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Latest Articles: War, War, War
Dumb and Dumber Wars
Post Date: 2009-11-25 06:01:08 by Ada
1 Comments
Michael O’Hanlon, a war hawk tank-thinker with the Brookings Institution who encouraged us to invade Iraq, says we should "remain hopeful" about Afghanistan. Even though the news about Afghanistan has been "dispiriting," O’Hanlon tells us, "Most foreign and Afghan officials and officers who I encountered on a recent week-long visit sponsored by the U.S. military are guardedly optimistic about our prospects." That’s because the Afghan officials and officers O’Hanlon met were guardedly selected to feed him a line of bull feathers. Our adventure in Afghanistan is as impossible to justify, or be optimistic about, as the follies conducted there ...
CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces
Post Date: 2009-11-24 16:52:24 by tom007
7 Comments
CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces * By Noah Shachtman Email Author * November 24, 2009 | * 1:37 pm | * Categories: Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance * 51-4nneaghl_ss500_At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of ...
Obama promises to 'finish the job' in Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-11-24 16:50:04 by Horse
10 Comments
WASHINGTON – Signaling he's decided on new troop levels for the Afghanistan war, President Barack Obama said Tuesday he intends to "finish the job" on his watch and destroy terrorist networks in the region. The president said he would reveal his decision on how many additional soldiers to deploy to Afghanistan after Thanksgiving. The White House is aiming for an announcement by Obama either Tuesday or Wednesday in a national address. Congressional hearings will quickly follow. Military officials and others have been expecting Obama to settle on a middle-ground option that would deploy an eventual 32,000 to 35,000 U.S. forces to the 8-year-old conflict. That rough figure ...
More Troops to Afghanistan, But What Will They Do?
Post Date: 2009-11-24 16:24:25 by tom007
22 Comments
More Troops to Afghanistan, But What Will They Do? * By Noah Shachtman Email Author * November 24, 2009 | * 11:21 am | * Categories: Af/Pak * 090702-M-2806C-045 So the President has apparently made his decision about Afghanistan: He’ll send another 34,000 troops there, according to multiple reports. The White House is preparing for Obama’s first-ever prime-time address to formally announce the move. But for the moment, it’s not at all clear what those troops will be doing. When top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal laid out his gloomy Afghan war report in August, he cautioned that “additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements ...
Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan
Post Date: 2009-11-24 06:27:35 by Ada
1 Comments
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military ...
In Afghanistan “people hate the Americans from the bottom of their hearts”
Post Date: 2009-11-23 21:08:24 by christine
17 Comments
“People hate the Americans from the bottom of their hearts,” Haji Akhtar Mohammed Shinwari said as he recalled how the US military had brought death to his homeland. For residents of Shinwar, a village in distant Nangahar province, the message from President Karzai’s address yesterday that the Americans would hand over security over the next five years was disappointing. At the village bazaar, Mr Shinwari told The Times that he could not wait that long. In 2007, a unit of special forces was speeding along a busy road a few miles from his village when they opened fire, killing 19 people and wounding 50. The unit responsible was sent home and the local US commander described ...
Lowering the Bar: Kindergarten Recruitment
Post Date: 2009-11-23 20:01:19 by Horse
1 Comments
How old is old enough for students to be approached by military recruiters? High school? Junior high? Fourth grade? How about ten weeks into kindergarten? Last week at the dinner table, my five-year-old son announced blithely, "Soldiers came to school today." He then added, "They only kill bad people. They don't kill good people." He made the announcement with the same levity he uses in recalling the plot line of Frog and Toad or a Nemo video. My wife and I looked at each other incredulously. "Soldiers came to school? What do you mean?" I asked. He repeated himself and then I remembered - it was "Career Day" at school. My son mentioned a bus ...
4 US service members die in Afghan attacks
Post Date: 2009-11-23 15:16:47 by Jethro Tull
2 Comments
4 US service members die in Afghan attacks By HEIDI VOGT (AP) – 6 hours ago KABUL — Bomb attacks and a firefight killed four U.S. troops in 24 hours in Afghanistan, the military said Monday, adding to the growing toll as NATO and the U.S. consider whether to send more forces to the war. Three of the Americans died in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, NATO said in a statement. Two of them were killed in a bomb attack and the third in a separate firefight. The statement said a bomb killed the fourth American in the east Monday. The deaths bring the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan in November to 15. October was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the eight-year war, ...
