US military has no business in Afghan civil war

Breaking the Silence - John Pilger

As we near the start of the 9th year of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan, take time to listen to the reasons voiced by George W, Tony B, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century that were meant to justify the illegal invasion and armed aggression against a sovereign people. John Pilger's documentary of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. What is the point? What is the justification 8 years on for the death and destruction?


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Richard B Cheney: please, go back to your safe-room and await the US Marshalls

Cheney's claim that his policies saved lives and foiled terrorist plots reminds me of that joke about the person shredding newspaper in NYC to keep away the tigers. When told that there are no tigers in NYC, the person rejoins,'See how well it works?'

Although correlation is not proof (as this joke illustrates), the number of plots foiled by Cheney's administration by torture and rendition are few and laughable. The heinous acts that they committed are numerous and vile.

Cheney (and Addington, Rice, Tennant, et al) were caught so flat-footed by 9-11 that they went off the moral and legalistic deep end in a frantic attempt to 1) avoid culpability and 2) make political hay.

In Cheney's own words, they went to the 'dark side' which to me indicates that he was already quite familiar with the territory having been there many times before.

Cheney's Memoirs - a pop-up book for neo-cons

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I particularly love the statement made by John Dean at 3:12 "He (Cheney) is all but a self-confessed war criminal."

From Our Favorite Dick's Own Pie-hole (part Five)

