Pass This On…

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Must-read on the twisted-horror of the US Senate health care bill at FireDogLake.

Politics and the human condition.

Intense Irony

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One really mind-boggling particular nowadays is the continual use of hypocritical-irony; creating a two-faced lie through the clenched-teeth of a smile.

Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced intentionally by speakers.
For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through their voice while truly trying to claim they’re not upset, it would not be verbal irony by virtue of its verbal manifestation (it would, however, be situational irony).
But if the same speaker said the same words and intended to communicate that they were upset by claiming they were not, the utterance would be verbal irony.
This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves.
There are examples of verbal irony that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, and there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic.

We’re living and walking around in an age of horrifying and catastrophic irony.

A terrible case in point: Nimble-minded George Jr. arrogantly blubbered to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001:

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

And the irony of it all:

Americans are asking “Why do they hate us?”
They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

(Illustration found here).

The then-spawned The Global War on Terror coupled with the creation of the huge, bungling Department of Homeland Security reproduced what it supposedly sought to eradicate — an example would best be described in the old reflective-adage of pouring JP4 jet fuel on a small, charcoal brazier in order to smother the fire.

This morning from Al Jazeera English:

Extremists held in a US-run detention centre in Iraq were allowed to teach fellow detainees how to use explosives and become suicide bombers, a former inmate has told Al Jazeera.
Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee of Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, said that US officials did nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating young detainees at the camp.
“Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers,” Mohammed said.
“For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals].”
Adel, who was held for four years without charge at Camp Bucca, said that extremists were allowed to speak freely to fellow inmates.
“In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority,” he said.
“He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees – they became extremists like him.”

And those five young, naive Americans arrested last week week in Pakistan has created a good scare about homegrown jihad, and the fabled wide, wide world-war on terror has doubled back on itself, feeding off its own entrails, as it were, to make matters far, far worse.
Those lost souls from Virginia were nabbed only after one of the guys’ daddy, Khalid Farooq, called authorities — and after his son and the others were arrested, and just to be on the safe-terror side: Police said they’d also detained Khalid Farooq as a precautionary measure.
One never knows the mystery of jihad.
Read a good view on the mythology of the US-led terror war here.

And this past week, the current US president, Barack Obama, reached far into the cosmic-ironic heavens to pluck a few words to whitewash the total-irony of  being both a Nobel peace-prize winner and a war escalator.


(Illustration found here).

Although Obama claimed he was “most surprised and deeply humbled” by the Nobel prize in October, he popped some hawkish-spin into the peace mix last week in Oslo, Norway:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
…
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their (Gandhi and King) examples alone.
I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.
For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.
Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

But what about change?
And what about reality vs bullshit?

A situation stated best via a letter to the editor, published Friday in the New York Times: The Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the irony and sadness of President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. On that memorable night a year ago, in Grant Park in Chicago, before an impressed and stunned nation and world, Mr. Obama promised that change would come to America.

Obama, therefore, has produced verbal irony using both the situational and dramatic ironies — Pain is just weakness leaving the body!

War! ‘He Who Picks A Rose’

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

UPDATE/ADD-ON BELOW

Yes, the Edwin Starr song paraphrased is the counterinsurgency of fighting dumb-shit wars.
Last month on PBS‘ “Frontline,” an interview with Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and a level head in this era of military idiots.
He’s also a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, a Vietnam veteran and the author of the 2008 book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”
The US military’s fog-horning a counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan is baffling:

I am baffled by the fad of counterinsurgency, and I’m especially baffled by the extent to which the American officer corps has embraced this fad.
Now, I say that from the point of view of somebody who comes from a generation when counterinsurgency was anathema to the United States military.
In the era after Vietnam, the officer corps believed with something close to unanimity that long, protracted campaigns were very much at odds not only with the well-being of the military as an institution, but frankly at odds with the interests of the country.
Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.
What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that.
War has become a permanent condition.
I mean, we’ve been at war now for eight years, and for all practical purposes, nobody can say with any accuracy when war will likely come to an end.
In my judgment — I know people that would disagree with this — we are now engaged in wars where we do not have vital interests at stake.
And … we’ve now abandoned the notion that we can win wars quickly or cheaply.
Our approach to war is one in which we now accept the notion that war is an open-ended proposition and that if someday out there some outcome is reached, it’s likely to be an ambiguous outcome that really doesn’t resemble in any sense the traditional definition of military victory. …

And this shit is generational?

