The Civilian Toll

National Security:

This month, the investigative website Wikileaks released a horrifying video "showing an American helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver in a July 2007 attack in Baghdad." After the initial shooting, a van of civilians arrived to aid the wounded, only to be fired upon by the helicopter's high-power cannon, wounding two children on board. "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one military pilot says, echoing the grim detachment of much of the conversation captured between the soldiers on the tape, which the military later authenticated. "[A]t face value, it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos," the Atlantic's James Fallows commented. But appearing on ABC's This Week Sunday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed that while the video was "clearly not helpful" and "painful to see," it "should not have any lasting consequences." Gates appears to be giving the unfortunate impression of U.S. indifference to civilian casualties. The video portrays just one incident among many others of civilians being needlessly killed by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just yesterday, "American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar" in Afghanistan, "killing as many as five civilians and wounding 18." The Wikileaks video serves to underscore the human and strategic costs of the U.S.'s continuing military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly the stepped-up use of drone strikes. While insurgents are inflicting chaos and violence (last year was the deadliest for civilians since 2001 in Afghanistan), the foreign troops are more often blamed, thereby dangerously undermining American credibility among the public and their political leadership. Sadly, as the Center for American Progress' Brian Katulis notes, the Wikileaks video may just confirm what Iraqis already assume about U.S. forces. New York Times correspondent Rod Nordland noted last week that the response in Iraq to the video has been "somewhat muted," as "most Iraqis have a pretty cynical attitude toward the Americans. And incidents of this sort don't really surprise them as much as maybe it does ourselves."

ALL TOO COMMON: Before taking command of the war in Afghanistan last summer, Gen. Stanley McChrystal told Congress that his success should be measured by "the number of Afghans shielded from violence." He has taken some laudable steps, and emphasizes the right things, but unfortunately, civilians are killed by coalition forces far too frequently. "[T]he most remarkable thing about the video is the business-as-usual dialogue between the pilots and crew of the Apache and the ground controllers that are guiding their actions," Foreign Policy's Stephen Walt notes. "This tells me that this incident wasn't unusual, which is of course why no disciplinary action was taken against the personnel involved. What is different in this case is that two Reuters journalists got killed, and eventually a video got leaked and put on the internet," he adds. Reports from former soldiers and war correspondents support this claim. Yesterday's bus shooting was "the latest deadly case of what the military calls 'escalation of force,' in which troops guarding military convoys or checkpoints gun down Afghans perceived as a threat because they have come too close or are traveling too fast." Speaking of these types of incidents earlier this month, McChrystal made this startling assessment: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." Still, checkpoint and convoy deaths are "fewer in number" than those from air strikes or Special Forces operations. And while drone attacks have been successful at killing top al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, they have also killed a startling number of innocents. As the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman notes, the military leadership may say the right things, but "the effect, the output, the result -- that's what matters." And the military's official reaction to killings is often unhelpful, with attempts to cover up or down play embarrassing incidents.

BLOWBACK: While it's difficult to count how many civilians have been killed by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the effect of the killings is tangible. Yesterday's bus shooting in Afghanistan "triggered a vitriolic anti-American demonstration, infuriated officials and appeared likely to harm public opinion on the eve of the most important offensive of the war, in which tens of thousands of American and NATO troops will try to take control of the Kandahar region," the New York Times observed. Demonstrations like this are common after civilian killings, which undermine public opinion of the coalition forces. Killings may also aid recruitment of militants fighting coalition forces. "Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall." "There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents," Hall told troops last month, urging them to exercise more caution. Following an alleged cover up of a botched Special Forces raid in February that killed two pregnant women and a teenage girl, the father of the girl vowed revenge, saying, "I will destroy everything I have and will launch my own suicide attack."

STRAINED RELATIONS: Civilian killings also have "political reverberations far beyond the sites of the killings." Following yesterday's bus shooting, the governor of Kandahar "called for the commander of the military convoy who opened fire to be prosecuted under military law." "If you want to stop the bus, it should be shot in the tires," he said. "Why shoot the people inside?" "This is a savage action. They have committed a great crime," said a member of Kandahar's provincial council. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called such attacks "unjustifiable" and become increasingly frustrated with civilian deaths. Last week, he told a gathering of tribal elders in Kandahar that he "would not permit an American offensive there unless the people supported it." The planned operation will be "one of the biggest of the nine-year war" and involve 10,000 American soldiers, but Karzai is threatening to stop it because of these needless deaths. "Are you happy or unhappy for the operation to be carried out?" Karzai asked the elders. "We are not happy," one shouted back. Karzai undeniably needs to clean up corruption and nepotism within his government, but the pressure he faces internally over civilian killings makes it more difficult for the U.S. to influence him.
 