Q So much of the debate on the war on terror,
(Well, not exactly debate – blather, rather; hand-wringing.)
particularly as Democrats
(Damned Dems…)
have encapsulated in Congress,
(to encapsulate: to epitomize, to express in brief summary. So WTF?)
is focused on the legality of the tactics.
(Legality – you say po-tay-to and I say ‘spud’.)
Could you talk a little bit behind the scenes
(Where you’re most comfortable – living on the ‘Dark Side’.)
of some of the discussions that might have focused on the morality and the ethics of the tactics,
(Not that you’d have even the most tenuous gasp of the concepts…)
and whether those things weighed into the discussions that went into --
(Oh, I’m getting lost in my own fractured syntax!)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: What kind -- which tactics?
(You better re-phrase that or I’ll have you head, you friggin’ mutt!)
Q Oh, anything from rendition to waterboarding to --
(Gawd, I hope he doesn’t snarl at me. I’ve heard he snarls!)
Q Sleep deprivation.
(Gulp!)
Q -- to deprivation, tactics that were used at Gitmo. Is there any -- I'm sure –
(Fake a weak chortle here.)
were there discussions that also focused just on American values
(Hay-rides, quilting parties, lemonade at the July Fourth picnic… We’re looking for a Norman Rockwell moment.)
and whether those can be preserved in the course of trying to protect the country from terror attacks?
(There, have we left you enough wiggle room to sufficiently dodge the question?)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, let me, before I respond to that,
(Since that’s why you’re paying me the honorarium.)
let me state a proposition.
(So as to side-track you and avoid actually giving an answer.)
It's very important to discriminate between different elements of -- or issues that are often at times conflated and all joined together and balled up.
(Like the following non-answer is obviously going to be.)
People take Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
(with a double-dose of Pepto-Bismol)
and interrogation of high-value detainees
(a delightful euphemism; ‘high-value detainees’- sounds much better than prisoners)
and sort of throw that all together
(in a big naked goose-pile…)
and say, characterize it as torture policy.
(snort! Preposterous, what the simple-minded John and Jane Q Public come up with.)
You've got to, I think,
(I know it’ll be a strain for you two knuckle-draggers)
back off and recognize that something like Abu Ghraib was not policy.
(Even though there’s ample proof that it was policy, we’d prefer it wasn’t recognized as such.)
It was, in fact, uncovered and then exposed by the military.
(With the New York Times and 60 Minutes giving them a gentle assist.)
There were people involved in that activity who were not conducting themselves in accordance with the standards that we would have expected,
(The standards we expected were much lower and more brutal. Underwear on the head? Naked goose-piles!? Come on! That’s kid stuff. We were thinking more of bamboo-under-the-fingernails and electrodes-on-the-genitals - you know. School of the Americas techniques.)
and they've paid the price for it.
(And luckily – knock wood – those of us who made the executive decisions to flout international law haven’t.)
Guantanamo I believe has been a first-rate facility.
(As a symbol of the American iniquity and neo-conic depravity.)
It's one we absolutely needed and found essential.
(By ‘we’ of course I mean those in the Bush administration; it was essential for us to cover our asses for criminal activity.)
It's been primarily a military facility.
(Even you dorks probably know that. But did you know that it’s held in violation of treaty?)
If you're going to evaluate how it's functioned,
(And I strongly advise that you do NOT.)
the policy that we adhere to at Guantanamo basically is the U.S. Army Field Manual.
(Although most of what is done there is in direct violation of the Field Manual in regard to torture or detainment.)
With respect to high-value detainees and enhanced interrogation techniques,
(The euphemistic jargon is so vital to the proper functioning of propaganda. Don’t you think?)
totally separate proposition under the jurisdiction of the Central Intelligence Agency
(They had carte blanche with the blessing of John Yoo and Gonzo.)
and applied to only a few people who were individuals like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
(a few hundred or so)
the mastermind of 9/11,
(Keep repeating that. It takes away some of the P.R. sting from the horrific things we authorized done to him.)
who we believe possessed significant intelligence about the enemy,
(Whoever we say that is on any given day.)
about al Qaeda,
(Which means ‘network’ and the title of a CIA databank used in recruiting Islamic extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.)
about their future plans, about how they were organized and trained and equipped, where they operated.
(Since we were- ahem - totally in the dark (wink-wink) about all of this even though, as mentioned, the CIA ran and funded the Mujahidins in the jihad against the Soviets which became the al Qaeda network – if you’ll pardon the redundancy.)
And after 9/11, we badly needed to acquire good intelligence on the enemy.
(Since we had no good intelligence in Washington DC. None that we wanted to pay any attention to, anyway.)
That's an important part of fighting a war.
(So I’m told.)
What we did with respect to al Qaeda high-value detainees, if I can put it in those terms,
(And since that’s the standard party line we’ve been using for years, don’t even think of denying me.)
I think there were a total of about 33 who were subjected to enhanced interrogation;
(A magical term, isn’t it: enhanced interrogation. A good quick round of ’20 Questions’ followed by tea and cucumber sandwiches.)
only three of those who were subjected to waterboarding -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and a third, al Nashiri. That's it, those three guys.
(It’s not like we did to thousands or millions. So, since it was only those three guys –and we all know what nasty dudes those guys were (take our word for it) - international law and the US Constitution outlawing torture can be waived under those conditions. Right? Ask John Yoo.)
Was it torture?
(Of course it was. Oh, sorry. That was meant to be rhetorical, wasn’t it.)
I don't believe it was torture.
(“And what a fool believes… no wise man has the power to reason away”.)
We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice,
(To cover our asses…)
legal opinion out of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where you go for those kinds of opinions,
(Otherwise we’d have called it something different like the Office of Obfuscation or the Department of Dissemblance.)
from the Department of Justice as to where the red lines were out there in terms of this you can do, this you can't do.
(That’s how we asked them to lay it out for the Frat-boy Brush-cutter – color coded. He still couldn’t follow it. )
The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately.
(They were doing what they do best after all – torture and undermining democratic process.)
They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration,
(Of course, they talked with me first since I’d summoned them to my office. Addington was there along with those other knuckle-heads – they always reminded me of those little toy dogs in the back windows of cars, their heads bobbing up and down, up and down… very gratifying.)
about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.
(Since, as I said, we had none of our own in DC.)
I signed off on it;
(Gulp!)
others did, as well, too. I wasn't the ultimate authority, obviously.
(George W Bush.)
As the Vice President, I don't run anything.
(LOL!)
But I was in the loop.
(Hell, I WAS the loop.)
I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
(Which goes to show I haven’t the foggiest notion anymore about what is right or wrong.)
I thought the legal opinions that were rendered were sound.
(Because we had lawyers write down what we wanted in legalese.)
I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they were asking to be able to do.
(Reasonable as far as criminal activity and in terms of what we demanded that the CIA do.)
And I think it produced the desired result.
(Although we got nothing as far as actionable intelligence as a result of our non-torture torture.)
I think it's directly responsible for the fact that we've been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for seven and a half years.
(That and the fact that I’ve had interns continuously shredding newspapers in my office, lighting incense and ringing a little silver bell. Oh, and the monkey paw blessed by Alexander Haig that I wear under my shirt.)
And come to the question of morality and ethics, in my mind,
(Comes up blank…)
the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in on January 20th of 2001,
(What was it again…?)
to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
(Actually, it’s ‘protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic’ – not the neo-conic ideology.)
And that's what we've done.
More or less. Probably less than more.)
And I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11.
(In hopes that we could somehow make up for the fact that we didn’t do diddley-squat – ethical, immoral or fattening – to stop those attacks in the first place despite multiple reports, memoranda and advisories warning us of imminent attack.)
We made the judgment, the President and I and others, that that wasn't going to happen again on our watch.
(Not again. Getting caught flat-footed with our pants down once was enough. Heh-heh.)
And I feel very good about what we did.
(And so do the stock-holders of Halliburton, etc)
I think it was the right thing to do.
(Whatever that means to you. It means shit to a tree.)
If I was faced with those circumstances again, I'd do exactly the same thing.
(Because I am that freaking stupid, insane or obstinate.)
To be continued...