It’s probably generational in that perhaps young people — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — have bigger dreams, have bigger ambitions. Older people tend to perhaps be more given to pessimism or cynicism.
I mean, I would like to call it realism, but others might view it differently.
I hesitate to say that older people have a better understanding of the human consequences of unrealistic and naive projects, because I know that these younger fellows like Nagl and [CNAS fellow Andrew] Exum have lost friends.
But at the same time, I puzzle over why their personal losses don’t cause them to question the implications for the policy proposals that they support.
We’ve lost over 5,000 American soldiers over the past eight years between Iraq and Afghanistan.
We think Iraq is now finally winding down.
At the same time, we ratchet up Afghanistan.
So if we do indeed have a full-court-press application of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, certainly at least several hundred more American soldiers are going to die.
And I think it’s very, very important to be absolutely certain that no alternative exists that would enable us to achieve our interests in Afghanistan without all those soldiers being killed.
And I think the people who insist that it has to be done through counterinsurgency have not seriously examined all the alternatives.

Is President Obama boxed in with regards to an Afghan escalation?

I think so. … I don’t think the president has to worry too much about being criticized from the right.
I mean, he’s going to be criticized from the right on, if not on the war in Afghanistan, on any number of other issues.
By staying the course in Afghanistan, he’s not going to get more Republican votes for health care or anything like that.
But if the president alienates the core of his support, plunging more deeply into this war when many on the left or people like myself, … wary of an overly militarized foreign policy, then I think he could find the enormous public support that he had during much of the first year of his term in office collapsing pretty quickly. …
There are many glib comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.
And maybe we’re beyond making glib comparisons. But I do think that’s one of the areas where the Vietnam comparison still has merit.
The Vietnam War destroyed the Johnson presidency, and it destroyed the Johnson domestic reform agenda. And to the extent that Obama’s war becomes this costly, open-ended proposition with no end in sight, then one possible consequence that he has to consider is that his own very ambitious and important domestic reform agenda could be placed in jeopardy. …

And is this Obama’s war?

I think so.
And the question is whether or not [it is] going to be Obama’s war in the same sense that Iraq became Bush’s war, that Vietnam became Johnson’s war; that it’s going to be the one issue that consumes his presidency; the one thing that, … for the rest of his time in office, reporters [are] going to be asking: “When is it going end? When will light become visible at the end of the tunnel? How many more soldiers are going to have to die? How many more hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be spent?”
That’s what I fear he is inviting if he allows himself to be sold this counterinsurgency program.
But the president is a smart guy, and the president, I believe, is a very shrewd man in the best sense of the word.
And so I retain at least a smidgen of hope that he will understand the trap that he’s being led into here and therefore avoid it.

Read the entire interview here.

And to highlight the coup-like seriousness of the problem, yesterday NATO indeed boxed Obama.
From the UK’s Independent via antiwar.com:

Nato defence ministers signalled their backing for the Afghan strategy put forward by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal yesterday in an implicit rejection of the alternative plan proposed by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
The general had made an unscheduled appearance at the meeting of ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, to give a presentation behind closed doors. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: “What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counter-insurgency approach.”

Real-bad moon rising — an insurgent War, What is it good for?

Update/Add-On:
Just discovered this evening — a way-little noted story of Seymour Hersh’s speech at Duke University 10 days ago, in which he said the US military, along with working hard in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, etc., are also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in…They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”
According to the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, Hersh also had this to say (h/t HuffPost):

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”
The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.
“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

If anywhere near reality, and Hersh has been so-many times around the military block, he’s got a shitload of DOD sources — what a US-constitutional catastrophe.

Eight Years Later

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Today eight years ago, Oct. 7, 2001…

“On my order, U.S. forces have begun strikes on terrorist camps of al Qaeda, and the military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” Bush said in a somber, televised address from the White House Treaty Room.
…
“We are supported by the collective will of the world,” Bush said.
— George Jr., CNN

History is way-ironic, yes it is.
Now the collective will of the world is focused on figuring out how to extract itself from a terrifying, tempestuous Afghanistan.
The US is also now poised to descent even further into an intractable abyss.

(Illustration found here).

Not only is President Obama pondering  the intensely-crucial decision on whether to jack-up the US Afghan troops levels — dragging the country (and with it the region and ultimately the world) into a quagmire with no end (see ‘abyss‘) — but there also appears to be a pull on the civilian leash-control of the military on what to do.

