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Latest Articles: War, War, War
Did Hitler Want War?
Post Date: 2009-09-05 20:10:34 by your_neighbor
4 Comments
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war. Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers. By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin. What cause could justify such sacrifices? The ...
Democrats Signal Resistance to Increase of Troops in Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-09-05 09:46:18 by christine
16 Comments
WASHINGTON -- Increasing congressional discord over the next U.S. steps in Afghanistan, coupled with a spike in violence there, is deepening the political divide on the war and how many troops are needed to fight it. Key Senate Democrats signaled Friday that any push by the White House to send more troops to Afghanistan is likely to hit resistance. And their unease was fueled by another bombing, that left as many as 70 dead, including civilians who were killed when the U.S. blew up tanker trucks hijacked by the Taliban. That deadly U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan Friday complicates the debate over the need for more U.S. troops, bolstering arguments that Afghan leaders must increasingly fend ...
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came from U.S., Not Iran
Post Date: 2009-09-04 16:33:58 by abraxas
7 Comments
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came from U.S., Not Iran By Gareth Porter WASHINGTON, Sep 3 (IPS) - In support of the official U.S. assertion that Iran is arming its sworn enemy, the Taliban, the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Dennis Blair, has cited a statement by a Taliban commander last year attributing military success against NATO forces to Iranian military assistance. But the Taliban commander's claim is contradicted by evidence from the U.S. Defence Department, Canadian forces in Afghanistan and the Taliban itself that the increased damage to NATO tanks by Taliban forces has come from anti-tank mines provided by the United States to the ...
90 Afghans (mostly civilian) dead as NATO airstrike hits fuel trucks
Post Date: 2009-09-04 09:34:55 by Jethro Tull
7 Comments
Kunduz, Afghanistan - Ninety people were killed Friday when a NATO airstrike hit two Taliban-hijacked oil tankers in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz as the militants were distributing fuel to civilians, Kunduz's governor said. The militants stopped the two oil trucks, which were bound for German forces stationed in Kunduz, Thursday night on the highway connecting Kunduz with the neighbouring province of Baghlan, Governor Mohammad Omar said. They took the trucks to Kunduz's Chardarah district, where the explosion occurred early Friday as civilians gathered to pick up the fuel, he said. 'Around 90 people with around half of them civilians were killed in the ...
Pentagon Extends Tours for 82nd Airborne Troops in Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-09-03 18:43:45 by christine
2 Comments
WASHINGTON -- Members of the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters serving in Afghanistan have been told their tours will be extended by 52 days from 12 months to nearly 14 months. Hundreds of officers and non-commissioned soldiers were told this weekend that they would have to stay longer so that their replacements in the 101st Airborne Division could have 12 months at home -- a sign at how stretched the forces remain. The members of the 82nd Airborne were supposed to return in May 2010, but will come home sometime in July, according to a senior defense official. Troops' families at Fort Bragg, N.C., were told about the extension at a town hall meeting this weekend "Based on the ...
The next new plan for Bananastan
Post Date: 2009-09-03 06:44:58 by Ada
1 Comments
We’re going through Bananastan* war strategies like they’re Pez candies. As Jason Ditz of Antiwar.com has noted, General Stanley McChrystal’s new report on Afghanistan "admitted that the current strategy, which was itself a new strategy presented only five months ago to replace the previous new strategy, isn’t working and that yet another new strategy is needed." It seems certain that Stan the Man will ask for more troops, though, so we’re at least being consistent in our policy of sending more American soldiers to war without knowing why. When you slice out the wimp words and platitudes, the current new strategy is the same as the old new strategy: ...
