Would you be shocked to learn that the FBI apparently knew that some organization, perhaps even a law enforcement agency or private security outfit, had contingency plans to assassinate peaceful protestors in a major American city — and did nothing to intervene?

Would you be surprised to learn that this intelligence comes not from a shadowy whistle-blower but from the FBI itself – specifically, from a document obtained from Houston FBI office last December, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, DC-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund?

To repeat: this comes from the FBI itself. The question, then, is: What did the FBI do about it?

The Plot

Remember the Occupy Movement? The peaceful crowds that camped out in the center of a number of cities in the fall of 2011, calling for some recognition by local, state and federal authorities that our democratic system was out of whack, controlled by corporate interests, and in need of immediate repair?

That movement swept the US beginning in mid-September 2011. When, in early October, the movement came to Houston, Texas, law enforcement officials and the city’s banking and oil industry executives freaked out perhaps even more so than they did in some other cities. The push-back took the form of violent assaults by police on Occupy activists, federal and local surveillance of people seen as organizers, infiltration by police provocateurs – and, as crazy as it sounds, some kind of plot to assassinate the “leaders” of this non-violent and leaderless movement.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what the document obtained from the Houston FBI, said:

An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified [DELETED] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles. (Note: protests continued throughout the weekend with approximately 6000 persons in NYC. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests have spread to about half of all states in the US, over a dozen European and Asian cities, including protests in Cleveland (10/6-8/11) at Willard Park which was initially attended by hundreds of protesters.)

Occupiers Astounded – But Not Entirely

Paul Kennedy, the National Lawyers Guild attorney in Houston who represented a number of Occupy Houston activists arrested during the protests, had not heard of the sniper plot, but said, “I find it hard to believe that such information would have been known to the FBI and that we would not have been told about it.” He then added darkly, “If it had been some right-wing group plotting such an action, something would have been done. But if it is something law enforcement was planning, then nothing would have been done. It might seem hard to believe that a law enforcement agency would do such a thing, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”

He adds, “The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists.

Kennedy knows first-hand the extent to which combined federal-state-local law enforcement forces in Houston were focused on disrupting and breaking up the Occupy action in that city. He represented seven people who were charged with felonies for a protest that attempted to block the operation of Houston’s port facility. That case fell apart when in the course of discovery, the prosecution disclosed that the Occupiers had beeninfiltrated by three undercover officers from the Austin Police department, who came up with the idea of using a device called a “sleeping dragon” -- actually chains inside of PVC pipe -- which are devilishly hard to cut through, for chaining protesters together blocking port access. The police provocateurs, Kennedy says, actually purchased the materials and constructed the “criminal instruments” themselves, supplying them to the protesters. As a result of this discovery, the judge tossed out the felony charges.

FBI Response

WhoWhatWhy contacted FBI headquarters in Washington, and asked about this document – which, despite its stunning revelation, and despite PCFJ press releases, was notwithstanding a few online mentions, was generally ignored by mainstream and “alternative” press alike.

The agency confirmed that it is genuine and that it originated in the Houston FBI office. (The plot is also referenced in a second document obtained in PCJF’s FOIA response, in this case from the FBI’s Gainesville, Fla., office, which cites the Houston FBI as the source.) That second document actually suggests that the assassination plot, which never was activated, might still be operative should Occupy decisively re-emerge in the area. It states:

On 13 October 20111, writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.

Asked why solid information about an assassination plot against American citizens exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly never led to exposure of the plotters’ identity or an arrest – as happened with so many other terrorist schemes the agency has publicized – Paul Bresson, head of the FBI media office, offered a typically elliptical response:

The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks that you are seeking. Exemptions are cited in each place where a redaction is made. As far as the question about the murder plot, I am unable to comment further, but rest assured if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.

Note that the privacy being “protected” in this instance (by a government that we now know has so little respect for our privacy) was of someone or some organization that was actively contemplating violating other people’s Constitutional rights – by murdering them. That should leave us less than confident about Bresson’s assertion that law enforcement would have responded appropriately to a “credible” threat.

Read the rest of the article

Among the reasons law enforcement sources are so confident they “got” their men were video surveillance photos from a Lord & Taylor storefront area showing the two brothers as they arrived at the finish-line area, each wearing a backpack, allegedly carrying what the FBI now says were two identical 6-quart steel pressure cookers marketed by the Canadian corporation Fagor. Fragments of those pots, which the FBI says were packed with black powder (gathered from a collection of fireworks) as well as nails and BBs, were recovered at the scene.

Besides the photos of the two brothers wearing their packs, the FBI also has released a photo of the remnants of one of the backpacks, allegedly the black, or dark-colored, one worn by the elder Tamerlan Tsarnaev. There is also a photo of what is described as a white backpack, which was placed on the street side of a metal crowd-control fence. It was said to contain the second bomb, which exploded 10 seconds later, further from the finish line. This is presumed to be the same light-colored pack Dzhokhar is seen wearing in the store video as he arrives on the scene.

There are a number of serious problems with this supposedly damning evidence, however.

First of all, nobody looking at the evidence to date has tried loading up one of these Fagor pots with the amount of weight that would have been created by a big four or five quarts’ worth of black powder, perhaps two quarts of nails, and perhaps a pound or two of BB shot, to see what it would look like in a basic unstructured book bag of the type the two men were wearing.

WhoWhatWhy decided to do that.

***

The first problem was buying the pot. This reporter looked it up online and found that it was being sold by Macy’s. Going to the nearest Macy’s at the Montgomery Mall in Montgomeryville, PA, we discovered that the cookware section had no pressure cookers. The store clerk in charge of that section was asked where pressure cookers were.