Reportedly last week, Obama met with Gen. Stan McChrystal, head of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, aboard Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen and chewed his ass about opening his lean-and-mean mouth — McChrystal had stated the only way forward in Afghanistan was with a troop surge and nothing short of that would accomplish the trick.
Don’t talk asshole talk behind the boss’s back: Bruce Ackerman, an expert on constitutional law at Yale University, said in the Washington Post: “As commanding general, McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements.”
He added that it was highly unusual for a senior military officer to “pressure the president in public to adopt his strategy.”

And what’s even worse, the White House won’t even venture an answer to a vital question Helen Thomas asked Bob Gibbs on Monday during a press briefing — what would happen if the US withdrew from Afghanistan?

Helen Thomas: “Is pulling out of Afghanistan part of the assessment?”
Robert Gibbs: “No. In fact, the President was — the President was exceedingly clear that no part of the conversation on — no part of the conversation involved was leaving Afghanistan. That’s not something that has ever been entertained, despite the fact that people still get asked what happens if we leave Afghanistan. That’s not a decision that’s on the table to make.”
Thomas: “What does he think will happen?”
Gibbs: “What does he think will happen?”
Thomas: “If we leave?”
Gibbs: “I don’t think we have the option to leave. I think that’s — that’s quite clear.”

Is it really all that clear?
The big-money words: ‘no part of the conversation…on leaving…’ and ‘that has never been entertained‘… and ‘don’t think we have the option to leave…’
Such total bullshit.
And the words ‘despite the fact‘ seem to scream out from Gibb’s fluttering answer: People want to know the freakin’ consequences if the US leaves.

One must remember another little spiel that spilled out Oct. 7, 2001: Osama bin Laden issued a strongly-worded warning that same day to the US in a recorded statement broadcast on al-Jazeera TV.
After a shitload of religious arrogance way-similar to George Jr.’s cowboy antics, Osama said this near the end (BBC translation):

As for the United States, I tell it and its people these few words: I swear by Almighty God who raised the heavens without pillars that neither the United States nor he who lives in the United States will enjoy security before we can see it as a reality in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed, may God’s peace and blessing be upon him.

Bin Laden eight years later — either dead or alive — has accomplished a great deal without really doing much at all.
In George Jr. he had the best dupe available, and now it appears President Obama is heading in that direction.
It’ll be a major shock if Obama does not okay the whole 40,000-GI request from McChrystal, and, what should have been a quick engagement in Afghanistan in 2001, maybe drawing down troops in 2003 or so, instead has morphed in another empire killer.

Spies, Lies and No Video Tape

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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.

9/11/01

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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.

Tortured Reading

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“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.

Historical Horror of the Shame

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In my eighth-grade history class (circa 1962), we would have studied a historical document similar to the one released on Monday, and although content might have been far less graphic, one thing was for sure –  it would not be anywhere, anyhow at all connected to the US; most-likely from centuries past, in some more cruel and violent age.
The Spanish Inquisition, maybe.

No great gut surprises in the at-long-last release of a May 2004 CIA IG report on “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogations Activities,” which finally found the light of day after nearly five years — torture is still torture and the US government was making ugly in the name of ALL US peoples.

Just a little sample of the back-ass-wards approach of the arrogant madness of George Jr.’s tenure in power and how they knew what they were doing was way-wrong: “This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of.” Waterboarding, for example, would “shock the conscience of any legal body looking at the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Somebody needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”

(Illustration found here).

History is in the now, not tomorrow, or even yesterday.
Intelligence isn’t the central word with the CIA — the sledgehammer approach is its historical mainstay and have been using torture, threatening to use torture and teaching how to torture for a long, long time, as the big difference here this week (and really since Abu Ghraib) is the secret has become way-more exposed.
The naked truth, so to speak — and it runs in the face of eighth-grade history of the US being the light of the planet, the best place on earth to live, where freedom and “doing the right thing” the centerpiece of American society.
Although the US did practice genocide, did screw around with governments in South America (and in the Middle East, i.e., Iran) and did drop a bomb on a Japanese city that started the whole world crying, never before in public has the nastiness been so revealed — the emperor has no clothes.
Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish has the near-perfect prose:

Notice the shift from the standards of the past.
In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded.
That’s what Cheney did to America.
He’s proud of it.
If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon.
The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted.
The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed.
The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

And the point, therefore, has already been made.
There’s no putting the torture genie back in the bottle.
The IG’s report released this week has been very-heavily pre-marked — the word, redacted, has become synonymous with all of George Jr.’s misdeeds from his entire time in office, and among the word’s numerous definitions, to make ready for publication; edit or revise, also includes, black out – suppress by censorship as for political reasons — and only in time will the full, ugly story be exposed.
Maybe.