Forced To Shrink, Army National Guard Gets Pickier
Post Date: 2009-09-02 19:32:38 by Brian S
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(09-02) 11:45 PDT Columbus, Ohio (AP) -- Suffer from a bad case of acne? That could disqualify you from joining the Army National Guard. Too many speeding tickets? In today's slimmer, smarter Guard, that could keep you out, too. Under pressure from the Pentagon to trim its ranks, the Guard has been quietly phasing in new restrictions that make it harder to enlist. "To get in now, you have to be the cream of the crop," said Sgt. 1st Class Brian Clum, a recruiter in Ohio. Military officials portray the cutbacks as an effort to trim excess from a Guard force that was bloated from years of successful recruiting, especially during the recession. But there are suspicions inside ...
The US is Deploying Its Vietnam-Iraq Fig Leaf
Post Date: 2009-09-02 15:07:52 by ghostdogtxn
1 Comments
These Colors Run Red
Post Date: 2009-09-01 06:35:36 by Ada
1 Comments
The U.S. follows the Soviet Union into Afghanistan. With the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan approaching, the question retains its fascination: Why did the Russians do it? The misguided Afghan War sounded the death knell of the Soviet empire. How could they have been so stupid? With the United States several years into its own Afghan War, the question possesses more than academic interest. However wrapped in irony and paradox, history is offering us instruction that we ignore at our peril. When it came to divining the motive behind that Soviet invasion, Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian and Russian expert, expressed considerable certainty. As he told the New ...
Mullen's Mulligans
Post Date: 2009-09-01 06:08:24 by Ada
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In golf and other sports, a "mulligan" is a second chance to get something right, sometimes referred to as a "do-over." In most sports, one do-over is all you get, and sports are just games. In war, humanity’s deadliest undertaking, the folks in charge of the Pentagon keep asking for another mulligan, and the president, Congress, and the news media keeping saying sure, tee it up again. Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen appeared on the Aug. 23 edition of Meet the Press to sell the war in Afghanistan. He couldn’t have asked for a better straight man than David Gregory. Gregory pulsed Mullen "on the question of U.S. resolve." Gregory noted the ...
Gen. McChrystal Calls For Overhaul Of Afghanistan War Strategy
Post Date: 2009-08-31 13:11:53 by Brian S
5 Comments
Reporting from Washington - The top commander in Afghanistan has submitted his initial assessment of the war in Afghanistan, calling for a full overhaul of the military's war strategy, NATO officials said today. In his assessment, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that he would call for an intensified effort to train more Afghan security forces faster, pump up intelligence collection efforts and improve how that information is used and shared. He also has said he will discuss the need to develop a cadre of experts committed to the war and improve coordination between civilian and military efforts, particularly on development projects. But at the heart of the assessment is ...
Obama’s Road to War: It's not just Afghanistan …
Post Date: 2009-08-29 13:03:52 by F.A. Hayek Fan
2 Comments
Obama is keeping his eye on the prize – the Nobel Prize, that is, as a reward for brokering a Middle East "peace" deal. Unfortunately, he’s doing it on the backs of the Palestinian people – and the rest of us, as well. The news out of the negotiations with the Israelis is that Bibi gets everything, and Obama gets to make an announcement that the perpetually stalled talks with the Palestinians will resume. By "everything," I mean to include what the Guardian describes as "a partial freeze" on settlement construction – an oxymoron that could only exist in the context of an agreement between Israel and the US. But isn’t that what the ...
(Obama) DOJ May Skirt Court Order on Interrogation Documents (Obama protecting Bush administration - Obamatards silent )
Post Date: 2009-08-29 12:08:19 by F.A. Hayek Fan
3 Comments
The Obama administration may circumvent the spirit of a judge’s order to disclose hundreds of documents relating to the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation program, delivering instead generic descriptions of the documents and legal arguments for continued nondisclosure. While the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report on torture was released Monday, a tranche of hundreds of supporting documents sought by an ongoing American Civil Liberties Union court case remain unseen. Those include 129 documents that provide some of the source material for the inspector general’s report; 138 other documents from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel about the interrogation ...