“We don’t sell pressure cookers,” she said.

“How can a cookware section not sell pressure cookers? Anyhow, your website says you sell a line of Fagor pressure cookers.”

She replied, “We stopped selling them after the Boston Bombing.”

So it goes. Guns – even the gun used in the incident, still get sold in stores after the Newtown, CT, school massacre, but when someone makes a bomb with an ordinary kitchen implement, they are taken off the shelves. (What’s next, a demand for licenses to buy canning equipment?)

Luckily, we found several of the Fagor six-quart pots in a nearby Sears store, and purchased one, on sale for $76.00. The dimensions of the kettle are 10 inches in diameter and 7.7 inches bottom to top, not counting the handle (which cannot be detached without exposing four bolt holes through the top and side of the lid).

After getting a calculation that a quart of black powder weighs about two pounds (a very general measurement, because the compound changes weight according to the humidity, and can be loosely or densely packed like any powder), and testing a bag of small nails to find that they weigh about six pounds per quart, and after weighing the pot itself, we found that the whole contraption, fully loaded with four to five quarts of powder, two quarts’ worth of nails and BBs, and a battery and ignition device, would weigh about 30 lbs. So we put a sufficient number of exercise weight plates into our container, shut the lid, and tried carrying it in two backpacks similar in construction to the ones on the two brothers’ backs.

The results were instructive.

If you look carefully at the first set of photos, showing the surveillance photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the model wearing a similar pack containing the loaded pot, both packs being slung over the right shoulder using the right strap only, you can see a dramatic difference. There are stress wrinkles under the jacket of the right image on the model, caused by the 30-lb. weight pulling downward, but Dzhokhar’s jacket can be seen to be completely smooth under the strap. His pack is clearly extremely light on his shoulder (which may be why he’s not wearing it slung over both shoulders). As well, you can see that the weight of the pot, pulling down and outward in the model’s bag on the right, is causing a downward sloping of the top of the backpack, and is also causing many vertical stress lines on the face of the bag itself. Dzhokhar’s bag, however, is flat across the top, indicating no such downward pulling force, and it does not exhibit any downward wrinkles on its side. Whatever he is carrying, it is clearly not a 30-lb., or even a 20-lb. cylinder.

Here’s a close-up image of the shoulder straps on Dzhokhar’s and the model’s right shoulders:

Moving to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, check out the model’s slightly larger pack, which like Tamerlan’s is being worn with both straps over the shoulders. Again, the pack on the right, containing the loaded pot, is causing obvious wrinkles on the winter coat where the straps are bearing down on a small section of padded coat. Once again the weight of the straps of the shoulder – this time 15 lbs. per strap – can be seen causing prominent wrinkling on the winter coat worn by the model underneath the straps. The downward sloping of the face of the backpack, and also the vertical stress wrinkles are prominent and clearly visible also. In the video surveillance photo of Tamerlan, however, his coat can be seen to be unwrinkled under the straps, and there are again no vertical stress lines on the face of his pack. Again, it is hard to imagine a 30 or even a 20-lb. weight in the bottom of that pack.

There are other questions too, that need to be asked, and that demand answers.

Read the rest of the article

Just yesterday, the New York Times, had a lead story about
Israeli planning to possibly “go it alone” in an attack
on Iran if the US were not to “succeed” in its diplomatic
efforts to get Iran to “stop” it’s alleged attempts
to develop a nuclear weapon capability.

Aside from the fact that there is no hard evidence that Iran is
trying to make a nuclear bomb or even to refine uranium to obtain
nuclear-grade material, the paper ignored one crucial point: Israel
cannot “go it alone” in any strike on Iran, since its
key weapons – F15 and F-16 fighter-bombers – are supplied to it, and
kept flying, thanks to the equipment and spare parts provided by
the United States. Indeed the entire Israeli military machine is
largely financed and armed by the US.

No Israeli military effort cannot go forward without the full backing
of the US, and to say otherwise is to simply perpetrate a fraud
on the public, implying that Israel is an independent actor on the
world stage. It is not.

Another example of warmongering came in an interview by Terri Gross
on her program “Fresh Air,” which I believe is the most
widely syndicated and popular program on National Public Radio,
produced here in Philadelphia at the studios of NPR affiliate WHYY.
Listening to “Fresh Air” this week, which featured an
interview with New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkens,
a generally excellent reporter who distinguished himself for his
reporting on the Iraq War, and particularly on the brutal US assault
on the city of Fallujah, I heard Filkens refer casually to Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as “America’s arch-enemy.”

Now it’s possible, and I certainly do hope it’s the case,
that Filkens was being ironic here. But Terri Gross allowed this
characterization of Iran’s president pass without comment.

America’s arch-enemy? Really? On what basis?

What, exactly, has Iran done to make itself America’s arch
enemy? It has backed the same Shi’ite led government in Iraq
that the US has been backing, and indeed, to the extent that Iraq
has stabilized, it is largely Iran’s doing. It provided key
help to the US in the early invasion of Afghanistan and the routing
of the Taliban government, which was never favored by the Iranians.

We know that two years before the election of Ahmadinejad to the
presidency, Iran made
an offer to the US to recognize Israel, help broker a two-state
peace solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and end Iran’s
support of armed groups in the Middle East region, all in return
for the US accepting Iran as what the 70-million population nation
unarguably is: a legitimate power in the region. That offer was
slapped down by the Bush/Cheney administration, which had as its
goal not peace in Palestine or with Iran, but the occupation and
control of Iraq, and perhaps ultimately a war against Iran.

