Headin’ to Helmand
Filed Under Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
From President Obama’s lips to boots on the ground.
Word came Sunday night: Escalation — 35,000 more troops for the Afghan meat-grinder.
And the first batch, 9,000 Marines for Helmand province, will leave as soon as Obama opens his mouth Tuesday at West Point, an event creating a most-strange and ironic circumstance for a snow-job — He will try and somehow explain to US peoples why such a bloody, dumb-ass move makes sense.
(Illustration found here).
A poem from Jean Gerard, age 94: “Defragging Afghanistan”
Take Showkar Kariz for example.
It’s thirty miles northeast of Kandahar
as the crow flies over Mohammed Qasim’s head.
He’s the only remaining inhabitant now.
He looks up into a cloudless sky.“There’s no Al Quaeda here,” says he.
“I had just dug out a child when
the second strike flew over. That time
they got him!”
He squints in the sun,
rubs his eyes.
“These are war crimes,” he says.
Silence.
Then: “Guess who came by last week,
and for what? Americans,” he says.
He’s tired. His voice shakes. “They
buried a piece of the World Trade Center
here,” he says, “and took a piece
of our mosque back to New York.”
He points
to a small mound beside a ruined wall,
sifts a handful of dust through his fingers.
Bad moon rising, and so forth…
’scrabbling for the smoking gun…’
Filed Under Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Some serious shit: “Tony Blair and George Bush at Camp David in February 2001 where they discovered they both used Colgate toothpaste.”
And they loved war games, much to the peril of the planet.
These two terrifying clowns are together again — part-and-parcel of an UK inquiry into British shenanigans in the US-led nefarious run-up to the Iraq war.
Despite some nasty, back-stabbing testimony this week, news of the hearings have been downplayed in the US, if reported at all.
(Illustration found here).
On Thursday, the former British ambassador to Washington related how so intense the preparations for the invasion (in early 2002), the UN weapons inspectors couldn’t do the proper job and were forced to find evidence, any kind of evidence:
Sir Christopher Meyer said the “unforgiving nature” of the build-up after American forces had been told to prepare for war meant that “we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun”.
He added: “It was another way of saying ‘it’s not that Saddam has to prove that he’s innocent, we’ve now bloody well got to try and prove he’s guilty.’
And we — the Americans, the British — have never really recovered from that because of course there was no smoking gun.”
…
Asked about Tony Blair’s meeting with Bush at Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, where, some observers believe, the decision to go to war was made, Meyer said: “To this day I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was signed in blood at the Texas range.”
…
On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in “no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation.”
The following weekend Bush and his key advisers met at Camp David and contacts later told Meyer there had been a “big ding-dong” about Iraq and Saddam.
And Meyer expressed the idea Margaret Thatcher would have done a better job than Twisted-Tony Blair:
Sir Christopher said that he was “not making a party political point,” but Lady Thatcher had been much tougher on the “special relationship” with the Americans.
He expressed frustration over the failure of the allies to agree a diplomatic strategy to overthrow Saddam or to prepare properly for victory, which would have prevented the country’s descent into chaos.
“Quite often I think what would Margaret Thatcher have done,” Sir Christopher told the inquiry.
“I think she would have insisted on a clear, coherent political-diplomatic strategy. I think she would have demanded the greatest clarity about what the heck happened if, and when, we removed Saddam Hussein.”
And the ever-so-delightful Dick Cheney:
“I remember saying to London ‘This may be the most powerful Vice-President ever.’
I mean, his institutional opposite number was the Deputy Prime Minister,” said Sir Christopher. “This was an unbalanced relationship and probably didn’t reap the dividends that we might have expected.”
And on Wednesday, senior officials within UK’s Foreign Office told the inquiry Iraq’s WMD was known to be non-existent, even early on in pre-war planning:
The inquiry was told how officials within the Foreign Office had become convinced that the regime in Baghdad was developing chemical and biological weapons.
When it received intelligence contradicting the claim in March 2003, this was discounted.
“There was contradictory intelligence, so I don’t think it invalidated the point about what weapons [Saddam] had,” Sir William (Ehrman, a senior official within the Foreign Office) said. “It was more about their use. Even if they were disassembled the [chemical or biological] agents still existed.”
