Spies, Lies and No Video Tape

Filed Under Madness, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment

A major, major story, though few in the US are even aware of it.


(Illustration found here).

Via The Brad Blog on Monday, Marc Grossman, a former US ambassador to Turkey and George Jr.’s third-ranking State Department honcho — right behind Colin Powell and Richard Armitage — was targeted as part of a “decade-long investigation” by the FBI, according to an 18-year veteran manager of the bureau’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments.
The disclosure for the first time confirms that the US is lying to everybody about just about everything, especially when it comes to nukes, money and power.
And the news also further authenticates under-oath testimony of Sibel Edmonds, a 39-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, who turned whistleblower after too much stupid, ugly shit began to pile up around her.
The Edmonds’ saga has now endured way-more than half-a-decade, since before being “fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States’ security.”
Whoa! A mouthful that, especially if one’s mouth is gagged.

Despite US Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in the summer of 2002, despite all kinds of mounting evidence calling for Congressional investigations, all were nil as efforts were stifled by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft with mutant-use of the State Secrets Privilege in order “to make her statements “classified” — including previously public statements and journalism quoting her on the case.”
I myself didn’t connect onto Edmonds’ story until a piece appeared in the UK’s Sunday Times in January 2008.
She’d skirted Ashcroft’s order by the written word: In a series of open letters to various officials and news media, Edmonds pleaded her case, but only since last August has she been able to talk freely about the the whole affair.

In a most-recent interview in The American Conservative magazine, Edmonds detailed the whole ugly story, including this bottom line on if any of this would ever make it to the general public:

“When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.”

(Illustration found here).

There have been few news stories in the US press on Edmonds — a partial list can be found here — and NONE by broadcast journalism — a damn-sad state of affairs.
The situation is not all that remarkable, considering the MSM news people and reminds me of the black-out on the New York Times‘ Pulitzer Prize winning story on the Pentagon pundit caper from last year — the story won journalism’s top award, for shit’s sake — and most US peoples haven’t a clue.
The media is a big chunk of the problem.

Take Bob Woodward (please!) of the Washington Post.
Woodward, of Watergate fame and books on everybody fame, and one of the more notorious talking heads of Washington DC “insider” journalists, broke the story last week on Gen. Stan McChrystal’s “secret assessment” of the Afghanistan war as a perfect example of a major reporter playing political tag with the DOD.
McChrystal followed that up with a “60 Minutes” interview on the same damn thing — push President Obama into sending more US troops into the Afghan wilderness.
Woodward is nothing more than a lackey for the rich and the established, the same spot were the vast, vast majority of top-tier US journalists play and practice their so-called craft.
And for instance, how does the Arab media feel about US reporters?
Via Think Progress — Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for the Dubai-based satellite TV network MBC:

I found that I think they really think that if you make it to cover the White House then you must be bigger than God, therefore, you know, you have to be treated as such.
So for them the foreign media is invisible. … So I think they’re opportunistic, rude, as I said, really self-centered. … I find them, not even on like a – people again, the people at the State Department, it’s a different story altogether.
But what I’m talking to now are the people in the White House that occupy the first two, three rows, with exception to two or three people you know.
I’m talking about all the networks and all the organizations.
So I find the relationship is a bit strange.

The rest of the planet knows a lot more than the average US person.
In other words, the US media can not to be trusted.
An example just this week — the hysteria over a “newly” discovered Iranian nuke facility, which according to the New York Times on Monday (with all kinds of satellite and high-altitude photos), the mullahs are building a nuclear device to strike the US heartland within scant minutes.
A similar smell as the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
Chris Floyd has a good post here on the bat-shit crazy warmongers, and so does antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, dipping into another bad-sounding bottom line:

The pro-war ads have already begun and the “liberal” media lining up behind its commander in chief.
All the actors are in their places, and now the drama — an all-too-familiar drama — begins.
“Weapons of mass destruction,” phony intelligence, a compliant media: all the ingredients are there.
All that’s needed is a spark that sets off the conflagration…

And absolutely no film at 11.

Afghan Awful

Filed Under Just Plain War, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment

“On the heights of the Kabul Gorge, they still find ancient belt buckles and corroded sword hilts. You can no longer read the insignia of the British regiments of the old East India Company but their bones — those of all 16,000 of them — still lie somewhere amid the dark earth and scree of the most forbidding mountains in Afghanistan. Like the British who came later, like the Russians who were to arrive more than a century afterwards, General William Elphinstone’s campaign was surrounded with rhetoric and high principles and ended in disaster. George Bush Junior and NATO, please note.”
– Robert Fisk, The Independent, Sept. 14, 2001

(Illustration found here).

Now it’s President Obama’s turn to take note.
And from the above-mentioned journalist, Robert Fisk, who has interviewed Osama bin Laden three times, the last in March 1997: “The next year, he told me he sought God’s help “to turn America into a shadow of itself.” I wrote ‘rhetoric’ in the margin of my notebook — a mistake.”
Is Obama poised to make a really, really bad mistake — not taking history serious enough?