Rummy and the Pentacrats

“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With a brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.

Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone; our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary is closer to home: It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”

“An average American family works an entire year to generate$6,000 in income taxes. Here we spill many times that amount every hour by duplication and by inattention.”

“Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”

“We must change for a simple reason – the world has – and we have not yet changed sufficiently. The clearest and most important transformation is from a bipolar Cold War world where threats were visible and predictable, to one in which they arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today.”

Spoken by Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, in an address that announced an end to the S.O.P. of waste and fiscal mismanagement at the Pentagon, delivered on September 10, 2001; the day before the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

What would have been an excellent, long-called-for policy shift (from a most unexpected quarter), tossed out with the ‘Ba’ath’ water, so to say.

In the days immediately following, George W. Bush called for $20 Billion to fund the ‘War on Terror’. Since then, he has demanded and gotten a blank check for debacle after debacle, all sanctified by ‘them-or-us’, anti-terrorist bluster and approved by a spineless, bi-partisan, rubber-stamp Congress.

(The cowards in Congress just approved another $257,000,000,000 (two-hundred-fifty-seven billion dollar) emergency supplement to fund the wars through the end of Bush’s term. )

(Any wonder there is no money for universal health care, education or infrastructure projects such as reinforced levees on the Mississippi River? That astronomical figure – more than a quarter of a trillion dollars - is only to help pay for the next 7 months of these hateful wars which so rapaciously destroy lives. Someone should check the Congress for drugs or implants. )

From being on the verge of tightening federal purse-strings to the current open-vault-door policy of hysteria-driven defense spending - financing the building of new nuclear submarines to counter the non-existent Al-Qaeda navy and new super-sonic jet fighters to combat the air force that Al-Qaeda doesn’t have – was a most fortuitous swing of events for the Pentagon and its contractors. This catastrophic bit of malevolent serendipity is what author and journalist, Robert Scheer refers to as the ‘gift of 911’ to the military-industrial complex.

The military-industrial complex; since Eisenhower used that cumbersome phrase in his farewell speech, it has seen plenty of use. Though its initial axiomatic power still resonates, it’s a stock phrase, shop-worn. Moreover, from its inception it has been inadequate. Its failing, despite its power as an axiom of unalloyed truth, is that it hides the people who operate this complex and extremely profitable relationship between government bureaucracy and big business.

It is time to put a face on these people in the Pentagon, in the Congress and in the Defense Department. It is long past time to strip the mask of anonymity from leaders of the arms industry, their lobbyists and their agents. What is needed is a more pertinent, personalizing epithet which exposes the active players of the military-industrial complex.

