‘Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met’
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UPDATE: This now Tuesday evening and it might appear the story posted below might/might-not be bogus.
Interesting tale to it.
Link to counterpunch.org listed below has been broken.
The story now can be found here.
The story seems true to me — fits Jackboot John’s real-life profile of nasty-mouth asshole that’s been published in the mainstream press — and maybe I wanted to believe it as just another, though seemingly worse, example of the senator’s way of life.
***
This is a must-read for all US peoples.
Jackboot John McCain is and has been an asshole all his entire, worthless life.
At counterpunch.org, Anasuya Dubey, a clinical psychologist from California, recalls a vacation from the outer banks of hell all because Jackboot John was there.
The recollection ran this morning and you can read the entire piece here.
One great, deciding graph, however:
- My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island.
Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn’t be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight.
Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment.
I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her alone.
He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said “don’t you know who I am” and I looked him in the face and said “yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met” and headed back to my cabin.
I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain’s bullying.
The US, the World, is in for some real, bad shit if Jackboot John makes the White House.
Winning Fantasy — Again
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In the wake of the bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel — killing from 53 to 60 people, depending on the news outlet — the crisis in making war in Afghanistan comes under a deeper blanket of loss, a war that in the end will be un-winnable.
Today, US helicopters were fired on again — the second time in less than a week — at the Afghan/Pakistan border, making the stilted effort at fighting the Taliban/al-Qaeda even much more dense.
And the end is — Loser!
History repeats itself in the lovely wilds of Afghanistan.
UK’s Robert Fisk pens a good look at the status of the Afghan war and how the US-led coalition there is doomed to failure.
Fisk’s commentary ran Saturday in UK’s The Independent and brings together the loose strings in Afghanistan which will in the end cause a strangle hold on US intentions there.
History knows what is on the road ahead despite the looniness of more is less.
A couple of snippets:
- We, of course, have been peddling this crackpot nonsense for years in south-west Asia.
First of all, back in 2001, we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban.
Then we marched off to win the war in Iraq.
Now – with at least one suicide bombing a day and the nation carved up into mutually antagonistic sectarian enclaves – we have won the war in Iraq and are heading back to re-win the war in Afghanistan where the Taliban, so thoroughly trounced by our chaps seven years ago, have proved their moral and political bankruptcy by recapturing half the country.
It seems an age since Donald “Stuff Happens” Rumsfeld declared, “A government has been put in place (in Afghanistan), and the Islamists are no more the law in Kabul. Of course, from time to time a hand grenade, a mortar explodes – but in New York and in San Francisco, victims also fall. As for me, I’m full of hope.”
Oddly, back in the Eighties, I heard exactly the same from a Soviet general at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan – yes, the very same Bagram airbase where the CIA lads tortured to death a few of the Afghans who escaped the earlier Russian massacres.
Only “terrorist remnants” remained in the Afghan mountains, the jolly Russian general assured us. Afghan troops, along with the limited Soviet “intervention” forces, were restoring peace to democratic Afghanistan.
…
And Obama and McCain really think they’re going to win in Afghanistan – before, I suppose, rushing their soldiers back to Iraq when the Baghdad government collapses.
What the British couldn’t do in the 19th century and what the Russians couldn’t do at the end of the 20th century, we’re going to achieve at the start of the 21 century, taking our terrible war into nuclear-armed Pakistan just for good measure.
Fantasy again.
Joseph Conrad, who understood the powerlessness of powerful nations, would surely have made something of this.
Yes, we have lost after we won in Afghanistan and now we will lose as we try to win again.
Stuff happens.
Read Fisk’s whole piece here.
What happens when fantasy meets facts?
Another Afghan ‘Mistake’
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Just when it was thought to be safe to venture over to a relative’s house in Afghanistan:
- An Afghan district governor and two of his bodyguards have been killed by mistake in a Nato raid on a house in Uruzgan province, police say.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, expressed sorrow over the killing, which he called a “misunderstanding,” and said the district chief, Rozi Khan, was his close associate.