Last week, establishment-stalwart, larger-than-life reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post ran an A1 story of Gen. Stan McChrystal’s supposedly secret assessment of the Afghanistan war, which accordingly bled out the bottom line that the whole shebang “will likely result in failure” if the US does not supply a shitload more boots on the ground there — reportedly McChrystal wants at least 40,000 fresh fodder to boost US presence in country upwards to 68,000 military personnel (combined with other NATO forces, there’s already more than 100,000 Western troops fighting the insurgency).
The hard-core, nutcase general then told “60 Minutes“ Sunday night the Afghan war has turned nasty: “They’re probably a little worse,” McChrystal tells CBS’ David Martin. “I think that in some areas that the breadth of the violence, the geographic spread of violence, is a little more than I would have gathered.”
Dumb-ass Duh!

One crucial item: McChrystal wants to beef up the Afghan security/army forces.
What forces?
The so-called Afghan army is fairly-near non-existent – Writer/photographer Ann Jones, the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan, describes an invisible army in a recent post at tomdispatch.
Key snippets:

American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines.
That is not going to happen.
Not now.
Not ever.
No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen — and ever faster.
…
When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police.
Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own?
No explanation has been offered.
American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

They’re lost in that vast-vapor of ‘victory’ and success.

Success in Kabul?
Hamid Karzai leads such a corrupt, slip/shod government it’s extreme-black-humor laughable and last month’s election is considered a three-dollar bill, so much fraud with near a quarter of the votes requiring a recount.
The depth of corruption amongst Karzai’s operation would never allow for any kind of substantial government, never — the Taliban will forever fight tooth-and-toenail any puppet authority the US props up and then leaves to fall.

Afghanistan has been a quagmire for centuries — even for its own people.
And worse for foreigners.
History has a way of circling back around and biting one on the ass.
Obama is supposedly facing such discord among his own advisers on how to proceed on this Afghan-awful mess, DOD honcho Bob Gates had to respond: “General McChrystal was very explicit in saying that he thinks this assessment, this review that’s going on right now is exactly the right thing to do,” Gates told ABC television’s “This Week” in an interview taped Friday and broadcast on Sunday. “He obviously doesn’t want it to be open-ended or be a protracted kind of thing.”
A decision not to be taken lightly.

Frank Rich had another good read Sunday in the New York Times with a post aptly titled, Obama at the Precipice, likening this president’s particular Afghan-awful moment to LBJ’s decision to ramp-up the US foray into Vietnam.
Check it out.

Cash-n-Go: TARP Gone

Filed Under Finance, Madness | Leave a Comment

Naomi Klein talked with Michael Moore on his new documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
The interview in The Nation online examines the lust-for-dollars.
Says Moore:

“Well, people want to believe that it’s not the economic system that’s at the core of all this.
You know, it’s just a few bad eggs.
But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay, capitalism is the legalization of this greed.
Greed has been with human beings forever.
We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them.
If you don’t put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.
Capitalism does the opposite of that.
It not only doesn’t really put any structure or restriction on it.
It encourages it, it rewards it.”

Hear, hear!

And away the money goes.
Yesterday from HuffPost, an interview with Neil Barofsky, who tracks last September’s big-ass bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Some Barofsky observations:

1. He found hundreds of banks capable of tracking their use of the TARP money – despite claims by the U.S. Treasury that the task was impossible.
2. If the purpose of the TARP rescue was to increase lending, it has failed.
3. The U.S. financial system, now dependent on bigger and fewer banks, is shakier than ever.

And this (via ABC News) from Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP:

“In the last year, the apprehension that pervaded this country has turned into something else: frustration and anger. Today’s fragile stability has come at an enormous cost to the American people.”
…
“The toxic assets remain on the books of the banks…
“The commercial real estate mortgages are a coming crisis. Small banks are continuing to fail. We were talking a year ago about too big to fail.
We are now facing an industry that’s more concentrated than it was a year ago and too big to fail is up on us now in a much larger sense.”
“Until we get down to dirt, to something that’s solid, that we can put our feet on, our financial institutions are standing in a secure place, we can’t rebuild and know that we are safely past this crisis,” Warren said.
“The question about how we’re going to get these toxic assets out of here at a time when the real estate mortgage market is still in trouble and the commercial real estate mortgage market may be getting into more and more trouble — I’m not hearing the plan,” she said.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
Via the financial factoid site,  footnoted.org, on the employment contract for Freddie Mac’s new CEO includes:

annual compensation of $3.5 million (this includes $675K in salary, $1.6 million in something called “additional annual salary” and $1.1 million in a target incentive
a $1.95 million signing bonus
immediate buyout of Kari’s house (or perhaps houses)
reimbursement for travel between Washington D.C. and Kari’s residences in Ohio, Washington and Oregon
…
Needless to say, none of this — and certainly not the ridiculous sounding additional annual salary — was included in the press release that Freddie put out earlier this week…
…
Still, you don’t have to be a tea-bagger to wonder why something like Freddie, which is being propped up by the government to the tune of billions of dollars, is able to hand out such a generous welcome package to a new executive.

Ain’t all this shit just a giant pisser?
We’re all F.U.C.K.ed.

