WARNING: Graphic Content RATING: NSFPWRLTWIAAHINE (Not Safe For People Who Really Like The War In Afghanistan And Hope It Never Ends) REUTERS: The Marine Corps said on Wednesday it would investigate a video showing what appear to be American forces in Afghanistan urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. The video could aggravate anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan after a decade of a war that has seen other cases of abuse. The Marine video release comes at a sensitive moment, with Washington trying to promote Afghan reconciliation as U.S. troops gradually withdraw from the country. The video, which was posted […]
90% Of Captured “Taliban” Turned Out To Be Innocent
IPS: But it turns out that more than 80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official U.S. military data. Even more were later released from the main U.S. detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers. The timing of Petraeus’s claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as “captured Taliban […]
WORTH REPEATING: Dead Man Talking
NEW YORK TIMES: “[Richard Holbrooke] thought that this could become Obama’s Vietnam,” Marton recalled. “Some of the conversations in the Situation Room reminded him of conversations in the Johnson White House. When he raised that, Obama didn’t want to hear it.” Because he was fiercely loyal to his friend Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, Holbrooke bit his lip and kept quiet in public. But he died in December, and Marton and some of his friends (me included) believe it’s time to lift the cone of silence and share his private views. […] Holbrooke opposed the military “surge” in […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Those Who Forget The Lesson Of Vietnam Are Doomed To Repeat It In Afghanistan
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY This just in, folks: America is now spending $2,000,000,000 a f _ _ _ _ _ g* WEEK in Afghanistan! Wouldn’t you think that that might finally be enough to make even the bloodthirstiest of Washington’s fiscal phonies cry out for SOME sense of sanity, reason, or rationality, or, at the VERY least, a tiny smidgen of f _ _ _ _ _ g HUMANITY on the subject. Of course not. There’s not so much as a single SYLLABLE in ANYONE’S budget proposal devoted to reducing, or even ACKNOWLEDGING, the pissed away BILLIONS (345 SO FAR!) and […]
GOING ROGUE: The Thrill Kill Cult Of Bravo Company
ROLLING STONE: The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution. He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, […]
Charlie Wilson Is Dead, But His War Is Alive And Well
WASHINGTON POST: DALLAS — Charlie Wilson, the former U.S. congressman from Texas whose funding of Afghanistan’s resistance to the Soviet Union was chronicled in the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” has died. He was 76. Wilson represented the 2nd district in east Texas in the U.S. House from 1973 to 1996 and was known as “Good Time Charlie” when he was in Washington. Actor Tom Hanks portrayed Wilson in the 2007 movie about Wilson’s efforts to arm Afghani mujahedeen during their war against the Soviet Union. Wilson, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, helped secure money for weapons. MORE THE […]
PLOT THICKENS: CIA Bomber Was Double Agent
ASSOCIATED PRESS: The suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in Afghanistan was a Jordan-born terrorist double agent who was invited to the base because he claimed to have information targeting Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a foreign government official confirmed MondayThe bombing killed seven CIA employees – four officers and three contracted security guards – and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former U.S. intelligence official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident. The former senior […]
Taliban Suicide Bomber Kills Eight CIA Agents
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Reporting from Kabul — A bomber slipped into a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday and detonated a suicide vest, killing eight CIA officers in one of the deadliest days in the agency’s history, current and former U.S. officials said. The attack took place at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khowst province, an area near the border with Pakistan that is a hotbed of insurgent activity. An undisclosed number of civilians were wounded, the officials said. No military personnel with the U.S. or North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces were killed or injured, they said. A U.S. […]
POTUS Orders More Cowbell For The Endless War
ASSOCIATED PRESS: After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas. Obama has said that he prefers “not to hand off anything to the next president” and that his strategy will “put us on a path toward ending the war.” But he doesn’t plan to give any […]
ADDICTED TO AFGHANISTAN: Karzai’s Brother, Suspected Drug Lord, Is On The CIA’s Payroll
[Artwork by SHEPARD FAIREY] NEW YORK TIMES: KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency […]
State Department Official/Ex-Marine Resigns Over Afghanistan Policy, Says War Is Over If You Want It
[Artwork by SHEPARD FAIREY] WASHINGTON POST: Hoh’s journey — from Marine, reconstruction expert and diplomat to war protester — was not an easy one. Over the weeks he spent thinking about and drafting his resignation letter, he said, “I felt physically nauseous at times.” His first ambition in life was to become a firefighter, like his father. Instead, after graduation from Tufts University and a desk job at a publishing firm, he joined the Marines in 1998. After five years in Japan and at the Pentagon — and at a point early in the Iraq war when it appeared to […]
HERSH: Military At War With The White House
THE HERALD SUN: The army is “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told several hundred people in Duke University’s Page Auditorium on Tuesday night. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.” In a speech on Obama’s foreign policy, Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraqi war, said many military […]
AFGHANISTAN: 10 U.S. Soldiers Killed In 2 Days
A U.S. Marine, from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmser in Helmand Province of Afghanistan May 18, 2008. The Marine was not injured. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic) WASHINGTON POST: The attack began in the early morning hours. Taliban-linked militiamen struck from the high ground using rifles, grenades and rockets against the outpost, a cluster of stone buildings set in a small Hindu Kush valley that has been manned by 140 U.S. and Afghan forces. By the end of a day-long siege, eight Americans and two Afghan security officers were dead, marking the […]