Terminal Death
Filed Under Bullshit, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Understatement on the crazed shootings yesterday in Afghanistan: It is believed that, some time before the killings, the soldier suffered a nervous breakdown.
In a bad situation getting worse, the incident only makes it near-imperative the US and NATO get the shit out of that country, and like way-now.
US peoples know, but the powers-that-be don’t, or don’t care: Sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth its costs, and nearly the same number advocate an early US pullout from the country, a new poll showed.
(Illustration found here).
Although on the surface apparently, the shooting hasn’t yet stirred the ugly pot of unrest, but it might be just building up steam.
From the New York Times this morning:
Early on Monday, with the attacker in the custody of American forces, the public mood in Kandahar and Kabul seemed subdued with no immediate sign of protests on the streets.
But social networking sites such as Facebook and Afghan blogs were filled with angry postings, some of them accompanied by graphic photographs of what appeared to be children slain in the attack.
“This is a clear crime and will only add to the people who hate American in Afghanistan,” said one online posting.
“You can’t give their lives back to them with apologies.”
The shooter, an US Army staff sergeant, had from all indications, more than a passing experience in the ways of war:
Another senior military official said the sergeant was 38 and married with two children.
He had served three tours of duty in Iraq, this official said, and had been deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in December.
Yet another military official said he has served in the Army for 11 years.
War effects everybody and these George Jr.-affiliated conflicts seem to pack a wallow with those actually doing the killing — the shooter yesterday was from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, a place in 2010 considered “the most troubled base in the military” by the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
Overall, suicide in the US military jumped 80 percent from 2004 to 2008 — four real-bad years for a lot of killing.
Two years ago, four Lewis-McChord soldiers were convicted in the deliberate thrill killings of three Afghan civilians, and the military would like to sweep all that bad shit under some kind of happy rug in order to save money.
CBS News:
In the past five years, about 300 patients at Madigan Army Medical Center at the base had their PTSD diagnoses reversed by a forensic psychiatry team, The Seattle Times reported this month.
The Army is reviewing whether those doctors were influenced by how much a PTSD diagnosis can cost, in terms of a pension and other benefits.
At Coffee Strong, a coffee shop near the base that doubles as a resource center for soldiers seeking to leave the Army, executive director Jorge Gonzalez said he was not surprised the shooter was from the base.
“Joint Base Lewis McChord has been bombarded with bad stories,” said Gonzales, who served in the Army in Iraq in 2006.
“We’re not seeing the true costs of war, we’re seeing soldiers committing suicide … murder and domestic violence.”
Richardson said the vast majority of the tens of thousands of soldiers at the base were professionals.
“It’s unfortunate that these things keeping ending up at Joint Base Lewis-McChord,” he said.
“I promise you, not even a percent of those people are like this, but unfortunately it keeps happening.
Things like this will continue until there is no more war.”
The war on terror sucks the terror homeward.
Despite reality, President Obama continued the official line of bullshit: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
Barry, are you out of your mind.
Even as he meets with his UK counterpart today.
This nugget from the Guardian:
Such is the bleak reality facing Barack Obama and David Cameron when they sit down in Washington to discuss Afghanistan on Monday.
The shared narrative they have presented to their nations on how the Afghan war will end has been relentlessly eroded by the death toll among their soldiers and the daily headlines about the Karzai government’s seemingly incorrigible venality, like the Wall Street Journal report over the weekend that the US-funded Afghan air force was using its planes to smuggle narcotics and illegal weapons around the country.
Afghanistan is indeed the ‘graveyard of empires‘ and the US is most-likely at the end of its run as the world’s top dog — what a fitting place to end the American Dream.
Hopefully, not, but yet….
Hustle Up
Filed Under Cloud gazing, history, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
We can all sleep better now that Mitt Romney is once again the top GOP dog — slipping past the field in Arizona, and especially in the land of his birth, Michigan: ” … We didn’t win by a lot, but we won by enough and that’s all that counts.”
Yes, winning is all that counts, but the problem Mitt doesn’t care about, or even think about, is the US is a loser.