Fragments from a place far, far away and long, long ago

Filed Under Media, Musings, Politics | Leave a Comment

Announced quietly last week was the death of Jody Powell, 65, press secretary to Jimmy Carter, ‘A leader for a change,’ whose presidency inadvertently was the last apparently in Americana’s more sane and serene view of itself as an entity of ideal.

On the cover of the Rolling Stone (left), at the height of glory in May 1977, Powell is teamed with Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff — Powell has the tie and Ham has the hambones — in an enthusiastic stance of a White House still on a political honeymoon with the media and the US peoples.

After a series of ugly events, however, “voters strongly rejected Jimmy Carter’s honest but gloomy outlook in favor of Ronald Reagan’s telegenic optimism…” Thus, the end began.

(Illustration found here).

I’d started this post Sept. 14, the day Jody Powell died (of a heart attack reportedly), but got sidetracked — personal life before writing/blogging, most likely.
A flash memory a few days ago to some song lyrics from a Powell era  group, America, and “Sister Golden Hair” (1975) and its opening words: “Well I tried to make it Sunday, but I got so damn depressed. That I set my sights on Monday and I got myself undressed…” released a sad sense of time and growing old and a lot of other shit that only somewhat-advanced age can reveal.
Coming upon my 61st birthday in November, some health issues has caused me to reconsider how I live, the foods I eat, how many cigarettes I can smoke in a 24-hour period, and even worse, how my beloved morning coffee has got to go — the old flesh and blood breaking way down — but the human-body problems I’ve experienced are more irritating and frustrating than anything else.
In reality, health-care is not of this world.

And along with this growing great-hatred for anything to do with the word, ‘bowels,’ there’s another even more compelling reason to become “so damn depressed:” This bizarre emptiness and quiet, and no exasperation feelings.
After raising five children as a single parent, now I’m alone — the kids are all off and fending for themselves, more-or-less, and although I’ve always considered myself a loner-type personality, the last three months have been different with a touch of strange.
A friend emailed a similar difference — also a recent “empty nester,” she thought  not having anyone to cook for was fairly sad (sadly, I agree), which might explain my current dumb-ass diet.
Cast as mother/daddy, I lived strange, which I am originally.
And now I feel stranger still (one daughter in particular would respond that would be a lot of strange) and the combination of health and mental issues coming together at the same time led to not wanting to write — which has rarely struck me in 45 years.
Couple that shit with the extreme-ugly pessimistic, but the hard-cold reality of today’s current events: Makes a body sad.

A personal/professional news-addict all of my adult life (as a writer, I consciously began to understand literary scribblings at about age 14 and later worked in actual newsrooms for many years), the current span of people, places and things spread across the news cycle 24/7 are hugely profound — maybe not for eons, or maybe even not never, has the awful scheme of things taken such a planetary, global-like quality, while eventually will explode like an IED (unexpectedly and violently) into everyone’s existence.
(Illustration found here).

Clueless are most of western civilization, especially among the fatted, arrogant Americans.
In the US, as people go about daily lives, eating, sleeping, working, performing mundane tasks like “you help your landlady carry out her garbage,” they’re unaware of the horrors coming.
All of humanity faces two big obstacles not-too-far down the road — global warming and peak oil — I may/may not witness the impact of these two events, but my children sure will, and their children.

In many parts of the world, this hard-cold reality has already IEDed them — in eastern Africa (Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Djibouti) a savage drought has effected/affected 19 million people, and with no food: “My month-old baby boy was taken by hyaenas two weeks ago — somebody found his body 10 miles away from here a few days later,” Habiba Malim, 49, a former nomad, told Christian Aid researchers during a recent visit.
And what about the Mars-appearing Sydney, Australia?
What’s happening down under is a ‘horrific glimpse‘ into a not-so-pretty future.
And peak oil?
From Energy Bulletin in 2007:

Peak oil presents a profound challenge; one completely at odds with demand based forecasts of growth in energy consumption.
The poor standard of fundamental information relating to reserves and future production makes it easy to deny or obfuscate the likelihood of a near-term peak in global oil production.
The low level of new discoveries limits the extent to which the industry can continue delivering such a high level of new capacity.
Meanwhile, there is a real danger that decline rates in mature regions will continue to increase.
The balance between these two may tip in favor of depletion sooner than expected.
As Hirsch et al12 have noted, preparing for peak oil requires two decades of intensive, government coordinated effort. Peak oil critics propose that we take a large risk by delaying preparation.
The analysis presented here signals that making changes now would be far more prudent.