It needs to be said, but somehow never is in the establishment
US media, whether corporate or not-for-profit, that Iran historically
is not an aggressive, expansive nation. Though it is, by dint of
its oil reserves and its population, one of the biggest and most
powerful countries in the Middle East, it has not invaded another
country since the 18th century, and there is no indication that
it plans to invade any other country now.

Read
the rest of the article

April
23, 2010

So finally
the truth comes out…sort of.

After initially
claiming that two pregnant women and a teenage girl killed in a
US Special Forces raid on an Afghan home in Khataba in February
had been discovered bound and slain by the Americans, the US military
has admitted that they were actually shot and killed by those US
troops–who then tried to cover up their “mistake” by
carving the bullets out of the bodies with knives, removing other
incriminating bullets from the compound’s walls, and then washing
away the bloody evidence with alcohol.

In this new
grisly version of the story issued from the US command in Afghanistan,
it was a case of the Special Forces Unit lying to superiors about
what had transpired in their botched raid, which also killed an
Afghan police commander and a government prosecutor.

The only reason
we know all this today is because of the intrepid digging by a relentless
reporter from the Times of London, Jerome Starkey, who, unlike
the hacks in Kabul passing themselves off as journalists from American
news organizations, didn’t just accept the press release on
the incident put out by Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s office, but
instead did his own investigation, talking to Afghan and UN investigators,
as well as local people where the incident happened.

For his efforts
at getting to the truth, Starkey was attacked by the US military,
accused of lying and misrepresenting US statements.

Now that Starkey
has been fully vindicated, there has been no apology from McChrystal’s
office, or from the military public relations operation. Nor have
US reporters and editors, who left Starkey undefended while his
credibility was being attacked by the US, said anything about his
role in bringing the truth to light.

The New
York Times, in an article
today by Richard A. Oppel, Jr., datelined Kabul, said that the
US military, “after initially denying involvement in any cover-up
in the deaths,” had “admitted that its forces had killed
the women during the nighttime raid.”

The paper also
credited the Times of London (without mentioning Starkey),
with, a day before the military’s about face, disclosing
that American forces on the scene had “dug bullets out of their
victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed
the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what
happened.”

Read
the rest of the article

April
6, 2010

Back in 2005–06,
I wrote a book, The Case for Impeachment, in which I made the argument
that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, as
well as other key figures in the Bush/Cheney administration –
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – should be impeached
for war crimes, as well as crimes against the Constitution of the
United States.

These days,
when I mention the book’s title, people sometimes ask, half
in jest, whether I’m referring to the current president, Barack
Obama.

Sadly, it is
time to say, just 14 months into the current term of this new president,
that yes, this president, and some of his subordinates, are also
guilty of impeachable crimes – including many of the same ones committed
by Bush and Cheney.

Let’s
start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership
of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in
that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and
CIA) to 100,000 by this August.

The president
has authorized the use of Predator drone aircraft for a program
of bombing conducted against Pakistan which has illegally expanded
the Afghan War into another country without any authorization from
Congress. These pilotless drones are known to kill far more innocent
bystanders than enemy targets, making them fundamentally illegal
on principle as weapons. Furthermore, this wave of attacks in Pakistan
is a war of aggression against another nation if the word “war”
is to have any meaning at all, and as such it is illegal under the
UN Charter. Indeed initiating a war of aggression against a country
which does not pose an immediate threat to the invader is described
in the Charter and in the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter as the gravest
of all war crimes.

The president,
as commander in chief, has also, in collusion with Attorney Eric
Holder, blocked any prosecution of those who authorized and perpetrated
torture against captives in the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan,
and the so-called War on Terror – notably Federal Appeals Court
Judge Jay Baybee, and Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, who as Justice
Department attorneys authored the legal briefs justifying torture
– and has in fact continued to permit the application of torture
against captives. All of this is in clear violation of the Geneva
Conventions, which as a signed set of treaties, are part of the
law of the United States. Under those treaties, failure on the part
of those up the chain of command to halt or to punish those who
commit torture are themselves guilty of the crime of torture.

As commander
in chief, President Obama has also overseen a strategy in Afghanistan
of expanded attacks on civilians in Afghanistan. As in Iraq under
the Bush administration, this current phase of the war in Afghanistan
is seeing more civilians killed than enemy combatants, because of
the widespread use of weapons like helicopter gunships, aerial bombardment,
fragmentation bombs, etc., as well as a tactic of night raids on
housing compounds where insurgents are suspected of hiding –
raids that frequently lead to the deaths of many women and children
and innocent men. It is significant that even the recent execution-style
slaying of nine students, aged 11–18, by US-led forces, has
not led to an investigation or prosecution of a individual. Rather,
the incident is being covered up and ignored, with the clear acquiescence
of the White House and the leadership at the Pentagon.

It is also
widely believed that under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal,
who is known to have directed a large-scale death-squad operation
in Iraq before moving to his current position, a similar death-squad
campaign of assassination is being conducted now in Afghanistan – a
campaign that like the notorious Phoenix Program in the 1960s in
Vietnam, is almost certainly resulting in the deaths of many innocent
Afghans.

Read
the rest of the article

April
2, 2010

How pathetic
a scene was this: The president of the United States, commander-in-chief
of the mightiest war machine the world has ever known, sneaking
into one of the poorest countries in the world and meeting with
the corrupt leader of that country, where he has committed 100,000
troops to battle, to beg with that corrupt leader to “clean
up” his corrupt and profoundly inept government.