The report: “Though heavily redacted, the version of the report made public this week documents stomach-turning practices, apart from the hundreds of waterboardings, which we already knew had occurred. There was emotional torture: One detainee was told that if another attack occurred, his children would be killed, and another was told that, if he didn’t cooperate, the interrogators would “get your mother in here.” There were near-strangulations, mock executions and threats to maim prisoners with power drills.”

Also on Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced John Durham, the Connecticut-based prosecutor who is already investigating the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations, will conduct a widening exam into all this torture mess, but will only go after the fall guys and not George Jr., Dick Cheney or any of those young shithead-lawyers who wrote all those infamous “torture memos” released earlier this year.
Not everybody wants any kind of CIA investigation.
Reportedly, CIA Director Leon Panetta pitched a bitch-fit, “profanity-laced screaming match,” at the White House over investigations into agency misdeeds, even threatening to quit.
ABC News:

Amid reports that Panetta had threatened to quit just seven months after taking over at the spy agency, other insiders tell ABCNews.com that senior White House staff members are already discussing a possible shake-up of top national security officials.
“You can expect a larger than normal turnover in the next year,” a senior adviser to Obama on intelligence matters told ABCNews.com.
Since 9/11, the CIA has had five directors or acting directors.

Panetta should quit or be replaced — making it a quick six in eight years.

Supposedly, the CIA works for the US peoples, and the spy agency should let their bosses in on whatever is going bad or wrong in the organization — the CIA most-likely needs an ass-whipping.

Glenn Greenwald has really been covering this mess like a fly on some real-bad shit.
First, his post Monday on the IG report itself, found here — he breaks down the ugly and even title’s the piece, “What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report.”
And on Tuesday, Greenwald launches into those defenders of torture — that post is found here.
Must reads.

The earth and all those dwell upon it are living in an extreme-interesting period of history — great economic and climate changes are not only a-coming, but are here now, not to mention the horror of wars and beyond-rumors of wars waging all over the globe — and for US peoples, a time to witness how a constitutionally-mandated democracy could end up so shamefully deep in the toilet over such a short space.

Afghan’s ‘Toxic’ Election

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UPDATE BELOW

The war-worn and weary Afghan people go to the polls tomorrow for a national election amidst Taliban scare tactics and a weak central government unable to comprehend the inevitable.
In October 2004, Moqadasa Sidiqi (left), was the first Afghan to cast a ballot in the first national election post-Taliban, but she did so in Pakistan, where she and her family had fled in 1992.
This week’s election, however, is into complete fraud: Somebody even registered U.S. pop star Britney Spears to vote in Thursday’s presidential election — copies of her card were widely emailed and, for a while, pinned up in a Kabul hotel bar.

(Illustration found here).

In order to create some semblance of an election, Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) will reportedly have a staggering 250,000 people around the country observing the ballot process, and will man the 6,000 polling stations to help the average Afghan vote without dying or being shot to bits.
Human Rights Watch reported security is “considerably worse than during the last elections,” with at least 13 political killings and at least 10 abductions of electoral commission officials, candidates and campaign workers.
Attempting to play down the violence, the Afghan government took a page from other nations’ playbooks and ordered a ban on reporting incidents this week — the news blackout didn’t seem to register, however, as this morning “insurgents” struck a bank in Kabul: With shots and explosions from the bank assault heard across the city centre it was impossible to suppress the news of the incident. But there has been no coverage of other events, including a rocket which landed in Kabul’s district eight.
And on top of all the violent shit, Afghanistan’s current president, Hamid Karzai — who is corrupt and useless as they come — brougt back an old buddy, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leader of an Uzbek militia, from out of exile in Turkey to campaign for him.
Dostum, if you recall, is one nasty-faced killer and is under investigation for the massacre of more than 2,000 Taliban prisoners in November 2001 and had to flee the country.
No politics involved, Dostum proclaimed, just a helping hand for his people.

“I have no personal agreement with Karzai,” Dostum told Reuters at his ostentatious pink and blue palace in Shiberghan.
He said he was a member of a political party that had already decided to back Karzai, and that his decision to return was intended to increase turnout in the election.
“The people … they became somewhat sick while I was away … I heard them say, ‘If General Dostum doesn’t come here, we won’t vote’,” Dostum told Reuters.
“I thought, God forbid people don’t vote, so I came here to make sure that people vote,” he said.