Duh!
And if one had been paying attention, most predictive-research has changed near-dramatically in just the past two years – recent studies on various climate-change and energy issues seem to indicate the situation appears worse than predicted even a year earlier.
Nowadays, this ain’t counting the weird-ass economy, two bad, horribly-run wars, and a Republican Party full of liars, buffoons and deniers — a major problem for the US is the conservative right wing, the so-aptly-called “wingnuttery.”
All enough to get one truly “so damn depressed” to stop.
Yet one must see what is ahead.
Another biggie-problem, which is most-likely tied into global warming and peak oil — getting the grub.
Last week, while sadly surfing the sad news online, I came across a discussion of food distribution at The Oil Drum, one of the better informational, factual sites, and was entitled The Thermodynamics of Local Foods.
The bottom line:

…that only a predominantly local food system will ever be sustainable.
What I mean by sustainable is the ability to endure.
Quite simply and irrefutably I conclude that the current globalized food system is a flash in the frying pan because it doesn’t respect the first law of thermodynamics.
Whatever other argument you might want to make against the global and for the local (and several legitimate ones come to mind) this fatal flaw is insurmountable.
No quibbles, qualification or value judgments need to get in the way of this basic fact.

So, some bad shit coming, huh?
Clueless: How many US peoples understand how food does not originate from Safe-Way?

There’s so much news out there it’s near-remarkable (or has it always been this way, just now there’s more options to get that news out?) and I sit in front of my laptop and watch an age draw to a dramatic conclusion — near-before my very eyes — oh, the vicious cycle of technology!
Indeed, I’m writing/blogging again.

Anyway, back to the late Jody Powell.


(Illustration found here).

In the fall of 1975, a fellow journalist and friend at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama (where I was then the paper’s police reporter), told me with forceful enthusiasm the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, would be the next president — I didn’t pay a dab of attention, as then Carter didn’t mean shit to me, and the friend, though a nice guy, was kind of a kook.
Well…
A year later, in the Advertiser’s AP wire-room (this was 1976, remember?), my friend and I watched the hammering type proclaim Carter president, beating Gerald Ford and capping a wild political year, and in retrospect, probably the last rational US election.
And Powell was Carter’s for-real, right-hand guy.
From Time magazine in August, 1976:

Except for Campaign Manager Hamilton Jordan, none of the candidate’s 250 full-time staff members has served longer or is paid more ($22,000) than sandy-haired, chain-smoking Powell, 32.
He is also closer to the candidate than even Jordan.
“Jody probably knows me better than anyone except my wife,” Carter has said.
If the candidate wins in November, Powell will probably become one of the more powerful presidential press secretaries in decades.

And life was swell for a couple of years into Carter’s tenure in office.

In the time of the Rolling Stone cover, shown above, life had appeared to soften — the Vietnam war, Watergate, the popular turmoil of the 1960s and early ’70s had left the political/optimism air in the US a bit cleaner, as if a lot of debris had been swept away by all those events.
The US had straightened itself out, would never, ever get into another Vietnam-like situation and the future looked so bright a great many people were forced to wear shades.
However, Carter and his boys — Ham and Jody — knew exactly how to run a campaign, but not a government.
Not only were they inept at handling Congress — even pissing off Ted Kennedy on health care — they got slammed by the economy, a gasoline shortage, Three-Mile Island, among a litany of other shit, and much-of course, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Read a good overview of Carter’s presidency here.

The 1970s in this current age are most-likely similar to what the 1950s were to those in the 1970s — American Graffiti, “Happy Days,” etc. — but nowadays the nostalgia for that seemingly-so-long-ago decade is more for the supposedly lucidity of the time than anything else.

Alexander Cockburn recently posted an excellent look at how the rise of gossip in the 1970s spawned our modern tabloid-cultural society and proclaimed the ’70s “the last sane decade in American political life.”
And Jimmy Carter just a signpost: “It seemed America was tottering into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was Ronald Reagan who truly credentialed nutdom, setting the national thermostat at max degrees F for fantasy.”

And one thing about time: You can think back, but you can’t call back.

9/11/01

Filed Under Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment

This from Josh Marshall and his fledging Talking Points Memo on Sept. 11, 2001 — unaware of even a worse horror coming:

TPM, of course, is normally all about arguments among us, among
Americans.
But all of that falls deep into the background now.
And my support, and I’m sure yours too, is with our president, our armed
services, and all of those struggling mightily to save those who can still
be saved.

Marshall, who now commands one of the best, most-insightful political sites on the Internet, was like most Americans that day, including yours truly, who watched as terror spread and infected the entire country.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, as Americans watched the events in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania on that fateful day eight years ago, we had no freakin’ idea of the events behind the attacks, didn’t understand the term, “Blowback,” didn’t know Osama bin Laden from dick, and sure didn’t know George Jr.’s obsession with Iraq.

As Chalmers Johnson wrote in The Nation (link on ‘Blowback’ above) on Sept. 27, 2001:

The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy.

And as Marshall wrote, all of the support went to the president and the military on that ugly day, but sonofabitch, did the attack on the Twin Towers open a horrible can of nasty, gross worms, or what?

No one in them days but a few knew of the August 2001 CIA memo ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in Us‘ and George Jr.’s comment to the CIA briefer: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
In the wake of the 2,752 innocent US lives lost that day, one must not only remember, but keep in mind the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the aftermath — the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and the dimwitted, horror of war thrust upon the planet gained from the “support” of ignorant Americans.
And eight years later, the US is a divided, near-ugly country as the GOP has become a bottom-feeder among Americans — the epitome of one, Joe Wilson, who screamed “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech Wednesday night.