Already, a
thousand American soldiers as well as many civilian aid workers,
not to mention tens of thousands of innocent Afghans, have died
in an eight-year war that the US launched in 2001, originally with
the intent solely of ousting the existing Taliban government and
destroying the bases of mostly Arab fighters who had been assisting
the Taliban in their fight against Russian-allied warlords.

Over the years,
with the Al Qaeda fighters destroyed or pushed out of Afghanistan,
the war has grown and morphed into a grinding and so far losing
battle against indigenous Taliban fighters and Afghan nationalists
and tribalists who are trying trying to drive out the US. But after
eight years of fighting, the goal of the war, on the American side,
has only become less and less clear.

That goal now
appears to be: crushing the Taliban and creating a modern, functioning
nation state with a government that at least has the grudging respect
of the populace.

But none of
that is really likely to happen.

The US military
recently staged a fake, movie-set battle in a rural area of southeastern
Afghanistan, claiming it was assaulting a large town of 80,000,
allegedly infested with Taliban fighters – an alleged center of the
insurgency. With the support of an either duped or incredibly corrupt
US press corps, the military went into the area, which was actually
a group of scattered farming villages with a central market, claiming
it would operate under new rules of engagement designed to protect
civilians, and then, after clearing out the Taliban, set up a model
government administration.

Things went
badly from the start, when the Marines fired a rocket salvo into
a home and killed 12 innocent civilians, including children. In
the end some 30 civilians were killed, very few actual Taliban fighters
were killed or captured, as they fled the scene in the weeks leading
up to the highly advertised offensive, and to cap it off, the Afghan
soldiers who hung behind as the Marines went into the area, when
they did finally enter the battle zone themselves, proceeded to
strip the market area, stealing anything of value.

Read
the rest of the article

March
30, 2010

In mid-October,
hundreds of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans got some good if grim
news: The Veterans Administration announced it was adding three
more diseases to the 11 others it automatically presumes to have
been caused by exposure to Agent Orange, the dioxin-laced herbicide
spread by the U.S. military across much of South Vietnam to deny
crops and cover to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters during
the war.

Newspapers
and radio and TV news programs across America ran stories announcing
that veterans of the jungle war who now suffer or may eventually
suffer from Parkinson’s Disease, ischemic heart disease or
a type of cancer called hairy-cell leukemia will henceforth automatically
be offered free medical care by the VA if they’d spent at least
one day in uniform on the ground in Vietnam.

The connection
of these diseases to Agent Orange exposure had first been announced
in July by a task force of the national Institute of Medicine. But
the medical researchers made an obvious point that has been almost
universally ignored in the media coverage of this story: As bad
as the impact of Agent Orange was on American troops, it was worse
for those millions on whom the chemical was directly dumped –
the Vietnamese people.

The Institute
of Medicine report notes at several points that the Vietnamese were
exposed in far larger numbers and more extensively than were most
American troops, and adds that when it comes to health impacts of
Agent Orange, “The Vietnamese are an understudied population.”

Indeed. A total
of 20 million gallons of dioxin-containing herbicide was sprayed
by U.S. aircraft on at least 10 percent of what was once South Vietnam
– over 3.6 million acres, much of it populated, even heavily
populated. Cropland was deliberately targeted, and water bodies
used for drinking and irrigation were contaminated. As the report
clinically puts it, “Although there are likely to be serious
logistical challenges, the many Vietnamese people who had substantial
exposure constitute a potentially informative study sample.”

When New
York Times military affairs reporter James Dao was asked why
his October 13 article about the VA’s decision to add three
new major illnesses to the list of Agent Orange – caused problems
among veterans didn’t mention the obvious fact that these illnesses
would also be afflicting many more Vietnamese, the reporter replied,
“My beat is veterans,” adding that he “only”
had 800 words to work with. (That’s 50 words longer than this
piece.)

Read
the rest of the article

March
10, 2010

When Charlie
Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men
to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 women and children and old
people in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four
heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to
justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated
some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between
a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner
to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One
was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began
a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon
and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company
who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour
(also confiding that if Ridenhour didn’t succeed in getting prosecutions
going he had a hit list of all the officers involved and planned
to execute them himself!). And one was journalist Seymour Hersh,
who broke the story in the US media.

Today’s
war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost
weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected”
of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians.
But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get
filed away and forgotten as the inevitable “collateral damage”
of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a "mistake"
– a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen
innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style
slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11–18, and a 12-year-old
neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar
Province, on Dec. 26.

Sadly, no principled
soldier with a conscience like pilot Hugh Thompson tried to save
these children. No observer had the guts of a Michael Brernhardt
to report what he had seen. No Ron Ridenhour among the other serving
US troops in Afghanistan has investigated this atrocity or reported
it to Congress. And no American reporter has investigated this war
crime the way Seymour Hersh investigated My Lai.

There is a
Seymour Hersh for the Kunar massacre, but he’s a Brit. While
American reporters like the anonymous journalistic drones who wrote
CNN’s December 29 report on the incident took the Pentagon’s
initial cover story – that the dead were part of a secret bomb-squad
– at face value, Jerome Starkey, a dogged reporter in Afghanistan
working for the Times of London and the Scotsman,
talked to other sources – the dead boys’ headmaster, other
townspeople, and Afghan government officials – and found out
the real truth about a gruesome war crime – the execution of
handcuffed children. And while a few news outlets in the US like
the New York Times did mention that there were some claims
that the dead were children, not bomb-makers, none, including CNN,
which had bought and run the Pentagon’s lies unquestioningly,
bothered to print the news update when, on Feb. 24, the US military
admitted that in fact the dead were innocent students. Nor has any
US corporate news organization mentioned that the dead had been
handcuffed when they were shot.

