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Latest Articles: War, War, War
Patrick Cockburn: Warning to the US: beware treating Afghanistan like Iraq
Post Date: 2009-02-27 06:42:25 by Ada
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It's a mistake to think that 'failed states' won't put up strong resistance President Obama is likely to announce in the coming days that he will withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. Many of these soldiers will end up in Afghanistan where the Taliban is getting stronger and the US-backed government weaker by the day. How much has the US learnt from its debacle in Iraq? One lesson not learnt in Washington is that it is a bad idea to become involved in a war in any so-called "failed state". This patronising term suggests that if a state has failed, foreign intervention is justified and will face limited resistance. But the greatest US foreign ...
US refuses to free the final British resident in captivity
Post Date: 2009-02-24 22:41:44 by bush_is_a_moonie
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The British wife of the final UK resident being held in Guantanamo Bay has pleaded for her husband's release so he can be united with the son he has never seen. Shaker Aamer, 42, was separated from his family more than seven years ago while they were visiting Afghanistan. He claims to have been beaten and tortured during his detention at the notorious US Navy detention centre in Cuba. His wife, Zin Aamer, 33, who lives in south London, told The Independent that the return of the Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed to the UK on Monday was a bittersweet moment for her and the children. "The kids keep asking me why wasn't Shaker on the plane with Binyam. Of course, I am happy for ...
Iraqi Police Shoot Dead Four US Soldiers: Ministry
Post Date: 2009-02-24 11:52:10 by Brian S
3 Comments
BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraqi policemen shot dead four US soldiers and their local interpreter in the main northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, an interior ministry official said. "Four US soldiers and their Iraqi interpreter were killed by two Iraqi policemen who opened fire at them in the Dawasa district of (central) Mosul and then fled," the official told AFP, declining to be named. The incident took place during a US army visit to the Mosul headquarters of the Iraqi police in charge of protecting the city's bridges, police said. The bullet-riddled body of the interpreter was taken to the local mortuary. It was the third such fatal shooting involving US soldiers in just over ...
Obama's Bananastan
Post Date: 2009-02-24 06:11:49 by Ada
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"If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." - Sun Tzu Sun Tzu maintained that proper planning secures victory before the battle begins. Carl von Clausewitz insisted that war must focus on the political aim. How is it, then, that we are about to put more troops into a war we know is unwinnable and in which we have no coherent objective for them to pursue? President Obama announced on Feb. 17 that he will send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. That's just over half of the 30,000-troop escalation that's been discussed in recent months. Gen. David McKiernan, top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, says he needs another 10,000 ...
US Tests Military Exit Routes Out Of Iraq
Post Date: 2009-02-21 18:18:08 by Brian S
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AGHDAD – The American military is shipping battlefield equipment through Jordan and Kuwait, testing possible exit routes in advance of a U.S. withdrawal in Iraq, military officials said. The convoys — carrying armored vehicles, weapons and other items — mark the Pentagon's first steps in confronting the complex logistics of transporting the huge arsenal stockpiled in Iraq over nearly six years. It's also part of a wider assessment, ordered by U.S. Central Command, to decide what items the military can transfer, donate, sell or toss away once a full-scale withdrawal is under way, Marine Corps and Army officials told The Associated Press. "Because they are ...
Obama Widens Missile Strikes Inside Pakistan
Post Date: 2009-02-21 06:02:49 by bush_is_a_moonie
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With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government. The missile strikes on training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud represent a broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan, which has been largely carried out by drone aircraft. Under President Bush, the United States frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at Mr. Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops. ...
Plague-Infested Mice (bubonic plague) Missing From New Jersey Research Lab
Post Date: 2009-02-19 10:39:12 by Jethro Tull
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Miami, FL (AHN) - The frozen remains of two mice infected with the bubonic plague are missing from a New Jersey bioterror research facility, and the facility waited seven weeks to report the incident to federal and state authorities. Officials with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, where the remains went missing, and FBI officials, said the missing mice pose no public health threat. This is the same facility where three live plague-inflected mice went missing in September 2005. Officials concluded those mice died. The frozen mice were noticed missing when an animal care supervisor went to prepare them for sterilization and incineration, the New Jersey ...
U.S. Commander Offers Grim View of Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-02-19 10:07:00 by christine
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The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan offered a grim view Wednesday of military efforts in southern Afghanistan, warning that 17,000 new troops will take on emboldened Taliban insurgents who have "stalemated" U.S. and allied forces. Army Gen. David McKiernan also predicted that the bolstered numbers of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan -- about 55,000 in all -- will remain near those levels for up to five years. Still, McKiernan said, that is only about two-thirds of the number of troops he has requested to secure the war-torn nation. McKiernan told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that the extra Army and Marine forces will be in place by the summer, primed for ...