All a lie.

Obama’s Dark-and-Dire Decision — Afghan Cataclysm?

Filed Under Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment


(Illustration of Salvador Dali’s The Visages of War found here).

War is not pretty, funny or real clever.
War is Ambrose Bierce’s ‘Chickamauga‘ revealed as “the dead body of a woman — the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles — the work of a shell.”

The war in Afghanistan has become the US ‘jagged hole‘ in the brain.

Just as a way-crucial juncture in a US commitment to an Afghan campaign is most-quickly approaching, the war itself has churned into an even more nasty and deadly-stupid conflict — seemingly the only alternative is the obvious.
The war is conducted near-blind, in the shadows of friend or foe, and US boys and girls are being slaughtered for naught.
Two prime examples in just days — One an apparent product of an insurgent/occupation conflict, the other an example of an over-extended, incompetent US military leading the country into something akin to a scenario worse than Vietnam and Iraq combined.

On Tuesday, four US Marines were killed during an ambush in eastern Afghanistan, and a riveting first-person account by a McClatchy reporter, on the scene, has been spread across the Internet.
The first two graphs:

We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition.
“We will do to you what we did to the Russians,” the insurgent’s leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.

The telling bit, however, is contained here:

Several U.S. officers said they suspected that the insurgents had been tipped off by sympathizers in the local Afghan security forces or by the village elders, who announced over the weekend that they were accepting the authority of the local government.
“Whatever we do always leaks,” said Marine Lt. Ademola Fabayo, 28, a New Yorker who was born in Nigeria and is the operations officer for the trainers from the 3rd Marine Division.
“You can’t trust even some of their soldiers or officers.”

Securing intelligence on the Taliban is another matter.
The US-led NATO troops are foreigners, distrusted by a population spread over a huge canvas of a country, and after eight years of nothing but more death and destruction, just about all reliable information on Taliban movements is tainted at best.
And the best intelligence on the insurgency comes from far-distance via drones and satellite imagery, but getting the low-down, down on the ground about the Taliban is tricky at best.
Even General Stan McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, was recently “surprised” by the new-and-improved Taliban tactics this past summer — apparently Stan didn’t know they were that good at insurgent warfare — Duh!
In July, McChrystal issued his big, though ‘revised,’  Tactical Directive (pdf) that the core emphasis will now be to gain support of the civilian population through not slaughtering them, not driving around Kabul and other cities in a cowboy/”guns up” kind of way, causing chaos to all, “thus alienating the people.”
In other words: “The Taliban cannot militarily defeat us — but we can defeat ourselves.”
So coupled with the disaster in southern Afghanistan this summer — July and August were brutal for US and UK troops — and last month’s national elections a complete farce of a breakdown — Hamid Karzai’s little city-state government not only buggered-up the results, but also painted a worse-case scenario for any kind of central government — the entire Afghanistan mission is in deep shit.
In the ambush described above, where the four US GIs died, the commander on the ground called for air and artillery support, but didn’t get any for quite awhile — two reasons cited: both the vast distances (for helicopter gunships to arrive) and the new guidelines for less harm to civilians.
Of course, the entire ‘Tactical Directive’ went down in shit flames last Friday when between 90 and 125 people (most were civilians) were incinerated after NATO aircraft bombed some fuel-tanker trucks stolen by the Taliban, and although only Taliban fighters were targeted, and to avoid any real-stupid stuff: Later another spokesman, Brig Gen Eric Tremblay, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “It would appear that many civilian casualties are being evacuated and treated in the local hospitals.
“There is perhaps a direct link with the incident that has occurred around the two fuel trucks.”
No shit Sherlock.
The air strike on the tankers was called for by the Germans, as it occurred in their zone of Afghan hell, and the event has triggered more political backlash in Germany over that country’s operation in Afghanistan — the war is becoming increasingly unpopular in German as well as English.

McChrystal, however, would get snagged by another piece of shit off the tanker blast.
From Tuesday’s timesonline:

When he tried to contact his underlings to find out what had happened, however, he found, to his fury, that many of them were either drunk or too hungover to respond.
Complaining in his daily Commander’s Update that too many people had been “partying it up,” General McChrystal, head of International Forces in Afghanistan (Isaf), banned alcohol at his headquarters yesterday, admonishing staff for not having “their heads in the right place” on Friday morning — a few hours after the deadly attack.
…
Nato began an investigation later that morning but military sources said that General McChrystal was furious because he “couldn’t get hold of the people he needed to get hold of and he blamed it on all-night partying”.
Rear-Admiral Gregory Smith, the top US spokesman in Afghanistan, accused German troops of waiting too long after the blasts to investigate the scene.
When General McChrystal flew north, the local German commander, Colonel Georg Klein, told him that it was too dangerous to visit the blast site, four miles outside their camp, because they might get shot at.

In a vast country like Afghanistan, they couldn’t go four miles from camp ‘because they might get shot at‘?
As one can see, the mission has gone to shit in a wire basket.

