|
Latest Articles: War, War, War
Global Depression and Regional Wars - Part I
Post Date: 2009-08-14 05:57:36 by Stephen Lendman
0 Comments
Global Depression and Regional Wars - Reviewing James Petras' New Book: Part I - by Stephen Lendman James Petras is Binghamton University, New York Professor Emeritus of Sociology. Besides his long and distinguished academic career, he's a noted figure on the left, a well-respected Latin American expert, and a longtime chronicler of the region' popular struggles. He's also a prolific author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, most recently his new one titled, "Global Depression and Regional Wars" addressing America, Latin America and the Middle East. Part I - Global Depression Variety's famous October 30, 1929 headline is again relevant: "Wall ...
Gates: 'A few years' of combat in Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-08-13 19:27:36 by F.A. Hayek Fan
2 Comments
WASHINGTON – The Pentagon presented a grim portrait of the Afghanistan war Thursday, offering no assurances about how long Americans will be fighting there or how many U.S. combat troops it will take to win. Defeating the Taliban and al-Qaida will take "a few years," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, with success on a larger scale in the desperately poor country a much longer proposition. He acknowledged that the Taliban has a firm hold on parts of the country President Barack Obama has called vital to U.S. security. Congress wants answers to what lawmakers described as basic questions to soothe a war-weary American public. "In the intelligence business, we ...
US Cops Go Out of Control; Citizens No Longer Safe
Post Date: 2009-08-13 14:37:50 by IndieTX
4 Comments
I grew up believing 'police officers' were sworn to 'protect and serve'. Since the GOP believes it has installed a dictator, the US has become 'Thug Nation', defending and practicing torture abroad while, at home, cops run wild and out of control. They apparently believe that martial law is a 'done deal' though Bush's prediction --a terrorist attack that will make 911 'pale by comparison' --hasn't yet come to pass! So many crimes, so little time to report them. In the following example, a cowardly 'cop' turns off the video camera before beating hell out of a woman denied her right to make a telephone call. She was beaten senseless, ...
Addicted to War: America's Brutal Pipe Dream in Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-08-13 06:25:47 by Ada
2 Comments
Looks like the "Good War" in Afghanistan is morphing even more directly into the "Drug War" that the U.S. government has been waging all over the world -- and especially against its own people -- for almost 40 years now, with all the attendant aggrandizement of authoritarian powers and degradation of civil liberties and human rights. As The Times reports, and Pentagon brass confirmed, the "continuity government" of the Obama Administration has drawn up yet another "hit list" of people to be arbitrarily assassinated: 50 "drug lords" allegedly associated with the Taliban. No doubt the many drug lords associated with the American-installed ...
Trader: Somali Insurgency Buying Arms US Gave to Government
Post Date: 2009-08-12 06:30:44 by Ada
0 Comments
State Department's "Tons of Arms" Being Sold at Market In June, the US State Department went public with the revelation that it has provided nearly 40 tons of arms to the ever-floundering Somali government to combat the al-Shabaab insurgency. Last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged to double the supply to 80 tons after a meeting with Somali President Ahmed. At the same time, the US has threatened a series of sanctions and at one point a military invasion to the nearby nation of Eritrea, which it has accused of supplying weapons to the al-Shabaab insurgency. Eritrea has denied supplying the weapons though it has been backing various groups opposed to the ...
Glen Clancy interviews Bali bombing investigator Robert S. Finnegan
Post Date: 2009-08-11 16:58:34 by Horse
0 Comments
“Fool Me Twice” Producer/Director Glen Clancy interviews Bali bombing investigator Robert S. Finnegan on recent and not so recent events surrounding the October 12 2002 bombing that killed over 200 people in Kuta, Bali Indonesian forces last Saturday laid siege to a central Java residence believed to be sheltering Noordin Mohammed Top, the leading Islamic militant implicated in a series of major terrorist attacks, now including – once again - the 2002 Bali bombings that claimed more than 200 lives. The next day I spoke with colleague Robert S. Finnegan, former Jakarta Post senior editor and lead investigator on the Bali bombings for the paper. Finnegan was livid that Top is ...
Pakistanis see US as biggest threat
Post Date: 2009-08-11 16:44:17 by tom007
1 Comments
Pakistanis see US as biggest threat By Owen Fay About 43 per cent of Pakistanis support dialogue with the Taliban, the survey said [AFP] A survey commissioned by Al Jazeera in Pakistan has revealed a widespread disenchantment with the United States for interfering with what most people consider internal Pakistani affairs. The polling was conducted by Gallup Pakistan, an affiliate of the Gallup International polling group, and more than 2,600 people took part. Exclusive Complete survey results Report methodology Inside Story Interviews were conducted across the political spectrum in all four of the country's provinces, and represented men and women of every economic and ethnic ...
Hiroshima AND Nagasaki: The Inside Story
Post Date: 2009-08-11 06:26:17 by Ada
22 Comments
At 8:16 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the world got a glimpse of its own mortality. At that moment, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a fireball that sent waves of searing heat, then a deafening concussion, across the landscape. Three days later, a second bomb hit Nagasaki. … [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower said in 1963 "It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing." … Besides the Manhattan Project’s internal momentum was an external motive. Its leaders had to justify the $2 billion ($26 billion in today’s dollars) expense to Congress and the public… Byrnes…warned Roosevelt that political scandal would follow if it [the ...