Starkey reported
the US government’s damning admission. Yet still the US media
remain silent as the grave.

Read
the rest of the article

March
5, 2010

In the ironically
named Liberty County Jail since December 11 sits Army Specialist
and Iraq War veteran Marc Hall, a rap musician who had the audacity
to write a
song attacking the Pentagon for subjecting him to a so-called
stop-loss order after he had finished his Army tour and had returned
from a posting in Iraq.

Hall, whose
hip-hop alias is Marc Watercus, wrote the song and sent it to the
Pentagon as a protest. His commander at Ft. Stewart initially had
him arrested after he went to his base commander to protest his
stop-loss order. He had planned to leave the service when his contract
was up on Feb. 27. The Pentagon then upped the charges, claiming
that in sending his song to the Pentagon, he had “communicated
a threat” to the military. In the song lyrics, Hall says he
will shoot officers if he is stop-lossed.

The Pentagon
reports that since 2001 it has prevented 120,000 soldiers from leaving
the service using the stop-loss policy, which critics say is being
grossly misused. Originally intended to keep the military from having
to withdraw active troops from the battlefield if their contracts
expire while they are engaged in the field, the policy has become
instead a way of compensating from low enlistment and re-enlistment
rates, with stop-loss orders generally hitting soldiers who have
already returned home from the wars and who, like Hall, who has
a wife and child, are preparing to return to civilian life.

The ironies
of Hall’s incarceration and prosecution – he is being held without
bail, pending a court-martial proceeding, which could be months
off – are stunning.

Liberty County,
Georgia earned its name – it was originally called St. John’s
Parish by the Puritan settlers who founded it – because back in the
1770s it was a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment in a colony that
was largely populated by pro-British Loyalists. Two signers of the
Declaration of Independence hail from the county. One, Dr. Lyman
Hall, actually shares Marc Hall’s surname, and was one of the
most ardent of revolutionists in America – a man who despised tyranny
boldly and who and actually went to the original Continental Congress
representing not Georgia, but only his own county, because of lack
of support from the population of the broader colony. Hall was a
primary writer of the Constitution, which he allegedly based upon
a pamphlet he had been carrying with him that had been penned by
John Adams.

Read
the rest of the article

January
11, 2010

The Taliban
suicide attack that killed a group of CIA agents in Afghanistan
on a base that was directing US drone aircraft used to attack Taliban
leaders was big news in the US over the past week, with the airwaves
and front pages filled with sympathetic stories referring to the
fact that the female station chief, who was among those killed,
was the “mother of three children.”

But the apparent
mass murder of Afghan school children, including one as young as
11-years-old, by a US-led group of troops, was pretty much blacked
out in the American media. Especially blacked out was word from
UN investigators that the students had not just been killed but
executed, many of them after having first been rousted from their
bedroom and handcuffed.

Here is the
excellent report on the incident that ran in the Times
of London (like Fox News, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication)
on Dec. 31:

Western
troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children

By Jerome
Starkey in Kabul

American-led
troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from
their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten
people dead.

Afghan government
investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all
but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims
were handcuffed before being killed.

Western military
sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist
cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices
(IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and
civilians.

“This
was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that
Afghan and US officials had been developing information against
for some time,” said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted
that “the facts about what actually went down are in dispute”.

The article
goes on to say:

In a telephone
interview last night, the headmaster [of the local school] said
that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived.
“Seven students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas.
“A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room,
and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

“First
the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them.
Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students.
Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting
and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He
was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

A local elder,
Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and
five were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their
school books covered in blood,” he said.

The investigation
found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to 17. The guest
was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said.
He said that six of the students were at high school and two were
at primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews.

Compare this
article to the one mention of the incident which appeared in the

New York Times, one of the few American news outlets
to even mention the incident. The Times, on Dec. 28, focusing entirely
on the difficulty civilian killings cause for the US war effort,
and not on the allegation of a serious war crime having been committed,
wrote:

Attack
Puts Afghan Leader and NATO at Odds

By Alissa
J. Rubin and Abdul Waheed Wafa

KABUL, Afghanistan
– The killing of at least nine men in a remote valley of
eastern Afghanistan by a joint operation of Afghan and American
forces put President Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at
odds on Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or
Taliban insurgents.

In a statement
e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai condemned the weekend attack
and said the dead had been civilians, eight of them schoolboys.
He called for an investigation.

Local officials,
including the governor and members of Parliament from Kunar Province,
where the deaths occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar
police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office was
still investigating the killings and that outstanding questions
remained, including why the eight young men had been in the same
house at the time.

“There
are still questions to be answered, like why these students were
together and what they were doing on that night,” Mr. Ziayee
said.

A senior
NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid
had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that
its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and
smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces
call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s.

According
to the NATO official, nine men were killed. “These were people
who had a well-established network, they were I.E.D. smugglers
and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security
and coalition forces in those areas,” said the official,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy
of the issue.

“When
the raid took place they were armed and had material for making
I.E.D.’s,” the official added.

While the
article in the New York Times eventually mentions the allegation
that the victims were children, not u201Cmen,u201D it nonetheless begins
with the unchallenged assertion in the lead that they were u201Cmen.u201D
There is no mention of the equally serious allegation that the victims
had been handcuffed before being executed, and the story leaves
the impression, made by NATO sources, that they were armed and had
died fighting. There is no indication in the Times story that the
reporters made any effort, as the more enterprising and skeptical
London Times reporter did, to get local, non-official, sources of
information. Moreover, the information claiming that the victims
had been making bombs was attributed by Rubin and Wafa, with no
objections from their editors in New York, to an anonymous NATO
source, though there was no legitimate reason for the anonymity
(u201Cbecause of the delicacy of the situationu201D was the lame excuse
offered) – indeed the use of an anonymous source here would
appear to violate the Times' own standards.

