Disinformation » Afghanistan

Who Did Give the Green Light to Torture?

Good German — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:00:07 +0000

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 both have exposed a systematic pattern of abuse in a culture which had been nurtured or authorised at higher levels.

The Taliban, for all their perfunctory condemnation, have announced that the video will not affect the process of political negotiating that has begun in Afghanistan. As part of a deal to bring a modicum of stability in that country ahead of the withdrawal of US combat troops in 2014, Washington has offered to allow them to open a political office in Qatar. The Taliban are far more concerned about that than the desecration of three dead bodies. They and their al-Qa’ida allies are, after all, happy enough to desecrate living bodies, stoning to death young women who have had the ill fortune to be raped, or cutting the throats of hostages and filming it for the internet.

Bad things happen in war. When men have been under extreme fire, or seen their best friend die, anger and hatred flow freely. Enemies are dehumanised. Contempt for the other is a battlefield weapon. Young soldiers – and nearly 40 per cent of the US Marine Corps are below the age of 22 – are prone to callow as well as gallows humour. Some of them do stupid things. With a total of 90,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the real wonder is that there haven’t been more videos like this. British soldiers did worse things in the Second World War. They just weren’t able to video it and stick it on YouTube…

US Marines Urinating On Dead Afghans

Good German — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:28:19 +0000

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

Good German — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:14:04 +0000

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 of Defense (DoD) has repeatedly said it is attempting to curb the problem, the most recent evidence shows that it has failed to adequately address the spread of this outbreak …

Afghanistan: The Endless War for Resources

Abby Martin — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 23:35:33 +0000

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 in the country for the last eight years.

So what has the US been doing in Afghanistan for the last decade?

War has always been about two things: resources and control. Alongside the supposed surprise discovery of Afghanistan’s $1 trillion wealth of untapped minerals, it’s more than coincidental that before the US invasion, the Taliban along with the UN had successfully eradicated the opium crop in the Golden Crescent. Now 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan.

As reported by Global Research:

Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.

Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.

In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.

While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, the media fails to mention that Karzai collaborated with the Taliban. He had also been on the payroll of a major US oil company, UNOCAL. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban.

In today’s globalized world, one can’t discount the role that multinational corporations play in US foreign policy decisions. Not only have oil companies and private military contractors made a killing off the Afghanistan occupation: big pharmaceutical companies, who collectively lobby over $250 million to Congress annually, need opium latex to manufacture drugs for this pill happy nation.

Read full article by Abby Martin on Media Roots.

U.S. Has Provided $360 Million To Taliban To Fight U.S.

JacobSloan — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:59:43 +0000

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

bluemana — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:03:06 +0000

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 Six, known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group.

More: AP via KTLV

Afghanistan is Not the USA’s Longest War

Good German — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:07:07 +0000

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

majestic — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:22:04 +0000

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. Now, he’s calling for that campaign to be reconsidered, and possibly even junked.

Starting with the drone attacks. Yes, they take out some mid-level terrorists, Blair said. But they’re not strategically effective. If the drones stopped flying tomorrow, Blair told the audience at the Aspen Security Forum, “it’s not going to lower the threat to the U.S.” Al-Qaida and its allies have proven “it can sustain its level of resistance to an air-only campaign,” he said.

It’s one of many reasons why it’s a mistake to “have that campaign dominate our overall relations” with countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. “Because we’re alienating the countries concerned, because we’re treating countries just as places where we go attack groups that threaten us, we are threatening the prospects of long-term reform,” Blair said…

[continues at Wired]

Afghanistan Getting Its Own Politically-Charged Version Of ‘The Office’ Sitcom

Pelliciari — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:34:30 +0000

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.

[Continues at Daily Mail]

Should We Say “Maybe” to Drugs in Afghanistan?

moezilla — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:18:03 +0000

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 our stated goal.”

Is The U.S. Really About To Defeat Al Qaeda?

majestic — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:53:16 +0000

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, Pakistan where bin Laden was killed, along with “operations that we conducted at the CIA,” has undermined the terror organization’s ability to conduct 9/11-type attacks, he added.

“I think we have them on the run,” Panetta said. “I think now is the moment, following what happened with bin Laden, to put maximum pressure on them, because I do believe that if we continue this effort we really can cripple al Qaeda as a threat to this country.

“Is it going to take some more work? You bet it is. But I think it’s within reach,” Panetta said.

Panetta also said he believes Aymin al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s new commander, is living in the tribal areas of Pakistan, known as the FATA…

[continues at CBS News]

The Pentagon’s Invisible Third-World Army

JacobSloan — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:06:17 +0000

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. military bases in Iraq.

