Osama’s Legacy
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One of the great outlaw-on-the-dodge stories of all time.
Seven years and near-a-month after the 9/11 attacks, the supposedly-master-brain behind the operation, Osama bin Laden, the Saudi prince of terror, is still floating around out there in the ether, whether he’s kicking up Pakistani daisies or not.
Now he’s one of the most-celebrated celebrities of our time, like it or not, and because Decider George is an inept, creepy-crawler kind of guy, Osama’s countenance has become a poster-model’s ideal — encouraging way-more recruits to enlist in his struggle than that scrab-coated, financially insolent Uncle Sam, stabbing that hard-cut fingernail in US faces.
And in a sordid case of horrible historical irony, Osama cut his fighting teeth, gained his experience and grew in terror-making capabilities under the tutelage of the US while engaged in an Afghan/US proxy war with the old USSR.
(Photo found here).
In the true account of things, Decider George’s so-called legacy is tied directly to Osama’s coattails, and it ain’t pretty.
Poll out today indicates Decider George sucks really, really big time.
From ABC News:
- With the current economic situation, a record 70 percent of Americans disapprove of George W. Bush’s job performance; a career-low 26 percent approve.
Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard Nixon and Harry Truman) than President Bush, and none has had higher disapproval in polls since 1938.
And even upon Decider George’s warmongering ways.
Last week, another poll indicated US peoples have gone south on the Iraq/Afghan wars and the whole Osama bullshit.
- A new Ipsos/McClatchy online poll finds a solid majority of 57 percent thinking that the country can win the war on terrorism but a similar majority of 54 percent saying that the country is NOT winning it.
…
The survey also found that Americans think by 57-43 percent that Afghanistan is now a more important front in combating terrorists than Iraq.
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By 66-34 percent, Americans oppose proposals to send more troops to Afghanistan, either redeployed from Iraq or sent from elsewhere.
Rather, Americans favor gradually withdrawing troops from both countries by 74-26 percent.
Among those most in favor of getting out of both countries were women, young people, those who make less than $50,000 a year and Northeasterners.
Finally, given four options, 57 percent said they wanted to gradually withdraw troops from both countries and bring them home, 21 percent want to redeploy some troops now from Iraq to Afghanistan, 12 percent want to keep troop levels the same in Iraq while sending new troops to Afghanistan, and 10 percent want to keep troop levels the same in Iraq until the country is secure and then redeploy them to Afghanistan.
One mixed-up, freakin’ mess.
And the legacy of Osama continues to burn.
Gareth Porter, noted historian and a detailed military investigative journalist, has put together a good description of Decider George’s non-approach to killing or apprehending Osama, but all that oil, and all those empire-dreams were in Iraq.
Maybe the first real-time disaster in the legacy-list of disasters over the past near-eight years.
Decider George and his boys had no plan whatsoever in any form to snag Osama and his boys if they fled Afghanistan into right-there Pakistan.
Although there was a possible military set-up through Pakistan, implementing the operation meant a delay until spring 2002.
Decider George and his boys were too itchy, though, and invaded Afghanistan without a clue — Osama and few of his boys then slipped away and rode into folk history:
- That failure was directly related to the fact that top administration officials gave priority to planning for war with Iraq over military action against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
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The views of Bush’s key advisers, however, ruled out any such plan from the start.
During the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld had refused to develop contingency plans for military action against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan despite a National Security Presidential Directive adopted at the Deputies’ Committee level in July and by the Principles on Sept. 4 that called for such planning, according to the 9/11 Commission report.
Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz resisted such planning for Afghanistan because they were hoping that the White House would move quickly on military intervention in Iraq. According to the 9/11 Commission, at four deputies’ meetings on Iraq between May 31 and July 26, 2001, Wolfowitz pushed his idea to have U.S. troops seize all the oil fields in southern Iraq.
Even after Sept. 11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to resist any military engagement in Afghanistan, because they were hoping for war against Iraq instead.
Porter’s full piece ran today at antiwar.com.
Legacy has a double-edged point.
‘Watching Gidget address the Reichstag’
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Near, so near to conclusion of the extreme-worse of all US presidential administrations, we find ourselves also with a view of the extreme-worse of all presidential candidates — Jackboot John McCain is the most retarded (not PC, we know), shameless incompetent ever to attempt the White House.
