“…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?

“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.

“She is certainly one of the people you would look at,” he responded.
“I am a great admirer of hers and she was a remarkable reform governor of Alaska, she’s somebody who I think brings a great deal to the possibility of helping in government and that would be one of the possibilities.”

(Illustration found here).

Anyone hearing that babble would blow chunks in the direction of the twitchy, no-brainer Rick Santorum, who claimed that poverty comes from being gay — one needs to marry in the “normal” way because then there’s only a small, small chance you’ll end up poor: “If you graduate from high school, you get married before you have children, and of course you work — that’s sort of a given, you have to work — you do those three things, there’s a 2 percent chance you’ll be in poverty.”
Of course, twitch Rick has it back-ass backwards.

Michele Bachmann is a laugh, and she’s so hilarious, her state chairman suddenly defected to support Ron Paul, just hours after appearing at a campaign event with her.
Hahaha from one Iowa voter: When asked if she’d support Bachmann this time around, she said hesitantly, “Yea, I guess. I would support her.”
Love those strong endorsements.

And Mitt Romney went history — from HuffPost: “When the president’s characterization of our economy was, ‘It could be worse,’ it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” said Romney.
The DNC responded:

“It is actually laughable that the ‘Quarter-Billion-Dollar Man’ would call President Obama out of touch — and use the example of a French monarch to make the point,” DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell said in a statement to The Huffington Post on Thursday evening.
“This is the same guy who joked that he was ‘unemployed,’ offered a $10,000 bet as casually as one might buy a cup of coffee, and said ‘corporations are people.’
He’s also the same person who, as a former corporate buyout specialist for Bain Capital, made his fortune firing thousands of workers, cutting benefits, bankrupting American companies and outsourcing jobs overseas.
He’s the one who won’t release his tax returns — most likely because we would all learn that he pays a lower tax rate than middle class wage-earners.
Laughable.”

Keep laughing and laughing.
Politics is so full of shit it’s hard to find the toilet.
This is only the GOP and there’s not a one who’s worth any salt of US history and they act as if the world revolves their words.
The US in 2011 is not all that funny.

Dear George Carlin nailed:

Forget the politicians.
They are irrelevant.
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.
You don’t.
You have no choice!
You have OWNERS!
They OWN YOU.
They own everything.
They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations.
They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.

Now try to giggle.

When bad shit hits the fan — even a zombie apocalypse — the president, military types and other important folks will be saved to carry on while the rest of us run for the burning hills: The $223 million aircraft is outfitted with an electromagnetic pulse shield to protect its 165,000 pounds of advanced electronics. Thermo-radiation shields also protect the plane in the event of a nuclear strike.

Nice ride in an era of gloomy doom-speak.

(Illustration found here).

Scary is the events unfolding now in North Korea — even as everybody on the planet have their panties in a bind over Iran’s so-called nuclear ambitions, another way-more serious situation lies via Pyongyang — and the fright is the secrecy.
Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket without anybody outside a few North Koreans knowing about it, and all despite billions of dollars worth of all kinds of high-tech gear.
From the New York Times:

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.
Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea.
Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist.
The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.
…
“ ‘Oh, my God!’ was the first word that came to my mind when I saw the North Korean anchorwoman’s black dress and mournful look,” said a government official who monitored the North Korean announcement.

What bullshit — the Korean peninsula is a tender box waiting for a match while the rest of the world sits in the dark.
The Washington Post: “It is scary how little we really know,” said one administration official who closely follows the region and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. “I don’t think you can overstate the concern.”

When one takes a truthful view of the world nowadays, there’s much to be alarmed about and gloomy, but it’s only a respite before the doom arrives, and it will.
According to all the data, we (the planet) can’t avoid a coming horror — between climate change, energy depletion, worldwide financial collapse, and just plain old war, amongst a host of lesser calamities — although apparently the world sits willingly in the dark.

