Who Did Give the Green Light to Torture?
Paul Vallely writes at the Independent:
There has been something artificially over-heated about the international reaction to the video of four American soldiers urinating on the bodies of their dead Taliban enemies in Afghanistan. It was, of course, a fairly disgusting thing to do.
But all the breastbeating about how the men’s “egregious inhumanity” had brought “disgrace to their armed forces” and “dishonour to their nation” had something of bluster about it. How could anybody do such a thing, asked people who had never been to war, heard their wounded friends scream or seen them die, blown to pieces, before their very eyes.
There may yet be demonstrations and deadly riots around the world in protest. But I suspect not. This is no Abu Ghraib, for the scenes of degraded torture in that Iraqi prison were inflicted upon the living rather than the dead. But what the two have in common is that…
US Marines Urinating On Dead Afghans
This is the LiveLeak video (allegedly) showing US Marines pissing on dead members of the Taliban that has Afghanistan in an uproar. Semper Fi?
The U.S. Military’s Sexual Assault and Rape Epidemic
Sarah Lazare reports in Al Jazeera:
As the war in Afghanistan passes its ten-year mark, sexual assault runs rampant within the ranks, with an estimated one in three female service members raped during their service, according to at least one peer-reviewed study. This is in a military where women comprise more 11 per cent of active duty service members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and more than 15 per cent of the total military, with at least 200,000 active duty women currently serving. This epidemic also affects men: 60 per cent of women serving in the National Guard and Reserve, along with 27 per cent of men, are estimated to have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Perpetrators rely on a chain of command that appears to offer virtual impunity for sexual assaults committed against lower-ranking service members.
Military reports and Congress-appointed task forces acknowledge that sexual assault within the military is widespread. While the Department…
Afghanistan: The Endless War for Resources
Photo: DVIDSHUB (CC)
Abby Martin writes on Media Roots:
Last year marked the tenth anniversary of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government’s logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.
Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in “terror” and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd — just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn’t make that entire country guilty of the criminal’s crimes.
In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to tell CNN that US forces had successfully pushed the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the region, and reports reveal that Osama Bin Laden hadn’t even been in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, a White House spokesperson recently admitted that there hasn’t been a terrorist threat…
U.S. Has Provided $360 Million To Taliban To Fight U.S.
Granted, Afghanistan is very corrupt, and $360 million that flowed to criminals and the Taliban is a mere one percent out of the total reconstruction contracts reviewed. Also, consider this a marked improvement from our 1980s policy of giving billions of dollars to Afghanistan’s jihadist forces on purpose. Via Washington Post:
After examining hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan, the U.S military estimates $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals, and power brokers with ties to both. The losses underscore the challenges the U.S. and its international partners face in overcoming corruption in Afghanistan.
Navy SEAL Team 6 Members Killed in Afghanistan Helicopter Crash Not Osama bin Laden’s Killers
So official sources say. A dramatic loss of life to one of America’s elite military forces. Christine Haverkamp reports on the AP via KTLV:
U.S. officials tell the Associated Press that they believe that none of the Navy SEALs who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although they were from the same unit that carried out the bin Laden mission.
Sources say that more than 20 Navy SEALs were among those lost in the crash in Afghanistan.
The operators from SEAL Team Six were flown by a regular Army crew. That’s according to AP military sources.
Another source says the team was thought to include 22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew.
The sources thought this was the largest single loss of life ever for SEAL Team…
Afghanistan is Not the USA’s Longest War
This article is from 2010, but the math still adds up. From NPR:
Afghanistan hasn’t become the U.S.’ longest war; Vietnam still is, according to someone who should know, Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who also served as a young American diplomat in Vietnam.
Holbrooke spoke with All Things Considered co-host Robert Siegel Monday (we’ll provide a live link when it becomes available) and took issue with what he sees as a revisionist history being peddled by some in the media who are dating the start of Vietnam to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964.