In the horror aftermath of the Ohio school shooting — the US leads the world in these kinds of things: Kids with guns kill kids at school.
US history leads the way as the very second European peoples stepped off the boat 300 years ago they started hustling up wealth and whatever got in the way was killed, a kind of death-cycle dodge ball where native peoples/animals/plant life were eliminated.
(Illustration found here).
This sincere give-or-be-killed attitude is awfully on display via the horror of Afghanistan, where US hustling has drawn up a nub — after nearly 11 years, the conflict there is coming apart at the seams even as US generals cry the luminosity of the “fundamental strategy” despite it all.
Not necessarily, at least for Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has served as a consultant for the Pentagon: “It has been a truly grim week and one where these events raise questions about U.S. strategy and the value of continuing with the current approach to the war,” Cordesman wrote Monday in an online commentary. “The reality, however, is that the strategy . . . has been dying for a long time.”
No shit, sherlock.
The big problem with the Afghan theater is the US hustle.
Tomdispatch writes:
Sensitivity, in case you hadn’t noticed at this late date, has not been an American strong suit there.
In the headlines in the last year, for instance, were revelations about the 12-soldier “kill team” that “hunted” Afghan civilians “for sport,” murdered them, and posed for demeaning photos with their corpses.
There were the four wisecracking U.S. Marines who videotaped themselves urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans — whether civilians or Taliban guerrillas is unknown — with commentary (“Have a good day, buddy… Golden — like a shower”).
There was also that sniper unit proudly sporting a Nazi SS banner in another photographed incident and the U.S. combat outpost named “Aryan.”
And not to leave out the allies, there were the British soldiers who were filmed “abusing” children.
And the powers that be really don’t give a shit.
Even the Stars and Stripes pitched in with a anti-hustle nod:
“There is a lack of cultural understanding with the U.S. soldiers that should have been addressed by now,” said Waliullah Rahmani, executive director of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies, a nonpartisan think tank.
“With their constant rotations — the new units coming in every year — knowledge does not get passed on.”
This bottom line to the whole Afghan bullshit: “The U.S. public has trouble understanding why the United States continues to sink blood and treasure into Afghanistan when the people we are trying to help are killing us,” Andrew Exum, a counterinsurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, told the Los Angeles Times.
US peoples have had a long, hard time trying to understand — history pushes back.
One interesting explanation comes in a review of the new book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (John Wiley, 2012), by Morris Berman, an US academic humanist cultural critic who specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history.
Berman says the problem with America is its very character.
From the examination of the book by Thomas H. Naylor at Counterpunch:
According to Berman the seeds of the Empire’s destruction were sewn in the sixteenth century by the early European settlers who were, above all, into “hustling” — looking out for number one.
Ever since then, “hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others” have provided the dominant theme of the American culture.
He or she who dies with the most toys wins the game.
Enough never seems to be quite enough.
The hustler’s credo is “Teach me how to be a moneymaking, moneyspending machine.”
Most hustlers are obsessed with having — owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth.
Through having they try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world.
Their compulsive desire to have leads straight to technofascism – affluenza, technomania, cybermania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.
…
As a nation we are so obsessed with hustling that we have lost our ability to be human beings.
Our happiness depends mostly on our superiority over others, our power, and our ability to manipulate others.
Capitalist America may be the most efficient and productive nation in the world, but it extracts a high human cost.
Conspicuous consumption is no longer a sign of our success, but rather of our spiritual vacuum.
America has lost its soul.
…
Berman devotes an entire chapter to what he calls the “illusion of progress” and the relationship between technology and progress.
He views technology as a kind of “hidden religion” linked to the notion of “unlimited progress” and the “perfectibility of man.”
It supplies the “social glue” which hustling alone is unable to provide.
…
Most books about the decline of the American Empire conclude with a “happy chapter” explaining how some idea such as campaign finance reform, banning corporate personhood, or a return to the Constitution will guarantee eternal bliss.
Berman makes it very clear that his book has no “happy chapter” because the endgame is not going to be very pretty.
Berman describes life in the United States as vapid, utterly meaningless, and without heart.