9/11 planner is recast as key asset for CIA: Mohammed gave ‘terrorist tutorials’ after waterboarding, sleep deprivation (Obamabots embracing torture as effect now that they are in control)
Post Date: 2009-08-29 11:34:53 by F.A. Hayek Fan
1 Comments
WASHINGTON - After enduring the CIA's harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency's secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called "terrorist tutorials." In 2005 and 2006, the bearded, pudgy man who calls himself the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks discussed a wide variety of subjects, including Greek philosophy and al-Qaeda dogma. In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture. Speaking in English, Mohammed "seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to ...
Bombing medical facilities: a violation of international humanitarian law
Post Date: 2009-08-29 11:26:31 by F.A. Hayek Fan
1 Comments
Recently, hospitals in Sri Lanka and Gaza were bombed. In January 2009, a week after being declared a United Nations Relief and Works Agency area for humanitarian goods for displaced Palestinians in Gaza City, the facility was bombed by the Israeli military. This bombing killed civilians in a declared hospital zone. Closer to home, in February 2009, the Sri Lanka Air Force bombers cluster bombed and fully destroyed the Ponnampalam Memorial hospital in Puthukkudiyiruppu. The Ponnampalam hospital was a modern non-governmental medical facility, named after Dr Ponnampalam who provided medical relief in the Jaffna district in the conflict situation. These events did receive media attention, ...
US Copter Opens Fire on Afghan Medical Clinic (Obamatards rejoice as Obama's Hope and Change marches on)
Post Date: 2009-08-29 10:59:18 by F.A. Hayek Fan
13 Comments
US and Afghan forces, backed by a US Apache helicopter attacked a medical clinic in the Paktika Province of Afghanistan yesterday after receiving reports that a wounded Taliban commander had “sought treatment” at the facility. The attack sparked a gunbattle which according to provincial officials left at least 12 militants and two policemen killed. The US denied that anyone had died in the attack but claimed to have injured their target, though since he was already injured in the first place it’s probably hard to be sure about that. The US defended the attack on the clinic, insisting that it had ensured the building was cleared of civilians before the helicopter began ...
Gen. McChrystal Seeks 20,000 More Troops for Afghanistan (Obamaphiles revel in blood of American troops as "Hope and Change" is implemented in DC)
Post Date: 2009-08-29 10:45:31 by F.A. Hayek Fan
15 Comments
According to a report in the Saturday edition of the Independent, top US commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal will request another 20,000 troops for the war effort in Afghanistan, on top of the escalation already provided by President Obama, when he issues his new “plan” for the nation. Shortly after taking office President Obama approved the addition of another 17,000 to the war effort as part of an attempt to turn around the sagging war effort. He added another further 4,000 troops in March as part of his new “comprehensive strategy” at the time. Needless to say, the strategy did not work, and the situation in Afghanistan has continued to worsen. Gen. ...
Thugs of Fortune
Post Date: 2009-08-29 10:02:33 by Ada
0 Comments
A singular absurdity of the 21st century is that the nation that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined needs to hire mercenaries to fight wars against enemies who have no defense budget at all. An August 19 New York Times article revealed that in 2004 the CIA hired Blackwater USA to help "locate and assassinate top operatives of al-Qaeda." This is the secret program that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not tell Congress about for seven years. "It is unclear," wrote Times reporter Mark Mazetti, "whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the ...
August tied for deadliest month in Afghanistan (Obama Hope and Change!)
Post Date: 2009-08-27 07:48:22 by F.A. Hayek Fan
14 Comments
KABUL – A U.S. service member died Thursday in a militant attack involving a roadside bomb and gunfire, a death that pushed August into a tie with July as the deadliest months of the eight-year war. The death brings to 44 the number of U.S. troops who have died in Afghanistan this month. But with four days left in the month, August could set a new record. More than 60,000 U.S. troops are now in the country — a record number — to combat rising insurgent violence. The number of roadside bombs deployed by militants across the country has skyrocketed, and U.S. forces have moved into new and deadlier areas of the country this summer, in part to help secure the country's ...