Last March, President Obama unveiled his “new” Afghan policy, the now-famous alliterated “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida” spiel and dispatched an additional 4,000 US troops to the already previously-dispatched 17,000 new GIs earlier in the year.
This new stance, however, is extreme-similar to George Jr.’s belated attempts to turn the corner in that conflict.
One former Afghan envoy said Obama’s plan is “largely an extension of where the Bush Administration, in its last years, was heading, with some refinements and additions.”
However, despite the additional troops, despite all the new directives and what-not, the presence of the Taliban, driven out of sight and under cover more than eight years ago, has come back stronger and now control big chunks of the country.
According to Reuters:

The Taliban have a significant presence in almost every corner of Afghanistan, data from a policy think tank showed on Thursday, as the country lurches into political uncertainty after a disputed presidential election.
…
A security map by policy research group the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) however showed a deepening security crisis with substantial Taliban activity in at least 97 percent of the country.
The ICOS data, obtained by Reuters before its release on Thursday, painted an even darker picture than an Afghan government map last month that showed almost half of Afghanistan at either a high risk of attack or under “enemy control.”

Now McChrystal is coming back this month with yet another plan, and a request to Obama for more US troops.

Obama must face NATO, whose secretary-general, it was reported today, said “We must stay in Afghanistan as long as necessary, and we will stay as long as necessary. Let no one think that a run for the exits is an option. It is not.”
While US politics, especially from his fellow Democrats, there’s not much support for any more troops, with Sen. Russell Feingold even calling for a flexible timetable for withdrawal.
History points to the obvious: A most-quick departure.
(Illustration found here).

Similar to a lot of other nefarious shit nowadays, any kind of organized exit operation out of Afghanistan might be too late, at least for any kind of foreseeable future.
Although the Brits, French and Germans have called for a UN-mandated conference later this year to set up some semblance of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, based on “timelines” and “benchmarks,” which never, ever work in reality — and a most-excellent post on “success” via benchmarks and numbers in Afghanistan can be found at tomdispatch this week.

The ultimate problem for Afghanistan is Obama himself.
He campaigned the last couple of years and has constantly stated Afghanistan was/is the good war and a “war of necessity,” and will most-likely okay another 25,000 US troops to the conflict later this month, and push the US into a deep, near-bottomless well of historical horror.
Afghanistan has never had a strong central government (the brief Taliban, but they didn’t control the entire country) and it is one of the worse possible examples of a candidate for nation building — the attempt will naturally fail.
And the failure might be a slow strangulation, or a quick knife-slash to the throat, either way, the sight sure won’t be pretty.

Earth’s Frantic ‘Wake-Up Call’

Filed Under Environment | Leave a Comment

Global warming is not only about oceans and weather, but also the land.

(Illustration found here).

Just as more bad global warming news gushed forth — sea level rise, unprecedented regional droughts, and, the Arctic is warmer than its been been for 2,000 years — comes research that indicates the land masses of earth (the ground) will be literally shifting as well.
From UK’s The Guardian this morning:

Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.
Reports by international groups of researchers – to be presented at a London conference next week – will show that climate change, caused by rising outputs of carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations, will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth.
…
“Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire, who is one of the organisers of UCL’s Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September.
…
“Global warming is not just a matter of warmer weather, more floods or stronger hurricanes. It is a wake-up call to Terra Firma,” McGuire said.

Yes, maybe so…

Tortured Reading

Filed Under Media, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment

“They stuff people’s heads down the toilet the first day at Stonewall,” he told Harry.
“Want to come upstairs and practice?”
“No, thanks,” said Harry.
“The poor toilet’s never had anything as horrible as your head down it — it might be sick.”
– Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

According to Juan Cole’s most-essential site, Informed Comment, the library at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison, still with 229 inmates, has 13,500 books in it.
And what are the prisoners favorite book picks?

1. The ‘Harry Potter’ novels
2. Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’
3. Barack Obama’s ‘Dreams from my Father.’
No reason was given for these choices, which are followed in popularity by Muslim religious volumes.
Do they think Guantanamo is a little like Hogwarts Academy and that their torturers were Lord Voldemort?
Do they know that Miguel Cervantes fought at the second Battle of Lepanto in 1571 in which the Holy League defeated the Ottoman empire at sea, and that later on his ship was captured by the Algerians and he spent 5 years imprisoned and enslaved in Algiers before being ransomed — thus reversing an element in their own biographies?
They are said to be fascinated that the new president of the United States has African and Muslim roots.
Although the prisoners receive newspapers, all violent incidents are torn out of them, so they know nothing of the Huthi revolt in Yemen, e.g.
I’m still thinking about the idea of John Yoo as Voldemort.

Can the world get any nutcase nuttier?

‘Strange Days, Indeed, Mama’

Filed Under Madness, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment

As I was thinking fairly-clear this morning — thinking is sometimes for me a really, really mega-complicated ordeal and not so unclouded — and although mostly about all kinds of related/unrelated shit, the focus finally came to war, which is part and partial to this whole blog, and on today’s complete-whole world the life-and-death real reality for billions of people.
Just click to antiwar.com and see a partial list of links to conflicts, consequences of conflicts and conflicts most-likely to come all over the globe — and I say ‘partial list’ because reporting war is like trying to gather bubbles off boiling water.
War is agitated by beating or heating.

