Diamonds Are Forever But Afghanistan Is A Close Second
(War • )
They bust this real high-ranking Afghan official after catching him demanding a car bribe for his son, see, but then it turns out there’s a curtain behind the man…
Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
No worries though, because we know that they know that we know that they know.
Now if we could only figure out how to lop a few trillion off of the deficit…
On the other hand (and I do believe I have one left someplace), just as the moon shot brought us Tang and Space Blankets, so has failed Afghan War research brought us Invisible Heat Rays we can fire at prisoners if things get out of control or too dull.
Sometimes you wish you were making stuff up, but you aren’t.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 26, 2010, 04 37 AM
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In Afghanistan, Embedded BS And A Crumbling Fourth Estate
(War • Media)
The “major news organizations” never have spent the money required to do the kind of thorough reporting on the Afghanistan War that the public, and the public’s children fighting and getting their legs blown off or dying over there, deserved.
Instead, the news orgs allowed their reporters to be “embedded,” which is to say, baby-sat, by a military that either intimidated them into sanitizing their reports or completely controlled what they saw and heard.
Then some guy with an Internet site developed a reputation for his willingness to publish government and business secrets some people would deem deserved to see daylight – without disclosing the sources of the leaks. The most recent result has been the disclosure of a huge diary of reports on the Afghan War over the past six years, direct from soldiers and intelligence officers.
Now some in Congress and the Obama administration are wringing their hands for fear the public will read this and not support the war. Because – who could have guessed it in a million years? – it turns out the current administration and the past administration have been lying to the American people about how badly this war has been going.
The disclosures, with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed, landed at a crucial moment. Because of difficulties on the ground and mounting casualties in the war, the debate over the American presence in Afghanistan has begun earlier than expected. Inside the administration, more officials are privately questioning the policy.In Congress, House leaders were rushing to hold a vote on a critical war-financing bill as early as Tuesday, fearing that the disclosures could stoke Democratic opposition to the measure. A Senate panel is also set to hold a hearing on Tuesday on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.
Administration officials acknowledged that the documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, will make it harder for Mr. Obama as he tries to hang on to public and Congressional support until the end of the year, when he has scheduled a review of the war effort.
“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”
To those of us curious enough to seek out the truth about this war, Wikipedia’s disclosure was pretty much no surprise whatsoever. The problem is, most of the people who now hold the purse-strings to the major American news organizations apparently no longer possess such curiosity, otherwise Wikileaks would’ve been redundant.
Today we have at least one big media player (FOX) whose owner has taken the position that it should serve as the propaganda minister for the rightist political party, and a bunch of other big players whose media properties are merely small pieces of big entertainment (ABC and CBS) corporations or conglomerates with major defense-contractor holdings (NBC). Their owners’ gross interference in their news operations is legion to those who keep their eyes open. But – and this is natural and I’m not being critical – the public is too busy trying to stay alive to devote time to such behind-the-scenes malarkey, and the big media outlets themselves do a great job of covering it up.
So here we stand today, again, with an economy still torn and bleeding as far as the American working stiff is concerned, while corporations are feeling fat and profitable even amid a new round of major layoffs. People without jobs cannot spend, though, which even the fattest corporation will learn eventually – unless their products are major weapons systems, in which case, apparently, the corporate welfare goes on forever and the party never ends.
The Machiavellian Republicans have used deficit fear talk to scare timid Democrats into putting forth a stunted stimulus program that mostly went to big corporations that didn’t need and won’t spend or lend the cash, while the acknowledged champion American job-growth engine, small business, sits out on the curb trying to figure out how to start a new venture that doesn’t require any capital. Meanwhile, the Mexican drug wars long ago spilled over our borders here in Texas, and the main route from my house to Houston also is the mainline for tons of cocaine traveling from Nuevo Laredo to Houston, yet amazingly, law enforcement is only able to intercept chicken feed – a couple of pounds of coke here and a couple of pounds there.
Yet we could afford enough needed public works projects to effect a bold economic stimulus and secured our southern border with some military muscle in one fell swoop, by bringing our troops home from Afghanistan and employing them where they’re needed. We are, after all, dumping billions of dollars down the drain over there every week and, perplexingly, a Republican Congress and Democratic president always appear ready to pour in more.
The Republicans, in the pockets of the military-industrial complex, will and do howl about the responsibility of not turning our backs on those who perpetrated 9-11. But the truth is that pilotless aircraft with remote-control missiles have done more to wipe out those terrorist enemies – by far – than all the troops roaming Afghanistan in an effort to, essentially, prop up the crooked Karzai family, proven crooks and opium lords. And even our own CIA director has stated that there may be as few as 50 Al Qaeda within the entire of Afghanistan. People in the know realize Pakistan is where they’re hiding, but neither the administration nor the media cares to talk much about that fact.
So if it takes a WikiLeaks to break the logjam of government cover-ups and media complicity and allow real truth to fill the vacuumous void in the collective head of a preoccupied American public, well, that’s a good thing.
The only thing that would be better would be for an awakening American public to start questioning its leaders’ spending priorities and foment change.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 27, 2010, 04 43 AM
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Hear No Evil, See No Evil
(Border • War)
I’m going to get off of this Afghan war/national defense kick pretty soon, because who am I to blow against the wind, and who can I influence who could do anything at all to help change the course we’re on? (I could write my congressman, but Pete Olson is himself without influence. And if he wanted to produce a single thought about the war, which he very much does not, he would have to call the National Republican Congressional Committee first, in order to find out what it is that he thinks.)