“The United States has run out of steam.”
An ugly, inconvenient truth — hard to swallow, but if you can’t get it down, you choke to death.
One idea: Gird thy loins, or hustle up a strong-ass jock strap.
Silent Screaming
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Irony is today’s word.
Just as ‘The Artist,’ an ode to silence, won Best Picture at last night’s Oscars, the organization known for anti-silence, WikiLeaks, dumped another load of classified files onto the public — this batch emails from US-based intelligence firm Stratfor, supposedly depicting the company’s “web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.”
Thus to become more than a quiet riot.
(Illustration found here).
From WikiLeaks:
The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff.
It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in “becoming government Stratfors”.
Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division.
Despite the governmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in complete secrecy with no political oversight or accountability.
Stratfor claims that it operates “without ideology, agenda or national bias,” yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad — including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.
An example of Stratfor’s use of so-called ‘methods:’
“[Y]ou have to take control of him.
Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase”
– CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.
What a noisy mess.
Even worse, contrary to public disclosures, maybe bordering on near-sarcasm:
Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused “gravy train” that sprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures :
“[Is it] possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravy train ?
This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing.
And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet… Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventing one’s own employees from leaking sensitive information…
In fact, I’m not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.”
These files will be pored over in the coming days and a lot of disturbing, and most-likely illegal stuff will surface, and will once again display how ugly Americans can be when they think their shit doesn’t stink, or worse, they have no shit.
And it’s this American attitude that’s fueling the chaos in Afghanistan right now — seven US servicemen were injured this weekend in not-quiet-at-all riots over the supposed burning by American personnel of the Islam holy book, the Qur’an.
Although President Obama has publicly apologized for the Qur’an burnings, the GOP presidential nit-twits jumped Obama hard on it — Rick Santorum slobbering the move “shows weakness;” Newt Gingrich proclaiming the apology is akin to “surrender;” and Mitt Romney called it an “enormous error.”
Between them there’s not even a bird-sized shit for brains.
And there’s always more to a story that smacks the ears.
From the New York Times, though buried way down in the story:
Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said.
“They burn our Koran and then they apologize.
You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”
Sorry.
Glenn Greenwald adds this kicker-thought on the subject:
Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump.
Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them?
Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?
Indeed again.
And the shooting on Saturday of two US military officers in a supposedly secure Afghan government ministry has also displayed US compassion — NOT!
Juan Cole this morning enlightens a bit:
Two US military advisers to the Ministry of the Interior were shot dead on Saturday by an Afghan security man.
It turns out, according to recovered security tapes, that they were watching footage of the protests and cursing out the protesters, then speaking badly of the Qur’an.
The Afghan argued with them that they should be more respectful, and when the argument escalated, he drew on them and shot them both dead.
If this story is true, it distills the arrogance and bigotry of some US personnel in Afghanistan (they are in someone else’s country).
They didn’t deserve to meet that end, but cursing the Qur’an in a Muslim country in front of a local Muslim is about the most foolhardy act I can imagine.
The strong evangelical element in some parts of the US military makes it particularly unsuited to more or less running a largely illiterate Muslim nation that is deeply religious.
Evangelicals are the American group that has the highest disapproval of Islam.
Is the GOP listening, or in a cone of don’t-give-shit silence.
And what makes the whole Afghan situation even worse is the horrible horse shit heaved up by hard-case military assholes.
In this instance, Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who called the shooting of the two officers as “outrageous,” without any background on it.
And claimed in his air of authority, the incident reveals the “shallow impact [the United States] has on this primitive society.”
A total jerk — one must remember McCaffrey was among those so-called ‘military analysts‘ that bullied the fog-brained US public into supporting the Iraq invasion — the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for exposing the Pentagon Message Machine, on which Barry was a major player.
From the NYT story on the good general: Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.
Silence as we can see is not golden, though, one has to be an artist of some type in order to keep a lid on, or maintain the DL, of any news that might filter down to the US’ unwashed, near-ignorant masses.
Do we live in a vacuum, and if so, can anyone hear us screaming?
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?