Since September 2001, the Pentagon has listed $40 billion worth of contracts for small arms intended for Afghanistan and Iraq, supplying 1.45 million guns to both countries while only accounting for 3 percent of them, says a new report by a British NGO.
The London-based nonprofit Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) pored over 14 years’ worth of contracts issued by the US Department of Defense, documenting the purchases of small arms – defined as anything under 30mm in caliber – ammunition and attachments, such as sniper scopes or tripods. They found a massive amount of weapons supplied by the US to the primary theaters of the “War on Terror,” and remarkably little accounting of whose hands they ended up in.
“Our findings raise concerns about the DOD’s own transparency and accountability when it comes to issuing contracts,” Iain Overton, AOAV’s director of investigations, said when announcing the report’s publication Wednesday.
Not only has the Pentagon’s contract database listed only 3 percent of the approximately 1.45 million small arms sent to Iraq and Afghanistan over the years, “we also know the US government has acknowledged they don’t know where many of these weapons now are,” Overton added.
A team of AOAV researchers spent almost a year looking into every contract published by the Pentagon between September 11, 2001 and September 10, 2015, said the organization, whose mission is “research and advocacy in order to reduce the incidence and impact of global armed violence.”
What they found was just over $40 billion of solicitations for small arms, ammunition and attachments, with just under $20 billion actually paid out to contractors. Of the 412 published contracts, 137 – or 33 percent – contained errors and discrepancies.
Ten companies accounted for 65 percent of the total published contract values, the researchers found. The top five contractors were Alliant Techsystems – now split into OrbitalATK and Vista Outdoor – DRS Technologies, BAE Systems Inc., Knight’s Armament Co, and General Dynamics. The largest single contract was for the modernization of Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri, worth up to $8.48 billion.
Some 949,582 small arms were sent to Iraq, and another 503,328 to Afghanistan, amounting to 1,452,910 assault and sniper rifles, pistols, machine guns and other unspecified firearms. Yet the Department of Defense contract publications listed only 19,602 of these weapons, just over 1 percent of the total. When AOAV pressed for verification, the DOD provided itemized lists for 719,474 weapons provided through June 2016.
The numbers “tell the story of two wars that did not go as pitched,” veteran military correspondent CJ Chivers wrote in the New York Times Magazine, commenting on AOAV’s findings.
The retired Marine and author of The Gun also filled in a piece of the puzzle the researchers missed by not counting the grenade launchers and anti-tank weapons provided by the Pentagon.
“The data offer no insight into a startlingly risky aspect of the Pentagon’s arming of local forces with infantry arms: the wide distribution of anti-armor weapons, including RPG-7s,” Chivers wrote.
After the first few weeks of each war, the only armor on either battlefield was either American or allied, “which made the Pentagon’s practice of providing anti-armor weapons to Afghan and Iraqi security forces puzzling,” Chivers wrote. “Why would they need anti-armor weapons when they had no armor to fight? All the while rockets were somehow mysteriously being fired at American convoys and patrols in each war.”
August 24, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Militarism | Afghanistan, Iraq, United States |
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With the battle for Aleppo raging in Syria, another crucial battle in the east of the Greater Middle East, in Afghanistan, is being joined, the outcome of which is going to be no less fateful. The Associated Press flashed the news today that the key southern Afghan city of Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province, has been “completely surrounded” by the Taliban and the government forces are regrouping for a last-ditch defence.
The head of the Helmand provincial council estimates that the Taliban may capture Lashkar Gah within days. (UPI )
The development comes as a huge embarrassment for the Barack Obama administration. The entire mythology built around the famous “surge” ordered by President Obama in 2010 and the massive campaign in the Hindu Kush led by the general with the Roman nose, David Petraeus, with over 100,000 American troops under his command, is unravelling.
The “surge” was mostly concentrated on Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Rajiv Chandrasekharan of the Washington Post who covered the war in Helmand and Kandahar wrote a beautiful book on it, Little America, which is a brilliant recount of the political foibles and ambitious goals set by feckless Americans and about the Hobbesian world in which the “surge” slithered its way like a serpent through the great poppy fields, across irrigation canals and culverts and beyond the mud walls into the orchards of pomegranates, grapes and sweet melons into the seamless desert plateau with rocky outcrops — creating Potemkin progress but in reality letting loose a tidal wave of corruption and venality and mindless horrific violence and destruction. (Guardian )
The big question today for Obama, therefore, is: Just what was the point? Yet, he’s decided to abandon his 2008 election pledge and bow to the military commanders’ wish once again to keep troop levels at a threshold that would give the option for his successor in the White House to order a second “surge”, which is, in fact, what Gen. Petraeus has demanded in a recent opinion piece. (Wall Street Journal )
Without doubt, the capture of Helmand province will be a turning point in the Afghan war. Several factors come into play. First and foremost, the Taliban will have made a big point underscoring their capability – how quick they have been able to take advantage of the withdrawal of the thousands of British and American soldiers as recently as in 2014. The message will resonate all across the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan.