As Washington Talks Iraq Withdrawal, the Pentagon Builds Up Bases in the Region
Post Date: 2009-11-23 11:32:10 by Horse
5 Comments
Despite recent large-scale insurgent suicide bombings that have killed scores of civilians and the fact that well over 100,000 U.S. troops are still deployed in that country, coverage of the U.S. war in Iraq has been largely replaced in the mainstream press by the (previously) "forgotten war" in Afghanistan. A major reason for this is the plan, developed at the end of the Bush years and confirmed by President Obama, to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq to 50,000 by August 2010 and withdraw most of the remaining forces by December 2011. Getting out of Iraq, however, doesn't mean getting out of the Middle East. For one thing, it's likely that a sizeable contingent of U.S. ...
The Children's Crusade
Post Date: 2009-11-23 06:15:15 by Ada
1 Comments
"It really boils down to one of two decisions, getting out or getting in." – President Lyndon Johnson, speaking about Vietnam "Soldiers came to school today," announced the kindergarten kid. “They only kill bad people. They don’t kill good people.” This story comes to us by way of Jon Letman of Truthout.org. The kindergarten kid is his 5-year-old son. Letman relates that: "In his book The Limits of Power, Boston University history professor and retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich describes a near future in which the U.S. is in an almost constant state of war. He writes, ‘Rather than brief interventions ending in decisive victory, ...
Audio: Webster Tarpley - Operation Safe Haven
Post Date: 2009-11-22 13:48:18 by Horse
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Poster Comment:Audio> Click on the URL. Whenever we have too many dollars out there, we always have an oil war to push up the price of oil which soaks up all those excess dollars. Tarpley does not expect an attack on Iran as that would be too costly. The term Safe Haven refers to the deliberate creation of a war so people with dollars put them in New York for safe keeping. I say Baloney. Buy Gold. I think Lebanon and a Ssudi or Iranian oil boycott would achieve that goal. It would also give Israel water from the Litani river.
US military brass "clueless" about Afghan mission purpose
Post Date: 2009-11-22 07:40:13 by Tatarewicz
5 Comments
A Marine colonel, speaking at a Corps ceremony, could not explain why soldiers are being sent to Afghanistan, when asked by a Viet Nam vet whose son is being deployed next year. Former captain Curtis Bennett asked Lt. Col. Glasco at a Lawrence, Kansas base ceremony: "Can you tell me one good reason why he (son) is going over there and should he be killed, what exactly would he be dying for? He (Glasco) responded to me, but didn't really answer my questions." Tatarewicz: What a joke! But even more ridiculous is that of the 58 comments posted following the article none pointed out that the Afghan invasion was launched solely to enhance Israel's security at the direction of ...
Obama Allies Want New Tax To Pay For Cost Of Protecting Afghan Opium Fields, Bribing Taliban
Post Date: 2009-11-20 12:08:37 by christine
2 Comments
Not content with savaging American taxpayers with two huge new financial burdens during an economic recession, in the form of health care reform and cap and trade, close allies of Barack Obama have proposed a new war surtax that will force Americans to foot the bill for the cost of protecting opium fields in Afghanistan, paying off drug lords, and bribing the Taliban. Warning that the cost of occupying Afghanistan is a threat to the Democrats’ plan to overhaul health care, lawmakers have announced their plan to make Americans pay an additional war tax that will be taken directly from their income, never mind the fact that around 36 per cent of federal taxes already go to paying for ...
Military experiment seeks to predict PTSD
Post Date: 2009-11-20 10:33:44 by christine
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Two days before shipping off to war, Marine Pfc. Jesse Sheets sat inside a trailer in the Mojave Desert, his gaze fixed on a computer that flashed a rhythmic pulse of contrasting images. Smiling kids embracing a soldier. A dog sniffing blood oozing from a corpse. Movie star Cameron Diaz posing sideways in a midriff top. Troops cowering for safety during an ambush. A doctor tracked his stress levels and counted the number of times he blinked. Electrode wires dangled from his left eye and right pinky finger. Sheets is part of a military experiment to try to predict who's most at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. Understanding underlying triggers might help reduce the burden of ...
Leviathan's Orphans
Post Date: 2009-11-20 10:31:20 by ghostdogtxn
6 Comments
Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.
Post Date: 2009-11-20 09:38:42 by tom007
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Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A. o Permalink o By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN Published: October 27, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Ahmed Wali Karzai, right, the brother of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, at a campaign event in Kandahar in August. Multimedia The Takeaway ...