Let The Sun Shine In......

Karzai’s Words Leave Few Choices for the West

Bring our men and women home and send in the drones. Now that we have drones that are capable of warfare, they should be used in any state that supports terrorists.We have to find a way to clean up Bush's mess.

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — As President Hamid Karzai made more antagonistic statements over the weekend toward the NATO countries fighting on behalf of his government, the West was taking stock of just how little maneuvering room it has.

There are no good options on the horizon, many analysts say, for reining in Mr. Karzai or for penalizing him, without potentially damaging Western interests. The reluctant conclusion of diplomats and Afghan analysts is that for now, they are stuck with him.

Many fear the relationship is only likely to become worse, as Mr. Karzai draws closer to allies like Iran and China, whose interests are often at odds with those of the West, and sounds sympathetic enough to the Taliban that he could spur their efforts, helping their recruitment and further destabilizing the country.

“The political situation is continuing to deteriorate; Karzai is flailing around,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul with long experience in the region. “At the moment we are propping up an unstable political structure, and I haven’t seen any remotely plausible plan for building consensus.”

The tensions between the West and Mr. Karzai flared up publicly last Thursday, when Mr. Karzai accused the West and the United Nations of perpetrating fraud in the August presidential election and described the Western military coalition as coming close to being seen as invaders who would give the insurgency legitimacy as “a national resistance.”

Despite a conciliatory phone call to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday, his comments over the weekend only expanded the discord.

On Saturday, Mr. Karzai met with about 60 members of Parliament, mostly his supporters, and berated them for having rejected his proposed new election law. Among other things, the proposal would have given him the power to appoint all the members of the Electoral Complaints Commission, who are currently appointed by the United Nations, the Afghan Supreme Court and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. The Electoral Complaints Commission, which reviews allegations of voting fraud and irregularities, documented the fraud that deprived Mr. Karzai of an outright victory in the presidential election.

At the meeting, Mr. Karzai stepped up his anti-Western statements, according to a Parliament member who attended but spoke on condition of anonymity.
“If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban,” Mr. Karzai said, according to the Parliament member.
A spokesman for Mr. Karzai, Waheed Omar, could not be reached for comment on Sunday.

In a speech in Kandahar on Sunday, Mr. Karzai promised local tribal elders that coalition military operations planned for the area this summer would not proceed without their approval.

“I know you are worried about this operation,” he said, adding: “There will be no operation until you are happy.”

Given his tone in the last few days, it was unclear whether he was literally extending the elders veto power over the offensive, or merely trying to quell their fears and bring them on board.

Interviews with diplomats, Afghan analysts and ordinary Afghans suggest that the United States and other Western countries have three options: threaten to withdraw troops or actually withdraw them; use diplomacy, which so far has had little result; and find ways to expand citizen participation in the government, which now has hardly any elected positions at the provincial and district levels.

Threatening to withdraw, which Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the “nuclear deterrent” option, would put the United States and other Western countries in the position of potentially having to make good on the promise, risking their strategic interest in a stable Afghanistan. Few experts think the country would remain peaceful without a significant foreign force here. Moreover, withdrawal could open the way for the country to again become a terrorist haven.

Some Western critics of Mr. Karzai believe that the West has no choice but to threaten to leave.

“There is no point in having troops in a mission that cannot be accomplished,” said Peter W. Galbraith, former United Nations deputy special representative for Afghanistan, who was dismissed after a dispute with his superiors over how to handle widespread electoral fraud and what senior U.N. officials later said was his advocacy of Mr. Karzai's removal. “The mission might be important, but if it can’t be achieved, there is no point in sending these troops into battle. Part of the problem is that counterinsurgency requires a credible local partner.”

Diplomacy has so far failed to achieve substantial changes, although some analysts, like Mr. Biddle, who opposes the so-called nuclear option, believe that the West should demand concessions before spending any more money on development projects like digging wells and building schools.

“We do millions of things in Afghanistan, and any of those things can become a source of leverage,” he said. “Far too much of what we do in Afghanistan we just do without asking for anything explicit in return.”

That approach can backfire, some argue, hurting those the West most wants to help.

Greater power sharing, while promising, faces structural obstacles. Under the Constitution, provincial governors, local judges, district governors and most other offices are appointive rather than elective. In some areas, Afghan and American programs have begun to involve communities in local budgeting, but progress is slow and it would probably take several years to expand it to higher levels of government.