THe Man With A Plan For Bananastan
Post Date: 2009-08-11 06:15:12 by Ada
2 Comments
The Bananastans, the banana republic-style tar pits in Central Asia that we’ve stumbled into, have rapidly become a bigger cluster bomb than Iraq ever was. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said the "measure of effectiveness" in Afghanistan "will not be enemy killed. It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence." Shortly after his confirmation, the New York Times reported that McChrystal had been given "carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates" as he carries out "an ambitious new strategy" of "stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks." McChrystal then re-reversed ...
U.S. Commander Warns Taliban Getting Stronger
Post Date: 2009-08-10 10:34:15 by Jethro Tull
4 Comments
The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency's spiritual home. Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the commander offered a preview of the strategic assessment he is to deliver to Washington later this month, saying the troop shifts are designed to better protect Afghan civilians from rising levels of Taliban ...
Amputee Private Matt Woollard plans return to fight Taliban
Post Date: 2009-08-09 10:23:53 by christine
7 Comments
A BRITISH soldier who had part of his leg blown off by a landmine is preparing to return to Afghanistan to settle “unfinished business” with the Taliban. Private Matt Woollard, 20, is expected to be the first British infantryman to return to the front line after being fitted with a prosthetic limb. Woollard, a member of 1st Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment, lost his lower right leg after setting off an insurgent bomb while on patrol near Kajaki in May 2007. His heart stopped three times while he was receiving treatment. “I want to get back and do what I was sent to Afghanistan to do in 2007 — take the fight to the Taliban,” Woollard told The Sunday Times. ...
Analysts Expect Long-Term, Costly U.S. Campaign in Afghanistan [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2009-08-09 10:14:59 by christine
85 Comments
As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war. Since the invasion of Afghanistan eight years ago, the United States has spent $223 billion on war-related funding for that country, according to the Congressional Research Service. Aid expenditures, excluding the cost of combat operations, have grown exponentially, from $982 million in 2003 to $9.3 billion last year. The costs are almost certain to keep growing. The Obama administration is in the process of overhauling the U.S. ...
Perpetual War for Perpetual War
Post Date: 2009-08-08 17:42:44 by F.A. Hayek Fan
10 Comments
U.S. Army Col. Timothy R. Reese says it’s time for the U.S. to “declare victory” in Iraq and “go home.” It was time to declare victory and go home in January 2007, when the Bush administration decided to ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and charged off on its cockamamie “surge” strategy. The original stated objective of the surge was political reconciliation in Iraq. By September 2007, when it was clear that the political objective was not in sight, Gen. David Petraeus pulled a bait-and-switch and announced that the military objectives of the surge were being met. Petraeus hagiographer Thomas E. Ricks slipped Freudian in February 2009 ...
Fewer Than Half of Returning Vets Seeking Help For PTSD
Post Date: 2009-08-07 10:41:37 by christine
21 Comments
Veterans returning from the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are displaying many of the same post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms of troops that fought in Viet Nam, yet most do not seek treatment. “I’m not an alarmist but I think this is a serious problem,” Dr. Matthew Friedman, executive director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD), wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. Referring to a 2004 study of 6,201 returned service members who had been on active duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, Friedman said most “apparently were afraid to seek assistance for fear that a scarlet P would doom their ...
5 U.S. troops killed as Afghan violence swells
Post Date: 2009-08-07 10:13:15 by christine
7 Comments
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan -- The pace of American combat deaths in Afghanistan has quickened anew as roadside bombs killed five U.S. troops in 24 hours in the same western province, the American military said Thursday. The deaths bring to 11 the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan so far in August, on the heels of what was the worst month for Western and U.S. troop fatalities since the conflict began in 2001. Forty-three American military personnel died in July. Violence has been surging in advance of Afghanistan's presidential and provincial assembly elections, which are two weeks away. In addition to the troop fatalities, a total of 26 Afghans, most of them ...
The War We Can’t Win
Post Date: 2009-08-07 06:10:32 by Ada
0 Comments
Afghanistan & the Limits of American Power History deals rudely with the pretensions of those who presume to determine its course. In an American context, this describes the fate of those falling prey to the Wilsonian Conceit. Yet the damage done by that conceit outlives its perpetrators. From time to time, in some moment of peril or anxiety, a statesman appears on the scene promising to eliminate tyranny, ensure the triumph of liberty, and achieve permanent peace. For a moment, the statesman achieves the status of prophet, one who in his own person seemingly embodies the essence of the American purpose. Then reality intrudes, exposing the promises as costly fantasies. The ...
Will Venezuelan Destabilization Follow the Honduran Coup?