(The above pix from bewarethemarketplaceidols).
One gut-clenching, hands-over-face experience is Jackboot John’s heir apparent Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric — whimsical, Gracie Burns-funny while shitting-the-pants scary — all at once.
If Sarah wasn’t on a possible path to the Oval Office, if she was just maybe a freakin’ governor of a state being interviewed on CBS, if a lot of shit…
This entire scenario would then be black-humored, Dr. Strangelove-like-hilarious.
Watch the incredible Tina Fey as Sarah on Saturday night’s SNL via HuffPost here.
And for the real thing: Sarah interviewed by Couric last week (Amy Poehler plays Couric in the above skit) also via HuffPost here.
This evening Couric interviewed Jackboot John and Sarah, together again for the first time — “gotcha journalism” the scapegoat for Sarah’s foreign policy quip about tracking militants into Pakistan.
Jackboot John has got to be the most-dumb-ass man to ever hold himself up for president.
Marc Ambinder’s blog at The Atlantic has a section of convoluted dialogue between the three — Couric finally being a journalist, Sarah following Jackboot John’s interruptions — the whole scene written-out is reminiscent of a parlor-room scene in a freaked-out ‘Father Knows Best‘ episode.
However, it’s hobbed-about that CBS might have more of Katie’s interview with Sarah from the other night, according to the Washington Post, And the worst may be yet to come for Palin; sources say CBS has two more responses on tape that will likely prove embarrassing. (Hat tip to dailykos.)
As was said above with a sitting-on-the-shitter-grimace, Jackboot John’s run for the White House is probably the worse in US history — way-badder than Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, even Michael Dukakis in ’88 — and Sarah is just a horror extension of the McCain presidential campaign.
Sarah is just the obvious lie.
Matt Taibbi, the always-interesting political writer for Rolling Stone, offers up a view of the RNC and Sarah Palin as a reflection of the floating-toward-the-abyss USA — fat, sassy, and from-the-looks-of-it, dumb-ass blind.
- Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States.
As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove.
But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.
Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way.
All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
And Sarah’s RNC speech:
- It was a virtuoso performance.
She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, “five children later” is “still my guy.”
It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
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Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
Read Taibbi’s entire shit-knuckled, right-on piece at AlterNet.
When Jackboot John and Sarah’s flippant gotcha on the worsening Afghan/Pakistan crisis is coupled with now-global-domino collapse of the world’s financial markets, the couple appear like a dream — they just can’t be real.
And the shit goes on…
War as ‘Obscene Brutality’
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“[The Iraq war] broke his heart. … It wasn’t until the Iraq war and the end of his life that he became sincerely gloomy.”
– Mark Vonnegut, introduction to “Armageddon in Retrospect,” by Kurt Vonnegut (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008)
All Vonnegut people know he was a POW in Dresden, spinning experience into “Slaughterhouse Five,” a most-anti-war work (probably the best, though, others might argue about “Catch 22,” but of course, that wasn’t Vonnegut).
He died in 2007, and his son, Mark Vonnegut, has since discovered some of dad’s unpublished papers/letters/reflections which eventually bled into just about all of Kurt’s enormous, multi-genre portfolio.
In this particular one, and after being led through 1945 Dresden, we cut to the chase:
- The night they came over, we spent in an underground meat locker in a slaughterhouse.
We were lucky, for it was the best shelter in town.
Giants stalked the earth above us.
First came the soft murmur of their dancing on the outskirts, then the grumbling of their plodding towards us, and finally the ear-splitting crashes of their heels upon us – and thence to the outskirts again.
Back and forth they swept: saturation bombing.
“I screamed and I wept and I clawed the walls of our shelter,” an old lady told me.
“I prayed to God to ‘please, please, please, dear God, stop them’.
But he didn’t hear me.
No power could stop them.
On they came, wave after wave.
There was no way we could surrender; no way to tell them we couldn’t stand it any more.
There was nothing anyone could do but sit and wait for morning.”
Her daughter and grandson were killed.
Read the whole piece — back story and its ‘wink, wink” at timesonline.
While we’re on the subject, let’s NOT change the subject…
Review of Armageddon in Retrospect from New York City’s, The Indypendent:
- “It is these short, pithy, bon mots that gave Vonnegut his shine throughout his writing career and his talents are on luminous display here.