Last weekend, the UK’s The Guardian ran a detailed piece on this age of destruction — titled, “The news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?” — and presented all the gloomy evidence to support a coming implosion/explosion of civilization.
A few key points:

“The apocalypse,” wrote the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1978, “is aphrodisiac, nightmare, a commodity like any other … warning finger and scientific forecast … rallying cry … superstition … a joke … an incessant production of our fantasy … one of the oldest ideas of the human species.
Its periodic ebb and flow … has accompanied utopian thought like a shadow.”
…
This autumn, as the estimated world population passed seven billion, an earlier prophet of doom, Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 60s and 70s bestseller The Population Bomb and professor of population studies at Stanford University in California, resurfaced in the British press to warn that demand for the planet’s resources would soon decisively exceed supply.
“Civilisations,” he reminded this newspaper, “have collapsed before.”
…
In July, the word “apocalypse” appeared 60 times in British national newspapers.
In August, 70 times.
In September, 92 times.
In November, 100 times.
Usually calm Guardian columnists have started to ponder armageddon.
After the chancellor George Osborne’s bleak autumn statement on the economy, Zoe Williams discussed the pros and cons of food hoarding.
In November, Simon Jenkins declared: “Today’s [economic and political] predicament is unquestionably worse than the 1970s.”
The same month, Ian Jack wrote: “Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable.”
…
Meanwhile, for westerners who instinctively look to other countries or big political ideas for inspiration, the possibilities seem to be withering.
The US appears economically declining and politically dysfunctional.
The EU is damaged and possibly disintegrating.
The social democracy of Europe’s postwar golden decades seems unable to modernise itself.
The ability of Thatcherism and its international variants and descendants to rescue countries from national decline — if that ability ever truly existed — seems to have run its course.
Žižek argues that over the past five years the west has suffered a form of bereavement.
To describe the resulting mindset, he uses the famous “five stages of grief” model devised in 1969 by the Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The current combination of public doominess and desperate-looking political summits certainly seems to feature the middle three.
Gray sums up the prevailing mood more succinctly: “People are afraid – for good, practical, experientially based reasons.”

The entire post covers all the ugly angles.

A nagging truth, however, is there’s not much the average-guy-on-the-street can do about it.
As I sit here in the comfort of my apartment on a clear, pre-dawn morning, the world outside is quiet and still — I can hear the slight roar of the Pacific Ocean — and the coming horror seems so far remote and so Horn of Africa.
Time is a much flexible measure, although time never changes, slows or changes direction.
A downer indeed if one doesn’t have the ears to hear.

“Holy shit it’s only Wednesday.”
– George Carlin

(Illustration found here).

In surfing the news this morning, a lot of Dookie spills off the rim of the Net, but the world’s bat-shit crazy goings-on continues unabated, although with a flourish of zero finesse.

One of the titular events that would drive a Wednesday’s slurping up a quart of Jack Daniels, is major bullshitter Leon Panetta’s double-lying bullshit on the happy-wonderful state of the horror of Afghanistan.
Panetta, the US defense honcho, was in country to spread goodwill via bullshitting, in this particular case, to American troops at a base near the Afghan border with Pakistan.
From Aljazeera English:

“We’re moving in the right direction and we’re winning this very tough conflict,” he said.
…
Panetta told reporters that Washington would continue to back Pakistani efforts to secure its border regions.
“This has been a difficult and complicated relationship as all of you know, but it is an important relationship, and it is one that we have to continue to work at,” he said.
The dispute between the US and Pakistan is also beginning to raise some concern from the Afghani government, Smith reported.
Panetta also played down concerns about Afghanistan’s future, saying 2011 had been a “turning point” for the country, citing lower levels of violence and the successful turnover of portions of the country to Afghan control.
“Clearly I think Afghanistan is on a much better track in terms of our ability to eventually transition to an Afghanistan that can govern and secure itself,” he said.

However, in the same story:

Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith reported from Kabul that while the US and its allies are arguing that progress has been made ahead of the 2015 withdrawal, UN statistics that violence has peaked in 2011 contradict this assertion.
“In the east of Afghanistan, NATO’s own figures say there’s been a 21 per cent increase in what it calls enemy attacks,” he said.

However — again!
Leon makes no mention of the possibility of Afghanistan might spiral into a similar situation Iraq blundered through five years ago — the horror of sectarian violence.
Especially after this week’s suicide bombing of a shrine near Kabul.