“There are no better angels about to descend on Afghanistan,” said Alex Thier, a senior Afghan analyst at the United States Institute of Peace. “Unless some drastic action is taken, Mr. Karzai is the president of Afghanistan, and he was just elected for another five years.”

That prospect leaves some Afghans uneasy. In interviews with more than a dozen people around the country, there was apprehension and dismay over Mr. Karzai’s clash with the international community, and the specter of renewed chaos it could lead to.

“Karzai delivered this speech based on his own difficulties with the foreigners,” said Gulab Mangal, a tribal leader in the Musa Khel area of Khost Province.

“When the international community criticized his brother, he started to raise these problems,” he said, referring to Ahmed Wali Karzai, a prominent figure in southern Afghanistan. “It shows the relation between Karzai and the international community is deteriorating day by day, and that should not be allowed to happen.”

Mehram Ali, a man from Wardak Province who was shopping in Kabul over the weekend, voiced a similar qualm. “We need the international community to keep supporting us and our government,” he said.

“In this recent situation we do need foreign soldiers to help us in bringing peace and stability for our country, and if the foreigners leave us, then the people of Afghanistan will face adversity from every direction, and Afghanistan will return to what it was like 10 years ago when we had the Taliban government.”

Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr., Abdul Waheed Wafa and Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar.

Let The Sun Shine In......

How Food and Water Are Driving a 21st-Century African Land Grab
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/07-3

Polls Close in Iraq Election
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/07

Revealed: The Shocking Truth About Tasers
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/07-1

US Concerned Over Blackwater's Work in Afghanistan
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/06

Senate Debates Indefinite Detentions
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/06-2

Ill. Judge Won't Toss Torture Suit Naming Rumsfeld
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/06-1

and more...

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Senate report: Bin Laden was 'within our grasp'

By CALVIN WOODWARD
The Associated Press
Saturday, November 28, 2009 11:33 PM



WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.
Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry, as President Barack Obama prepares to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Although limited to a review of military operations eight years old, the report could also be read as a cautionary note for those resisting an increased troop presence there now.

More pointedly, it seeks to affix a measure of blame for the state of the war today on military leaders under former president George W. Bush, specifically Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary and his top military commander, Tommy Franks.

"Removing the al-Qaida leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the report says. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism."

The report states categorically that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least. It says that a review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants "removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora."

On or about Dec. 16, 2001, bin Laden and bodyguards "walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area," where he is still believed to be based, the report says.
Instead of a massive attack, fewer than 100 U.S. commandos, working with Afghan militias, tried to capitalize on air strikes and track down their prey.

"The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," the report said.

At the time, Rumsfeld expressed concern that a large U.S. troop presence might fuel a backlash and he and some others said the evidence was not conclusive about bin Laden's location.

He Lied, he lied and don't be letting W and Vice off the hook so easily, either. It almost caused me whiplash, the speed with which we changed enemies from Osama bin Laden, whom we are told attacked us on our own soil, to Saddam Hussein who could not have caused an traffic accident in Manhattan.
---
On the Net:
The report:http://foreign.senate.gov/





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Let The Sun Shine In......

A 9/11 Reality Check

Posted on Sep 8, 2009

By Robert Scheer


What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?       

(Not to mention the most disturbing domestic Cheney/Rove product, Data mining, millions of Americans. While pretty much useless for the purpose of finding "terrorist cells,"  data mining is a high tech way of keeping tabs on Americans most personal information, along with publicly expressed opinions on blogs and comments all over the web.)

As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.

Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn’t compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima’s mayor two years ago: “That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted.”


We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us and, having been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade silicon into their women’s breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our soldiers.

Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than instant and full forgiveness for our “mistakes.” Only last month, four decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did former Army Lt. William Calley express “regret” for his crimes. He served no time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the commutation of his sentence by Richard Nixon, who might have been anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon.

In blind and wrathful retaliation for 9/11 we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren’t able to find Manhattan on a map.


We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and fair trials even after years of torturing them.


Many of our co-citizens were driven to frothing-at-the-mouth vengeance, not merely be the attacks of 9/11/01, but by the out-and-out lies of the Bush/Cheney administration in the weeks and months that followed, eventually leading to the massive bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq, a nation of people who had zero to do with the events of 9/11/01. 

I knew that there would be an attack on Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, even though they asked for proof and the Bush administration refused to give any information at all. But was that the most expedient way of arresting leaders of Al Qaeda. 