Files prove Pentagon is profiling reporters
Post Date: 2009-08-27 07:44:18 by F.A. Hayek Fan
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WASHINGTON — Contrary to the insistence of Pentagon officials this week that they are not rating the work of reporters covering U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters’ coverage is being graded as “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.” Moreover, the documents — recent confidential profiles of the work of individual reporters prepared by a Pentagon contractor — indicate that the ratings are intended to help Pentagon image-makers manipulate the types of stories that reporters produce while they are embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. One reporter on the staff of one of America’s ...
Ex-Bosnian Serb chief: US helped Iran arm Muslims
Post Date: 2009-08-27 07:39:57 by F.A. Hayek Fan
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Radovan Karadzic is seeking evidence that the U.S. turned a blind eye to weapons shipments from Iran to Muslim forces fighting in the Bosnian war, to support his claim that Serbs acted in self-defense during the conflict. In written responses from jail to questions by The Associated Press released Wednesday, Karadzic said he has asked several countries for documents that will support his contention they violated the U.N. arms embargo during the 1992-95 conflict. He said this included direct U.S. military supplies to the Bosnian Muslim army and Iranian weapons sent through Croatia with the support of U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith. "Those Americans well knew that the Bosnian Muslims ...
Where to Begin Rebutting the Afghan Blather?
Post Date: 2009-08-27 07:36:25 by F.A. Hayek Fan
2 Comments
Everything that appears in our mainstream media about foreign policy is blather. Everything we read about Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran floats upon a sea of false premises and lies of omission and commission. Right now the American mainstream media is printing mountains of news stories and editorials and opinion pieces about the Afghanistan "elections." All of it is blather. All of it. This is an election where no political parties are allowed. This is an election for a government that does next to nothing but serve as a propaganda tool for an occupying army, an election where no one truly opposed to the U.S./NATO occupation is allowed to run. All the stories and opinion pieces ...
Lockerbie bombing: three conspiracy theories : Was it a CIA hit, an Iranian revenge mission, or the work of the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s?
Post Date: 2009-08-26 04:43:57 by Mind_Virus
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Lockerbie bombing: three conspiracy theories Was it a CIA hit, an Iranian revenge mission, or the work of the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s? By Seth Jacobson FIRST POSTED AUGUST 24, 2009 The growing furore over the Scottish government's decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan accused and convicted of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing, has refocused attention on the tragedy and who was culpable. Pan Am flight 103 was on its way from Heathrow to New York JFK on the night of December 21, 1988 when it was brought down over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in Dumfriesshire by an explosion. All 259 people on board the Boeing 747-121 were killed, as were 11 people on the ...
International People's Declaration of Peace by Cindy Sheehan
Post Date: 2009-08-25 13:50:35 by christine
7 Comments
One thing that the Obama presidency has put into even sharper focus for me, is that most of the leaders of the world do not want peace. People can try and fool themselves that unlike Bush (Or Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan, or Carter, or Ford, or Nixon.....etc), Obama truly wants peace. The reality of facts on the ground dispute this. We are deceiving ourselves if we think otherwise. Obama is fully on the trajectory of the Empire. There is no denying this. If anyone has read my book: Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution, they would know that I do not place the blame for imperial violence on any president: it is the system. Governments of most every ...
Danger Room in Afghanistan: Helmand’s Bomb Fight, Up Close and Personal
Post Date: 2009-08-25 10:21:32 by tom007
3 Comments
Danger Room in Afghanistan: Helmand’s Bomb Fight, Up Close and Personal * By Noah Shachtman Email Author * August 25, 2009 | * 9:06 am | * Categories: Af/Pak, Army and Marines * helmand-p1000645_croppedMIANPOSHTEH, AFGHANISTAN – The robot was back in the armored truck, and the truck was parked across the canal. Which meant Gunnery Sgt. Tony Lindsey had to get right up close to the pair of improvised bombs, and try to get rid of the things by hand. This isn’t the way he is supposed to operate. During the Iraq war, the military gave explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians like Lindsey a heap of new gear to help them dispose of jury-rigged bombs in relative safety. ...
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