Did Hitler Inspire the U.S. Post-9/11 Tribunal System?
Post Date: 2009-11-20 06:52:53 by Ada
2 Comments
I don’t know how President Bush and the Pentagon came up with the idea of establishing a new judicial system for trying terrorists, but there is the distinct possibility that they got the idea from German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Yes, I know, there are going to be those who resent such a suggestion, exclaiming, “Just because the idea might have come from Hitler doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.” They might point, for example, to the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which was inspired by Hitler’s autobahn system. Or they might point to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, whose programs were remarkably similar to the socialist and fascist programs of Hitler as ...
Dying for Crooks: US Troops in Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-11-20 06:40:07 by Ada
2 Comments
Transparency International reported yesterday that Afghanistan is the most corrupt nation in the world – except for Somalia. Heckua achievement, if the only nation on earth that is more shady is one that is full of pirates… Karzai is making Marion Barry look like Mother Teresa. The Washington Post reported today that one of Afghanistan’s top ministers took a $30 million bribe to give a special deal to a Chinese mining company. The New York Times reported: “Everything seems to be for sale: public offices, access to government services, even a person’s freedom.” So what do Army recruiters say these days? Why in Hades would any American agree to risk his neck ...
The administration guts its own argument for 9/11 trials
Post Date: 2009-11-20 06:04:42 by Ada
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(updated below - Update II) "What I'm absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism" -- Barack Obama, yesterday. "Holder said five other Guantanamo detainees would be tried by military tribunals. The five include Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, who is accused of masterminding the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen; and Canadian Omar Khadr, accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan" -- NPR, yesterday. "'Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be ...
World economy setting itself up for a bigger bust, says Marc Faber
Post Date: 2009-11-19 10:52:29 by ghostdogtxn
1 Comments
Obedience to God or Obedience to Orders?
Post Date: 2009-11-19 06:18:42 by Ada
1 Comments
Speaking about the Ft. Hood killings, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs stated, “The investigation is ongoing to figure out what would motivate an individual to carry out the type of act that this major carried out.” Of course, it goes without saying that in examining into motive, Gibbs is not justifying what the alleged killer, Major Nidal Hasan, did. (See my article “Motivation vs. Justification.”) As the investigation into motive progresses, it will be interesting to see the extent to which the U.S. military’s policy on conscientious-objector status played in the Ft. Hood horror. Under U.S. military policy, the only way that a soldier can claim ...
A Crock of COIN
Post Date: 2009-11-19 06:10:33 by Ada
3 Comments
A new CBS poll says 69 percent of Americans think things are going badly in Afghanistan. Only 27 percent of Republicans think things are going well there. Yikes. Much of this perception was no doubt shaped by Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s assessment that was leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and the ensuing media mania that accompanied it, including sanctioned leaks that Stan the Man would kick a sand dune and quit if he didn’t get what he wanted. McChrystal insisted throughout the echo chamber that lack of more troops in Afghanistan would result in "mission failure." But what is the mission in Afghanistan? The Obama administration has stated it’s about ...
Why I Support The WARS
Post Date: 2009-11-18 17:38:17 by tom007
2 Comments
OUr National Cognitive Dissonance
Post Date: 2009-11-18 06:18:06 by Ada
3 Comments
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” – Bertrand Russell Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on the Sunday gab circuit that rooting al-Qaeda out from Afghanistan is our only goal in that country. That’s interesting, considering that the "maximum estimate," according to National Security Adviser James Jones, says there are at most 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Since there are roughly 100,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, we already outnumber them 1,000 to one. Why does Gen. Stanley McChrystal insist we need more troops to avoid mission failure? ...
Obama: Al-Qaeda the Greatest Threat to US (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss)
Post Date: 2009-11-17 23:18:15 by F.A. Hayek Fan
3 Comments
Speaking at a town hall meeting today in Shanghai, President Barack Obama declared that al-Qaeda remains the “greatest threat to the United States’ security” and said that they have moved from Afghanistan into Pakistan. It is no secret, of course, that General Stanley McChrystal informed the administration just two months ago that there is no sign of any significant al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, nevertheless, President Obama says that “stabilizing” the nation, by which he means continuing the nearly decade long US occupation, remains a vital aspect of this conflict with al-Qaeda. Obama’s comments are expected to be parroted almost verbatim by British ...
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