I remember well, Donald Rumsfeld saying, when months past without any sighting of Osama, after Tora Bora, that finding Osama is like finding a needle in a hay stack. Seemed to me that the best way to accomplish that feat would not be blowing the haystack to "kingdom come." 

Now, 8 years later, Osama is either dead of natural causes or is still on the loose. Within months of 9/11, we now know Bush and Cheney, plus various Neocons already had Iraq in their sites before they took office and were moving assets to prepare for war with Iraq long before Congress was asked for a war resolution against Iraq

But we do have a saving grace for our experiment in democracy—although unfortunately it did not exist in the Supreme Court or Congress as a barrier to an imperial vice presidency. It is the power of the lone whistle-blower of conscience, occasionally given voice in what remains of our free press and which can influence presidential elections, as happened quite dramatically this last time around. There are those like Joe Wilson, who exposed presidential fraud masquerading as national security concern over bogus Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and more recently the truth-telling of Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent and lead interrogator of terrorists.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Soufan, who was involved in obtaining much reliable information from prisoners before they were tortured, observed that the recently released memos cited by Cheney to back his argument that torture was efficient actually “fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.”

So, Cheney is again proved wrong, but if there had been a larger attack on 9/11, I doubt whether many free souls would be around now to tell him so.


AP / Alex Brandon

Two Afghan men watch from their motorcycle on Saturday as soldiers with the 20th Special Forces Group go on a training mission in Afghanistan.

---

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Didn't "We" Go Into Afghaistan To "Get Osama?"

McGovern, one of our heroes, tells it like it was and is. I doubt we could add to this article.

Could any of us, in autumn if 2000, imagined what a horrible mess we could have been in 8 years later?

Afghanistan for Dummies

By Ray McGovern
September 2, 2009

I’m going to ask for my money back. I’ve seen this Afghanistan movie before. The first time, Vietnam was in the title.

As in an early scene from the Vietnam version, U.S. military officials are surprised to discover that the insurgents in Afghanistan are stronger than previously realized.

And our protagonist, Gen. Westmoreland — sorry, I mean McChrystal — sees the situation as serious but salvageable. As Westmoreland did with President Lyndon Johnson, McChrystal is preparing to tell President Barack Obama that thousands of more troops are needed to achieve the U.S. objective — whatever that happens to be.

As in Vietnam, uncertainty about objectives and how to measure success persist in Afghanistan. Never has this come through more clearly than in the fuzzy remarks of “Af-Pak” super-envoy Richard Holbrooke who has purview over Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On Aug. 12 at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, Holbrooke tried to clarify how the Obama administration would gauge success in Afghanistan.

John Podesta, the center’s president who was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and served as head of

Obama’s transition team, waxed eloquent not only about his friend Holbrooke but Holbrooke’s team; really spectacular, impressive, multidisciplinary, interagency, truly exceptional were some of the bouquets thrown at team members.

Holbrooke said his Af-Pak squad is “the best team” he’d ever worked with, adding that “Hillary” – the Secretary of State whose last name is Clinton – personally approved “every member.”

It may indeed be a good team but that doesn’t change the fact that it appears to be on a fool’s errand. Each member has considerable expertise to offer, but no one knows where they’re headed.

The whole thing reminds me of the old saw: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. (Or you might say Holbrooke’s team finds itself in a dark place peering into the distance looking for a light at the end of the tunnel.)

Pressing for Answers

To his credit, Podesta kept trying to get a clear answer from Holbrook about the overall objective in Afghanistan, as well as seeking some metrics to judge progress.

 “There is increasing concern here at home and in allied capitals abroad about the cost of winning in

Afghanistan, and to what end-goals we should aspire,” Podesta said. “I hope to focus on … our objectives in
Afghanistan and how we measure progress.”

Holbrooke was as smooth — and vacuous — as Gen. William Westmoreland and his briefers were in Saigon:

“We know the difference with input and output, and what you are seeing here is input,” Holbrooke said. “The payoff is still to come. We have to produce results, and we understand that.

“And we’re not here today to tell you we’re winning or we’re losing. We’re not here today to say we’re optimistic or pessimistic. We’re here to tell you that we’re in this fight in a different way with a determination to succeed.”

In an apparent attempt to get Podesta to stop asking about objectives and how to measure success, Holbrooke tossed a bouquet back at the Center for American Progress for doing “an extraordinary job of becoming a critical center for our efforts.”

For those who may have missed it, Podesta’s Center surprised many, including me, by endorsing Obama’s non-strategy of throwing more troops at the problem in Afghanistan. (The charitable explanation is that there is something in the water here in Washington; less charitably, the Center may have feared losing its place at Obama’s table.)