It also emerged that a secret paper drawn up in the summer of 2002, which pointed to Iraq as a potential threat, was based almost entirely on uncorroborated and outdated assumptions.
Tim Dowse, the former head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office, said the document was based on information obtained before weapons inspectors were thrown out of the country in 1998.
“We had got ourselves in a particular mindset,” Mr Dowse said.
Nevertheless, there were repeated warnings to ministers about the reliability of the intelligence on Iraq.
In April 2000, intelligence was said to be “limited to chemical weapons.”
By May 2001, knowledge of major weapons programmes was described as “patchy;” by March 2002 it was “sporadic and patchy.”
Advisers admitted in August they knew “very little” about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, while intelligence information “remained limited” by September.
In June 2008, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report: “Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” (chairman of the Committee John D.) Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
Meanwhile back at the UK hearings last week, Jeremy Greenstock, the Brit’s former ambassador to the UN, testified George Jr. was “hell bent on the use of force” in Iraq and was not going to be stymied:
As diplomats frantically attempted in early 2003 to agree upon a U.N. resolution approving a military offensive, Bush’s key aides grew impatient — criticizing the process as an unnecessary distraction, he said.
Grumbling from Washington “included noises about ‘this is a waste of time, what we need is regime change, why are we bothering with this, we must sweep this aside and do what’s going to have to be done anyway — and deal with this with the use of force,’” Greenstock testified before the inquiry into the Iraq war.
And on the Crawford, Texas, pow-wow between George Jr. and Twisted-Tony, there was this:
Greenstock said following the Crawford meeting, he realized Britain “was being drawn into quite a different discussion.”
But, like Meyer, he said the talks were secretive and the conversation between the two leaders was not disclosed to officials.
Read more on the inquiry here and here.
And read about what end the inquiry — according to the UK’s Independent, which will be nothing except some good headlines (in the UK, of course, not the US) and another whitewash.
A shame and disgrace that such public hearings won’t be held in the US as President Obama has made it fairly clear there won’t be any Iraq-war criminal investigations, despite all indications to the contrary.
From the Center for Public Integrity in January 2008:
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
People should be scrabbling for a real-life legal gun.
Quick Punch
Filed Under Cloud gazing | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
A new satellite-based study published Sunday in Nature Geoscience indicates the supposedly more-stable East Antarctic ice sheet has as been losing 57 billion tons of ice bulk a year since 2006.
From the BBC on the report:
“We felt surprised to see this change in East Antarctica,” study leader Jianli Chen from the Centre for Space Research at the University of Texas in Austin told BBC News.
The loss still looks small by contrast with West Antarctica, which is losing 132Gt (tons) per year, and with Greenland, where a recent analysis combining Grace data with other measurements indicated an annual figure of 273Gt.
(h/t Climate Progress).
Another brick in the wall of weird.
Also published Sunday in the Energy Bulletin:
The trouble with apocalypse is that most people have already seen it at the movie theater, watched it on television, read it in a book, or heard all about it from the pulpit.
So inundated with the language of crisis are we that we have become immune to it.
From the perspective of the historian our age has been chock full of “great transformations.”
And, it is, after all, the historian’s business to write about great change even if he or she has to invent some.
…
What apocalyptic narratives do is elevate the importance of the trajectory of every person’s life regardless of his or her station in society.
If we’re all in this together, then we can share in a great destiny no matter who we are.
But destiny sounds like fate.
What can one do if one is headed toward a great apocalypse? Pray, perhaps. Repent, maybe.
But responding to such a gargantuan event calls more for attaining the right relationship with one’s god than engaging in constructive social and political action.
Punch line: Don’t mothball the tuxedo!
Lyin’ through his ass
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
The Iraqi saga is a horror-eyed bristle of lies.
In the run-up to the invasion, all kinds of fear-mongering lies created a sense of urgency, which quickly evaporated when those woeful tales of woe were shot-to-bits by reality.
We’re familiar with George Jr. and Dick Cheney’s intentional falsehoods — “deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate” — but what about others involved in the criminal and immoral enterprise.
Today in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph:
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action.
In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.
The need to conceal this from Parliament and all but “very small numbers” of officials “constrained” the planning process.