Oh, that’s so sweet and thoughtful.

President Obama has tied the feet of US peoples with a huge brick and thrown them into the bottomless pit that is Afghanistan, and in the long run, the situation will become worse than Iraq, if that’s possible.
Even now, Obama’s handpicked commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, doesn’t have a clue on what to do next — the big, new operation last month in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan has turned out to be a terrible bust.
From Lara Logan of CBS:

We were crouched down in a field, the earth steaming with the heat of the sun and the air thick with humidity. Two Marines were kneeling down beside me.
“All we’ve done since we got here is get blown up,” one of them said. And then they started to talk.
On a patrol exactly like this one a few days ago in southern Helmand province, they had been walking along the canal. One of their Marines stepped on a relatively small explosive device hidden in the ground, most likely a landmine.
The problem was, that mine was linked to a bigger explosive device in a deadly daisy chain that did not miss its mark. The Marine who was walking behind was hit by the bigger, secondary explosion.
We ran as soon as we heard it go off but when we got to the canal the only thing that was there was his body armor. He was nowhere,” they told me, “just gone.”
So they started to search. Some distance away, they found their friend’s arm, his watch still attached.
“I just cannot get that picture out of my head, I keep seeing it, his arm just lying there with his watch. I can’t stop seeing it.”
It was hours later when they found the rest of him. It would take much longer for the shock to wear off, and the fear to subside.
…
The terrain in Helmand is as relentless as the enemy. The heat burns into your body, tearing you down bit by bit. There is no shade, no shelter from the sun. The earth soaks up the warmth like an oven and spits it back at you when you come to the end of the day. A clinging, soaking humidity that wraps itself in a sickly blanket around your body.
These are the skinniest Marines I have ever seen, and I’ve been in some rough places with Marines, like Ramadi in Iraq, where more Americans died than any other part of the country.
But here, I stare in amazement — and some horror — at the uniforms hanging off their lean bodies. There isn’t an inch of excess anywhere. Every uniform is worn thin and faded, hanging off wily frames that still manage to haul over a hundred pounds of gear and weapons and patrol for miles.

This is a farce, a dangerous, ugly farce.

Even says voter registrant Britney Spears…
From “Toxic“:

It’s getting late
To give you up
I took a sip
From my devil cup
Slowly
It’s taking over me…

Never mind the ancient Greeks, the British and the Soviets — Oops…I did it again.

UPDATE
From Gareth Porter today (8/19/09) at IPS:

As early as last May, the country’s independent election monitoring organisation, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), had documented a suite of voter registration practices that laid the groundwork for massive voter fraud.
FEFA observers, who observed voter registration in 194 of 400 voting registration centres in four provinces during one stage of the process, found that nearly 20 percent of the voters registered, on average, were under age – in many cases as young as 12 years old.
It is now estimated that 17 million voter registration cards have been issued, which means that nearly 3.5 million cards may have been issued to children.
FEFA observers also found rampant distribution of multiple voting cards. During the third phase of registration, they observed at least four incidents of such abuses in 85 percent of the centres. The voter registration staff was seen handing out cards even before applicants had been registered.
In one case, the FEFA observers saw about 500 voting cards being given to a single individual.

The Afghan election is whacked.

Conventional Crimes

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Today 60 years ago — Aug. 12, 1949 — was the fourth installment of what has been termed the “Geneva Conventions,” a series of documents meant not to stop war (what piece of paper could do that?), or define weaponry, but to set humanitarian standards for treatment of war victims.

The first three ‘conventions’ — in 1864, 1906 and 1929 — were all about soldiers and war itself.
In 1949, after WWII and the wholesale massacre of civilians, the aim was to set guidelines for the innocent, and the not-so-innocent caught in modern conflicts.
Everything was fairly okay for nearly half a century until George Jr. and his boys arrived.

(Illustration found here).

The gathering in 1929 covered POWs, but part of the 1949 session was also about those captured during war — how to handle prisoners and what can and cannot be done to them.
These guidelines are now accepted as the fabric of modern warfare: In 1993 the United Nations Security Council adopted a report from the Secretary General and a Commission of Experts which concluded beyond doubt that the Geneva Conventions had passed into the body of customary international law that is binding on non-signatory parties whenever they engage in armed conflicts.
In June 2006, 194 countries had signed on to the ‘conventions,’ including the US.