President Lyndon Johnson got Congress to pass the resolution on what many historians consider the trumped-up pretext of a North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. warship …
Former U.S. Intelligence Chief Calls For End Of Drone War
Noah Schachtman of Wired reports on some subversive thoughts expressed by former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair (thanks to Liam P for submitting this story):
ASPEN, Colorado — Ground the U.S. drone war in Pakistan. Rethink the idea of spending billions of dollars to pursue al-Qaida. Forget chasing terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, unless the local governments are willing to join in the hunt.
Those aren’t the words of some human rights activist, or some far-left Congressman. They’re from retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair — the man who was, until recently, nominally in charge of the entire American effort to find, track, and take out terrorists…
Afghanistan Getting Its Own Politically-Charged Version Of ‘The Office’ Sitcom
The Office was a hit in England before it became a hit in the States. With the mock-documentary, hand-cam style of filming, Afghanistan is now getting it’s own version entitled The Ministry. Daily Mail reports:
Rather than being set in a Slough paper manufacturing firm, ‘The Ministry’ is based in the war-torn country’s Ministry of Garbage. The mock-documentary has been filmed in exactly the same way as Ricky Gervais’ BBC comedy.
Footage of the characters addressing the camera directly, as if being interviewed, is interspersed with scenes of them apparently going about their working lives. The comedy, which will be broadcast on Afghanistan’s largest commercial television station Tolo TV later this year, features a sleazy manager, a dozy security guard and a man-hating female secretary.
Should We Say “Maybe” to Drugs in Afghanistan?
There’s a global morphine shortage in the west (while the Taliban is financing terrorism through black-market opium). So for over a year, a mainstream journalist for both Information Week and Library Journal has been contacting Congressmen about the “Sustainable Opportunities for Rural Afghans Act.” (”Whereas granting rural Afghan farming families an economic ally other than the Taliban is good for the national security of the United States…”)
Basically, the act would allow American pharmaceutical companies to buy opium from the farmers in Afghanistan — and even offer aid and bonuses to the farmers to deter their cooperation with the Taliban (before eventually transitioning them to other crops). “Action has been nil and talk has been quiet,” the reporter writes, even though it could help efforts to “defeat, disrupt, and dismantle” al Qaeda and its allies.
“As we press our advantage after the death of bin Laden, it seems reasonable to use every available tool toward…
Is The U.S. Really About To Defeat Al Qaeda?
Leon Panetta
No doubt there will be naysayers who claim that Al Qaeda was a convenient fiction for the U.S. Government in the first place, but in any event it is certainly a change of tune to hear the U.S. Defense Secretary talk about victory over the bad guys. No doubt it means a change of strategy – but what? Mary Walsh reports for CBS News:
The United States is “within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda,” Leon Panetta declared, as he traveled to Afghanistan for his first visit there as Secretary of Defense.
Speaking to reporters aboard a government flight to Kabul, Panetta said intelligence gathered during the raid at Osama bin Laden’s compound has lead the United States to target 10-20 key al Qaeda leaders.
“If we can go after them, I think we really can strategically defeat al Qaeda,” Panetta said.
The success of the May raid on the compound in Abbottabad,…
The Pentagon’s Invisible Third-World Army
When enlistment is down, what’s the military to do? Outsource. Seventy thousand of the people in the Pentagon’s war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan are not U.S. soldiers, but “third-country nationals” — Filipinos launder our soldiers’ uniforms, Bosnians repair electrical grids, Indians serve up iced lattes. Many say they are being held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by subcontractors who operate outside the law, the New Yorker reports:
In the morning of October 10, 2007, the beauticians boarded their flight to the Emirates. They carried duffelbags full of cosmetics, family photographs, Bibles, floral sarongs. More than half of the women left husbands and children behind. In the rush to depart, none of them examined the fine print on their travel documents: their visas to the Emirates weren’t employment permits but thirty-day travel passes that forbade all work, “paid or unpaid”. And Dubai was just a stopping-off point. They were bound for U.S.…
The Cost of War: 225,000 Lives, $4 Trillion
Since 9/11, U.S. wars across the globe have cost at least a quarter million people their lives and will likely reach more than $4 trillion, a new research project reports. The Cost of War by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies details the toll the wars have taken in human, economic, social and political costs.