Holbrooke’s flattery, though, did not deter Podesta, who kept insisting on some kind of cogent answer about objectives and metrics.

Podesta: “From the perspective of the American people, how do you define clear objectives of what you’re
trying to succeed as outputs with the inputs that you just talked about?”

Holbrooke: “A very key question, John, which you’re alluding to is, of course, if our objective is to defeat, destroy, dismantle al-Qaeda, and they’re primarily in Pakistan, why are we doing so much in Afghanistan? ...

“If you abandon the struggle in Afghanistan, you will suffer against al-Qaeda as well. But we have to be clear on what our national interests are here….

“The specific goal you ask, John, — is really hard for me to address in specific terms. But I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the simplest sense, the Supreme Court test for another issue, we’ll know it when we see it.” (Emphasis added.)

Holbrooke almost chokes on the words as they proceed out of his mouth, and then takes a very visible gulp of air. Up until this point, Podesta has been bravely suppressing any outward sign of frustration with Holbrooke’s vacuous comments on U.S. objectives and measures of success.

After the “we’ll know it when we see it” remark, Podesta pauses for a few seconds and looks at Holbrooke — as if to say, and that's it? Then, like a high school teacher ready to move on to the next ill-prepared student, Podesta utters a curt "okay."

“Know It When You See It”

The Supreme Court test involving “know it when you see it” refers to a phrase used by former Justice Potter Stewart 45 years ago. Frustrated at not being able to define pornography in an obscenity case, he gave up and fell back on the “know it when you see it” formulation.

The same phrase was used by a similarly frustrated official, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in December 2002, just three months before the U.S.-U.K. attack on Iraq.

Unable to come up with any specific evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but determined to rebut

Saddam Hussein’s claims that he had none, Wolfowitz quipped, “It’s like the judge said about pornography. I can’t define it, but I will know it when I see it.”

How is it that we let people get away with that kind of rubbish when it means people — Iraqis, Afghanis, as well as Americans — are going to get killed and maimed?

But Holbrooke’s “we’ll know-it-when-we-see-it” measure of success is just the latest sign that the Obama administration has been playing the Af-Pak strategy by ear. The President himself seems generally aware of this, given his readiness to give wide latitude, not clear instructions, to Holbrooke and the generals.

An early hint of the disarray came on March 27, a little more than two months into his presidency, when Obama showed up a half-hour late to the press conference at which he announced a “comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

No explanation was given for his lateness, which required TV talking heads to reach new heights of vapidity for a full 30 minutes. I ventured a guess at the time that his instincts were telling him he was about to do something he would regret.

It soon became apparent that Obama’s 60-day Afghan policy review lacked specificity on strategy but tried to make up for that with lofty rhetoric — kudos to the alliterative speechwriter who coined the catchy phrase “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda.”

More important, the President also took pains to assure us that: “Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course.” Rather, he promised there will be “metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.”

(Yet the key “metric” appears to be what Holbrooke blurted out on Aug. 12, “we’ll know it when we see it.”)

In Holbrooke, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama appear to have picked a loser. It is bad enough that he does not seem to have a clue about how to measure success toward U.S. objectives — or, at least, cannot articulate them — even before a friendly audience.

Perhaps Secretary Clinton and President Obama were also unaware of his well-deserved reputation for logical inconsistencies, not to mention the delight he takes in bullying foreign officials — the more senior the person, the better.

A former Foreign Service officer who worked on the Balkans confided that he believes Holbrooke actually prolonged the Yugoslav civil war for several years by pushing a policy of covert military support for the Muslim side.

It should come as no surprise, then, if Holbrooke ends up playing a role in deepening the Af-Pak quagmire, if only by adopting a belligerent attitude towards the Pashtuns and also the Pakistani government — not to mention rival U.S. officials.

In sum, Holbrooke will probably prove more hindrance than help in working out a sensible U.S. strategy and objectives. Worse, he is not likely to serve as a much needed counterweight to the generals, who may well succeed in persuading Obama to give them still more troops for an unwinnable war.

George Will Favors Pullout

(I see Will's comments as political more than strategic. It's the GOP's way of putting Obama in a no win situation; the Dems Nixon. These people will do anything to regain absolute power. We should never forget that it was Bush and Cheney who took their eyes off the ball to invade and occupy Iraq. The Iraqis did not have a damn thing to do with 9/11.)