In “operational” terms, Taliban have made a slow, steady pincer movement lasting months, closing in from the north and south toward Lashkar Gah, exposing the poor leadership of the Afghan army and police. On their part, Taliban demonstrated tenacity, organizational skill and access to resources.
Helmand is the biggest single centre of opium production in Afghanistan. Taliban are set to get a sizeable share of the drug business, which has always been a major source of funding for the insurgency. Beyond its opium economy, Helmand is strategically located – bordering Pakistan’s Baluchistan province and close to the Iranian border, which provide good exit routes to escape in an emergency – or, alternatively, to bring in reinforcements – as well as supply lines to other regions of Afghanistan.
Suffice it to say, Helmand has the potential to become Taliban’s core territory where the ‘Quetta Shura’ could be ‘headquartered’, which could become a ‘provisional government’ on Afghan soil at some point.
The Afghan army faces an uphill task to retrieve control of Helmand, which is dominated by the Ishaqzai tribe. The Ishqzais have been virulently ‘anti-American’ all along. Besides, the Taliban can also cash in now on their sympathy, since Mullah Akhtar Mansour whom the Americans killed in a drone strike in April also happened to be an Ishaqzai. There is a blood feud the Ishaqzais have to settle with Obama.
Helmand is Afghanistan’s largest province; it is twice the size of Belgium and 16 times bigger than Panjshir. It is a fertile region with a developed irrigation system. The famous marble mines of Khanashin become another source of financing for the Taliban. Helmand is on the highway connecting the western regions (Herat, Farah, Nimroz, etc.) with the southern provinces (Kandahar, Ghazni, Khost, etc.) and with Kabul. If the Taliban gain control of Helmand province, they can dominate vital communication links.
However, the full gravity of the emergent politico-military situation in Afghanistan will not sink in unless the crisis of legitimacy facing the so-called National Unity Government in Kabul is also understood. The point is, the NUG has no mandate to rule beyond September unless a Loya Jirga is convened. No one other than former president Hamid Karzai has pointed this out.
Now, about half the members of a legally-constituted Loya Jirga would be the chairs of district council. But elections to the district councils cannot be held in the prevailing security situation with the government steadily conceding territory to the Taliban. The alternative will be to convene a ‘traditional’ Loya Jirga comprising tribal elders chosen at random. But then, who holds the authority to convene a ‘traditional’ Loya Jirga that could in turn constitute an interim government?
Meanwhile, tension is also growing within the NUG between the factions led by the president and the chief executive officer. Over and above hangs the dangerous question, which no one wants to think about, as to how long will the army remain intact regardless of political crises.
All in all, the fall of Helmand to the Taliban can only deepen the crisis of legitimacy haunting the Afghan government. Read a recent report by the veteran Afghan hand Barnett Rubin – THE U.S. PRESENCE AND AFGHANISTAN’S NATIONAL UNITY GOVERNMENT: PRESERVING AND BROADENING THE POLITICAL SETTLEMENT
August 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, Helmand, NATO, Obama, Taliban, United States |
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The recent downing of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter and the death of all 5 on board over Al Qaeda-held Idlib province in Syria, represents the unenviable full circle US rhetoric has made surrounding both the Syrian conflict, and the wider “War on Terror.”
It was the United States who first created and used Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s to down Russian aircraft and to fight Russian troops. After successfully pushing Russia out of Afghanistan and plunging it into a sociopolitical dark age, the US went on to claiming to be victimized by the monster they themselves created, perhaps most spectacularly on September 11, 2001. Today, the US finds itself back to now fully using Al Qaeda to fight a proxy war against Russia, this time in Syria.
Russian Helicopter Was on Humanitarian Mission Over Al Qaeda Territory
The Russian Mi-8 helicopter was conducting humanitarian operations. This is not according to only Russian or Syrian sources, but even opposition sources including UK-based anti-Syrian government proponent Rami Abdulrahman who refers to himself as the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” (SOHR).
The New York Times in its article, “Russian Military Helicopter Is Shot Down in Syria, Killing 5,” would report that:
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes the Syrian government and tracks the conflict from Britain through contacts in Syria, said the helicopter had crashed near the village of Saraqib in Idlib Province.
The aircraft had recently delivered aid to two Shiite villages nearby that have long been surrounded by Sunni rebels, the group said.
Qatari-state media Al Jazeera, also an admittedly pro-militant voice amid the conflict, would admit that Idlib province, Syria, is held by Al Qaeda.
In its article, “Syria’s civil war: Russian chopper shot down in Idlib,” Al Jazeera would admit:
Idlib is held almost entirely by a powerful coalition of hardline rebel groups, including the former al-Nusra Front, now known as the Fateh al-Sham group after renouncing its status as al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
Despite Al Jazeera’s attempts to qualify Nusra Front as having “renounced” its Al Qaeda affiliations, it is still recognized by the US, Russia and Syria as a terrorist organization.