Read
the rest of the article

January
4, 2010

There are so
many things wrong with Obama’s “New and Improved”
Afghanistan War that it’s hard to know where to begin, but
I guess the place to start is with his premise.

If America
needs to be fighting in Afghanistan because Al Qaeda planned and
launched the 9-11 attacks from there back in 2001, as the president
claimed in his lackluster address to the cadets at West Point last
week, then we would have to assume either that Al Qaeda is still
there, or that if we were not there fighting, that Al Qaeda would
be back to plan more attacks.

Well, we know
Al Qaeda is not there, because US intelligence reports that there
are “fewer than 100” Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan
at most at this point, and probably a good deal fewer. Maybe even
zero. Al Qaeda has long since moved on to Pakistan and thence to
other countries far removed from Afghanistan (even Defense Secretary
Robert Gates, after speculating that Osama bin Laden “might
be” hopping back and forth across the border with Pakistan
like a kid doing a double-dare game, concedes that in truth no one
in the US has any idea where bin Laden is, or whether he is even
in South Asia). But would Al Qaeda come back if the Taliban, ousted
back in 2001 by US Special Forces, were to return to power in Kabul?
Not likely. As the New York Times reported in last Sunday’s
paper, the Afghan Taliban have convincingly broken with Al Qaeda,
because of the latter organization’s targeting of the Pakistani
government, which has long had a supportive relationship with the
Afghan Taliban. Besides, the Taliban in Afghanistan have a clear
goal of ruling Afghanistan, and the US has already demonstrated
both that it can live and work with a Taliban government, as it
was doing before the 9-11 attacks, and that it will punish the Taliban
if they allow Al Qaeda a free hand inside their country. So the
odds of a re-established Taliban regime in Afghanistan inviting
Al Qaeda to move back in and set up shop are somewhere around zero.

Ergo, whatever
he may say, the current Christmas ramp-up in the war announced by
Obama has nothing to do with 9-11, nothing to do with combating
terrorism, and nothing to do with protecting American security.

What about
the bogie-man of a so-called “failed state”? Obama said
a failed state in Afghanistan could mean a return of Al Qaeda or
other terrorist organizations.

The problem
with this second argument is that Afghanistan already is a failed
state, if the definition of a failed state is one in which there
is no effective central government. For that matter, Afghanistan
has been a failed state since the overthrow of Mohammed Najibullah,
the Communist leader who had the country largely unified and who
was instituting reforms like protecting the rights of women, building
roads, etc. (the very things the US says it wants to do), until
he was driven out of power and ultimately hung by forces, including
the Taliban, organized and armed by the CIA. Actually, the truth
is that Afghanistan has always been something less than a real nation,
with different ethic groups occupying different regions of the country
largely operating like autonomous little countries. To expect such
a situation to somehow coalesce into something resembling a European
nation-state is simply ludicrous. In fact, the only commonality
uniting the various ethnic groups within Afghanistan actually is
religion – they’re nearly all Islamic – which suggests
that the Taliban, for all their medieval fundamentalism, may have
a significant edge in the nation-building game.

Moving on to
strategy, Obama talks about effectively doubling the number of US
and NATO forces fighting in the country (the term “fighting”
is used loosely because many of the European forces are barred by
their governments from actually engaging in combat), with the goal
being, reportedly, to protect the cities from Taliban attacks (and
good luck with that!) and giving the current government in Kabul
time to build up a 400,000-man army that supposedly would take over
the job of security.

Hmmmm. If you
protect the cities, by definition you leave the countryside around
the cities unprotected, right? But you cannot do that in a country
that is largely rural, so the US will inevitably resort to search-and-destroy
run-outs into the countryside, and of course air attacks by bombers
and remote-controlled drones, in a doomed effort to keep the Taliban
at bay. But such actions, as America leaned when it tried the same
policy in Vietnam, inevitably mean massive and disproportionate
civilian casualties – the so-called “collateral damage”
of war. And civilian casualties are not the way an army wins “hearts
and minds.” In fact, a high rate of civilian casualties means
the destroying of hearts, minds, limbs, families, houses, etc.,
and the concomitant creation of blood enemies. So we start out by
making more enemies outside the city gates.

Read
the rest of the article

December
8, 2009

Nobody in the
corporate media mentions it, but the war in Afghanistan which President
Barack Obama just ramped up by 50% this year, with the dispatch,
first of 17,000 troops last spring and now with another 30,000 troops,
to begin deployment on Christmas, is being fought on the shaky legal
basis of a hastily passed Authorization for the Use of Military
Force (AUMF) voted by Congress back in October 2001, more than three
years before Obama was even elected to the Senate.

Obama is sending
more troops to Afghanistan on a lie to fight in an illegal war

That AUMF was
the handiwork of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney, and it was rammed through House and Senate with almost no
debate in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and then used to justify
most of the subsequent assaults on the Constitution and Bill of
Rights that are still haunting America and the world today.

While Congress
saw the 2001 AUMF as an authorization to launch an attack on Al
Qaeda in Afghanistan (an attack that quickly toppled the Taliban
government, but that famously failed to crush Al Qaeda, thanks to
its being called off half a year later so troops could be shifted
to a new war in the making against Iraq), Bush and Cheney interpreted
it as a “declaration of war” in a “global war on
terror,” which they claimed had no border, no end, and which
they even tried to claim extended to within the boundaries of the
US.