Even after he focused on his art (the sketches in Armageddon deserve a separate review altogether), the wisdom kept flowing as in Confetti #46: “In the U.S.A. it’s winners vs. losers and the fix is on.”
Armageddon can be recommended to all who felt that Vonnegut articulated their frustrations with the world, and to those who haven’t, this is an entertaining gateway book to the rest of his work.”
Some hard-case, dumb-ass general reportedly once said, “War is Hell” — obviously the clown didn’t fully understand obscene brutality as nightmare in a meat locker.
Interestingly Grim Part Deux: ‘This sucker could go down’
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This afternoon, reports surfaced of a little dust-up between US-led forces and Pakistani troops.
Although there’s been no US confirmation, supposedly US and Afghan GIs exchanged fire with Pakistani guards near/on/at the border between the two countries.
From antiwar.com:
- NATO has issued a statement today saying that Pakistan troops opened fire on two helicopters near the Afghan border.
This is the third such incident reported in the past two weeks, with the other two reports involving US helicopters in South Waziristan.
This report is unique, however, in that it did not come from anonymous officials over the denials of their military, but rather was an official statement issued by NATO itself later confirmed by the US military.
…
He (a US military spokesman) insists “they did not cross the border and they did not fire back.”
And this from Reuters via wiredispatch:
- U.S. and Afghan troops exchanged fire with Pakistani forces after they shot at two U.S. helicopters near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border Thursday, a U.S. military official said.
The official with U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, said there were no reports of casualties from the exchange of fire, which lasted about five minutes. U.S. and Afghan forces were about one mile inside Afghanistan at the time, he said.
This is a hard-case spot, this South Waziristan, one of those wild-n-woolly Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Pakistani must officially maintain only because FATA does as FATA wants, and has done it a long time.
This from Arab News on Monday:
- The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is 1,640 miles long, much of it virtually inaccessible remote and mountainous, with only the locals able to move freely on goat and footpaths. This is the distance between New York and New Mexico.
It contains the warlike Pashtuns who provide nearly all the Taleban insurgents.
The 25 million Pashtuns are one of the largest tribal groups in the world.
In fact, they are the largest ethnic group without a state of their own.
Pakistani and Afghan government institutions have never been able to gain a foothold in these areas.
Taxes are not paid and outsiders repulsed.
This goes back to the time of Macedonian would-be conqueror Alexander. The British likewise were defeated. So were the Soviets.
The latter killed more than a million Pashtuns and drove three million into exile in Pakistan and Iran and still they were compelled to retreat.
As for post-independence Pakistan, it has never controlled more than 100 meters to the left and right of the few paved roads.
In the wilds, and in Islamabad, the Pakistanis don’t need US help.
- Pakistan on Sunday rejected a U.S. offer to help investigate the weekend suicide bombing that killed at least 53 people and destroyed the Islamabad Marriott, this capital city’s best-known hotel.
“We do not need help. We are competent. We reject it,” Interior Ministry adviser Rehman Malik told reporters Sunday after the U.S. offered FBI help in pursuing the terrorists behind the attack.
The Marriott bombing is the latest in a series of terrorist attacks across Pakistan and will likely intensify debate within the country over Pakistani support for the U.S. war on terror, says Samina Ahmed, South Asia director for the conflict prevention, non-profit International Crisis Group.
As this little South Asian tea pot simmers into boiling, Decider George went all-politics this afternoon drooling after Jackboot John McCain’s bright idea of holding a photo-op at the White House with everybody who’s anybody in this Wall Street bail out craziness.
Jackboot John is one nut-case dude.
The guy is so obvious, one wonders how anyone can take him seriously at all.
This meeting, however, once behind closed doors became a little contentious, with all kinds of egos head-bounced around the room — Jackboot John stood above the draw.
From HuffPost:
- Inside an intense White House meeting over the financial crisis on Thursday, where nearly every key player came to an agreement on the outlines of the bailout package, Sen. John McCain stuck out.
The Republican candidate, according to sources with direct knowledge, sat quiet through most of the meeting, never offered specifics, and spoke only at the end to raise doubts about the rough compromise that the White House and congressional leaders were nearing.
McCain’s reluctance to jump on board the bailout agreement could throw the entire week-long negotiation into a tailspin.