Surprisingly, one of the new voices urging a troop drawdown in Afghanistan is conservative columnist George Will, who showed his human side in an op-ed appearing Tuesday in the Washington Post, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

Will starts and ends the piece with references to a young Marine who had just lost two buddies. To his credit, Will avoids the customary quote from the poet Horace — “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country”) or anything like it.

Will says, in effect, that syrupy sentiments and faux appeals to patriotism do not apply in present circumstances. He would probably be the last to draw this connection, but he has begun to sound like Cindy Sheehan, who has been trying for over four years to get George Bush to explain to her the “noble cause” for which her son Casey died in Iraq.

(God forbid that we should become sentimental about our men and women in uniform! Will talks about syrupy patriotism!!! Puleeze Louise.....Now it is supposedly Obama's war? Give us all a break, George!)

Will ends his article with a heartfelt appeal for substantial troop reductions now, “before more American valor…is squandered.”

On Wednesday, the neoconservative editors of the Post compiled a series of rebuttals to Will’s column in a section entitled "Where Will Got It Wrong," including a lengthy excerpt from a blog post by leading neocon theorist William Kristol, who attacks Will for sentimentality when “it would be better to base a major change in our national security strategy on arguments.”

(Yet another idiot!)

Not surprisingly, given his enthusiastic support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Kristol advocates “a surge of several brigades of American forces” in Afghanistan and a determination “to support a strategy, and to provide the necessary resources, for victory.”

Alongside Kristol’s blog post was an op-ed by Post columnist David Ignatius, another enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War.

Regarding Afghanistan, Ignatius concludes that “this may be one of those messy situations where the best course is to both shoot and talk – a strategy based on the idea that we can bolster our friends and bloody our enemies enough that, somewhere down the road, we can cut a deal.”

You may recall that President Johnson followed a similar strategy of trying to bomb his Vietnamese enemies to the bargaining table.

Counting the tragedy in Iraq – as well as the one in Vietnam – this is the third time I’ve seen this movie.

[To see a clip of the exchange between Holbrooke and Podesta, click here.]

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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Army used profiles to reject reporters

We heard something about this several years ago but, as is often the case, the story went down the old memory hole.

By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, August 29, 2009

RELATED STORIES:

• Pentagon: Reporter profiling under review
  
• Files prove Pentagon is profiling reporters
• Journalists' recent work examined before embeds
  
• In the newsroom: Military puts its spin on PR story
  

WASHINGTON — The secret profiles commissioned by the Pentagon to rate the work of journalists reporting from Afghanistan were used by military officials to deny disfavored reporters access to American fighting units or otherwise influence their coverage as recently as 2008, an Army official acknowledged Friday.


What’s more, the official said, Army public affairs officers used the analyses of reporters’ work to decide how to steer them away from potentially negative stories.


“If a reporter has been focused on nothing but negative topics, you’re not going to send him into a unit that’s not your best,” Maj. Patrick Seiber, spokesman for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, told Stars and Stripes. “There’s no win-win there for us. We’re not trying to control what they report, but we are trying to put our best foot forward.”


Seiber, who as a task force public affairs officer in Afghanistan in 2007-08 was responsible for deciding whether to approve requests from reporters to accompany some U.S. units as “embeds,” said his superior officers routinely sent the reporter profiles to him as part of the review and placement process.


In at least two instances, Seiber said, he rejected embed requests based partly on what he read in the profiles — once because a reporter had allegedly done "poor reporting" and once because a journalist reportedly had violated embed rules by releasing classified information. The latter allegation, if true, would have been grounds for automatic denial of an embed request even in the absence of the profile.


"In one case we had a writer who had taken a story out of context and really done some irresponsible reporting," Seiber said. "When I looked at that on the [profile], I decided if that guy is going to take that much effort to handle and correct I wasn’t going to put a unit at risk with an amateur journalist."

The revelations are the latest twist in the controversy over how the military is gathering and using reporter profiles compiled by The Rendon Group, a Washington, D.C. public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to rate journalists’ work.

Stars and Stripes revealed the existence of the profiles this week in several stories documenting how a "positive-negative-neutral" reporter rating system was being employed, including advice on how to try to "neutralize" negative coverage of the U.S. military — a practice that appears to contravene the Pentagon’s longstanding policy that the embed system is "in no way intended to prevent release of embarrassing, negative or derogatory information."

Pentagon officials repeatedly denied this week that the Rendon profiles are being used to rate reporters or determine whether they will be granted permission to embed with U.S. units in Afghanistan.


"There is no policy that stipulates in any way that embedding should be based in any way on a person’s work," Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters on Monday.