The result was a “rushed”operation “lacking in coherence and resources” which caused “significant risk” to troops and “critical failure” in the post-war period.
Operations were so under-resourced that some troops went into action with only five bullets each.
Others had to deploy to war on civilian airlines, taking their equipment as hand luggage.
Some troops had weapons confiscated by airport security.
Commanders reported that the Army’s main radio system “tended to drop out at around noon each day because of the heat.”
One described the supply chain as “absolutely appalling,” saying: “I know for a fact that there was one container full of skis in the desert.”
…
The leaked documents bring into question statements that Mr Blair made to Parliament in the build up to the invasion.
On July 16 2002, amid growing media speculation about Britain’s future role in Iraq, Mr Blair was asked: “Are we then preparing for possible military action in Iraq?”
He replied: “No.”
Twisted-Tony Blair just lied through his ass.
In the pile of leaked documents to the Telegraph — classified verbatim transcripts, reports and papers — was the actual situation of the British forces: The analysis of the war phase describes it as a “significant military success” but one achieved against a “third-rate army.” It identifies a long list of “significant” weaknesses and notes: “A more capable enemy would probably have punished these shortcomings severely.”
Reminds one of Donald Rumfeld’s reply to all those young US boots-on-the-ground who were getting killed or blown apart by inadequate military equipment: “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
He added: “If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up.”
Pity the heartless lie.
And one does wonder if any of these lying bastards on both sides of the pond will ever pay the piper for creating a horror story for the ages.
Slow-Melt Irony
Filed Under Environment, Finance, Madness | Leave a Comment
One of the great turds of the US political system, Sen. James Inhofe, yes, that silly-assed Republican from Oklahoma, displayed a most-marvelous bit of horror-irony this week as he tweaked the future and all those to come after us.
Inhofe is a major big-mouth-crybaby global-warming denier — appears a fairly ignorant man.
And with the Copenhagen climate talks coming up in a couple of weeks, the pecker-head, dim-witted Inhofe claims the world is safe as nothing good comes out of Denmark.
Via HuffPost:
And Inhofe had a message specifically for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) — “We won, you lost, get a life.”
Something terrifyingly-paradoxical there.
(Illustration found here).
Whether one wants to hear it or not, or even, whether you believe/know it or not, the near-future of the planet is way-grounded in the word, change.
There’s so much afoot nowadays aimed at a really-clouded and anxious tomorrow — weather, energy, food (all the basics) — that despite all of stinky-Jim Inhofe’s blubberings will affect/effect everyone in such a profound way it’s unfathomable here writing this morning.
Read the basics on weather/climate here.
And on energy here; the basic problem on food here.
Inhofe’s mouth-off last week was in response to news the full Senate won’t get around to a climate bill until this coming spring, months after the Denmark meeting.
Last summer, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), which called for cutting US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, 83 percent by 2050.
The Senate’s slightly more ambitious bill calls for a 20-percent cut by 2020.
And from the clown who blubbered years ago climate change was “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Inhofe continues to bluster hysterical about the hysteria behind global warming alarmism:
I also said in Milan that the science is not settled.
That was an unpopular view back then.
But today, since Al Gore’s science fiction movie, more and more scientists, reporters, and politicians are questioning global warming alarmism.
I proudly declare 2009 as the “Year of the Skeptic” — the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard.
…
Of course, from the most memorable tidbit from my two-hour global warming speech in July of 2003 were my comments about the science behind global warming.
Now, six years later, and as I head to the next UN global warming conference, I am pleased by the vast and growing number of scientists, politicians, and reporters all over the world who are publicly rejecting climate alarmism.
When I made those comments on the Senate Floor, few people were there to stand with me.
Today, I have been vindicated and I am proud to share the stage with all those who now dare question Al Gore, Hollywood elites, and the United Nations.
Inhofe feels “vindicated” from what?
Barbara Boxer is head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — the EPW passed global warming legislation a couple of weeks ago by bypassing bowl-obstructed GOP members, thus eliminating their participation — the guys were being asshole-jerks, they’d boycotted the bill by stubbornly seeking more EPA analysis at an estimated (and additional) $140,000 cost.