Khan was allegedly killed on Wednesday when he went to the aid of a friend who had called for help believing the Taliban had surrounded his home, Uruzgan police chief, Gulab Khan, said.
The forces outside the man’s home were however international troops, who in turn mistook the governor and his men for Taliban fighters, Gulab Khan said.
And while Adm. Mike Mullen, big cheese of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in Pakistan Tuesday to piece together a plan with the Pakistani military to coordinate US-led strikes into their country, and mainly to soothe rumpled Pakistan egos, a couple of US unmanned drones struck at the South Waziristan Agency, near the Afghan border — scene of several major military ‘incidents’ in the last few weeks — and killed seven people.
- And while negative reactions from Pakistan’s government and military are nothing new the latest attack, coming as it did just hours after Admiral Mullen promised that the US would respect Pakistan’s sovereignty, has further undermined American credibility in the nation.
Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmad Mukthar said Admiral Mullen had appeared “very understanding” during their meeting, and that the latest air strikes “have come as a surprise.”
‘Surprise‘ might be an understatement of a word.
Peoples of the world must come to understand the US lies — and tortures, and will invade your ass if you don’t do as they say, and they will lie to you face-to-face so you will have a ‘surprise’ — even when they don’t have to, but it’s political, so world don’t take it personally.
Yet, a certain part of the world knows Decider George and all his dark, ugly misadventures the past near-eight years, and the world takes a collective shudder at though of Jackboot John McCain slowly dying in the Oval Office.
The BBC reported this morning:
- Pakistan was not warned about a suspected US missile strike in the north-west on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has said.
Such attacks were “counter-productive” and reflected an “institutional disconnect” on the US side, he said.
…
Last week, it emerged in Washington that President George Bush had authorised cross-border attacks by US troops based in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s army has warned that the aggressive US policy will widen the insurgency by uniting the tribesmen with the Taleban.
Not only is there an “institutional disconnect,” Mr. Qureshi, the US military is now just lobbing rockets at a particular spot and see what happens.
Yesterday, CIA chief Michael Hayden, another Mullen-like liar, at an Air Force Association conference let drop some hints about the hi-tech bullshit now employed in the Wide World War on Terror.
And from the great Danger Room blog at wired.com:
- “Today, we routinely use kinetic force [bombs-and-bullets attacks] not just for its own effect, but to create a response that will allow us to collect more intelligence. We use military operations to excite the enemy, prompting him to respond,” Hayden said.
“We create and benefit from a highly virtuous cycle: Operations generate opportunities to learn more about the enemy, the intelligence gained creates opportunities for follow-on operations, and so on.”
And so it goes…
Tora Bora Blowback
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As the nation seemingly ponders the application of lipstick on various barnyard animals and the financial IED on Wall Street, long-simmering Afghanistan has finally boiled over onto Pakistan.
Near seven years ago, this little conflict was indeed a “slam dunk” win — the original Taliban routed, Osama and a few of his boys corralled in the Tora Bora Mountains –all this in just a few short weeks of work by a fired-up, muscle-flexed US military working really without much of a clue.
After a horrific sidebar in Iraq for more than five years, draining US peoples and treasure, Afghan shit is ready to hit the old fan.
Military operations in Afghanistan are coming apart at the seams, and despite what Barack Obama and Jackboot John McCain blubber, no amount of additional troops — another “surge” Afghan style, if you will — sent to the region will help.
A case of even more troops too late.
Today Defense Secretary Bob Gates was in Kabul attempting a ‘I’m sorry’ pitch for the US-led coalition’s slaughter of civilians.
- Mr. Gates accepted a proposal from Afghan officials to establish a permanent joint investigative group to determine the facts surrounding civilian casualties more quickly. And he pledged that even before all the facts are known, the United States would apologize for civilian casualties and offer compensation to survivors.