At least 56 people were killed in a blast in Kabul on the Shia holy day of Ashoura. A second near-simultaneous strike killed four people and injured 21 in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif as a convoy of Shias was driving past.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the attacks but suspicion centred on Sunni armed groups based in neighbouring Pakistan.
“Without any doubt, the enemies of Afghanistan are trying to separate the Afghan people,” Karzai said in a statement.
He did not blame any specific group, but when he uses the phrase “enemies of Afghanistan,” it is widely believed that he is referring to countries, including Pakistan, that he suspects are backing fighters in Afghanistan.
Until now, the decade-long Afghan war has largely been spared sectarian violence.

Although the US (and its NATO allies) are supposed to be out of the country in two years, there’s considerable evidence, some troops will remain until maybe 2025 — the Afghan war may never have an end.

A couple of other events seem noteworthy this morning — horrible violence in places that usually don’t encounter such things — one in Belgium, the other in Italy.
First, in Liege, Belgium, where a guy  lobbed hand grenades and fired indiscriminately into crowds near a Christmas market, killing four people, wounding more than 100 and creating panic before killing himself.
Police later discovered a woman’s body at a storage facility used by the shooter/lobber, which raised the death toll to six — including an 18-month-old baby.

Meanwhile, in Florence, Italy, another guy opened fire in a crowed market, killing two Senegalese traders and injuring three others — this guy also apparently killed himself later, his body found in an underground car-park.
The mayor of Florence: “These are the actions of a lone killer – a lucid, mad and racist killer,” Matteo Renzi said, adding that such behaviour was out of character for the city and had shocked it to its core.
No doubt.

And Carlin’s note from above was aimed at drinking booze:  “And this should go without saying. That’s why I’m going to say it: Drinking and driving don’t mix.  Do your drinking early in the morning and get it out of the way.  Then go driving while the visibility is still good.”

Oh, yeah.

Two prominent senators want Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to steer talks on an international weapons ban away from a plan they say would harm U.S. defense firms that manufacture cluster weapons.

The assholes are (of course) GOP assholes — Jon Kyl and Richard Lugar — and they want to make sure US-built cluster bombs keep on killing most-indiscriminately.

(Illustration found here).

And make no mistake about it, the US is forcing the world to once again allow the engagement of one of the most-nefarious of weapons — cluster munitions just keeps on killing for years and years, a quick-busting, maiming, killing snake-in-the-grass (or ruin).
From an opinion/commentary in the UK’s Independent:

Britain used to be one of the leading lights on the issue of cluster bombs.
Following the lead on landmines of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Foreign Office proved one of the main movers of the ground-breaking 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, helping to persuade 22 of 28 NATO allies to sign up to the agreement to ban their use.
It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to find that the Government has been backsliding in the face of determined opposition to the ban by the exporters of these deadly weapons, led by Washington.
The US, along with Russia, China, South Korea, India and Pakistan, have come up with an alternative, and unpalatable, proposal for a meeting in Geneva later this month.
Forget a total ban, they propose, instead agree a watered-down version as an amendment to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons from the early 1980s.
Under this, countries will be allowed to use cluster bombs as long as they are of more recent manufacture (after 1980) and have a failure rate of less than 1 per cent or a self-destruct mechanism.
…
In this case, the only response can be: no.
Compromise is neither right nor possible.
Cluster bombs are an abomination.
They are indiscriminate, hurting civilians as much as combatants.
They can lie around for years as unexploded ordnance to endanger the limbs and lives of children and ordinary civilians.
They are based on a principle of maximum harm that belies any hope of restraint or humanity.

Hard to fathom a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize would allow horrible shit like this to happen.
But…

And although the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, has called the new press on the cluster-bomb ban, “…a step backwards, it is a much lower standard,” the US is seeking consensus next week during a big pow-wow in Geneva by envoys from 114 countries.

Cluster bombs are really, really most horrifying, and, because of the way they operate, they are also called “dumb bombs.”
See a good video here on cluster munitions.
In nut form, cluster bombs are little hellish pellets released by a big mother bomb dropped from an aircraft or fired from a cannon, and these little pills are supposed explode, but most just plop themselves on the ground, scattered about to kill later.
Especially children, and farmers.
From the Cluster Munition Coalition website:

Air-dropped or ground-launched, they cause two major humanitarian problems and risks to civilians.
First, their widespread dispersal means they cannot distinguish between military targets and civilians so the humanitarian impact can be extreme, especially when the weapon is used in or near populated areas.
Many submunitions fail to detonate on impact and become de facto antipersonnel mines killing and maiming people long after the conflict has ended.
These duds are more lethal than antipersonnel mines; incidents involving submunition duds are much more likely to cause death than injury.