Inhofe whined about it anyway: “In the history of this, we’ve not been able to find a time when a bill has been marked up without minority participation…”
However, he does seem to get the ever-changing last laugh –spine-lacking Harry Reid’s assertion of no Senate debate on climate-warming until the snow melts.
Read a view of the Senate version of the climate bill at Climate Progress.
And adding fuel to the skeptic/denier crowd were e-mails hacked this week from the UK’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted online — actually a bit to do about nothing, unless you’re scamming.
From Wired:
Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank discussion.
And one such e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado:
But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it.
That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.
“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.
…
“If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists,” he (Trenberth) says. “The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”
A good semi-insider response can be found at RealClimate.
Global warming and all its outlying complications are all too real — even a total mainstream source like National Geographic has a good interactive site on climate change — and Time magazine posed on Friday the consequences of a lame or near-non-existent agreement coming out of Copenhagen:
But there’s no getting around the fact that as the science of climate change grows more dire, the global political system seems increasingly unable to deal with that reality.
“We don’t want a global suicide pact,” said Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a low-lying Indian Ocean nation that could be swamped by global warming-caused flooding. “We want a global survival pact.”
But the world’s most influential leaders still aren’t ready for that.
Ready for what? An event way down the road, a maybe-problem for some future generation?
Not so fast…
From the executive summary of a new study (pdf) commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund International (h/t Climate Progress):
This report models the ability of low-carbon industries to grow and transform within a market economy.
It finds that runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialisation over the next five years.
The point of no return is estimated to be 2014.
Re-invent modern industry in five years?
You gotta be shittin’ me!
Just follow Jumping-Jim Inhofe’s advice: ‘Get a life.’
Blog Thyself
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Writing in this modern age is still the same as in Twain’s day, only quicker and with a lot more adjectives, a word-group the Huck-n-Tom author found abhorrent.
However, we much-so live in an multi-adjective world (notice the much-used hyphen modifiers) as the data and information availability defies the imagination — the red links in this post testifies, but whether any kind of truth is at those links so poses the real question.
Truth is in the eye of the reader and should be in the mind of the writer — even authentic, good fiction is just truth self-created.
(Illustration found here).
Nowadays, writing takes two forms — no longer just the piece of paper/book held in one’s hand, but there’s also a virtual version, found only online.
And having now performed in newspapers and online, the latter is the more personal, especially since no financial compensation is part of the literary mix and no deadlines other than the inherent, obsessive desire to write and have at least one dumb-ass read it, but sadly, has no newsroom — blogging is most likely the equivalent of a professional diary in the form of journalism practiced under the auspices of some-type literature.
Of course, I speak of real writing/journalism/literature — anyone can get a blog, currently there must be a hundred-quadrillion blogs with even a blog for bloggers — but there’s a fairly-insufficient, short-list (how about that for adjective-hyphenated modifiers) of readable blogs where there’s decent writing and good journalism.
If one seeks current events in a somewhat fervent way, there’s only about a dozen blogs or so to be visited on a daily basis and maybe twice that number on a semi-regular basis — I tend to favor those sites with an emphasis on reality, which are few in number.
The MSM has to be verified and most of the time, that’s found strictly online (one extremely-glaring example is the New York Times Pentagon pundit story, on which the MSM’s TV side performed a near-complete black-out).
Blogging is what I do — and it fits.
According to that most-massive of information sites, Wikipedia: Blogging is not a full-time job for most bloggers, nor is it their main source of income. A blogger can also be a doctor, a mechanic, a lawyer or a musician, and thus bloggers typically maintain a variety of professions for which the act of blogging is their communicative outlet with the public.
My “full-time job” in this so-called “variety of professions” is with a northern California liquor store and currently I’m in a kind of the OJTing manager — our long-time manager suffered a stroke and I was tapped to take her job.
She’s doing fine and recuperating well, but not coming back.
Hence not many blog posts the past two weeks — way-too tired to do much more than surf the major news sites.
And, of course, since there’s not many visitors here, not a great crowd has been disappointed when they arrive at Compatible Creatures and it’s the same old shit.
But what the heck?
I’m a freakin’ blogger!