Some of the project’s findings:
- While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.
- At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.
- The…
The Taliban Joins Twitter
Military maneuvering in the 21st century means the Pentagon and Islamicist rebels responding to one another’s tweets, apparently. If this is a hoax, it has fooled the Guardian, among others:
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they eschewed most modern technology, including television and music players. But in the latest sign of the hardline movement’s rapprochement with at least some areas of the modern world, the Taliban have embraced microblogging.
Their Twitter feed, @alemarahweb, pumps out several messages a day, keeping 993 followers up to date with often highly exaggerated reports of strikes against the “infidel forces” and the “Karzai puppet regime”. Most messages are in Pashtu, with links to news stories on the elaborate and multilingual website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban’s shadow government likes to style itself.
Today, the feed broke into English for the first time, with a tweet about an attack on police in Farah province:…
Osama Bin Laden’s Intended War On the U.S. Economy
- Note pre-9/11 (in red) and post-9/11 (in yellow) Debt.
This viewpoint from Ezra Klein in the Washington Post is one not discussed enough by the media and its pundits in our nearly decade-long “War on Terror” (except on a few occasions). Writes Klein in WashPo:
Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t.
So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?
Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After…
Now That Bin Laden’s Dead, Where Does That Leave The War On Terror?
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
Osama Bin Laden’s death caused most of America to break out the flags and head to the local town square to pat each other on the back saying “we got him.” Regardless of how we feel about the final execution of the modern world’s most notorious villain, capturing or killing Bin Laden was the impetus for the war in Afghanistan (remember, we originally went to war against the Taliban because they were harboring him).
Even though most Americans understand that the war in Iraq was never about the war against Al-Qaida, such a momentous occasion should give us pause to ask ourselves what exactly it is we’re doing fighting two wars and several smaller conflicts across the globe, and what exactly, continuing our course of action will accomplish:
What does Bin Laden’s death really change? We’ve already heard plenty of rhetoric that Bin Laden’s death does not end the…
Taliban Announces Spring Offensive In Afghanistan
Trying to keep the shareholders happy for Q3? Especially noteworthy following last week’s jailbreak where over 400 insurgents escaped. BBC News reports:
The Taliban have announced the start of a spring offensive across Afghanistan.
In a statement, the group said the fighting would start on Sunday, targeting foreign troops as well as Afghan security forces and officials.
It warned civilians to stay away from public gatherings, military bases, government buildings and convoys.
Meanwhile initial findings from a Nato inquiry into a deadly attack at Kabul airport on Wednesday suggest the gunman was not connected to the Taliban.
The man, an Afghan pilot, killed eight US troops and a contractor. He was later found dead.
The Taliban claimed the attack, but the coalition said there was no evidence for this and the gunman appeared to have acted alone.
Saturday’s statement by the Taliban said the group would attack “foreign invading forces, members of their spy networks and other spies, high-ranking officials…
Over 400 Taliban Insurgents Escape Afghan Prison Through Thousand Foot Tunnel
Via Fox News:
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents dug a more than 1,050-foot (320-meter) tunnel underground and into the main jail in Kandahar city and whisked out more than 450 prisoners, most of whom were Taliban fighters, officials and the insurgents said Monday.
The massive jailbreak overnight in Afghanistan’s second-largest city serves as a reminder of the Afghan government’s continuing weakness in the south, despite an influx of international troops, funding and advisers. Kandahar city, in particular, has been a focus of the international effort to establish a strong Afghan government presence in former Taliban strongholds.
The 1,200-inmate Sarposa Prison has been part of that plan. The facility has undergone security upgrades and tightened procedures following a brazen 2008 Taliban attack that freed 900 prisoners. Afghan government officials and their NATO backers have regularly said that the prison has vastly improved security since that attack.
But on Sunday night, around 475 prisoners streamed out…