Last year, The Convention on Cluster Munitions banned the stockpiling, use and transfer of virtually all existing cluster bombs, and also provides for the clearing up of unexploded munitions — the treaty went into effect without the signature of the US, Russia and China.
And despite the US being an asshole, the ban appears to be working.
From Human Rights Watch after a meeting of the coalition this past September:

“This week’s meeting has shown how the cluster bomb ban is not only working, it is powering ahead in bringing more states on board and in destroying cluster munitions. The US and other nations should join them,” said Steve Goose, director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch and co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC).
“Every cluster munition destroyed represents future lives saved.”
…
“This extraordinarily rapid destruction of stockpiles just one year into the life of the convention demonstrates the strong commitment of governments to urgently tackle this issue,” said Goose.

Except in the good-old US or A.

And these devices kill for generations — in Cambodia just last week: The unexploded devices — including anti-personnel landmines, anti-vehicle weapons and cluster munitions — were found within a five square kilometre radius of the school and some as close as 100 metres from areas where the school children and villagers frequent on a daily basis.
In a more-recent war zone: A shepherd narrowly survived after a cluster bomb left over from the July-August 2006 war with Israel exploded in the southern town of Shebaa Sunday morning wounding and killing several goats, reported Lebanon’s National News Agency.
Happily, it was just goats, but still…

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
“To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.
“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
– Walter Cronkite, February 27, 1968

Uncle Walter could have most-easily been talking about Afghanistan, where yesterday 12 US peoples were killed in Kabul when a suicide bomber struck a vehicle in a NATO military convoy.
Four Afghans, including two students, were also killed.

In the US, at least a baker’s dozen of mothers will be weeping in unimaginable sorrow — a continuing grief that apparently has no end, even as a big majority of Americans now oppose the Afghan war, a conflict which started right, but has become a beyond-Halloween horror show.

(Illustration of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman I‘ found here).

The Afghan war has morphed into a terrible stalemate, the dying of more US military service people will continue unabated if the war continues on its current path, and there ain’t no indication it won’t.
According to the CNN story, four US GIs and eight US contractors were killed in the blast — first reports told of five American soldiers dying, but later released word one of those was Canadian.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the incident — a suicide driver/bomber drove a Toyota packed with 1,800 pounds of explosives into an armored bus, called a RhinoRunner (typically a 13-ton vehicle described by its builder as “The Toughest Bus on Planet Earth”).
Well, not so much against a Toyota packed with exploding shit.
And WTF this: Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Kabul, said the incident is indicative of an attack where a suicide bomber will “drive up and down the roads waiting for a target.”
Apparently, an opportunity kind of approach.

Also on Saturday, 10 Australian soldiers were fired upon by a trainee Afghan soldier in Kandahar Province, killing three and wounding seven — an interpreter was also killed.
The shooting occurred at a morning parade, and despite it all, the shooter was said to be a rogue soldier, yet he had been in the army for three years.
Meanwhile, one incident didn’t pan out when a female suicide bomber was stopped outside a branch of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in northeaster Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan, and then detonated her package, injuring five people, two civilians and three security officials — she was the only fatality and had awaited for hours at a nearby female-only bus stop before attacking.
A casual-like oddity, huh?
And this was just Saturday.

The whole theater of war has become infected — some ‘major‘ incidents:

– Sept. 20: An insurgent with a bomb wrapped in his turban assassinates former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading a government effort to broker peace with the Taliban.
The explosion kills four bodyguards and also wounds of a key presidential adviser working to lure Taliban fighters off the battlefield.
— Sept. 13: Taliban insurgents fire rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other buildings, killing seven Afghans in the coordinated daylight attack.
No embassy or NATO staff members were hurt.
— Aug. 19: Taliban suicide bombers storm the British Council, the U.K.’s international cultural relations body, killing eight people during an eight-hour firefight as two English language teachers and their bodyguard hid in a locked panic room on the anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain.
— Aug. 6: A CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashes in eastern Wardak province after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing 30 U.S. special operation troops, a translator, and seven Afghan commandos.
— June 29: Nine insurgents armed with explosive vests, rifles and rocket launchers storm the InterContinental Hotel in Kabul, killing at least 12 people and holding off NATO and Afghan forces for five hours.
…
— Feb. 26: Suicide attackers strike two residential hotels in Kabul, killing 20 people, including seven Indian nationals.