(Illustration found here).

And I use antiwar.com as example because it’s a very good, informative site, linking to all kinds of news media, and its editorial bent is toward it’s name: Antiwar.

These thoughts on war eventually led to the current seemingly non-existent US antiwar movement, which in this age of perpetual US warfare should be enormous, at Vietnam era levels or beyond.
Not too long ago…

On Feb. 15, 2003, hundreds of thousands of protesters from London to Rome and New York took to the streets to protest the impending war.
With estimates of hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in New York City alone, it was the largest antiwar demonstration in a generation.

Indeed, over that particular weekend it’s been estimated that between six and 10 million people participated in rallies in some 60 countries to protest the obviously-coming Iraqi war, and the event in Rome “involved around 3 million people, and is listed in the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history.”

Quick flash-forward to near-seven years later, the response of US peoples against the current “deteriorating” conflict in Afghanistan is dropping like a cluster bomb: “The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey says that 57 percent of respondents oppose the war, while 42 percent support it. The “against” number is up from 54 percent in early August, the only other time it has been above 52 percent.
Also according to the poll, 62 percent of Americans believe the US is losing the war, though 59 percent believe it can still win.”
Of course, the reality is there’s no winning in Afghanistan — just ask the ancient Greeks, the Brits and the Soviets.
And this is a conflict President Obama has pledged to not lose.

And in a kind of twist-a-flex look at the Afghan situation, Mark Ames, in a post at AlterNet, viewed the current numbers of US people in Afghanistan, both in uniform and in civilian dress (I posted yesterday on DOD contractors) vs what the Soviets had in country at the height of its involvement there in the mid-1980s — and the result disheartening.
Right now there’s about 52,000 GIs and 68,000 contractors in Afghanistan.
Ames takes note:

That makes 120,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, a figure higher than the Soviet peak troop figure of 115,000 during their catastrophic 9-year war.
…
At the height of the Soviet occupation,Western intelligence experts estimated that the Soviets had 115,000 troops in Afghanistan — but like America, the more troops and the longer the Soviets stayed, the more doomed their military mission became.

And how obvious the catastrophe in the face of the preoccupied US peoples:

The Afghanistan War has somehow escaped most of America’s attention.
People just assumed that since Obama is a decent guy with a sharper mind than Bush’s, he must know what he’s doing in Afghanistan, and his intentions can’t be bad — so why bother paying attention, when we have all these other problems here at home?
Besides, war isn’t a fun topic anymore.
Thanks to Bush and Cheney, any talk of war is a total bummer, whether you’re from the right or the left.
And Americans don’t like bummers — instead, America is always “moving on” from its bummers.
Nothing bums Americans out more than losing wars, which helps explain why Afghanistan is the most we’ve-moved-on subject of our time.
The problem is that you can’t move on from something while it’s still a problem — but try telling that to a nation of delusionals.

The problem in the Afghan scenario is the old no-end-in-sight situation.
And just this morning come reports of another US/NATO air strike in northern Afghanistan, which has killed at least 80 people, including civilians.
Supposedly, the strike was on fuel trucks stolen by the Taliban, but early reports are unclear.
Spencer Ackerman has more on the incident here.
A big trouble is the war-like nature of the US the past near-60 years.
In 1950, the US installed the ultra-secret NSC-68, which was an attempt to handle the growing Soviet threat, but all it did was make this country a national war state.
In 1950, the fiscal situation was $13 billion for military spending — equal to one-third of the national budget and 5 percent of the gross national product (GNP). The 1951 budget, the first after NSC #68 went into effect, earmarked $60 billion for defense — about two-thirds of the national budget and more than 18 percent of a rising GNP.
And with all that military money flowing out towards everybody, perpetual war was the end product.
As the US public turns its thumbs down on Obama’s Afghan war strategy, and believe him a traitor to the cause, the big thing is he is just keeping the war machine running wide-open.
Chris Floyd has a great post on the 60 years of US military muscle flexing.

[NSC-68] constituted the re-founding of the country as a “National Security State,” controlled by the military-industrial complex and driven by a nightmare vision of exaggerated threats, craven fear, secrecy and deception, bellicosity and brinkmanship.
This vision has waxed and waned in intensity at various times over the years, but it has never been displaced as the central dynamic of American power.
The demonic, all-powerful enemy has now morphed from the Soviet Union to Islamic extremism, but the paranoid rhetoric and “Pentagon uber alles” philosophy of the Cold War has been seamlessly transferred whole cloth to the supposedly transformed “post-9/11 age.”

Read Floyd’s entire piece at his highly-informative site, Empire Burlesque.

