Afghan Reality
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In all the bullshit noise this past week — even from yesterday’s ‘secular high holy day‘ along with the Three-Ring-Three-Stooges GOP political antics — there’s still folks dying in Afghanistan.
A war now beyond the decade limit, and from all indications, going really, really bad.
An example of the dumb-ass futility of it all: An American soldier shot and killed an Afghan guard at a base in the country’s north, apparently because the American thought the guard was about to attack him, Afghan police said on Sunday.
This war is so messed up, allies are shooting each other — the US GI’s trigger finger was in response to the Afghan military/police people killing NATO troops.
(Illustration found here).
Last month, an Afghan soldier shot and killed four unarmed French troops at a base in eastern Afghanistan, and the whole war operation is worse than deadly.
Civilian deaths increased again in 2011 — up 8 percent from 2010, which saw 2,790 deaths, and an increase of 25 percent from 2009, when 2,412 civilians were killed.
From McClatchy on Saturday:
Mir Ahmad Joyenda, deputy director of the Kabul-based Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, and a former member of Parliament, said the rise in civilian deaths reported by the U.N. was a reminder that ordinary Afghans were at risk of violence “from morning to night.”
“Nobody’s safe, nobody’s secure,” said Joyenda. “Everyone is suffering.”
The country’s f*ucked.
And now one US solider has opened up something closer to the truth.
Lt. Col Daniel L. Davis has described a reality on the ground considerably inconsistent with the official statements the military presents to political leadership or the American public (via antiwar.com).
Davis posted a document with Armed Forces Journal on his observations on the reality of the other side of the Afghan war.
A few snips:
I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.
I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people.
Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.
From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.
…
On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.
Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.
“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked.
“Do you form up a squad and go after them?
Do you periodically send out harassing patrols?
What do you do?”
As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression.
Then he laughed.
“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”
According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints.
In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.
…
To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.
In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province.
Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier.
One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful?
How do I do that?”
One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’
Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’
They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”
…
If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable.
Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public.
But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress.
I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.
Read the whole post — might piss you off.
Also read the New York Times story on Davis.
And this reader’s comment from another NYT piece on Davis highlights the historical significance of the US military’s continued amnesia:
Those of us who are old enough remember General Westmoreland’s glowing reports on progress in Vietnam right up until we airlifted people out of Saigon by helicopter.
Reality ain’t no bowl game.
Pissing Bullshit
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Some of the righteous posturing:
“…utterly deplorable…” — U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
“…wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history…” — Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos
“…deplorable, reprehensible and unacceptable…” — White House spokesman Jay Carney
“…absolutely inconsistent with American values…” — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
(Illustration found here).
Of course, these clowns were commenting on a video splayed online this week of some US Marines apparently in Afghanistan taking a piss on some dead Taliban, but all these high-sounding forms of indignation are in reality just a mule-shit-pile of hypocrisy.
All this comes on the 10th anniversary of Gitmo opening — the US has its own Gulag and its own horror despite a so-called 200 years of freedom and piety.
The US the last decade has done absolutely nothing but piss on the entire planet.
From Gawker:
War is horrible.
War is sickening.
Wars started for supremely righteous causes are just as horrible and sickening in their consequences as wars started for less than righteous causes.
Politicians who sit in office chairs and start wars and wave flags as young men and women go off to kill and die and be psychologically and emotionally damaged for life are the most sickening of all.
Politicians start wars and are rewarded with an appearance on weekend talk shows and Very Respectable Discussions with Very Respectable media figures and jokes at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and appearances on Leno and ghostwritten self-glorifying memoirs and lavishly catered fundraising parties with corporate executives.
They should be rewarded with outrage.
They should be rewarded with scorn.
Starting a war is a monstrous, monstrous crime against humanity, as we know when it begins that no matter how cleanly it is conducted it will result in thousands upon thousands of bullets smashing men’s skulls and arms and legs blown off by shrapnel and mothers and children incinerated by high explosives.
And every extra day that a war is perpetuated unnecessarily is a crime anew.
The most-eloquent comes from the always-eloquent Arthur Silber, who touches upon the truth that will almost never be spoken:
The ruling class of the United States pisses on the entire world, just as it pisses on every human being who is not favored by privilege and power.
…
Rank these items in terms of the disgust you think they merit:
-The systematic destruction of a series of nations and their peoples over a period of many decades.
-The murder of more than a million innocent people in a criminal war.
-The ongoing murders of people who do not (and most commonly could not) threaten the U.S., in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and on and on and on — in 120 countries around the globe.