From Andrew Sullivan in a September 2004 piece in Time magazine:
The critics of blogs cite their lack of professionalism. Piffle. The dirty little secret of journalism is that it isn’t really a profession. It’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience, and you’re all set. You get better at it merely by doing it — which is why fancy journalism schools are, to my mind, such a waste of time.
Indeed.
Although a graduate of the fairly-prestigious University of Florida’s J-school (In 1974, supposedly listed second behind number-one Columbia), I OJTed my first journalism job as police reporter — J-school didn’t really teach real-life and the only thing I got from UF was the sheepskin.
One doesn’t really need a telephone to be a good journalist (either print or online), but you sure-as-shit require “a conscience.”
Journalism movies are rare, and those portraying a conscience, rarer still — at least one, Shattered Glass, displayed none at all.
And just last night, I watched a DVD version of the newest, State of Play, a real-enjoyable twisting thriller set in a big-time MSM newsroom with a kind of subtext of new media vs old — and in this case ending happily, the veteran print journalist leaving a late-night, on-deadline newsroom nearly hand-in-hand with the newbie blogger.
Damn-good film, fun to watch and kind of neat to see a reporter as a character in what is way-more an action movie, or shoot-’em-up whodunit then the rigid journalism-first kind of flick, such as, All the President’s Men, or Good Night, and Good Luck.
Read a review of “State of Play” from HuffPost if you wish.
Print guy and blogger gal: Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams
One disappointment in “State of Play” was lack of any kind of detail in the actual professional working-together of blogger and print journalist — a most-valid point if the newspaper is to survive into the Internet age.
McAdams’ blogger character seems more on site just as a tag-along to Crowe’s version of ace newspaper reporter — spunky for the newsroom — and in a near-final sequence, allows the blogger to click “send” on the big story.
Yippe do da!
The movie also seems to view blogs (and supposedly the Internet at large) as more for trash, tabloid-fueled gossip then any serious presentation of current events — wrong!
The conscience of “State of Play” is that newspaper guys, print journalists, want the last thread in the needlework of a story to be all laid bare — the end is worth what it took to get there.
And what would Mark Twain say about all this media?
He’d most-likely have viewed it as weird, but inevitable.
From 1880’s A Telephonic Conversation:
Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, — a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer.
You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return.
You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay.
You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.
Extra! Extra!
Now everyone is the other end of the wire.
Ghoulish Gall
Filed Under War & Politics | 1 Comment
In one of the most outlandish public elections in recent memory, the government of Afghanistan has re-installed itself on a pile of criminal corruption so putrid even an idiot can smell it a mile away.
Despite all the cuddling, a hard-serious fact remains: “Right now 85 percent of the government is corrupt,” said Ahmed Shah Lumar, a businessman in the southern city of Kandahar. He said bribery, extortion and other corrupt practices extend “from the very small person” in government to the very top.
And US GIs — along with troops from all over the world — are getting blown to bits to keep this pile of shit in office.
(Illustration found here).
And Hamid Karzai, supposedly just re-elected to a joyous second term as Afghan president, has apparently learned the trade-craft of bullshit, memory-lapse gall from a master: George Jr.
If you can’t beat ‘em, lie about it, then throw up a pious smoke-and-mirrors, holier-than-thou stream of consciousness.
From Al Jazeera English just this morning:
“Over the last few days some political and diplomatic circles and propaganda agencies of certain foreign countries have intervened in Afghanistan’s internal affairs by issuing instructions concerning the composition of Afghan government organs and political policy of Afghanistan,” the foreign ministry statement said on Saturday.
“Such instructions have violated respect for Afghanistan’s national sovereignty.”
In the past few days just about everybody that’s anybody has trashed Karzai’s government.
In the words of the UK’s Gordon Brown, who is catching bad flak for the Brits dying in the Afghan killing fields, the war there is bad news: “Sadly, the government of Afghanistan had become a byword for corruption,” Mr. Brown said in a speech to defense experts. “And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption.”
And as President Obama contemplates troops increases (or not), he should have some sense, he should think about more than the politics — get the US out of Afghanistan.
The trouble: No one will leave.
The UK’s turd-knuckle Brown in the same breath as the above quote said it for all the bullshit political-talking assholes on the planet: “We cannot, must not and will not walk away.”