And in September, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of US training for the Afghan military reported (from Wired‘s Danger Room blog): Two years of an accelerated effort to train Afghans to take over that fight, at an annual cost of $6 billion. And not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units.
Which would explain why the guy who shot and killed the Australians, supposedly a three-year veteran, was still considered a trainee.
Not only that, 1.4 percent of Afghan cops and 2.3 percent of Afghan soldiers walk off the job every month, which led Caldwell to say that if “left unchecked [attrition] could undo much of the progress made to date.”

Instead of truth, US peoples get bullshit.
From Time magazine:

Last week, the Pentagon sent Congress its required semi-annual assessment that said a “firm foundation” exists to shift responsibility for defending the country from foreign to Afghan troops.
“After five consecutive years where enemy-initiated attacks and overall violence increased sharply each year (example, up 88 percent in 2010 over 2009),” the report noted, “such attacks began to decrease in May 2011 compared to the previous year and continue to decline.”

In the latest CNN/ORC International Poll released Friday, 63 percent of US respondents opposed the war:

But that opposition is not a reflection of the original decision to get involved in Afghanistan a decade ago,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
“It’s what Afghanistan has turned into in the subsequent decade that has soured Americans on the war effort there.”
The survey indicates that 57 percent say it was not a mistake to send military forces to Afghanistan in October 2001, several weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
But according to the poll, 58 percent now say that the war in Afghanistan has turned into a situation like the U.S. faced in Vietnam, six points higher than the number who felt that way a year ago.

The horror is that ordinary US peoples can’t do a thing about it.

Nowadays, we’re not as naive and ignorant as we were in February 1968, when Cronkite gave his grim assessment of the Vietnam war — LBJ’s supposedly infamous retort: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America” — but then again, there wasn’t a Fox News in them days either.
The situation in Vietnam had been highly-altered in 1968 by the Tet Offensive, which was just winding down when Uncle Walter rendered his editorial, and had changed the landscape of how US peoples viewed the grinding conflict.
From Gallop polling via PBS, Americans responded to the question, “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”
The results — in August 1961, 61 percent had said “no,” it was not a mistake, and by February 1968, that number had dropped to 42 percent, and by May 1971, only 28 percent.
And most-telling from those polls, however, was from a secondary question of ‘Proportion classifying themselves as “hawks”‘ — before the Tet offensive, the amount was 60 percent, after Tet, them hawks had flown down to 41 percent.
Disaster compounded by lies will change attitudes.

And with that current CNN poll of 63 percent of respondents opposing the Afghan war, it led to UK’s ultra-right-wing The Daily Mail dishing President Obama for both the war, and, the floundering health care system, comparing the two to a horrific 2012 election: It is difficult to imagine the re-election of a president whose No. 1 foreign policy and No. 1 domestic policy both flopped while unemployment rose.
Of course, no one on the right ever, never brings up the Iraqi war, which actually doomed the Afghan effort and put the US in the quagmire it finds itself today.

Now he’s afraid US troops don’t love him anymore: “They hadn’t seen me and they hadn’t seen me with the troops,” he said. “So therefore I am using mountain biking and golf to stay connected with the military, people who served during my presidency.”

George Jr. is still a self-centered, lying asshole.

Pity is the only emotion I have for anyone — military or civilian — who consider the ex-president as anything other than a war criminal.

(Illustration found here).

In a story via HuffPost (link above), George Jr. blubbered about the only thing he really misses in retirement is being commander-in-chief because he has “great respect for those men and women who wear the uniform.”
And as the Decider for eight years, he bungled two war zones, which lead to nearly 1,700 US military deaths in Afghanistan in a decade of incompetent war making, more than 4,470 US GIs died in an unnecessary, fruitless adventure in Iraq, and both disasters caused nearly 50,000 wounded.
The Iraqi invasion led to between 103,000 to 112,000 civilian deaths, at the low side, and more than 655,000 to a million on the high side, numbers near impossible to comprehend.