So anxious
were Bush and Cheney to be permanent wartime generalissimos, unfettered
by Constitutional constraints, that just minutes before the measure
went to the Senate for a vote, according to then Senate Majority
Leader Tom Daschle, they sought to add the words “in the United
States” after the phrase “appropriate force” in the
language of the resolution. As Daschle, who wisely refused their
request, notes, “This last-minute change would have given the
president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just
overseas – where we all understood he wanted authority to act – but
right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens.”

The point though,
is that the 2001 AUMF was in fact an authorization to use military
force to go after terrorism. It was not an authorization to conduct
a full-scale war against another nation, or to become enmeshed in
a civil war in another nation, which is what is going on in Afghanistan
today. That, in fact, is why even Bush felt he needed a second AUMF
to authorize his invasion of Iraq.

Read
the rest of the article

December
4, 2009

Merry Xmas Jarheads!! The Man of Peace, Nobel Laureate-to-be President
Barack Obama, your latest commander-in-chief, is going to be shipping
you out as a holiday gift to the people of Afghanistan.

You will be delivering bullets and bombs, with my name and the
name of other American taxpayers on them, to the long-suffering
people of Afghanistan by December 25, according to press reports
ahead of the Mr. Hope and Change’s planned nationwide speech
tonight.

Back here in America, the land of the free and brave, come the
holidays, we will be scraping together the cash to buy small gifts
for our kids, hopefully without having to miss a rent payment or
a mortgage payment. Fortunately, we’ve got Food Stamps, which
are now, we are told, flooding the suburbs, and are “no longer
a stigma,” so we won’t be hurting too much for Christmas
dinner – though you still can’t use the stamps to buy eggnog.

It will be interesting to hear what your commanders tell you your
mission is. The president is saying we need to keep Al Qaeda out
of Afghanistan, but from what I hear, there are no Al Qaeda operatives
in the country. They all upped and left for greener pastures a long
time ago – to places like Pakistan, Somalia, and maybe Europe
and the USA. Hell, they can go anywhere. How do you spot an Al Qaeda
guy anyhow? The fellows getting on the plane in Boston on 9-11 were
clean-shaven and wore Brooks Brothers shirts, looking more like
bond traders than bombers.

No, you will be targeting the Taliban. But the Taliban are Afghans,
and look just like the people who are not Taliban, so what you’ll
most likely be doing half the time or more is shooting up ordinary
struggling Afghani peasants and shopkeepers, or members of weddings
or funerals, whose angry relatives will then seek revenge by setting
traps or ambushes for you.

From what I hear, we taxpayers will be forking over about $1 million
for each of you for each year you are rotated into Afghanistan.
You won’t see much of that money yourself of course, (most
of the dough will flow to the war-profiteers who make your uniform,
your gun, your ammo, your truck, etc.), but maybe it will feel good
knowing that there’s that big an investment being made in you.

You’ll be called “our heroes,” too. I’m not
sure why. I mean, it takes a certain amount of guts just to sign
up for an outfit like the Marines, I know (my dad volunteered to
be a Marine in WWII). But I just find it hard to see what’s
so heroic about being part of the best-armed, best-trained fighting
force in the history of mankind and fighting a group of poor, uneducated
peasants armed at best with AK rifles and home-made bombs – especially
when you guys reportedly outnumber your enemy by better that 10:1,
and have the backing of completely unchallenged air support – F-16s,
helicopter gunships, fixed-wing gunships and B-1 bombers.

That’s not a fight. It’s a slaughter.

I had a taste of this when I brought my son and a friend of his
to the Army Experience Center, an recruiting experiment in Northeast
Philadelphia where we were able to man a mock-up Humvee and race
through a simulated village, firing our mounted machine guns at
supposed Taliban fighters who would jump out at us, or plant IEDs
in our path. At the end of the run, we were congratulated by the
attending Iraq War vet/recruiter, for our number of kills and our
low (25%) “error” rate – that was the number of civilians,
usually women or kids, that we shot up in our haste to shoot first.
We were told that such “collateral damage” was to be expected
in war.

Read
the rest of the article

December
2, 2009

Most Americans
are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in
the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon
Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning
hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that
led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Even before
testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news began to
leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the government
of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public about
the country’s involvement in war planning.

Britain’s
Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published documents
from British military leaders, including a memo from British special
forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been instructed
to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”

This means
that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a House of
Commons committee that there were “no preparations to invade
Iraq,” was lying.

Things are
likely to heat up when the commission begins hearing testimony.
It has the power, and intends to compel testimony from top government
officials, including Blair himself.

While some
American newspapers, including the Philadelphia
Inquirer, have run an Associated Press report on the new
disclosures and on the commission, key news organizations, including
the New York Times, have not. The Times ignored the
Telegraph report, but a day later ran an article about the
British commission that focused entirely on evidence that British
military leaders in Iraq felt “slighted” by “arrogant”
American military leaders who, the article reported, pushed for
aggressive military action against insurgent groups, while British
leaders preferred negotiating with them.

While that
may be of some historical interest, it hardly compares with the
evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration were secretly
conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March 2002.

Read
the rest of the article

November
26, 2009

And yet America
is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone
to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing
captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk about censorship!
But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian-style control
over information.

Let’s
just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000 tons
of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of
it in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this
topic in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and
hidden the effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs
and bullets because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel
armor and concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where
the weapons were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that
would show if they have been contaminated. It has even resorted
to having paid Pentagon hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and
otherwise undermine those military sources and journalists who have
tried to expose this scourge (this reporter has been the target
of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship
in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at government-directed
control of information. In America, some of the most potent censorship
is done by the privately owned media – supposedly a bastion of
freedom of expression.

