has detained suspected insurgents here for nearly a decade. Most have been kept without trial, with less than a third of the prison’s detainees having been handed over for prosecution to an Afghan-run court.
The prison population has grown rapidly as the U.S. military has surged its operations in Afghanistan: Military officials say that over the past three years, the number of detainees has tripled. Parwan now holds 2,600 inmates, ranging from high-profile insurgents to those who have played a more peripheral role in the conflict.
[…] This is not the first time the United States has missed a deadline related to Parwan’s transition. Former top U.S. military commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal pledged in June 2010 that U.S. forces would "hand over all detention operations" at Parwan to Afghans by January 2011.
[…] News that the country’s largest prison will remain in American hands until at least 2014 has been bitterly received by some. "This is our country. We have our own laws. The process at Parwan should be an Afghan process," said Fareed Ahmad Najeebi, the Justice Ministry’s spokesman. "We might have some technical problems with our penal code, but we’re ready to take over judicial and detention operations."
[…] Among the Afghan proposals to reform the legal system is the development of a national security court that would adopt the U.S. practice of detaining suspected insurgents indefinitely without trial.
U.S. and Afghan officials say the legal basis for continuing the detentions derives from a provision of the Geneva Conventions that allows combatants to be held without trial, as long as standards of review and humane treatment are met. The advocacy group Human Rights First argued in a report published this year that Parwan’s U.S.-military-run detainee review board "fails to provide detainees with an adequate opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they are collaborating with insurgents and present a threat to U.S. forces." U.S. officials reject that claim.
[…]
8) 9 NATO troops killed in two days of fighting in Afghanistan; crash victims’ remains identified
Associated Press, Friday, August 12, 4:04 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/9-nato-troops-killed-in-two-days-of-fighting-in-afghanistan-crash-victims-remains-identified/2011/08/12/gIQApOhfBJ_story.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Insurgent attacks have killed nine NATO service members in the past two days in Afghanistan, where the U.S.-led coalition is mourning the deaths of 30 American troops and eight Afghans in a helicopter crash last week, military officials said Friday.
[…] So far this year, 378 American and other NATO service members have died in the war in Afghanistan.
9) Months after leaving, US troops return to the deadly Pech Valley in eastern Afghanistan
Associated Press, Washington Post, Friday, August 12, 1:57 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/months-after-leaving-us-troops-return-to-the-deadly-pech-valley-in-eastern-afghanistan/2011/08/12/gIQA9S8CAJ_story.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Just months after pulling out of a remote slice of eastern Afghanistan dubbed the "Valley of Death," U.S. troops are back reinforcing their once-abandoned bases in the area – a hotbed of the insurgency and a dangerous second front in the decade-old war.
Stationing U.S. troops again in the isolated, sparsely populated Pech Valley will boost the coalition’s presence and firepower in the area near the Pakistan border just as the focus of the war shifts back to that region where infiltrating insurgents closest to al-Qaida and other militants hold sway.
[…] The Pech Valley in Kunar province, with bucolic green farmland surrounded by sweeping mountain ridges, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the war and claimed the lives of more than 100 U.S. soldiers by some estimates.
In May, the U.S.-led coalition pulled out of the valley, saying it wanted to reposition its forces in areas where more Afghans live as part of strategy to protect large population centers and provide the Afghan government with an opportunity to extend its reach from Kabul and provide services to its citizens with the help of donor nations.
[…]
Mexico
10) Rights agency: illegal searches by army, police are common in parts of Mexico
Associated Press, Friday, August 12, 3:28 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/rights-agency-illegal-searches-by-army-police-are-common-in-parts-of-mexico/2011/08/12/gIQAoQGSBJ_story.html
Mexico City – Mexican police and soldiers regularly burst into homes, plant evidence and take people’s possessions, the official National Human Rights Commission complained Friday, and it said the violations have increased as Mexico’s war against drug cartels has grown more intense.
The problem drew renewed attention this week when police searching for an alleged drug-gang boss stormed into the home of a gentle, gray-bearded poet, breaking windows and doors and emptying closets and drawers.
In a rare general recommendation to all Mexican security, military and police agencies issued Friday, the governmental commission says security forces sometimes plant evidence to justify an illegal entry, or cite vague justifications such as receiving an anonymous tip or spotting a person who looked "unusually nervous."
"Illegal searches have become a common practice in many parts of the country, and they reveal a systematic pattern: they (authorities) burst into a home looking for illicit objects, they threaten, injure and detain the occupants, they take valuables or money, they alter evidence," the commission said.
A pre-dawn raid Thursday on the Mexico City home of poet Efrain Bartolome drew widespread media attention. He said police ransacked his house and took a watch, a memory stick and cell phones. Police said they were searching for the suspected leader of a brutal drug gang called "The Hand with Eyes" who allegedly confessed to more than 600 murders. He was captured in a nearby neighborhood.
That raid drew a rare, immediate apology from city officials, who said that cell phone signals had indicated the suspect was in the area of Bartolome’s home.
But that kind of quick apology is not the rule, the commission noted.
"Authorities use force against the victims, to make them confess to possessing illegal articles … and threaten them if they complain about what happened," according to the report.
Despite such pressure tactics, the rights agency said the number of complaints about such searches rose from 234 in 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels, to 393 in 2007 and 964 in 2008.
The number of complaints dipped slightly in 2009 to 947 and 826 in 2010, but rose again to an even greater rate of 422 in the first five months of 2011, a pace that would yield more than 1,000 such complaints this year.
[…]
–
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