Even in his pile-of-bullshit tome, Decision Points, George Jr. kept the charade going: “One thing was clear to me,” Bush says here, staying on message — the old one. “Iraq was a serious threat growing more dangerous by the day.”
A brain-dead idiot would laugh at such crap.

George Jr. also presided over the worst financial collapse in 80 years — and lied about the infamous recession as long as he could.
From Think Progress in December 2008:

Earlier today, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) announced that “the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy.”
The group, which the White House has previously pointed to as the determinative body for declaring a recession, said in a statement that the “decline in economic activity” after Dec. ’07 “was large enough to qualify as a recession.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto commented on the news “without ever actually using the word ‘recession.’”
Instead, Fratto released a statement saying the White House was focused on what they “can do for the economy right now.”
It’s not surprising that Fratto would avoid the word “recession.”
Though economic analysts and experts were predicting in late 2007 and early 2008 that the U.S. economy was likely to face a recession, Fratto declared on Jan. 8, 2008, “I don’t know of anyone predicting a recession.”

And George Jr. just shit all over US peoples (via the New York Times, June 2009): The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.
George Jr. screwed up everything he could touch.

He’s one tortured asshole.
And once again, lying through his mouth.
On CBS News and an interview with Katie Couric in February 2009:

Couric asked Mr. Bush if this is a tacit acknowledgement that the way these detainees were handled was wrong.
“No. Not at all. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that we’re doing smart things to get information to protect the American people,” the President said.
“I’ve said to the people that we don’t torture, and we don’t.”

Meanwhile, skip ahead a year — from UK’s The Guardian:

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“I’d do it again to save lives.”
Waterboarding is a simulated drowning technique that the Obama administration has said is torture. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and is the most senior al-Qaida operative in US custody.
In his speech, Bush also defended the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003.
He said ousting Saddam Hussein “was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him.”

No feeling sorry for this sonofabitch.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York told MSBNC in November 2010 (via HuffPost):

[T]he United States has always considered waterboarding torture except during the Bush administration.
We prosecuted Japanese generals for waterboarding people.
We prosecuted American soldiers for waterboarding people and pressed that cage.
The current attorney general Mr. Holder has said that waterboarding is torture.
We`ve always regarded it as torture and under our statute, under our international law, we are bound to prosecute.
The president has a duty under the constitution to take care the laws of faith to be executed and now that former President Bush said that he personally ordered waterboarding, there must be at least an investigation and a special prosecutor.

Nadler also said he didn’t believe anything would ever come of it:

“Judging by the record of this attorney general, he will not pay attention, he will not respond,” Nadler said.
The reason: “[T]his administration, unfortunately, has taken the opinion — has taken the attitude that they`re not going to look at any criminal actions within the prior administration.
They say, let`s look forward, not backward, by that standard no one would ever prosecute any crime and this is a violation of our obligations under the torture treaty, under the torture convention, that Ronald Reagan signed.”

Another lash of shame on the much-disappointing Obama.
Allowing George Jr. and his whole bunch to remain outside the law is more than a shame — it’s criminal.

“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says.
“But no one’s panicking.
“Yet.”

(Illustration found here).

The quote above comes from a Danger Room blog post on a computer virus that’s infested the US unmanned drone program, and although reportedly the canker hasn’t bothered flight operations at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the problem is no one knows for sure the source.

And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus.
“We think it’s benign.
“But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks.
The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread.
But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech.
That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

This throws a stick in the flywheel — drones are the future of US military adventures.
Even though officially the program doesn’t exist — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — it might be the single worst kept secret in the U.S. government.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the former CIA director, may as well have confirmed what most of the world already knows when he made two light-hearted references to the secret CIA drone program during a trip to Italy.
When the subject of Predator drones came up Friday during an appearance here at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Mr. Panetta said that in his old job, he had become “very familiar” with Predators.
Earlier in the day, speaking to Navy sailors in Naples, he made another crack about the effectiveness of Predators.
“Having moved from the CIA to the Pentagon, obviously I have a hell of a lot more weapons available to me in this job than I had in the CIA, although the Predators weren’t bad,” Mr. Panetta said.

Leon is just one big belly laugh, huh?