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid | Counter "Narco-Terrorism" Pilot Program to start in South Carolina! | The project calls for an as-yet-undefined partnership between the National Guard and the State Law Enforcement Division.
Post Date: 2009-02-18 18:15:27 by Mind_Virus
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FEBRUARY 18, 2009 Politics and fear unite against terrorism and drugs Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid BY WILL MOREDOCK A little history lesson for those who are capable of learning from history: During the Red Scare days of the mid-20th century, the land was full of fear-mongers, selling their poison to all who would listen, pointing to communists in high places and low, branding as "un-American" anyone who would challenge the conservative orthodoxy of the day. The essence of the tactic was to link any feared group or individual to communist subversion. It was not necessary to prove communist subversion or to prove a link. Just having it spoken by the likes of Sens. Joe McCarthy or ...
McKiernan: Extra forces could stay in Afghanistan 5 years
Post Date: 2009-02-18 17:43:36 by Jethro Tull
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, predicted Wednesday that the additional 17,000 U.S. military forces to be sent to Afghanistan will remain there for as long as five years. The commmander predicted the new troops will be operational before Afghan elections in August. "This is not a temporary force uplift," McKiernan said. "It will need to be sustained for some period of time, for the next three to four to five years." McKiernan made his comments a day after President Obama approved the troop increase for Afghanistan. "I'll use most of those forces in southern Afghanistan, an area where we do not have ...
Obama's Yes We Can Afghan War
Post Date: 2009-02-18 17:08:15 by Rupert_Pupkin
22 Comments
Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009 Obama's Yes-We-Can War: More Troops to Afghanistan By Mark Thompson / Washington Afghanistan became President Obama's war on Tuesday, when he ordered two more U.S. combat brigades into the fight. He will send 17,000 combat troops to join the 36,000-strong U.S. force already in the theater. The fact that the units now ordered to Afghanistan had originally been slated for Iraq underscores the new Administration's shift in priorities. The reinforcements include about 8,000 Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., who should be in Afghanistan by late spring, and a 4,000-strong Army brigade from Fort Lewis, Wash., which should arrive in the summer. Those units will ...
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?
Post Date: 2009-02-18 06:22:51 by Ada
2 Comments
President Lyndon B. Johnson's policy of Great Society spending and the Vietnam War is credited with the rising American inflation that persisted until checked by President Reagan's supply-side policy. In Johnson's time, the American economy and the U.S. dollar were strong, and there was no current account deficit. Yet LBJ's policy of guns and butter did long-term harm. The Bush-Obama 21st-century policy of guns and butter makes LBJ look like a piker. The 2009 and 2010, federal budget deficits will be monstrous even without guns. But Obama is exiting (apparently) the Iraq War in order to start two, possibly three, more wars. Obama has announced a surge of U.S. troops in ...
10,000+ TROOPS TO AFGHANISTAN [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2009-02-17 16:04:55 by Jethro Tull
66 Comments
Posted: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 2:50 PM by Domenico Montanaro Filed Under: White House, Security From NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube The White House is expected to announce the deployment of more than 10,000 additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan "within the hour," according to Pentagon officials. The Pentagon will follow with details on numbers and identification of troops to be deployed. The troop deployment to Afghanistan will be announced as a "remissioning," meaning many, if not most, of the forces were already scheduled to deploy to Iraq but will now be diverted to Afghanistan. That will reportedly include two Marine combat battalions and one ...
Judge Refuses To Toss Charges In Blackwater Case
Post Date: 2009-02-17 15:18:08 by Brian S
5 Comments
(02-17) 11:36 PST WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge has given a green light to the manslaughter case against five former Blackwater Worldwide security guards accused of spraying innocent Iraqis with machine-gun fire. U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina on Tuesday denied two motions to dismiss the case. The shooting in Baghdad in September 2007 left 17 Iraqis dead and another 20 wounded. The former Blackwater guards argue they are not subject to U.S. civilian criminal laws because they were working overseas under a contract with the State Department. A legal loophole says only contractors who work for or support the Defense Department can be prosecuted in U.S. courts for crimes ...
Military targets temporary immigrants
Post Date: 2009-02-15 19:26:04 by scrapper2
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WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Department has begun a pilot program in New York to recruit temporary immigrants, giving them a short cut to citizenship, officials said. The military goal is to recruit 1,000 people across the country in the first year, The New York Times reports. Recruiters in New York hope to convince 550 speakers of critical foreign languages like Urdu and Arabic to sign up. A second goal is to recruit 300 doctors, nurses and other medical workers. Immigrants with permanent resident visas can already enlist. The new program would not be open to illegal immigrants but is aimed at those with temporary work visas. Officials said they hope the program will ...
A Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble For Bush Lawyers
Post Date: 2009-02-15 18:44:39 by Brian S
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An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department's ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush ...
Former Gitmo Guard recalls abuse, climate of fear
Post Date: 2009-02-14 17:09:51 by Ada
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo's first shackled detainees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement — the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business. Neely has now come forward in this final year of the detention center's existence, saying he wants to publicly air his feelings of guilt and shame about how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first alleged al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the isolated U.S. Navy base. His account, one of the ...
Has Washington Run Out of Patience with Hamid Karzai?
Post Date: 2009-02-13 17:26:55 by scrapper2
7 Comments
The grumbling about Afghan President Hamid Karzai has grown so loud you'd think the Obama administration has given up on him. Indeed, you could almost hear the knees knocking in Karzai's embassy here when incoming Obama officials met privately during inauguration week with at least two Afghan politicians who would like to replace the president. With the war going badly, criticism has grown of Karzai's seeming tolerance of endemic corruption in his government, which threatens to turn Afghanistan into a narco-state, if not grease the return of the Taliban to power. Could his days be numbered? Karzai hasn't hesitated to fire back, especially about casualties from U.S. ...
Unredacted documents reveal prisoners tortured to death
Post Date: 2009-02-13 16:16:58 by PSUSA
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Human rights groups accuse Pentagon of running secret prisons, cooperating with CIA "ghost detention" programThe American Civil Liberties Union has released previously classified excerpts of a government report on harsh interrogation techniques used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. These previously unreported pages detail repeated use of "abusive" behavior, even to the point of prisoner deaths. The documents, obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act request, contain a report by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, who was tapped to conduct a comprehensive review of Defense Department interrogation operations. Church specifically calls out interrogations ...
Last Russian general warns US on Afghanistan
Post Date: 2009-02-13 11:51:32 by PSUSA
8 Comments
By JIM HEINTZ, MOSCOW – Twenty years after Red Army troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the last general to command them says the Soviets' devastating experience is a dismal omen for U.S. plans to build up troops there. On Friday, the anniversary of the Soviet departure from the Afghan capital, the Russian parliament's lower house adopted a resolution honoring the soldiers who "were faithful to the warrior's duty, who displayed heroism, bravery and patriotism." In retired Gen. Boris Gromov's view, the valor was shown in an unwinnable battle. "Afghanistan taught us an invaluable lesson ... It has been and always will be impossible to solve political ...
US Gear Ending up in Pakistan Markets
Post Date: 2009-02-13 08:57:42 by bush_is_a_moonie
1 Comments
PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Throughout the ages, this ancient Silk Road town near the border of Afghanistan has been the place where the black market thrives and the military spoils of empires are hawked openly. Here in the storefronts you can still buy antique field rifles left over from the British presence of the 19th century and find uniforms and revolvers from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Now the shops in this industrial rim of Peshawar are filling with military equipment and computers looted from the most recent empire to bog down in this hostile and impenetrable terrain: the United States of America. In the age of computerized high-tech warfare, it is not just ...
Obama's Afghan Trap
Post Date: 2009-02-13 06:44:15 by Ada
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President Barack Obama on Monday night held his first prime-time news conference. When questioned on Afghanistan, he replied, “This is going to be a big challenge.” He also was asked whether he would change the Pentagon policy banning the filming and photographing of the flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he was reviewing it. The journalist who asked the question pointed out that it was Joe Biden several years ago who accused the Bush administration of suppressing the images to avoid public furor over the deaths of U.S. service members. Now Vice President Joe Biden predicts that a surge in U.S. troops in Afghanistan will mean more U.S. ...
Cheney's Fright Mode
Post Date: 2009-02-13 06:25:53 by Ada
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney, obviously in perpetual fright mode, is continuing to do his best to frighten the American people. He claims that 61 of the inmates that have been released from Guantanamo have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.” He also predicted a “high probability” of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack on the United States. Human Rights First and others have debunked Cheney’s Guantanamo statistic, contending that it’s overblown. According to HWF, the numbers are “incoherent and baseless.” Nonetheless, Cheney’s statistic raises an interesting question: Why did the Pentagon release those prisoners, ...
Unredacted Documents Reveal Prisoners Tortured do Death
Post Date: 2009-02-12 18:46:56 by Ada
2 Comments
The American Civil Liberties Union has released previously classified excerpts of a government report on harsh interrogation techniques used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. These previously unreported pages detail repeated use of "abusive" behavior, even to the point of prisoner deaths. The documents, obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act request, contain a report by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, who was tapped to conduct a comprehensive review of Defense Department interrogation operations. Church specifically calls out interrogations at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan as "clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved ...
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