Oh, but they will, they surely will, but it won’t be pretty — just ask Alex the Great, (Brown should study his own British history) and the Soviets.
Big, Bad Bogeyman Can Still Boogie
Filed Under Just Plain War, Musings | Leave a Comment
Instead of George Jr.’s arrogant rant: “I want justice,” he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed last Tuesday when an airliner crashed into the building. “And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ “
We should follow Andy Borowitz’s reporting:
In a bold new strategy designed to locate the world’s most wanted man, the United States today dispatched a team of paparazzi to find Osama bin Laden.
“If these people can find George Clooney when he’s vacationing on Lake Como, they can find Osama,” one intelligence insider said.
(Illustration found here).
In the face of Dick Cheney’s insanely-ironic blast last month that President Obama was “dithering” on Afghanistan, dickhead and George Jr. more than dithered in December 2001 in letting Osama and his boys slip out of the east Afghan mountains of Tora Bora and flee to Pakistan, a move directly connected and a root-cause of the shit-mess now in the Af-Pak region.
Read a good, comprehensive report on the entire Tora Bora muck-up here.
Late to the game: US military/intelligence — pushed by the Bush White House — total dithered in adapting to the new (though very, very ancient) method of “asymmetrical warfare” (although Don Rumsfeld called for a study [pdf] of such tactics and strategy in 2002), which all insurgency/guerrilla groups practice and continue to this very day, and instead relied on a pure power, “shock and awe,” style, something akin to randomly swinging around a large shovel to combat a mosquito in a crowded theater lobby.
Most-likely scenario — the mosquito will vanish amidst the carnage inflicted on all those innocent-bystander theater patrons.
And Osama has been a weird, terror-like guy a long time.
One of his sons, Omar, has penned a ‘Dearest Mommy’-type memoir that paints a picture of a crazy person from the get-go — war against the infidal above all things, even from being a daddy.
From Time magazine’s review of “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” (St. Martin’s Press):
The younger bin Laden fled Afghanistan only when it become clear that Osama was planning a massive attack on the U.S., but he still couldn’t accept that his father was responsible for 9/11 until months later, when he heard the familiar voice on audiotape claiming credit for the attacks.
“That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible day,” he writes. “This knowledge drives me into the blackest hole.”
…
Still, ever the dutiful Saudi son, Omar couldn’t bring himself to break with his family until the day that his father asked his sons to volunteer for suicide missions.
When Omar protested, Osama replied, “You hold no more a place in my heart than any man or boy in the entire country. This is true for all my sons.” Omar writes, “I finally knew exactly where I stood.
My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”
Another view inside the infamous bin Laden family can be found here, which concluded: One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”
Osama bin Laden, however (apparently the .01 of the “evil variety”), has become the most-wanted person on the planet and just about everybody on the planet can recognize his mug — and the group he founded, al-Qaeda, is now listed along with Nazis and child rapists as bad, bad bogeymen of history.
Bill Moyers Journal has a good history on Osama and al-Qaeda in campaigns against the West, and especially the US, culminating with those attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
And nowadays, despite all the manpower, firepower, unmanned drones and satellite images, Osama is still at large, causing some to question whether the guy’s still alive (read this), although a lot of horrific shit is still taking place in al-Qaeda’s name.
In Iraq, the group claimed responsibility for the horrific car bombing a couple of weeks ago in Baghdad, which killed 160 people and wounded more than 500, and this despite all kinds of smack-down operations.
This analysis last week from CNN’s veteran war reporter Michael Ware:
While al Qaeda in Iraq has been gutted from within, principally by Sunni insurgents turning on them and assassinating them over recent years, the network still exists.
Al Qaeda, an organization built with the expectation of loss, has endured and will continue to do so until Iraq’s slated January election and beyond.
…
Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the network it once was, it’s not able to deliver multiple suicide bombings on an almost daily basis.
When I was last in Baghdad nationalist insurgents told me there were but a handful of operational al Qaeda cells in the city.
Nonetheless, they warned five committed al Qaeda members can “wreak havoc.”
Yes indeed.
From Al Jazeera English:
The reality is that, whilst direct al-Qaeda actions have been seriously restricted, the organisation has franchised from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa.