Lydia and Vinnie were unwitting recruits for the Pentagon’s invisible army: more than seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, construction workers, fast-food clerks, electricians, and beauticians from the world’s poorest countries who service U.S. military logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (aafes) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (aafes’s motto: “We go where you go.”)

The wars’ foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as “third-country nationals,” or T.C.N.s. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers.

Read the rest at the New Yorker

The Cost of War: 225,000 Lives, $4 Trillion

aaroncynic — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:25:07 +0000

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 armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.
Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.
Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The current number of war refugees and displaced persons — 7,800,000 — is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.
The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.
The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed. For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.

View the entire project at The Cost of War

Rachel Maddow on The Problem With Pakistan in 30 Seconds (Video)

ralph — Sat, 28 May 2011 19:09:39 +0000

The Taliban Joins Twitter

JacobSloan — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:52:19 +0000

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: “Enemy attacked in Khak-e-Safid, 6 dead.”

There is not much lively banter between the “emirate” and its Twitter followers, save for a cheerful “asalam alekum” sent last week to the Kavkaz Centre, a militant news site covering jihad in the Caucasus.

Many of the story links are broken as the Taliban’s official website, regularly evicted from servers or shut down by authorities, is constantly on the move.

Osama Bin Laden’s Intended War On the U.S. Economy

ralph — Wed, 04 May 2011 22:57:51 +0000

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 all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.

Read More from Ezra Klein in the Washington Post

Now That Bin Laden’s Dead, Where Does That Leave The War On Terror?

aaroncynic — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:41:34 +0000

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 war on terror. We’ve spent billions on GWOT since 2001, shed the blood of hundreds of thousands and invested our entire military industrial complex into it. While people will talk about how this is a symbolic victory, we’ll still be told that America must remain vigilant. Occupations will continue, drone attacks will continue, the loss of civil liberties at home will continue. We’ll continue to trade our freedom for a false sense of security. We’ll continue to justify torture, “collateral damage” (re: civilian deaths), and the concept of preemptive warfare.

Was it worth the price? Nearly 2500 servicemen and women died in Afghanistan in the past 10 years. More than 10,000 civilians have died since just 2007. In Iraq, nearly 4,500 servicemen and women have been killed and close to 1.5 million Iraqis have died because of the war and occupation. Since September 11th we’ve spent $1.3 trillion on warfare. That’s a hefty price tag for retribution of the actions of one man, or an organization that only 200 to 300 members left in Afghanistan. It’s been pointed out by plenty of experts that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased animosity towards the U.S. and helped Al-Qaida recruiting. We’re still living under constant threat of a shadowy attack and now should live in fear of a “lone wolf” style retaliatory attack.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

Taliban Announces Spring Offensive In Afghanistan

BananaFamine — Sun, 01 May 2011 15:19:02 +0000

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 of the Kabul puppet administration”.

It said the war would continue “until the foreign invading forces pull out of Afghanistan”…

[continues at BBC News]

Over 400 Taliban Insurgents Escape Afghan Prison Through Thousand Foot Tunnel

BananaFamine — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 02:14:50 +0000

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 of a tunnel dug between the prison and the outside and disappeared into Kandahar city, prison supervisor Ghulam Dastagir Mayar said. He said the majority of the missing were Taliban militants.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said insurgents on the outside dug the 1,050-foot (320-meter) tunnel to the prison over five months, bypassing government checkpoints and major roads. The tunnel finally reached the prison cells Sunday night, and the inmates were ushered through it to freedom by three prisoners who had been informed of the plan, Mujahid said.

For more information, see original article.

U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Posed in ‘Trophy’ Photos With Murdered Civilians

imkaan — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:52:59 +0000

Jon Boone writes in the Guardian:

The face of Jeremy Morlock, a young US soldier, grins at the camera, his hand holding up the head of the dead and bloodied youth he and his colleagues have just killed in an act military prosecutors say was premeditated murder.

Moments before the picture was taken in January last year, the unsuspecting victim had been waved over by a group of US soldiers who had driven to his village in Kandahar province in one of their armoured Stryker tanks.

According to testimony collected by Der Spiegel magazine the boy had, as a matter of routine, lifted up his shirt to reveal that he was not hiding a suicide bomb vest.

That was the moment Morlock, according to a pre-arranged plan, threw a grenade at the boy that exploded while other members of the rogue group who called themselves the “kill team” opened fire.

They would later tell military investigators that the boy, a farmer’s son, had threatened them with the grenade.

Army Deploys Psy-Ops On U.S. Senators

majestic — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:09:31 +0000

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell

Proving that some magazines are still able to practice important investigative journalism, Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings shows how the U.S. Army deliberately misled Senators on a fact-finding visit to Afghanistan. You might think this kind of plotting by the military against its own government only happens in places like Egypt and Libya … but you’d be wrong:

The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.