There is no
reason why the US media cannot report on depleted uranium and its
deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as Iraq, Kuwait,
Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American military bases
from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just recently, stories
have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian
newspaper, reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects
and infant cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities
like Basra, Najaf, Baghdad and Samara – all urban areas where
there were major assaults by US forces both in the initial invasion,
when most of the DU weapons were used, and later during fights against
holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah,
the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a staggering 15
times normal – an increase of 1400%! While the article doesn’t
mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing
number of birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US
forces in late 2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation
and chemicals” which were dumped on the city. (A
second article in another British paper, the Independent,
makes the link between the birth defects and depleted uranium weapons
more explicit and direct.)

There is no
such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship?
Of course it is.

The American
government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report this
story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least generally),
contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis
in Iraq, or on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though
the government did ask and successfully get the Times to hold a
story about the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying
program for a year, and managed to pressure the Times’ editors
to kill a Times reporter’s story about President Bush’s likely
use of a hidden cueing device during the 2004 presidential debates).
The editors of those news organizations themselves most of the time
simply decide that either the story is of no importance to readers
or they worry that they may be criticized either by the government
or by other media organizations for being unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result
of such a process of self-censorship, however, is that the American
public is as ignorant about certain things as someone in China.

More ignorant
in fact.

One thing
I learned from living and working as a journalist and journalism
teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese people, with
their long experience of living in a totalitarian dictatorship in
which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the state and
the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are being
lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them. Accordingly,
they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up subtle hints
in news articles which honest journalists have learned how to slip
into their carefully controlled reports. They have also developed
a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting called
xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.”
This system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends.
As telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become
known as China’s “Great Firewall” – effectively
all of China is like a vast corporate “intranet” which
blocks access to outside websites – still allows the flow of
email. This is nearly impossible to monitor, particularly when the
messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of addressees.

So in China,
reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes, of internal
struggles within the government or party, or of important news about
the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay, manage
to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative
highly-personal news network works because the Chinese people know
they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and they want to break
through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US,
in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is blissfully
unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored, filtered
and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we boast
of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed,
as a journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that
most people get their news either from corporately owned newspapers
or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t really
matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since
most Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live
in a society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that
is spoon-fed to them by corporate media sources.

The result
is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural Jiangsu
or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about their
own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information
she or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all
aware that one isn’t getting certain information via the obvious
sources, and then one has to want to get it, and make the effort
to find it. For most Americans, all three of these elements are
missing.

The list of
censored stories and issues in the US, about which the American
public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond just
the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans
know, for instance, that all the other modern western Democracies
in the world have some form of national health care – either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or Switzerland – and
that in all those countries, the systems are so popular that they
have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our corporate
media instead report on the crank critics of those systems and allow
us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans
know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of living in
the world – or even close? No. Because the American media continue
to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans
know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA? No. This
important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988,
when it got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the
arming of the mujahideen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani
intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and
support resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course,
we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and children that our
beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and Afghanistan
in our name.

No censorship
in America?

Mr. President,
please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence
of your Chinese audience.

November
17, 2009

Kudos to the
New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti
and James Risen, for their lead
article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s
stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in
the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years
been on the CIA payroll.

Okay, the article
was lacking much historical perspective (more on that later), and
the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly cautious
tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that “The financial
ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency
and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s
war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.”
Well, duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even
in Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and
about how can the government explain this to the families of the
over 1000 soldiers and Marines who have died supposedly helping
to build a new Afghanistan). But that said, the newspaper that helped
cheerlead us into the pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003,
and that prevented journalist Risen from running his exposé
of the Bush/Cheney administration’s massive warrantless National
Security Agency electronic spying operation until after the 2004
presidential election, this time gave a critically important story
full timely play, and even, appropriately, included a teaser in
the same front-page story about October being the most deadly month
yet for the US in Afghanistan.

What the article
didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear historical pattern
here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air America airline
front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian heroin trade.
At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that was the
leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where
there was a resulting heroin epidemic.

A decade later,
in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, as the late investigative
journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented first in a series
titled “Dark
Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury News newspaper,
and later in a book by that same name, the CIA was deeply involved
in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US, which
was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic – one that continues
to destroy African American and other poor communities across the
country. (The Times’ role here was sordid – it and other
leading papers, including the Washington Post and Los
Angeles Times – did despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly
trashing his work and his career, and ultimately driving him to
suicide, though his facts have held up.) In this case, Webb showed
that the Agency was actually using the drugs as a way to fund arms,
which it could use its own planes to ferry down to the Contra forces
it was backing to subvert the Sandinista government in Nicaragua
at a time Congress had barred the US from supporting the Contras.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the world
with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow
by US forces in 2001, had, according to the UN, virtually eliminated
opium production there), but now responsible for as much as 80 percent
of the world's opium production – this at a time that the US
effectively finances and runs the place, with an occupying army
that, together with Afghan government forces that it controls, outnumbers
the Taliban 12-1 according to a
recent AP story.

Your tax dollars
at work.

The issue at
this point should not be how many troops the US should add to its
total in Afghanistan. It shouldn’t even be over whether the
US should up the ante or scale back to a more limited goal of hunting
terrorists. It should be about how quickly the US can extricate
its forces from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start hearings
into corruption and drug pushing by the CIA, and how soon the Attorney
General’s office will begin a grand jury probe into the CIA’s drug
dealing.

Read
the rest of the article

October
30, 2009