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According to the source with knowledge of the White House gathering — which featured both presidential candidates, congressional leaders and the President — virtually ever key figure in the room, save McCain and GOP Sen. Richard Shelby, were in agreement over a revised version of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s plan.
Decider George, gifted with a gift of a second asshole for a mouth, blubbered out the truism for the last near-eight years, not only for this current shitfire on Wall Street, but in every segment of his administration.
The HuffPost piece continues:
- Paulson, however, argued directly against the conservative proposal.
“He said that he did not think it would work,” according to the source.
At another point in the meeting, President Bush chimed in, “If money isn’t loosened, this sucker could go down” — and by sucker he meant economy.
Yet ‘sucker’ is everything Decider George has touched, or even thought about touching.
And that’s grim in a real bad way.
Interestingly ‘Grim’
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Amazing how much is going on right now — a mother of a financial meltdown, a most-bizarre presidential election inundated with so much rhetorical, nonsensical bullshit, oil prices acting bi-polar, even global warming is apparently worse than just this past weekend.
- Global warming could rapidly accelerate as millions of tons of methane escape from beneath the Arctic seabed, scientists warned today.
Huge deposits of the greenhouse gas – 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – are rising to the surface as the Arctic region heats up, according to preliminary findings.
Read more of this “ultimate gas leak” here and here.
And the horror! Jackboot John McCain jacked David Letterman for Katie Couric.
Jackboot John instantly needs to save the Republic! — see Letterman’s superbly-funny response via HuffPost and a right-on Top 10 List here.
So in the face of all this grim shit — not including each individual’s own personal emotionally stressful events, like losing the house, job, wife/husband, death and dying, daughter on meth, etc., etc. — the situation in the Middle East is starting to also get grim, especially in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.
And speaking of “grim,” this from ABC News:
- US intelligence analysts are putting the final touches on a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan that reportedly describes the situation as “grim,” but there are “no plans to declassify” any of it before the election, according to one US official familiar with the process.
Officials say a draft of the classified NIE, representing the key judgments of the US intelligence community’s 17 agencies and departments, is being circulated in Washington and a final “coordination meeting” of the agencies involved, under the direction of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is scheduled in the next few weeks.
According to people who have been briefed, the NIE will paint a “grim” picture of the situation in Afghanistan, seven years after the US invaded in an effort to dismantle the al Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors.
Another damn NIE!
Decider George most likely has a sour, hateful feeling for a NIE.
Except maybe for the 2002 version, which has since been shone to be pretty-much bogus, NIEs have caused much public grief for him and his immoral, criminal invasion of Iraq, and how incompetent the White House performed in attempts to correct horrible mistakes.
In the 2004 NIE, the ugly end started, and two years later, the NIE reported the war in Iraq is “breeding” terrorists.
While last year, the 2007 version noted al-Qaeda was stronger and able to do a whole lot of shit, even hitting the ole US homeland, security in place or not.
No surprise the war in Afghanistan is going south, and fast, but it has failing for quite some time, but Decider George has had his head up Saddam’s dead ass in Iraq.
Now the whole shit-boat could be literally blown away.
An interesting twist to the growing Afghan/Pakistan nightmare developing along their common border was the truck-bombing last weekend of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing nearly 60 people, including a couple of US citizens.
The suicide bombing of a major gathering spot for foreigners — US Adm. Mike Mullen, top dog of the Joint Chiefs, met with Pakistani military officials there last week.
Defense Secretary Bob Gates stays there; the Czech ambassador to Pakistan lived at the Marriott and unfortunately died in the explosions.
No only is the shared border a dangerous place — more than just insurgent/militant attacks, the tension between the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistani military has been building to an out-of-control point for some time.
The conflict has spread within instead of without and since now the US wants full control of the Afghan war, the problems will only increase.
Just take the case this week of the mysterious, downed man-less drone.
On Tuesday, the Pakistani military reported a drone had been shot down with wreckage strewn on the ground at the village of Jalal Khel in South Waziristan after circling the area for several hours.
However, yesterday the US military confused the whole incident.
- A U.S. military drone went down in eastern Afghanistan with engine problems Tuesday but was recovered immediately and was never near the Pakistan border, a military spokesman said Wednesday.