“I think the key for us is, on those rare occasions when we do make a mistake, when there is an error, to apologize quickly, to compensate the victims quickly, and then carry out the investigation,” Mr. Gates said, speaking after meeting with President Hamid Karzai here.
However, Bob just couldn’t let it go.
- “While no military has ever done more to prevent civilian casualties, it is clear that we have to work even harder,” Mr. Gates said.
Hey, Bob, you’re full of shit.
Only just yesterday did senior American military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, said rules for air operations would be “tightened” in an effort to reduce civilian casualties.
Too little, too late.
The UN says that from January to August this year, 1,445 civilians were killed — a rise of 39 percent from the same period in 2007.
Last week, Human Watch released a 43-page report, “Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan,” and the bottom line is air power has its limits.
And the limit is reaction — planned airstrikes had less “collateral damage” than unplanned ones.
Duh!
As the Afghan war degenerated, attacks from a much-more vicious and sophisticated Taliban, with help by a resurgent al-Qaeda, became overwhelming, the tendency/panic response was for GIs to call in air support — termed ‘rapid-response airstrike.’
Capt. Dan‘s plea — but a lot of women, children die in the process.
The US should have some compassion, the report reported.
- “Rapid response airstrikes have meant higher civilian casualties, while every bomb dropped in populated areas amplifies the chance of a mistake,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
“Mistakes by the US and NATO have dramatically decreased public support for the Afghan government and the presence of international forces providing security to Afghans.”
…
Human Rights Watch criticized the poor response by US officials when civilian deaths occur.
Prior to conducting investigations into airstrikes causing civilian loss, US officials often immediately deny responsibility for civilian deaths or place all blame on the Taliban.
US investigations conducted have been unilateral, ponderous, and lacking in transparency, undercutting rather than improving relations with local populations and the Afghan government.
A faulty condolence payment system has not provided timely and adequate compensation to assist civilians harmed by US actions.
“The US needs to end the mistakes that are killing so many civilians,” said Adams. “The US must also take responsibility, including by providing timely compensation, when its airstrikes kill Afghan civilians. While Taliban shielding is a factor in some civilian deaths, the US shouldn’t use this as an excuse when it could have taken better precautions.
It is, after all, its bombs that are doing the killing.”
And the seething vapor from the Afghan pot is burning Pakistan.
Decider George in his deep-as-a-well wisdom had secretly ordered last July that it’d be Okay if US troops chased down those Taliban/al-Qaeda/terrorists/militants, whatever, into Pakistan.
Although apparently (hopefully) the jackass did get some kind of approval from the Pakistani military for those hot pursuits, so to speak, but the orders didn’t make it down to the ground level.
Monday morning some US choppers were fired upon by some supposedly Pakistani soldiers during a raid similiar to another operation that went bad earlier this month.
The choppers were forced to return back into Afghanistan.
According to Reuters via WireDispatch:
- The incident took place near Angor Adda, a village in the tribal region of South Waziristan where U.S. commandos in helicopters raided a suspected al Qaeda and Taliban camp earlier this month.
“The U.S. choppers came into Pakistan by just 100 to 150 metres at Angor Adda.
Even then our troops did not spare them, opened fire on them and they turned away,” said one security official.
The U.S. and Pakistani military both denied that account, but Angor Adda villagers and officials supported it.
…
One official told Reuters by telephone that “the troops stationed at BP-27 post fired at the choppers and they turned away”.
Two Chinook helicopters appeared set to land when troops began shooting, alerting tribesmen who also opened fire on the intruders, said a senior government official in Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province.
A resident described the tension in the village through the night.
“We saw helicopters flying all over the area. We stayed awake the whole night after the incident,” he said.
The fiercely independent tribesmen of the region carry weapons regardless of whether they are militants.
And also yesterday came reports the Pakistani military will indeed start shooting at NATO troops skirmishing across the Afghan border into Pakistan — creating another conflict hotspot in a nation of hotspots.
- General Athar Abbas, an army spokesman, told the Associated Press that after a cross-border assault in the south Waziristan region earlier this month, the military told its field commanders to take action to prevent any similar raids.