Besides, the tomato harvest is about ready to give way to the Crush of the Figs, and I need to go figure out how to increase my solar fig drying capacity. Attend to those matters over which you have some control.
Before completely knocking off this windmill tilting, though, I thought I’d pass on a few recent tidbits (within about the past two weeks) from a border I would suggest might benefit more from the presence of some U.S. military manpower than the one between the two ‘Stans. (For the geographically uncertain, Juarez is smack up against the Rio Grande opposite El Paso, an American city in southwest Texas.) For some reason, news from the Border War doesn’t seem to filter up north very far.
→ 19 die in attack at rehabilitation center: More than 25 gunmen with high-powered weapons burst into a drug rehabilitation center late Thursday in Chihuahua City and killed 19 men, an act that was described by officials on Friday as the worst in the city’s history. In Juárez, three municipal police officers were killed Thursday in two attacks.
→ Threats target Border Patrol agents: The Border Patrol confirmed Sunday that it has received threats since last week’s shooting of a 15-year-old Juárez resident who allegedly threw rocks at a Border Patrol agent. “In the past, we’ve had bounties of $250,000 and $25,000 placed on the heads of our agents, but none of those threats were carried out. I do not believe we had a bounty specified by these latest threats.”
→ Six dead after drug treatment center shooting in Juarez: Six people were shot dead outside a drug treatment center shortly before noon today in Juárez, part of a wave of more than 15 homicides. The people were killed outside the Clinica Integral Contra las Adicciones (Integral Clinic Against Addictions) at Manuel J. Clouthier and Piña streets, Chihuahua state police said. Investigators said attackers fired 49 rounds.
→ Juárez officer among members of alleged kidnapping family: Mexican federal police said Thursday that they dismantled a family-run kidnapping gang in Juárez, and that one of the crime ring’s members was a Juárez police officer. Police also said they rescued a 14-year-old girl and a 20-year-old woman who were kidnapped Sunday and raped during their captivity.
→ 22 slain Wednesday, at least 5 Thursday in Juárez: The homicide total was 22 on Wednesday in Juárez as the wave of violence continued throughout the city. Soon after 9 p.m., gunmen fired 50 rounds in a shooting that killed three men in the Colinas del Norte area of the city, Chihuahua state police said.
→ ‘Very violent week’ in Juárez logs 60-plus slayings: Chihuahua state police reported more than 60 murders in Juárez this week. “This has been a very violent week,” said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office, on Friday. Sandoval said eight homicides occurred on Monday, 11 on Tuesday, 22 on Wednesday and about 15 on Thursday. As of Friday afternoon, five people had been killed, he said.
→ Mayor of Valley of Juárez town is shot dead: The mayor of Guadalupe Distrito Bravo was shot and killed in Juárez, said Chihuahua state police. Jesús Manuel Lara Rodríguez, 48, was killed about noon in a home in the Santa Teresa neighborhood of Juárez. Chihuahua state police said Lara Rodríguez was shot several times in the back. At the scene, investigators found 14 bullet casings from a .223-caliber weapon, police said. Lara Rodríguez took office in 2007. His term was to end this year after the July 4 elections.
→ Chihuahua state homicide investigator shot to death in Juárez: Jose Luis Rey Macias, 49, had been with the ministerial investigative police for nearly 18 years, officials said. He was fatally shot about 4:30 a.m. at a home on Congreso Nacional Constituyente and Tepalcingo streets in colonia Morelos III. No bullet casings were found. The homicide took place the same day as the funeral for Juárez police officer Jazmin Mota Chavez, who was shot and killed when she arrived home Friday on her day off.
‘Course, it could be argued that most of this murder would stop if the drugs at the root of it were legalized and tightly regulated by the U.S. government, but fear of mass social right-winger heart attacks has and probably will continue to prevent that from ever becoming a political reality. So it’s privatized prisons and 10 years if you get caught with the wrong kind of roach in Houston, compadre.
Meanwhile, if the hardcore Mexican haters driving immigration policy in Arizona (and trying to in Texas) would read a few days’ worth of news from U.S. border cities, they might understand that many of the immigrants for which they hold so much disdain don’t so much want a better life for themselves and their family – they just want to stay alive, period.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 29, 2010, 08 34 AM
Hug a Drug Thug
(War • Politics)
For only a few million a day, you can keep these rich heroin traffickers fed and secure in their Dubai mansions…
Indeed, even as the United States and its allies pour money in, U.S. officials estimate that as much as $1 billion a year is flowing out as part of a massive cash exodus. The money, as first reported in The Washington Post in February, is often carried out in full view of customs officials at Kabul’s airport, where such transfers are legal as long as they are declared. Officials suspect much of the cash is going to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where elite Afghans, including Karzai’s older brother, have villas.For the Obama administration, the ability of Afghan investigators to crack down on corruption is crucial. If American voters see Karzai’s government as hopelessly corrupt, public support for the war could plunge.
Man, it was too late for that a long time ago.
Trouble for us is, the Republicans aren’t anymore interested in pulling the plug on this brain-dead war than Obama seems to be.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 28, 2010, 05 16 AM
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