-The claim that the U.S. Government has the “right” to murder anyone in the world for whatever reason it chooses — a “right,” I remind you, which the U.S. Government has actualized.
-Pissing on three dead bodies.
Read Sibler’s entire post, most-emotional.
And this is true — the pissing comes from the top.
From the LA Times and the power-elite in 2006 having a good chuckle at the good life:
Instead, concerns about a housing bust were largely dismissed by most officials, according to meeting transcripts released Thursday.
“We believe that, absent some large, negative shock to perceptions about employment and earned income, the effects of the expected cooling in housing prices are going to be modest,” said Timothy F. Geithner, the current Treasury secretary, who then was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
When Geithner was finished, Bernanke asked, to a round of laughter, “Anything to report on co-op prices in Manhattan?”
“As in many cases, I am not sure what you can take from the anecdote, but I guess some people say that you see a little of the froth dissipating,” Geithner replied.
“But I don’t think the adjustment is acute.
“If you see hiring at the New York Fed go up substantially in the market, that will be a good leading indicator of housing prices reverting somewhat,” he said, prompting more laughter.
A year later, the financial shit hits the fan — millions of jobs, homes, lives lost as the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression slapped 99 percent of the world’s peoples right up side the face.
Pissed off yet?
Couple of Dicks Named Rick
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
On occasion being ‘under the weather’ can cut some of life’s tangled problems loose as when one is sick, nothing else matters but being sick.
So, I paid scant attention to the two neurotic GOP debates over the weekend — these guys are after blood, and they don’t care whose blood, just so long as it ain’t theirs — and even if the New Hampshire primary is tomorrow, Republicans have got to be some of dumbest people around.
Most-likely the biggest and most-ignorant assholes out there are the two Ricks, as in, Santorum and Perry.
Both are way-unstable, and both really don’t have much real sense.
(Illustration found here).
Of course, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are pounding on each other about all kinds of ugly shit — both are as worthless as million-dollar bill, but they keep hacking at what they claim is reality.
But the two Ricks, well, they’re special…
First, let’s visit Santorum.
In one of the great twitching efforts, the boy just makes shit up — which most do, but Santorum is stupid about it.
During a campaign stop on Saturday, he was asked why he dislikes African-Americans.
From Think Progress:
While speaking about welfare reform last week, Santorum was quoted as saying, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”
The candidate now denies that he said “black,” claiming instead that he said “blah.”
WTF — ‘blah’ peoples?
Of the two Ricks, Santorum is the worse — a hypocrite about abortion, an ‘earmark’ hero and whoever supports the little shit needs to get back on the meds.
He had trouble all over New Hampshire this past weekend, responding to normal questions from seemingly normal folks — Santorum is one scary sonofabitch.
And then on the clod-kicker Rick Perry.
He claims the US should have never left Iraq, but since we’re out of that broken country, the US military should re-invade.
“We’re going to see Iran, in my opinion, move back in at literally the speed of light.
They’re going to move back in, and all of the work we’ve done — every young man that has lost his life in that country will have been for nothing.
Because we’ve got a president that does not understand what’s going on in that region,” Perry said.
And Politico adds this: Perry’s fellow Republicans declined to join him in calling for a return of U.S. troops to Iraqi soil. Perry strategist Nelson Warfield emails to take issue with the original headline of this post, “Perry: Re-invade Iraq,” explaining: “Rick Perry wants to establish a strategic presence in Iraq like we have in hot spots around the world. That’s not an invasion, that’s common sense.”
Maybe, GOP common sense.
Oil Nerves
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Economy, Energy, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In some political breathing room before the New Hampshire primary next week, another chance to check out how the great oil wars are performing.
Yesterday, I sloshed another $20 worth of gas into my old Jeep with the pump price at the neighborhood Union 76 remaining at $3.83 a gallon for regular — same as it was on my last fuel visit.
In all the saber rattling in the Persian Gulf, US motorists stayed away from the gas pump in record numbers last week.
Post holiday denial or what, demand dropped 14 percent: Drivers bought 8.16 million barrels a day of gasoline in the week ended Dec. 30, down from 9.46 million the week before, according to MasterCard’s SpendingPulse report. MasterCard’s data goes back to July 2004.
(Illustration found here).
Despite all that, pump prices are still 21-cents more than this time last year.
And it don’t stop there, according gasbuddy.com, we could see a near $4-a-gallon pump price as the weather warms — or worse if the shit hits the fan with Iran.
Just the noise of possible Persian Gulf trouble move the loins of oil.