“The orders are clear,” Abbas said in an interview. “In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.”
The remarks mark a sharp deterioration in military relations between the US and Pakistan, which have been close allies in the “war on terror” since the September 11 attacks seven years ago.
…
As the US steps up its military activity in the sensitive tribal area, Pakistani officials have warned that an increase in cross-border raids will achieve little and fuel the insurgency in Pakistan. Some complain that the country is being made a scapegoat for the failure to stabilise Afghanistan.
These orders apparently come from the top as Pakistan proclaimed its right/ability to handle the militants gathering, fighting and controlling the western provinces.
- Acting President Dr Fehmida Mirza on Sunday said Pakistan would resolve the problem of militancy on its own, adding that the government was committed to safeguard the sovereignty and geographical frontiers of the country.
She was talking to journalists after addressing a ceremony at the Frontier House here to distribute cheques among the displaced people of Bajaur Agency.
Dr Fehmida Mirza said, “Our security forces are effectively combating militancy and there is no need of any foreign force to fight terrorism in our country.”
Yeah right.
While Gates tried to apologize in Kabul, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in Pakistan on Tuesday in an attempt to defuse all this bluster/fuck-up on the conduct of the mishandled, mucked-up Afghan war — those nasty border problems.
Which means interal strife for Pakistan.
Writer, journalist, filmmaker Tariq Ali has a good view of the impact of these US-related incidents at tomdispatch.
A couple of snippets:
- Its effects on Pakistan could be catastrophic, creating a severe crisis within the army and in the country at large.
The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.
…
The neo-Taliban now control at least twenty Afghan districts in Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan provinces.
It is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters.
Though often characterized as a rural jacquerie they have won significant support in southern towns and they even led a Tet-style offensive in Kandahar in 2006.
Elsewhere, mullahs who had initially supported President Karzai’s allies are now railing against the foreigners and the government in Kabul.
For the first time, calls for jihad against the occupation are even being heard in the non-Pashtun northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.
What a complicated mess effecting an entire region.
And all because Decider George only had eyes for Baghdad.
Therefore, we return to December 2001 and those beautiful, but villainous Tora Bora Mountains.
Osama bin Laden, the supposed master-chef of the 9/11 attacks, had retreated into the mountain’s bowels to escape the oncoming US troops and its Afghan allies — those many anti-Taliban factions that cared not much for jihad.
Veteran Middle East correspondent Mary Ann Weaver covered those days in an interesting, finely-researched article, which ran Sept. 11, 2005, in the New York Times Magazine.
A long piece, though, well worth the full read and can be found here.
Weaver paints a frenzied, byzantine-like situation in Afghanistan in late 2001 as saturation bombing began to mash Osama out of the mountains, but the only thing that really happened was hundreds of civilians died:
- And yet, one American intelligence official told me recently, if any one thing distinguished Osama bin Laden on that cold December day, it was the fact that the 44-year-old Saudi multimillionaire appeared to be supremely confident.
…
One evening earlier this summer, I asked Masood Farivar, a former Khalis officer who had fought in Tora Bora during the jihad, to tell me why the caves were so important.
“They’re rugged, formidable and isolated,” he said.
“If you know them, you can come and go with ease.
But if you don’t, they’re a labyrinth that you can’t penetrate.
They rise in some places to 14,000 feet, and for 10 years the Soviets pummeled them with everything they had, but to absolutely no avail.
Another reason they’re so important is their proximity to the border and to Pakistan” – less than 20 miles away.
Osama and some of his boys got away, all to return and fight another day.
And that day was today as the U.S. embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a was attacked and although at least 16 people were killed, no US personnel.
State Department spokesman said the incident “bears all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack.”
A memory reaction from August 1998 and the al-Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Does the US military ever learn?
Osama will never die, even if he’s been dead the last three years.