The evolution of UAVs — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — is not all that hilarious, however, and has more than just a whiff of souless terminator about its infrastructure.
In February 2001, the machines unknowingly became self aware with the successful launch off itself of Hellfire missiles, thus, helping it evolve from a non-lethal, reconnaissance asset to an armed, highly accurate tank killer.
Or whoever.

The cowboy in George Jr. smoothed the transition — the first reported UAV-assassination use was in November 2002 with the blasting away of a SUV in the deserts of Yemen.
The SUV supposedly contained Al Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and some other guys — all were killed.
This, however, near the bottom of the USATODAY article reporting the incident (the link above): A Predator targeted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar at the start of the war on Afghanistan, but military lawyers could not decide whether he could be struck, officials have said. Its missiles were ultimately fired near him, but not to kill him.
Odd that, considering most-recent history.

The U.S. made nine drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and 2007, 33 in 2008, 53 in 2009 — Obama’s first year in office — and 118 in 2010.
Through Oct. 2, 2011, a recorded 60 strikes.
Under George Jr., a drone strike every 40 days, and with Obama, way-up to one every four days.
All this bad shit by two drone operations — one through the US military, the other via the CIA.
The latter, according to a detailed New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer, is the boner:

The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there.
As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare.
The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based.
It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel.
The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.

And this bit is from nearly two years ago.

So now the killing via drone in late September of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki has revealed more publicly the darkness behind UAVs.
The al-Awlaki incident has opened a legal can of worms, raised all kinds of moral and ethical questions, but the concern is too late.
From Reuters:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said.
Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Glenn Greenwald has a most-interesting post on the subject here, and this note: Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn’t you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list — in secret, without a shred of due process — would be a bridge too far?
And the other side of the bridge?

Unimaginable security opportunities.
Technology eventually shrinks both costs and ease of use — metro drones could eliminate the need for a lot of actual police officers, and with some modification, ID the shit out of just about anything:

A miniature airborne drone has helped archaeologists capture images for creating a 3-D model of an ancient burial mound in Russia, scientists say.
Archaeological sites are often in remote and rugged areas.
As such, it can be hard to reach and map them with the limited budgets archaeologists typically have.
Scientists are now using drones to extend their view into these hard-to-reach spots.
“There are a lot possibilities with this method,” said researcher Marijn Hendrickx, a geographer at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Ah, the possibilities…

Info/intell off a little battery-powered four-propeller “quadrocopter” could just as easily be sent to the Creech Air Force Base control room or the local FBI/Pentagon/CIA shop, which could trigger the appearance of the quad’s bigger, and much-more-violent cousins, instead of some archaeologists mapping ancient tombs.
One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see the possibilities.

And these machines are already flying over the US — working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, fire fighting in Arizona and Texas, inspecting flood damage along the Mississippi River, and so forth.
Reaper drones are in training in northern New York state: Army officials say the pilots will randomly pick out targets such as buildings and vehicles to observe during the training flights.

Which brings up this from the LA Times last month: Jay Stanley, a senior analyst on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the unregulated use of drone aircraft “leaves the gates wide open for a dramatic increase in surveillance of American life.”
However, these machines are becoming more and more domesticated, as one guy says in the above story: “People are constantly coming up and wanting a piece of that Predator pie.”

Of course, the very name, Predator, means there’s nasty-pointed thorns in that pie.
The actual indiscriminate horror on the ground in the near-vicinity of these UAV attacks is not so sweet for any bystanders, men, women, or children.
Just this morning, Press TV reported 16 civilians were killed and 50 others injured in a drone strike in southern Somalia near the border with Kenya — US operates drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.
And whole killing operation is bullshit, especially from within the US government.

The CIA claims no civilians have been killed in drone strikes for over a year — the New York Times last August begged to differ: In a UAV strike in May which bagged a bunch of insurgents, the CIA claimed no innocents died, but a report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists reveals the strike hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, and although the militants died, so did six civilians.
Says the Times: Accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.

Hard to fathom Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, huh?