The Bush boys and their ass-climbers, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, claim the conventions did not apply to the US Wide World War on Terror until a Supreme Court ruling ruled the Geneva Conventions were indeed the law — intact the whole time, since from Sept. 11, 2001, and even before.

“The Geneva Convention did not apply, until 2005, to the war on terror,” Graham said.
“So I can’t conceive of a statute that you could prosecute anyone under because their endeavor was not to commit a crime but to look at the law and come up with aggressive interrogation techniques to get information from an enemy that we all thought was coming after us again.”

Fear is a liar’s best friend.

An incompetent, contradictory liar with a mean streak, however, is something else.
In a memo signed by George Jr., dated Feb. 7, 2002, all those people captured fighting the US anywhere on the globe were not covered under the Geneva Conventions, and not only that, but with a huge-ass tongue-in-cheek smirk: “the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”

In an attempt to put some humanity into war, an inferno of insanity within itself, is a somewhat noble, though futile gesture to curb the excesses of people killing other people and taking their shit.
The history of the Geneva Conventions has its source in nursing and the care of those survivors of war, so its intent is to keep the killing and maiming down to a minimum.
And then the George Jr./Dick Cheney/Don Rumsfeld tabernacle trio decided the US with its armed might could do about what it pleased with just about anybody — and tried to skirt the international conventions on how man should treat their fellow man.
The 1949 document is actually four documents (coupled with what’s called Additional Protocols, which cover non-international conflicts), hence the Geneva Conventions — the first protects those wounded or sick at sea, the second for those wounded or sick on land, and the third (and most-important to George Jr.) applies to the handling of prisoners of war.
And the fourth (adapted in 1949) affords protection to civilians, even those in occupied land — the “collateral damage” so popular now among the drones.
A common convention to all four is a document called “Common Article 3” — which covers war not on a vast scale, good-old-fashioned civil wars, or some internal spat that spills over into a nearby country — and brings the conventions into line with the vast amount of warfare currently being conducted on the planet.
The rules are fairly simple, just be humane in the killing: It specifically prohibits murder, mutilation, torture, cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment, the taking of hostages and unfair trial.
Read a good article on the Geneva Conventions here.

George Jr. hated Article 3.
From a New York Times editorial three years ago this week:

Unfortunately, like many of the things the administration said about Guantánamo Bay, this was not true. The president did not intend to follow the Geneva Conventions, and in some vital respects, he still doesn’t, despite a Supreme Court ruling that the prisoners merit those protections.
…
The Bush administration objects to the clause in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

This standard has been followed for more than a half-century by almost 190 countries, including the United States. The War Crimes Act of 1996, passed by a Republican Congress, makes it a felony to violate the Geneva Conventions. But the Bush administration authorized techniques to handle and interrogate prisoners that clearly break the rules — like prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures, long periods in stress positions, strapping prisoners to metal contraptions and force-feeding them.
In fact, the Geneva standard is more specific than the shocks-the-conscience standard.
And a vast majority of Guantánamo inmates are not terrorists.
In fact, many do not appear guilty of anything, not even fighting United States troops in Afghanistan.

And here today, is President Obama slacking?

Bubba’s ‘lovely thing’

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Bill Clinton hasn’t ever meant much to me, other than being a greasy political animal with bad taste, thus seemingly just an inadvertent knuckle-head.

(Illustration found here).

This past week, however, the old bubba-boy seemed to have pulled off a neat turn-of-the-hand, if the appearance is true, by bringing two US journalists home after they’d been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for “illegal entry” into North Korea.
He even used a private jet of rich bubba-friend, Hollywood producer Stephen Bing, to make the trip to Pyongyang and back — this might be Clinton’s best moment yet.

The story has drama and a wondrous finale.
In public Thursday, Clinton had to fend off the politics, but conveyed the seemingly essence of the “private humanitarian mission.”
In the last graphs of the Washington Post story on the press conference:

Clinton described a “deeply emotional” first encounter with Lee and Ling. He said they were “delightful” on the trip home to Los Angeles by private plane, so happy and excited they couldn’t sleep. Lee talked frequently about being reunited with her young daughter, he said.
The two journalists ate huevos rancheros for breakfast when the private plane stopped at an American base in Japan, Clinton said, and were careful to measure their food intake because they had been on a radically different diet for almost five months.
“It was basically a lovely thing,” he said.

On this one, the bubba-boy put a lot of feathers in a lot of people’s hats, including his own.

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