Officials of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, who assumed control of the war effort in October 2008, said they began phasing out use of the Rendon profiles months ago.


But a Rendon representative is currently working in Afghanistan, according to Air Force Captain Elizabeth Mathias, a public affairs officer with USFOR-A. And at least one reporter who requested and received copies of her own Rendon profile this week said it rated her work as recently as July.


Another reporter, freelance writer P.J. Tobia, obtained the Rendon report compiled on him in May and posted it Friday on the True/Slant blog.


"Based on his previous embed and past reporting, it is unlikely that [Tobia] will miss an opportunity to report on US military missteps," the report read. "However, if following previous trends, he will remain sympathetic to U.S. troops and may acknowledge a learning curve in Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Friday published an essay in a military journal that was sharply critical of the U.S. government’s attempts to use "strategic communications" to shape messages directed at the Muslim world.

"To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate," Mullen wrote in the essay in Joint Force Quarterly.

"I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all," he wrote. "They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are."

Reporters Charlie Reed and Kevin Baron contributed to this story.
 

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Osama worked for the CIA?

The funny thing about this, if there is anything funny about it at all, is that there was a time, not all that long ago, when I would have by-passed this post much as I do the the one reporting that Michael Jackson is from the planet Bullshit in the Dogpiss galaxy  and that all his kids are the first true, balanced Alien/earthlings to be born on planet earth, or some other total horse shit. 

After the last 8 years or so, I've become much more open-minded about what is possible and what is not.  Wonder how that happened. LOL

Sibel Edmonds Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for CIA up to 9/11

www.bradblog.com/?p=7332
 

 

 

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript). In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained 'intimate relations' with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, "all the way until that day of September 11." These 'intimate relations' included using Bin Laden for 'operations' in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These 'operations' involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner "as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict," that is, fighting 'enemies' via proxies. As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from 'actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia') as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

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Contractors say Blackwater supplied forbidden guns

By MIKE BAKER, Associated Press Writer Mike Baker, Associated Press Writer Thu May 21, 8:43 pm ET

RALEIGH, N.C. – The security firm formerly known as Blackwater armed some of its workers in Afghanistan despite U.S. military documents that prohibited them from carrying guns, said two former contractors who were fired after they were involved in a fatal shooting in the country.

Justin Cannon and Steven McClain said Thursday that they frequently asked superiors why the company distributed the AK-47 assault rifles without Department of Defense authorization.

"We were just told, 'Continue doing your job. Don't worry about it. That's above your paygrade,'" Cannon, 27, of Texas, said in an interview with The Associated Press. The men were involved in a shooting earlier this month that killed an Afghan and injured two others, and they recently returned to the U.S., saying they were cleared to leave after an interview with military investigators.

Blackwater, now known as Xe, has said the company's subsidiary, Paravant, fired the men "for failure to comply with the terms of their contract." McClain showed a letter detailing his termination, and it listed a violation of alcohol policy as the only specific reason for firing.

Both men said they weren't drinking and hadn't drank since arriving in Afghanistan in November. Their attorney, Daniel J. Callahan, said he believes the company is making up the alcohol issue so it can avoid scrutiny over contractors being armed.

"Blackwater's concerned about getting kicked out of Afghanistan as it got kicked out of Iraq," said Callahan, with Santa Ana, Calif.-based Callahan & Blaine. "They're trying to use these four men as scapegoats."
Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell declined to immediately comment on the accusations.

McClain and Cannon said the company issued weapons to the contractors even though they were supposed to train the Afghan National Army on other styles of weapons used by NATO forces. And they said the company told them to carry the weapons, even when they weren't training, and that it was no secret that they had the guns.

"These weapons pretty much went wherever we went," Cannon said. "If we go to the classroom, we take our weapons. If we go to the range, we take our weapons. If we leave the compound at all, we take our weapons."

They had the guns with them as usual on the night of May 5. The men said they had dinner with some interpreters and then went to drive them to a taxi stand several miles away. On the way, the men said a speeding vehicle slammed into the first car of their two-vehicle convoy, causing it to roll.

McClain, 25, of California, said he was hurt and that he and his passengers had to climb out of the sport utility vehicle's back window.

Cannon said the people in his SUV got out to help but saw that the car that had caused the accident had turned and sped toward them. Cannon said he and another contractor, Chris Drotleff, fired their weapons. He wasn't sure how many rounds were fired.

"At that point, the vehicle was the threat," Cannon said. "I thought I was about to get creamed by a 2,000-pound car."