Obama’s antics since in office apparently prompted this commentary from Pakistan’s The Nation:

Obama is, in short, the Rambo of drone warfare and so it is not fair to accuse him of being soft on terrorists.
This is a heavily caveated assessment, for one of the differences between Obama and Bush is that Bush developed a more coherent and systematic strategy and embedded the kinetic dimension within that larger strategy (reasonable people can debate how effective the Bush administration was in implementing that strategy).
Obama’s overall strategy is not as coherent and systematic (cf. Iraq policy, artificial and arbitrary timelines, inattention to mobilising support, etc.).
And on some of his terror policies, the incoherence does seem tied in part to what critics could consider “softness.”
But there is no doubt that Obama, as he promised during the 2008 campaign, has shown a vigour in deploying one important weapon in his arsenal: drone strikes.

Obama and change, but ‘Rambo?’

Mr. Bush had belittled “nation building” while campaigning for president 18 months earlier.
But aware that Afghans had felt abandoned before, including by his father’s administration after the Soviets left in 1989, he vowed to avoid the syndrome of “initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.
“We’re not going to repeat that mistake,” he said.
“We’re tough, we’re determined, we’re relentless.
We will stay until the mission is done.”
– George Jr. babbling near-incoherent, April 2002

(Illustration found here).

Today, of course, is the 10th anniversary of the war still going in Afghanistan, and despite some indications, the US will stay until that so-called “mission is done.”
What’s the mission, though.

US GI Robert Messel reflects on the way-long war in a piece at CNN:

“I joined to defend the country, and I feel that a lot of the things we were doing were not exactly that,” he said in a CNN iReport.
“In my opinion, it basically should have been limited to what we initially were going in to do: Hunt down bin Laden and the architects of the attacks.”

The knotty problem, though, as George Jr. was babbling in April 2002, Tommy Franks was already far along in putting together dumb-ass plans for the invasion of Iraq, and that ‘should have been limited‘ concept to Afghanistan went out the window.

The war in Afghanistan has cost near near $462 billion and counting with 1,801 deaths and 13,700 more wounded: As of July, 1,439 troops had limbs amputated from injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service. Until early 2009, Iraq accounted for most major limb losses from battle wounds in the Army. Since then, most have come in Afghanistan.
And a decade of the dumb-ass-named ‘global war on terror‘ has left 2,900 people without a husband or wife, and the parents of the 6,278 killed have lost a child.
The horror of George Jr., and now President Obama, in keeping this horrible shit going is criminal.

And this from Simon Jenkins in the UK’s Guardian:

Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country’s drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation.
The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched.
This is incredible.
Afghanistan is the world’s greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending.
So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.
Everything about Afghanistan beggars belief.
This week its leader, Hamid Karzai, brazenly signed a military agreement with India, knowing it would enrage his neighbour, Pakistan, and knowing it would increase the assault on his capital by the Haqqani network, reported clients of Islamabad’s ISI intelligence agency.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Pentagon is exulting over its new strategy of drone killing, claiming this aerial “counter-terrorism” can replace the “hearts and minds” counter-insurgency.
Down in Helmand, visiting British journalists gather to recite the defence ministry’s tired catechism: “We are making real progress on the ground.”
…
The occupation of Afghanistan has been a catalogue of unrelieved folly.
America is spending staggering sums on the war, which it is clearly not winning.
Congressional studies show virtually no US aid reaches the local economy, most remaining with contractors in the US or going on security or being stolen.
Local democracy has failed, as warlords feud with drug lords and tribal vendettas resurface.
The “training of the Afghan police and army” has become a dope-befuddled joke.
…
The irony of this great folly is that its chief beneficiaries are likely to be those who lost the cold war, Russia and China.
As the west’s leaders struggle to rescue embattled armies and embattled economies from morasses of their own creation, they have left their old foes laughing with glee.
Democracy has snatched defeat from the arms of victory — without a shred of a reason.

This has caused a terrible and not-so-funny attitude.

Tom McCuin, an Afghanistan war veteran and an outpatient at the Veterans Affairs Department Medical Center in Washington, D.C., snapped the photo at left of a hat emblazoned with the phrase: “Warning: This Vet is Medicated for your Protection.”

The hat was available for sale in the lobby gift shop at the hospital, but has since been pulled by VA officials, who said: “This does nothing except perpetuate stereotypes. Unacceptable anywhere near a VA Medical Center.”

This deeply portrays the disaster of the past decade — what a horrible epitaph of a laugh.