Sarah’s Surge to War
Filed Under Musings, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
As the absolute horror of Jackboot John McCain sitting in the Oval office becomes much-more intense with each passing white-collar lipstick smear the real repugnance lies in death and killing and suffering from the Tigris and Euphrates to the south Texas coastline.
And what about his Number One?
Earmark Sarah Palin will be worse than Jackboot John — and that’s a shitload of worse.
Earmark Sarah’s surge into the public eyeball is a perfect example of artificial bullshit gorged into a tight-fitting gloved fist.
Listening to Enigma‘s sweet, Return to Innocence, makes one almost cry at the very thought of the affright of US peoples if Jackboot John makes the White House, then freakin’ croaks.
Jackboot John hasn’t a clue to what’s happening in Iraq, blubbering about the “surge” and “victory” with Earmark Sarah proclaiming going into Iraq was part-n-parcel a “task that is from God.”
See the Sarah war gospel here.
She’d even go after Russia.
And she herself gushed forth with the oldest Decider George lie — linked Iraq to 9/11.
Anyone with any sense and serious about the Constitution will see through Earmark Sarah, but the fear is there are way-too many US peoples out there lacking much sense.
Even the Middle East peoples are scared of the Jackboot/Earmark White House.
- While talking heads have said they did not expect either administration to be more sympathetic to the Arab and Muslim causes, many are now saying that Obama would be the “lesser of two evils,” after having endured a George W. Bush administration that has launched an undefined and indefinite “war on terror” that is raging in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
And what’s really going on in Iraq?
There’s no surge happening now, the country seems to be sliding back into oblivion without anyone knowing or caring, except maybe the Iraqi peoples.
People who have been following Iraq closely know the so-called “surge” alone didn’t bring down the violence this past year from being way-obscene to just horrifying nowadays.
Several factors — Sunni Awakening, Sadr ceased rabble-rousing, and according to Bob Woodward, assassinations — put together aided in reducing the Iraq carnage.
And even with the “surge” as a military operation being completed, there’s still more US GIs in Iraq than before the tactic was even started — the situation there is shit-on-a-stick.
The best journalist on the job in Iraq is UK guy Patrick Cockburn (see a neat interview video of Cockburn here), who has always been a step ahead of the pack in providing the real skinny on the shit in Iraq.
Cockburn says the surge was highly overblown and, too, if Jackboot John is elected in less than two months, the real-bad shit could spring up, again.
Perception of Sarah Palin’s surge has clouded the perception of what’s really happening in Iraq.
From Cockburn’s piece Sunday in the UK’s Independent:
- The perception in the US that the tide has turned in Iraq is in part because of a change in the attitude of the foreign, largely American, media.
The war in Iraq has now been going on for five years, longer than the First World War, and the world is bored with it.
US television networks maintain expensive bureaux in Baghdad, but little of what they produce gets on the air.
When it does, viewers turn off. US newspaper bureaux are being cut in size.
The result of all this is that the American voter hears less of violence in Iraq and can suppose that America’s military adventure there is finally coming good.
…
If McCain wins the presidential election in November, his lack of understanding of what is happening in Iraq could ignite a fresh conflict.
In so far as the surge has achieved military success, it is because it implicitly recognises America’s political defeat in Iraq.
Whatever the reason for President George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, it was not to place the Shia Islamic parties in power and increase the influence of Iran in the country; yet that is exactly what has happened.
…
General Petraeus has had a measure of success in Iraq less because of his military skills than because he was one of the few American leaders to have some understanding of Iraqi politics.
In January 2004, when he was commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, I asked him what was the most important piece of advice he could give to his successor.
He said it was “not to align too closely with one ethnic group, political party, tribe, religious group or social element”.
But today the US has no alternative but to support Mr Maliki and his Shia government, and to wink at the role of Iran in Iraq.
If McCain supposes the US has won a military victory, and as president acts as if this were true, then he is laying the groundwork for a new war.
Surge to the polls all you US peoples.
An extremely important election this year — might be the most-important yet.