Meanwhile, back at the anti-war movement.
Although the move is kind of tepid, as most do not want to go against the man they helped put in office, plans are for some events for this fall, but it may not go anywhere.
According to the New York Times:

Anticipating a Pentagon request for more troops there, antiwar leaders have engaged in a flurry of meetings to discuss a month of demonstrations, lobbying, teach-ins and memorials in October to publicize the casualty count, raise concerns about the cost of the war and pressure Congress to demand an exit strategy.
…
“People do not want to take on the administration,” said Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org. “Generating the kind of money that would be required to challenge the president’s policies just isn’t going to happen.”
Tom Andrews, national director for an antiwar coalition, Win Without War, said most liberals “want this guy to succeed.” But he said the antiwar movement would try to convince liberals that a prolonged war would undermine Mr. Obama’s domestic agenda. Afghanistan, he said, “could be a devastating albatross around the president’s neck.”
…
“We’re coming out of a low period,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink. “But as progressives feel more comfortable protesting against the Obama administration and challenging Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress, then we’ll be back on track.”

And the bottom line:

“In the next year, it will more and more become Obama’s war,” said Perry O’Brien, president of the New York chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “He’ll be held responsible for the bloodshed.”

One of the main reason the US got the shit out of Vietnam was the ant-war movement, including Walter Cronkite, and mass demonstrations…
Is that what is in store?
Sadly, I don’t think so.

Afghan ‘Lord of the Flies’

Filed Under Madness, Media, War & Politics | Leave a Comment

How in the living shit of any-kind-of-daylight can the US ‘win‘ any kind of war in Afghanistan?
On Tuesday via Raw Story:

According to a watchdog group and a litany of whistleblowers, Armorgroup North America, a key U.S. security contractor in Afghanistan, has suffered a breakdown of its chain of command resulting in an atmosphere in which “sexual predators and “deviants” are being allowed to “run rampant” at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
…
It said it had obtained many emails, photographs, and videos that “portray a Lord of the Flies environment,” referring to the title of the novel by William Golding about stranded school boys who turn into savages on a desert island.
Some of the activities mentioned include deviant hazing rituals in which guards were urinating on each other and drinking liquor from another’s buttocks.
A CBS News report published Tuesday carried video which showed a contractor being urinated on.

And the story continues that no one has been disciplined in this literal crap.
The little party in Kabul is more than just an extreme-strange scenario, but all those really, really weird people were American contractors, under contract with the US DOD, and on top of that, Secrecy News reports, also Tuesday, contractors now out number GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan — about 200,000 contractors, and about 194,000 military personnel.
The vast majority of contractors give mundane support — run laundries, mess halls and the like.
The big-ticket, highly-paid jack-boot boys, the security contractors like Blackwater Worldwide, comprise only 5 to 10 percent of the contractor workforce in both war zones , but this is where the rubber meets the IED — there’s a shitload of bad difference between not having enough chicken gravy and not enough security — ground zero in the horror of war.
In Afghanistan alone, contractors make up 57 percent of the entire DOD presence (68,000 contractors vs 52,000 soldiers): “This apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by DOD in any conflict in the history of the United States…”
In a report entitled “DOD Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis,” and dated Aug. 13, 2009 (also via Secrecy News and is pdf), these contractors play a “critical role” in how actual front-line troops get needed support, and even worse, because of a long history of decline in number of regular military in certain jobs, “Many analysts now believe that DOD is unable to successfully execute large missions without contractor support.”
And could it get even worse? Yes.
According to the above report, Manual 3-24 from the US Army and Marine Corps, “Counterinsurgency (December 2006),” the holy-grail guidebook to handling people like the Taliban and co-authored by none-other than the more-than-famous Gen. David Petraeus, presents “…multinational corporations and contractors as key counterinsurgency participants…” The kind of folks generally referred to as ‘mercenaries.’
However, because of all the corruption, horror stories and dumb-shit stuff like those sickos in Kabul, the report concludes: “In accordance with the manual’s assertion that the local population will ultimately determine the winner of the conflict, abuses and crimes committed by armed private security contractors and interrogators against local nationals may have undermined US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

There’s really no way to apparently stop the process: A Blackwater firm just received a contract renewal in Iraq despite all the problems with the company there, and according to ABC News, an aircraft-parts contractor in Kentucky is under investigation for putting US troops at bad risk because  equipment was shipped under “fraudulently repair.”

And as the conflict in Afghanistan goes from bad, to worse, to failure, the mess is even more complicated by a circle of deadly stupidity.
From the LA Times this morning:

U.S. officials are planning to add as many as 14,000 combat troops to the American force in Afghanistan by sending home support units and replacing them with “trigger-pullers,” Defense officials say.
The move would beef up the combat force in the country without increasing the overall number of U.S. troops, a contentious issue as public support for the war slips.
But many of the noncombat jobs are likely be filled by private contractors, who have proved to be a source of controversy in Iraq and a growing issue in Afghanistan.

Security is the issue: Just today, a honcho in the Afghan government’s own security apparatus was killed by a suicide bomber, which nailed 21 other people as well, and yesterday, the first day of September, an US GI also died from a bombing, starting off the month with a heartless bang.
In August, at least 49 US service people were killed, the worst month of the war yet, following July, which was up-to-then, the worst month of the war yet…

What can be said when the head of Blackwater is being sued for “war crimes” in a couple of wars where war crimes have become just part of the destroyed “conch shell” and death and destruction follows in its wake.