From liveoilprices: In London, Brent crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $112.88 a barrel, 15.37 GMT today on the ICE Futures Exchange.
And WTI: US Light crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $102.65 a barrel, 19.05 GMT today, or 3.9 percent higher than session open this morning.
This past weekend saw a a couple of nasty offshoots — on Saturday President Obama signed into law sanctions against Iran’s central bank (which controls much of that country’s oil revenue), while on Sunday, Iran conducted missile tests in the Strait of Hormuz, where bad doo-doo dominates.
And that’s some nasty shit, which could spread way-quickly to even my Union 76 gas pump.
According to the New York Times yesterday, if action blockades the strait the price of oil could skyrocket 50 percent within days.
Despite all kinds of deterrents to such foolishness, hot heads in battle are at minimum bat-shit crazy:
“I fear we may be blundering toward a crisis nobody wants,”said Helima Croft, senior geopolitical strategist at Barclays Capital.
“There is a peril of engaging in brinksmanship from all sides.”
…
“To close the Strait of Hormuz would be an act of war against the whole world,” said Sadad Ibrahim Al-Husseini, former head of exploration and development at Saudi Aramco.
“You just can’t play with the global economy and assume that nobody is going to react.”
…
“My guess is this is a lot of threats,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, “but there is no certainty in this kind of situation.”
The double winners/losers of the Iowa sideshow this week, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, both would bomb the shit out of Iran without as much as blinking an eye; Santorum even going so far as “treating them like Al Qaeda.”
Well beyond the Mayan bullshit, 2012 has all the earmarks of one nasty roller-coaster ride — does oil and blood mix?
Fog of Truth — ‘Bugsplat’
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
As the new year grinds on, politics has taken the edge off the nearly unnoticed pullout of US troops from Iraq, ending a segment in one of the most-horrible of episodes.
And the most lied about military adventure in US history.
“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.”
– US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, June 5, 2008
Despite the obvious, none of George Jr.’s entourage has ever even been threatened with criminal prosecution.
(Illustration found here).
In a new view of the Iraqi horror is the word, “bugsplat:” One definition is a software for scanning your computer for registry errors; another is the lack of humanity in warfare.
The US military’s invasion was a nasty example of the latter.
In fact, ‘Bugsplat‘ was the name of a computer program in 2003 used to determine collateral damage inflicted by American bombs.
HaHaHaHa — bugsplat, anyone/anything squashed on the US windshield.
Robert Koehler took a look at this line of bullshit yesterday morning at the Baltimore Sun:
“But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians,” journalist Allan Nairn told Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now!” interview last year.
“The Pentagon has a word for that, too,” he went on.
“They call it ‘bugsplat.’
In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid.
On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that 22 of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat — that is, more than 30 civilian deaths per raid.
Franks said, ‘Go ahead. We’re doing all 22.’”
And this is the foundation of our national security.
Koehler concludes:
Project Bugsplat is the name of every war, at least from the planners’ point of view.
A winnable war is waged from above, invisibly, with godlike impunity.
Such wars, especially in today’s political order, cannot be effectively opposed with acts of equally brutal counterforce; they can only be prolonged.
“Bugsplat” is a term of ultimate disrespect and indifference, and it begins with a state of mind.
The global Occupy movement, with its humane and nonviolent core certainty, is tipping the balance. Finally it comes down to this: Occupy consciousness.
Without such, death comes by indifference.
This indifference can be applied to the US MSM — news organizations who have turned its eyes and ears away from exposing a rot now fully grown within the American soul.
Watch and listen here to the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter’s emotional outrage at the Iraqi war — he expresses horror at his own country (the UK) for being involved with such a crime.
And despite the US supposedly being gone, the blood still flows – from Bloomberg on a new report from London-based Iraq Body Count:
“The rate of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led coalition forces has declined steadily from 2009, while the rate caused by Iraqi state forces has increased,” the group said in an e-mailed news release.
Recent trends point to a “persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar rate for years to come,” Iraq Body Count said.
“Time will tell whether the withdrawal of U.S. forces will have an effect on casualty levels,” the group said.
The US media, however, has been most quiet about any bad vibes coming off a war that tore apart the world’s thin fabric and left a country in a position beyond misery – a verbal snapshot of one Iraqi woman seems to sum it up: “Today is better than tomorrow.”
And tomorrow is the Iowa caucuses where the war party starts its machine rolling — horror of ugly horrors, though Newt Gingrich whined and took a bugsplat: “No, I feel ‘Romney-boated.”
The dogs of war fight amongst themselves — bug splatting everybody.