In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks.
Al-Qaeda is mercurial and, like a virus, mutates and adapts.
Also at the link is an most-excellent video on the subject.
In Afghanistan, the US appears to have driven out the group, as top dog Gen. Stan McNasty (oops,sorry) McChrystal told reporters in September: “I do not see indications of a large al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan now.”
So why does the US then continue its presence there?
Matthew Hoh has been in the news lately — he’s the US State Department official who resigned in September in protest over the Afghan war strategy — and this week he was on CNN to discuss the issue, which also included some words about al-Qaeda.
Crooks and Liars had this partial transcript:
ZAKARIA: Do you think – the top military brass have all endorsed General McChrystal’s report and request. Do you think that down on the ground there is a very different feeling?
HOH: Oh, yes. Yes, there is. I think on the ground – and the perspective is that, what is the strategic value of what we’re doing here. Why are we doing this? What are we getting out of it?
It’s not going to defeat al Qaeda. It’s not going to — if you take our two goals as being the defeat of al Qaeda, and then, because of its nuclear weapons and because of the relationship with India, the stabilization of the government in Islamabad, 60,000 troops taking 50, 60 dead a month in this country, and how many wounded and killing how many Afghans, as well, it doesn’t accomplish either of those goals.
ZAKARIA: Why doesn’t it defeat al Qaeda?
HOH: My belief is that, after 2001, al Qaeda evolved. They became, as I like to say, an ideological cloud. It exists on the Internet. They don’t need a safe haven in Afghanistan. They’ve got safe havens in five, six, seven other countries.
In this respect, should the US invade and occupy those “five, six, seven other countries” where Osama’s boys have been operating?
One would hope the obvious is apparent — the fight in Afghanistan, no matter how long and cruel, will not yield Osama bin Laden or any of his boys: Asked whether he would give up bin Laden, Mullah Omar explained in a September 21, 2001, interview with the Voice of America that “We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims . . . that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again.”
The moral: When trying to kill a mosquito, much less anything as vaporous and crazy as an ideological cloud, don’t use a big shovel in a small, crowded room.
Dismember the Memory
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While eyes of just about everybody are on Afghanistan’s potboiler of a national election, a mutinous DOD without a clue and a rising death toll there of US troops, Iraq has become one of those horrific, malignant gifts that keeps on giving.
On Monday, there was considered “light violence” in Iraq — two US GIs died from non-combat injuries and only three Iraqis killed and two wounded.
Blessed relief?
Since the invasion in 2003, 4,357 US GIs have been killed, 31,545wounded and the toll on Iraqi itself is frightening: Six-plus years later 94,000 to 102,000, and by some estimates, upwards to more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died — another 4 million displaced.
(Illustration found here).
Of course, now it’s a given — the entire Iraqi misadventure was not only illegal, but immoral and Saddam had no WMD, despite Condi’s slobbering ‘mushroom-cloud‘ fearmongering and Dick Cheney’s bullshit to CNN: “We will succeed in Iraq, just like we did in Afghanistan. We will stand up a new government under an Iraqi-drafted constitution. We will defeat that insurgency, and, in fact, it will be an enormous success story.”
Glaringly worse in the false realm of Iraqi WMD — the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, the guy who’s been around the nuclear-watchdog block, on Monday called out George Jr. and Dick Cheney as liars, and did so in public.
‘I will always lament the fact that a tragic war was launched in Iraq,’ he said in a last address to the UN General Assembly.
‘This was done on the basis of false pretext, without the authorization of the UN Security Council,’ he said.
He said the IAEA and UN weapons inspectors had found ‘no evidence’ that Iraq’s nuclear programmes involved production of weapons of mass destruction.
‘It gives me no consolation that the agency (IAEA)’s findings were subsequently vindicated,’ he said, implying that the US military campaign in Iraq had caused high civilians casualties.
Along with the war crime of the Iraqi invasion, George Jr.’s White House changed the US and the world for the far, far worse. and once the cat’s out of the bag, or the horse is out of the barn (closing the barn door concept) or Pandora’s box pried open, the end result is the same — we be screwed.
Home the Buck
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Home is not the castle so trumped years ago — now it’s nothing more than a file in the immoral portfolio of US banking’s financial system.