Pentacrats (noun)

1. The autocrats and oligarchs of the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense and arms industry who in concert advocate robbing the taxpayer to fund boondoggles, pork-barrel spending and bloated defense budgets for personal profit and political gain.

2. Their agents and functionaries.

Pentacrats have usurped the power of the citizenry to influence policy and thus the course taken by the ship of state, in order to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the citizens of the United States; deeply effecting, most deleteriously, nearly every aspect of the daily lives of the American people. Furthermore, the effect of Pentacratic policies on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and every other country around the world where armament and weaponry contracted and manufactured by Pentacrats, furnished and financed by the Pentacrats in Washington are used to violently suppress democratic movements, insurgencies and up-risings, is even more dire. A maleficent mélange of death, terror and suffering is what those people get on a daily basis.

Pentacrats.

What the precepts of Pentacracy boil down to is the super-rich getting richer by many other, much poorer men, women and children dying bloody, horrible deaths. To paraphrase the old song, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get murdered.’

The American citizenry must demand that this complex be dismantled, boondoggle by boondoggle, pork barrel by pork barrel, until the Department of Defense and Congress answer once again to the voice of the true, absolute, constitutionally recognized and affirmed rulers of our republic: the people of the United States of America. This demand must be constant and unrelenting, not solely reliant on participation in general elections, but rather with consistent, perennial involvement from the grass-roots to the Belt-way and the National Mall.

Defeating the agenda of the Pentacrats - and in so doing, returning control of the nation to its rightful rulers - is the gift we can bequeath, not only to the children of America but to the children of the world.

It is the right thing to do.

http://www.opensecrets.org/

http://www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com/contracts-leaderboard.asp

The Center for Responsive Politics
1101 14th St., NW • Suite 1030, Washington, DC 20005-5635
(202) 857-0044 • fax (202) 857-7809 info@crp.org

1984, 17 Years On

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/fmr_military_intelligence_officer_reveals_us

In this broadcast exclusive on Democracy Now!, Army Sgt. Adrienne Kinne (Ret.) reveals that as an Intelligence officer and Arabic language specialist, she was assigned the mission to illegally monitor and intercept cell phone calls of journalists, humanitarian aid organizations and non-governmental organizations including the International Red Cross, Red Crescent and Doctors Without Borders. Ms Kinne also discloses that she was personally ordered to eavesdrop on Americans working for news organizations and NGOs in Iraq. She monitored cell phone transmissions from Iraq and Afghanistan between December of 2001 and August of 2003 while stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

This is 1984, folks, 17 years on. It just showed up a little behind Orwell’s schedule.

FYI, United States Signals Intelligence Directive [USSID] 18 prohibits eavesdropping on Americans except in very limited cases when the Attorney General is allowed to grant permission. This little detail – upholding the Constitution and the 4^th Amendment right to privacy - was discarded in the wake of the panic and hysteria which followed 9-11.

During an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (which primarily focused on the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in 2003) Ms Kinne revealed that her unit’s mission changed after the September, 2001 attacks. She was given a verbal waiver on the Constitution. She and the other members of her unit were told they could listen to Americans and citizens of allied countries from humanitarian aid organizations, journalists and NGOs. Two reasons for this gross violation of the Constitution were given.

First, they were told that US citizens and allies were ‘eyes on the ground’ and if they stumbled upon the location of WMDs, and if they then pass the location of the WMDs over the phone to others, the military would be able to pass that location of the WMDs directly on to military superiors more expeditiously.

Well, there you go, then. We can’t let a little piece of paper like the Constitution stand in the way of efficient military intelligence gathering, can we?

The second rationale to justify spying on Americans is even more preposterous than the first. Sgt Kinne and her fellow eavesdroppers were told that if an American or ally lost their satellite phone, a terrorist could pick it up and start using it. If that happened, Sgt Kinne’s unit would then have to monitor all the phones to make sure that if such a loss (or theft) took place, they would be able to monitor the terrorists.