Post Date: 2009-08-07 05:54:18 by Stephen Lendman
1 Comments
Will Venezuelan Destabilization Follow the Honduran Coup? - by Stephen Lendman After ten and a half years in office, Hugo Chavez is very savvy about America's intentions. On January 17, even before Obama's inauguration, he said "Barack Obama has the 'stench' of his predecessor as US president and was at risk of being killed if he tries to change the American 'empire.' " He added that frayed ties with Washington were unlikely to improve despite the departure of Bush, the man he called the 'devil.' Now there's a new "devil" with his fingerprints all over the June 28 Honduran coup. More on that below. At a January political rally on a ...
The International - The True Value of a Conflict
Post Date: 2009-08-07 01:39:23 by Horse
0 Comments
Poster Comment:This movie clip explains the relation between banks and war, but neing made by Hollywood the bad guys (the bankers) neither look Jewish nor have Jewish names.
Russia prepares to strike on Tbilisi
Post Date: 2009-08-06 20:44:44 by X-15
1 Comments
Sources in the intelligence structures of the Caucasus Emirate report that according to operative information a secret order, regarding Georgia, is being circulated among the senior officers of Russian occupation troops. In private conversations the officers state that "the end of Georgia is near". The operative sources report that the invasion is due to begin with a massive strike on the selected objects in Tbilisi, which may occur between 12 and 15 August 2009. The main objectives are the residence of Saakashvili and all of his possible places of location, as well as military facilities. Before the beginning of the invasion of Georgia the head of the Tskhinvali ...
Chirac: Bush wanted to attack Iraq to fulfill biblical prophesies
Post Date: 2009-08-06 11:01:22 by tom007
6 Comments
Chirac: Bush wanted to attack Iraq to fulfill biblical prophesies Source: Secularhumanism.com URL Source: http://www.secularhumanism.org/inde ... ction=library&page=haught_29_5 Published: Aug 5, 2009 Author: James A. Haught Post Date: 2009-08-05 21:49:34 by Mekons5 Keywords: None Views: 33 Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God. ...
The New York Time’s Failure of Understanding
Post Date: 2009-08-06 06:22:52 by Ada
3 Comments
In a July 29 editorial entitled “The Military Is Not the Police,” the New York Times stated, “It was disturbing to learn the other day just how close the last administration came to violating laws barring the military from engaging in law enforcement when President George W. Bush considered sending troops into a Buffalo suburb in 2002 to arrest terrorism suspects…. More needs to be done to ensure that the military is not illegally deployed in this country.” Unfortunately, the Times fails to understand the critical point: After 9/11 the president acquired the power to treat terrorism as either an act of war or a criminal offense, at his option. Thus, the likely ...
Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire
Post Date: 2009-08-05 18:02:07 by Kamala
0 Comments
Tom Dispatch posted 2009-07-30 10:28:23 Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire The Obama administration's plan to end production of the F-22 Raptor has received plenty of press coverage, but the Pentagon budget itself, even though it's again on the rise, hardly rates a bit of notice. In fact, amid the plethora of issues large and small -- from health care reform to Gates-gate, from energy policy to the culpability of Michael Jackson's doctor -- that make up the American debate in the media, in Washington, and possibly even in the country, what Chalmers Johnson has called "our empire of bases" goes essentially unmentioned. Not that we don't build them ...
Senators, Military Advisers Urge Obama to Double Afghan Forces
Post Date: 2009-08-04 17:35:41 by 2big2fail
11 Comments
Senators, Military Advisers Urge Obama to Double Afghan Forces Share | Email | Print | A A A By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama and top U.S. military commanders are under pressure from influential senators and civilian advisers to double the size of Afghan security forces, a commitment that would cost billions of dollars. In private letters and face-to-face meetings, these supporters of mounting a stronger effort against the Taliban seek to boost the Afghan National Army and police to at least 400,000 personnel from the current 175,000. “Any further postponement” of a decision to support a surge in Afghan forces will hamper U.S. ...
New NATO Chief Outlines Priorities
Post Date: 2009-08-04 15:20:44 by farmfriend
2 Comments
New NATO Chief Outlines Priorities Written by Warren Mass Tuesday, 04 August 2009 10:35 Speaking to reporters at his first public appearance since assuming his new position as NATO's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen outlined his priorities on August 3 for reporters. Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark, told reporters that NATO troops would help prevent Afghanistan from "becoming again a grand central station of international terrorism." An AFP report quoted the new secretary-general's statement that the long-term goal was to "move forward concretely and visibly with transferring lead security responsibility in Afghanistan to the Afghans." ...
Chinese in Afghanistan: “They build and we guard.”
Post Date: 2009-08-04 09:08:20 by Jethro Tull
5 Comments
Global Strategies: Chinese in Afghanistan: “They build and we guard.” class="layout-two-column-right"> Global StrategiesThoughts on Oregon solutions to global problems « Getting the Afghan Poppy Policy Right | Main | "Entrepreneurship in in Zhejiang Province" » July 25, 2009 Chinese in Afghanistan: “They build and we guard.” Part of US strategy in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, examples of failed states we’re trying to turn around, is to provide security so businesses and investments develop. So it is good, and not surprising, that China’s businesses and investors are attracted. We need China to help ...
Latest [Newer] 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 [Older]
|