A system that’s so skewed you can’t tell the front door from the back.
McClatchy has another story on that ugly, nasty piece of shit called Goldman Sachs.
Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds.
Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.
The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003.
…
Joining other Wall Street firms that bought millions of subprime mortgages, Goldman companies have gone to courts from California to Florida seeking approval to foreclose on the homes of middle-and lower-income Americans who couldn’t keep up with their loans’ soaring monthly payments.
Some borrowers were speculators or homebuyers who exaggerated their incomes on loan applications, thinking they’d always have an escape hatch because housing prices would keep rising.
Others, however, were victims of fast-talking mortgage brokers who didn’t explain that the loans’ interest rates could rise to as high as 15 percent.
Many borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages may never qualify for a home loan again.
And for in-depth background, read Matt Taibbi’s most-excellent comprehensive piece in Rolling Stone from last July about Goldman Sachs: The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Problem, though, is the very system itself.
On Bill Moyers’ Journal, James K. Galbraith, on why the financial future sucks:
The fact is, the economy — production is going to turn around, has started to recover.
But it will be six months in before a strong growth of production leads to new employment.
And the question is, will that growth of production continue, after six months?
The problem here is that we have a stimulus package, which is helping now, but it will be over with at the end of next year.
Will there be a basis for another strong, privately financed expansion at that point? I don’t see the evidence for that now.
And that seems to me to be something we should be worrying about.
…
“That’s the point about the crisis, is that it could have been prevented.
The people in authority two, three, five years ago, knew how to prevent it.
They chose not to act, because they were getting a political and an economic benefit out of the speculative explosion that was occurring.”
…
The overwhelming emphasis, in the administration’s program, I think, has been to return things to a condition of normalcy, to use a 1920s word, that prevailed five and ten years ago.
That is to say, we’re back to a world in which Wall Street and the major banks are leading and setting the path… Do you want to have a financial sector dominated by a small number of very large institutions, very difficult to manage, practically impossible to regulate and ruled by, essentially, the same people and the same culture that caused the crisis in the first place.
Of course, Galbraith is speaking of President Obama’s people like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and so forth.
Recommendation: Get a big mattress.
George’s Gall (Unmitigated Version)
Filed Under Just Plain War | 1 Comment
One wonders what is bubbling up in George Jr.’s brain fluids and what makes the guy so blind he can’t see the huge, out-stretched, multi-layered hand about to slap his freakin’ face.
Either he’s so dumb to be believed, or he just don’t give a fat-rat’s ass.
Most-likely a strange, biological combination of both.
On Saturday, the former president (I write that with a heavy heart) told a leadership conference in New Delhi, India, the war in Afghanistan should be escalated beyond the boiling point as apparently the conflict is the linchpin for the freedom of the planet.
The boy hasn’t lost his touch for irony and unmitigated gall.
(Illustration found here).
Via Agence France-Presse:
“If the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and their extremist allies were allowed to take over Afghanistan again, they would have a safe haven and the Afghan people, particularly the Afghan women, would face a return to a brutal tyranny.”
“This region and the world would face serious threats,” he added.
The former buck-stops-here Big Decider guy steered clear of offering direct advice to President Obama, who is currently figuring out what to with George Jr.’s Afghan debacle — more troops and how many — but that didn’t plug his face-hole, however:
“…the work is hard and I hope we don’t abandon the people of Afghanistan.”
The asshole has a memory lapse — George Jr. abandoned the country in December 2001 when he started prep work on the Iraq invasion — and even after it became apparent the Taliban was re-emerging years later, denied a troop increase (due to the Iraqi front going to shit in a wire basket).
And he punked the Indians with the continuing line that extremists want to destroy us simply because they just plain loath our way of life.
Bush said both the United States and India were “involved in an ideological struggle against extremists who murder the innocent to advance a dark vision of extremism and control.”
“They attack political, financial and diplomatic targets because they hate our way of life and they hate our vision for freedom and human rights and human dignity and prosperity and peace,” Bush told the conference.
This is also the same George Jr. who waxed poetic nearly two years ago about the sweet-fiction of war: “I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.”
For what, you lying, freakin’ freak!