…
News of the problem drone coincided with Pakistani reports that a suspected pilotless U.S. drone crashed in northwestern Pakistan near the border village of Angor Adda, where U.S. commandos launched a raid on Sept. 3.
A U.S defense official responded to the reports of a downed drone in Pakistan on Tuesday by saying there were no reports of a missing Pentagon drone.
Wired’s Danger Room blog had this:
- It’s an odd reaction, despite the obvious diplomatic sensitivities.
American officials have confirmed drone crashes in Pakistan before.
Stranger still, Pakistani television ran footage today of wreckage bearing the insignia of “Aeronautical Systems.”
That’s the name American defense contractor General Atomics — the company behind the Predator UAV — used to employ for its drone-making division.
[UPDATED: One of the images shows a piece of wreckage marked "on-board starter unit." Its part number matches the number for the Predator's "on-board starter unit" in a logistics database.]
Danger Room also asks then who owns the drone — maybe Turkey, the UK, Italy?
And why the denial?
The US military in Afghanistan seem as befuddled as Jackboot John.
The attack on the Marriott Hotel, however, is the most interestingly grim aspect of this growing meltdown in US/Pakistan relations.
First reports indicated al-Qaeda was responsible, or some other militant group, but a couple of days later, a different brand was to blame.
- A shadowy group calling itself “Fedayeen of Islam” has claimed responsibility for the deadly bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel in a telephone call to Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television, the channel said on Monday.
Its correspondent in the Pakistani capital said he received a text message on his mobile phone showing a telephone number, which he called and then heard a recording in which the group admitted launching Saturday’s attack.
The speaker on the recording spoke in English “with a south Asian accent,” he said.
And this from Reuters via wiredispatch:
- The group calling itself Fedayeen Islam (Partisans of Islam) called Arabiya’s correspondent in the Pakistani capital and issued several demands including for Pakistan to stop its cooperation with the United States, Arabiya television said.
The television said the group played a recording to the reporter in which a group spokesman said there had been 250 U.S. marines and NATO officials at the hotel.
Arabiya said the authenticity of the tape could no be verified and the group is not known to have claimed other attacks.
The Czech ambassador and at least three other foreigners were among the 53 people killed in Saturday’s blast, Islamabad’s worst bomb attack.
The bombing wounded 266 people and security officials said it bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda.
And yesterday, another follow-up call:
- A militant group that claimed to be behind the deadly Marriott Hotel bombing in Pakistan’s capital threatened more attacks Wednesday, warning again that Pakistanis should stop cooperating with the United States.
In a cell phone message to reporters, the little known group calling itself “Fedayeen al-Islam” — “Islam commandos” — referred to the owner of the Marriott by name.
“All those who will facilitate Americans and NATO crusaders like (owner Sadruddin) Haswani, they will keep on receiving the blows,” said the message, which was in English.
It was impossible to verify the identity of the group or say whether it was in a position to make good on the threat.
Pakistani officials were not immediately available for comment.
Is it ‘Partisans’ or ‘warriors’ for Islam?
This group, however, has a history spanning back to mid-1940s Tehran, Iran.
According to noted Middle Eastern/South Asian expert and a pioneer in terrorism studies, Martha Crenshaw, this group, originally called Fedayeen-i Isalam, has a strong tendency to an enraged kind of violence to make a point.
The Fedayeen played a part in the free-wheeling, turbulent days in Iran prior to the arrival of Mohmmed Reza Pahlavi, the dreaded Shah, in 1953.
From Crenshaw’s 1995 book, Terrorism in Context (page 561):
- “During this period Islamic fundamentalism became to grow in influence throughout the country.
Most notable among fundamentalist groups, from the perspective of terrorist activities, Fedayeen-i Isalam, which was founded in 1946 by a twenty-two-year-old theology student in Tehran named Sayyid Navab Safavi.
…
Their significance lies in the fact that as an avowedly terrorist group their activities became part of the mainstream of Iranian political life.
That is, terrorism became a common and “normal” facet of political expression in Iran.
Fedayeen, Crenshaw says, practically disappeared as it became increasingly isolated in the early 1950s within Iran’s political power struggles when people realized these guys were just too violent, and too, in trying for retribution, Fedayeen itself came to understand “that they could not kill everybody…” (page 563).
The boys seem to be back, however, and back with a bang.
Interestingly grim the future of just about everything.