“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. “I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.”

The list of targeted visitors was long, according to interviews with members of the IO team and internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone. Those singled out in the campaign included senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin; Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and a host of influential think-tank analysts.

The incident offers an indication of just how desperate the U.S. command in Afghanistan is to spin American civilian leaders into supporting an increasingly unpopular war. According to the Defense Department’s own definition, psy-ops – the use of propaganda and psychological tactics to influence emotions and behaviors – are supposed to be used exclusively on “hostile foreign groups.” Federal law forbids the military from practicing psy-ops on Americans, and each defense authorization bill comes with a “propaganda rider” that also prohibits such manipulation. “Everyone in the psy-ops, intel, and IO community knows you’re not supposed to target Americans,” says a veteran member of another psy-ops team who has run operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s what you learn on day one.”…

[continues in Rolling Stone]

4-Year-Olds On Opium

majestic — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:35:01 +0000

In America we complain that parents keep their kids quiet (and obese) with TV and junk food. That strategy looks remarkably good compared to Afghanistan where overtaxed parents keep their kids quiet (and skinny) with opium. For real — Arwa Damon reports for CNN:

Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan — In a far flung corner of northern Afghanistan, Aziza reaches into the dark wooden cupboard, rummages around, and pulls out a small lump of something wrapped in plastic.

She unwraps it, breaking off a small chunk as if it were chocolate, and feeds it to four-year-old son, Omaidullah. It’s his breakfast — a lump of pure opium.

“If I don’t give him opium he doesn’t sleep,” she says. “And he doesn’t let me work.”

Aziza comes from a poor family of carpet weavers in Balkh province. She has no education, no idea of the health risks involved or that opium is addictive.

“We give the children opium whenever they get sick as well,” she says, crouching over her loom.

With no real medical care in these parts and the high cost of medicine, all the families out here know is opium.

It’s a cycle of addiction passed on through generations.

The adults take opium to work longer hours and ease their pain.

Aziza’s elderly mother-in-law, Rozigul, rolls a small ball in her fingers and pops it into her mouth with a small smile before passing a piece over to her sister.

“I had to work and raise the children, so I started using drugs,” she says. “We are very poor people, so I used opium. We don’t have anything to eat. That is why we have to work and use drugs to keep our kids quiet.”

The entire extended family is addicted…

[continues at CNN]

25 Tons of Bombs Wipe Afghan Town Off Map (Photos)

ralph — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:12:45 +0000

Spencer Ackerman writes on the intriguing WIRED’s Danger Room:

An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.

But it’s the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.

Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Petraeus biographer, described the destruction of Tarok Kolache in a guest post for Tom Ricks’ Foreign Policy blog. Or, at least, she described its aftermath: Nothing remains of Tarok Kolache after Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.

Dewey Clarridge’s Private C.I.A.

majestic — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 14:16:56 +0000

A fascinating profile of Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, once (and in his own mind always) a CIA spy, by Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times:

Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, he still runs a network of spies.

Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class.

Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy,” Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge’s suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.

Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.

His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.

For all of the can-you-top-this qualities to Mr. Clarridge’s operation, it is a startling demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones and rivalries inside the American government to carry out their own agenda.

It also shows how the outsourcing of military and intelligence operations has spawned legally murky clandestine operations that can be at cross-purposes with America’s foreign policy goals. Despite Mr. Clarridge’s keen interest in undermining Afghanistan’s ruling family, President Obama’s administration appears resigned to working with President Karzai and his half brother, who is widely suspected of having ties to drug traffickers…

[continues in the New York Times]

I Have a Dream … To Go To War?

majestic — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:21:12 +0000

The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to end it must be ours. — Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking of Vietnam.

This week the Pentagon sank to a new low: claiming that Dr. King would “understand” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. King’s legacy is clear: he opposed war and other violence and condemned war as “an enemy of the poor.”

People Joe Klein Thinks Are Stupid: Ed Schultz and YOU

majestic — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:57:50 +0000

The irrepressible Robert Greenwald explains why Joe Klein is the stupid one in the debate about taking our troops out of Afghanistan, at Huffington Post:

…Let’s talk about stupid for a minute.

The U.S. has increased troop levels in Afghanistan every year since the initial invasion, and every year we’ve seen an increased level of violence in Afghanistan. President Obama and General Petraeus promised–twice!–that huge troop increases would help “protect the population” of Afghanistan and break Taliban momentum. Yet over the course of their major escalations, the heightened troop levels failed to protect Afghan civilians, who suffered more war-related deaths than the year before. And, according to NATO and the Pentagon’s own statistics and reporting, the estimated number of insurgents is exactly the same as last year, and they continue to grow in geographic and operational reach. After all this failure of troop increases to stem the violence, Secretary Gates just announced another troop increase.