Huh!? How many hypotheticals can you pile one on top the other?

So, to recap: during Sgt Kinne’s mission, the justification for spying on Americans was that terrorists might steal or find our cell phones and begin using them for evil-doing.

Please, go to Democracy Now! to hear this interview for yourself. Our republic, our Constitution and our rights as citizens are in gravest danger.

Impeach Bush!

Impeach Cheney!

Impeach Scalia!

Prosecute the war criminals and the defilers of our Constitution.

Detecting Baloney

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I do like conspiracy theories though, so it might be said that I am a fan of conspiracy theories without being a straight out fanatic about them.

What most intrigues me about conspiracy theories is the quest for knowledge and understanding exhibited by the theorists. It could be argued (and often is) that such quests are misguided, a waste of time and effort better spent on more ‘productive’ endeavors.

Who is to say? According to Professor Joseph Campbell in his study of comparative mythology, quests are not chosen but rather quests chose their ‘questers’. Campbell’s own quest was to discover and understand the links between the various myths of the world. Admiral Perry’s was to reach the Pole. Jake and Elwood’s was to save the orphanage. Whether great or small, grand or petty, quests are not to be ignored.

The source of the incentive, the drive to research and postulate theories about conspiracy is not solely a metaphysical one. Undoubtedly, there is an intellectual impetus to discover the truth about the world we inhabit. The search for truth is inherent in the postulations of conspiracy theorists.

The question must be asked: why are the postulators of conspiracy theories not satisfied with the accepted explanations given for enormously complicated event? Here is the nub that irritates many detractors. Why can’t conspiracy theorists accept at face value explanations such as the Warren Commission Report or the 9-11 Commission Report?

The answer to that query can easily be discerned if one reads over the arguments and examines the material presented by many conspiracy theorists. Whenever the generally accepted explanation of an event or phenomenon begs the question (whether it is regarding a terra-centric universe, WMDs or a ‘magic bullet’) there are questions which beg to be asked. In a conspiracy theorist’s postulation, one invariably finds a check list of questions about the event which have either gone unanswered, ignored, glossed or are answered in a less than satisfactory manner hence raising further questions. Here we find the same motivation that has initiated all of the great scientific discoveries and uncovered all of the scandals throughout history: the search for truth amid what are perceived as falsehoods and failing that, the search for acceptable answers.

Unfortunately, too often conspiracy theorists rely on specious arguments, tautology and emotionally driven thought processes rather than finely honed critical thought. (This is hardly over-stating the general situation.) Exacerbating the effect of these general deficiencies of argument, the fans of conspiracy theories too often accept these deficient arguments at face value. The result is well-known: the theorists and fans are roundly denounced as ‘crackpots’. Quite often this denunciation is deserved.

Nevertheless, points raised by conspiracy theorists challenging accepted explanations are very often thought provoking. These should not be brusquely dismissed as spurious even if in a many cases the points raised are very emotionally charged, taboo or politically unpopular. Interesting points should be examined and weighed critically for merit, substance and validity. Too often the treasure is tossed with the trash.

Here the failure to think critically is shared by theorists, fans and detractors.

So, in an effort to rectify that situation, here is a link to a crash course on critical thinking; Carl Sagan’s ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ as it was presented in his book,’The Demon-Haunted World’.

http://www.xenu.net/archive/baloney_detection.html

For a more complete treatment of the ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse, here is a link to Skeptics.com where it can be purchased in a booklet form.

https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=32c4c614bdb2fd78c08c0c84faa4e4c4&

The ability to detect baloney will well serve us all when we are presented with dubious information and explanations from our governmental representatives, corporate leaders, their agents and functionaries. Perhaps if more members of the US Congress and the citizens of the United States had learned to think critically, the US would not have been suckered into going to war in Iraq. Or Vietnam. Or Nicaragua. Or Guatemala. Or Haiti. Or Panama. Or Grenada. Perhaps the ability to think critically may even allow us to detect the baloney that is leading us into armed conflict with Iran.