The brother of one of the wounded Afghans has said the car was full of shopkeepers heading home from work and that the people in the vehicle misinterpreted one of the Americans hitting the car as an order to move.

A passenger was hit in the stomach and died two days later, said Shah Agha, whose brother Farid was driving the car. Farid was shot in the hand and another person was injured outside the vehicle, Agha said.
McClain said three of the men, including Armando Hamid, who were fired in the aftermath of the shooting have left Afghanistan while a fourth, Drotleff, is still there. Callahan had accused the company of holding the men against their will. But they said Thursday that Blackwater told them to stay but didn't physically detain them. They left the compound Saturday night.

Xe, which is based in North Carolina, dumped its brand name Blackwater earlier this year as it tried to distance itself from its operations in Iraq. The State Department is not renewing the company's lucrative security work in there, which comprises an estimated one-third of Xe's revenues.

(This version CORRECTS Corrects names of person identified as fired and person who stayed behind in Afghanistan in 16th graf. Moving on general news and financial services.)


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DOJ: Courts could harm Afghan effort

Admittedly, Bush and Cheney's GWOT is a fraud. We all know it, if we are honest with ourselves. 

As a born and raised American, hailing from the deep south, I want to be on the moral side of thing for a change. 

As far as I am concerned, everyone who was responsible for the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, in any way,  should be arrested and tried for murder.

Those who are responsible for the war of aggression against Iraq should receive the same justice. 

Anyone who covers for the international war criminals in the Bush administration can only be considered as complicit after the fact and guilty of obstruction of justice.

By: Josh Gerstein April 11, 2009 03:02 PM EST

President Obama’s effort to pursue a new strategy against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban could be jeopardized if some prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan are allowed access to American courts, the Justice Department argued in a court filing Friday. Government lawyers made the claim in a motion asking for permission to pursue an expedited appeal of a judge’s ruling last week that prisoners who claim they were captured outside Afghanistan should be permitted to pursue habeas corpus challenges to their detention. Judge John Bates ruled April 2 that he would hear cases from non-Afghan prisoners who claimed they were captured outside Afghanistan and taken to the Bagram Airfield near Kabul. “Drawing a jurisdictional line at the border of Afghanistan creates a disincentive to move to Bagram individuals captured in Pakistan, where there is neither a temporary screening and processing facility nor a long-term theater internment facility,” Justice Department lawyer Jean Lin wrote. “This jurisdictional line also provides the enemies of the United States an incentive to conduct operations from Pakistan, using it as a safe haven and using the U.S. court system as a tactical weapon.” The Justice Department noted Obama’s statement last month describing Afghanistan and Pakistan as “as two countries but one challenge.” Friday’s filing notified the court that Solicitor General Elena Kagan had authorized an appeal in the case. The motion suggested that allowing the prisoners to be heard now would also interfere with a 180-day review Obama ordered in January into policies regarding interrogation and detention of terror suspects. Lin asked Bates to suspend his order, arguing that proceeding with the cases “would impose serious practical burdens on, and potential harm to, the Government and its efforts to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. “There is no dispute that Bagram Airfield is in a theater of war where the Nation’s troops are in harm’s way,” she wrote. “Responding to these petitions – and to the potentially large number of other petitions filed by Bagram detainees who may now allege that they are similarly situated – would divert the military’s attention and resources at a critical time for operations in Afghanistan, potentially requiring accommodation and protection of counsel and onerous discovery.” The Obama administration’s stance in the case is aligned with that of the Bush Administration—and infuriating to detainee lawyers. The new administration’s latest arguments, that interference by the courts could aid America’s enemies, is provoking more anger. An attorney for Bagram detainees, Tina Foster, said in a statement Friday that the Obama team’s action signaled “a particularly dark day in American history.” She said Obama was betraying his rhetoric about returning to the rule of law. “The time has long since passed for issuing platitudes about ending torture, rendition, and indefinite detention. President Obama today becomes complicit in the unjust and illegal detention of our clients — who deserve better,” Foster said. In his ruling, Bates said the prisoners’ claim that they were captured outside Afghanistan was pivotal. He said the government should not be permitted to deposit inmates at Bagram simply to put them beyond the reach of the courts. Lin countered that none of the prisoners claimed to have been captured or held previously in a place where they would have had recourse to U.S. courts. The government’s latest motion hints at a possible compromise to be pursued before the appeals court: considering Pakistan to be part of the Afghan theater of war. That would allow prisoners detained in Pakistan to be held at Bagram without recourse, but still permit those whisked there from around the world to bring challenges to their detention.

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