That sounds pretty stupid to me.

American workers are drowning in an economic crisis. Huge numbers of us remain unemployed, and hundreds of thousands are giving up on finding work at all. States all over the country are slashing their social safety nets to shreds, cutting things like health care for kids in poverty, while at the same time the federal government is charging their state an amount larger than their states’ deficits to continue the Afghanistan War. While 68 percent of Americans worry that the war’s costs affect our ability to fix problems here at home, we’re wasting $2 billion a week on a war that’s not making us safer.

That sounds pretty stupid to me…

[continues at Huffington Post]

U.S. Air Force’s ‘Gorgon Stare’ Drone Can ‘See Everything’

majestic — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:33:35 +0000

First they road test it in Afghanistan, next thing you know it’s flying over Houston. From the Washington Post:

In ancient times, Gorgon was a mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them. In modern times, Gorgon may be one of the military’s most valuable new tools.

This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.

Officials also acknowledge that Gorgon Stare is of limited value unless they can match it with improved human intelligence – eyewitness reports of who is doing what on the ground.

The Air Force is exponentially increasing surveillance across Afghanistan. The monthly number of unmanned and manned aircraft surveillance sorties has more than doubled since last January, and quadrupled since the beginning of 2009…

[continues in the Washington Post]

U.S. Army ‘Edits’ Its History of The Deadly Battle of Wanat

Good German — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 03:55:10 +0000

Greg Jaffe writes in the Washington Post:

The Army’s official history of the battle of Wanat — one of the most intensely scrutinized engagements of the Afghan war — largely absolves top commanders of the deaths of nine U.S. soldiers and instead blames the confusing and unpredictable nature of war.

The history of the July 2008 battle was almost two years in the making and triggered a roiling debate at all levels of the Army about whether mid-level and senior battlefield commanders should be held accountable for mistakes made under the extreme duress of combat.

An initial draft of the Wanat history, which was obtained by The Washington Post and other media outlets in the summer of 2009, placed the preponderance of blame for the losses on the higher-level battalion and brigade commanders who oversaw the mission, saying they failed to provide the proper resources to the unit in Wanat.

The final history, released in recent weeks, drops many of the earlier conclusions and instead focuses on failures of lower-level commanders.

The battle of Wanat, which took place in a remote mountain village near the Pakistan border, produced four investigations and sidetracked the careers of several Army officers, whose promotions were either put on hold or canceled. The 230-page Army history is likely to be the military’s last word on the episode, and reflects a growing consensus within the ranks that the Army should be cautious in blaming battlefield commanders for failures in demanding wars such as the conflict in Afghanistan.

I wonder what the families of the deceased Iraqis think. Read more here.

TSA Allows GIs To Carry Guns On Plane – But Not Nail Clippers

majestic — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 05:01:42 +0000

Thanks to disinformation reader Synapse for sending us this story about the TSA’s treatment of armed soldiers returning from Afghanistan, from Redstate, a portion of which is shown below:

[Update: with thanks to commenter King-gonad, the TSA says this story is false]

…This is probably another good time to remind you all that all of us were carrying actual assault rifles, and some of us were also carrying pistols.

So we’re in line, going through one at a time. One of our Soldiers had his Gerber multi-tool. TSA confiscated it. Kind of ridiculous, but it gets better. A few minutes later, a guy empties his pockets and has a pair of nail clippers. Nail clippers. TSA informs the Soldier that they’re going to confiscate his nail clippers. The conversation went something like this:

TSA Guy: You can’t take those on the plane.

Soldier: What? I’ve had them since we left country.

TSA Guy: You’re not suppose to have them.

Soldier: Why?

TSA Guy: They can be used as a weapon.

Soldier: [touches butt stock of the rifle] But this actually is a weapon. And I’m allowed to take it on.

TSA Guy: Yeah but you can’t use it to take over the plane. You don’t have bullets.

Soldier: And I can take over the plane with nail clippers?

TSA Guy: [awkward silence]…

[read the whole sorry tale at Redstate]

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Dying Words: ‘You’ve Got to Stop This War in Afghanistan’

ralph — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:52:08 +0000

Jason Ditz writes on Antiwar.com:

Family members are reporting that the late Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan who died yesterday following heart surgery, gave as his last words “you’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

The dying words stand in stark contrast to Holbrooke’s living words, which were almost uniformly supportive of President Obama’s repeated escalations of the Afghan War. They’re also a major inconvenience to the president at a time when he’s trying to spin the ever worsening war as a runaway success.

Indeed, President Obama has already released a statement praising Holbrooke and saying he deserves much of the credit for the “progress” in the disastrous conflict, and reiterated that “he understood” how important the war is. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also issued a statement on Holbrooke, and it too centered on how important the escalation of the war was.