Justifying & Celebrating Al Qaeda’s Atrocity
In the immediate aftermath of the helicopter’s downing and now ongoing since, pro-militant pundits from both the public and Western policy centers, celebrated the incident.
Former director of the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center, Salman Shaikh, repeatedly retweeted accusations that Russia’s Mi-8 was not in fact on a humanitarian mission, simply because empty rocket pods were found among the wreckage.
With SOHR insisting indeed the Russian helicopter was on a humanitarian mission, the empty rocket pods were most likely empty upon take off. So far, “experts,” including Atlantic Council’s “Digital Forensic Research Lab Senior Non-Resident Fellow” Eliot Higgins, previously an unemployed British social worker and blogger, have insinuated the Mi-8 was on a military mission, but have yet to provide any evidence.
This attempt to leverage supposed “experts” to justify the downing of a helicopter (and subsequent celebrations) engaged in humanitarian operations even in contradiction to media reports coming from both sides of the conflict, indicates just how far departed Western rhetoric has become from the principles it claims to uphold, particularly in regards to its involvement in the Syrian conflict and its backing of militant groups operating in Al Qaeda-held Idlib province.
US Aspired to Down Russian Aircraft in Syria
The downing of Russia’s Mi-8 over Idlib is not the first. Another Russian helicopter was shot down near Palmyra in early July.
Japan Times in its article, “U.S. missile brought down Russian helicopter in Syria: report,” would report:
Two Russian airmen killed in Syria on Friday were shot down with American weaponry, the Interfax news agency said Sunday, quoting a Russian military source.
It said insurgents from the Islamic State group hit the airmen’s Mi-25 assault helicopter with a U.S.-made TOW heavy anti-tank missile, a weapon that uses guidance from a ground station.
The possibility of terrorist organizations like the Islamic State (IS) ending up with US missiles should be no surprise. It is a “coincidence” it appears many US policymakers wanted to unfold in Syria, if a no-fly zone implemented over Syria by the US directly was not a possibility.
One of those US policymakers is US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who would say in a 2015 interview on Fox News that:
I might do what we did in Afghanistan many years ago, to give those guys the ability to shoot down those planes. That equipment is available.
He would elaborate further by stating:
The Free Syrian Army, just like the Afghans shot down the Russian…
It should be noted that the “guys” Senator McCain is referring to in Afghanistan were Al Qaeda. With the downing of 2 Russian helicopters at the hands of IS and Al Qaeda respectively, it appears very much like Senator McCain has (one way or another) gotten his wish, with Al Qaeda once again serving as the armed intermediary between the US and Russia.
The end result is US foreign policy coming full circle, having created Al Qaeda to fight Russia in the 1980s, then using the terrorist organization as a pretext to extend military interventionism globally, to now once again cheering them on in Syria as they down Russian aircraft amid a struggle to restore peace and stability to both Syria and the wider region.
One wonders if this irony is lost on the American people, who have been asked to sacrifice so much in the name of fighting “terrorism,” only to have those who have done the asking to ally themselves with the very terrorists in a destructive proxy war in the distant lands of the Levant.
August 3, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, John McCain, Russia, Syria, United States |
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I always found myself giggling during the Democratic debates when Hillary would ask Bernie how he was going to pay for things like healthcare or college tuition, and then Bernie stammering to find an answer.
They both knew the secret but neither would say it — there’s plenty of money, we just don’t want to spend it on Americans.
We think of that as freeloading, unearned stuff. Go get a job, moocher. But then move the same question overseas and everything changes. There is always plenty of money, and the people getting free stuff from that money aren’t moochers. They’re allies.
So how much healthcare would $1.7 billion buy? Because that’s how much money the United States just laid out to buy radios for the near-useless Afghan Army. And while I don’t know how much healthcare the money would buy, I do know it will purchase a helluva lot of radios. Is everyone in Afghanistan getting one? Maybe we’re buying them for the Taliban, too.
Anyway, the $1,700,000,000 radios for Afghanistan contract was just recently awarded to the Harris Corporation. And here’s a funny thing: only one company — Harris — actually put in a bid for the contract.
But the Afghans must need more stuff than just radios, and so the U.S. has money ready for that.
The United States will provide $3 billion to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces from 2018 to 2020 for, well, we don’t really know. Meanwhile, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan said the White House planned to ask Congress for about $1 billion a year in development and economic assistance for Afghanistan through 2020. And if that isn’t enough, the United States and its allies are expected to raise $15 billion for the Afghan National Defense and Security forces at a NATO summit scheduled for next month in Warsaw.
There’s money. You just can’t have any of it, moochers.
July 29, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Afghanistan, NATO, United States |
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The neo-con “West” and its allies want to destroy the Middle East so that they can control the Middle East.
Under the auspices of their imperial “New Middle East” project, the criminals (U.S–led NATO, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and Israel, are targeting everything that they falsely profess to cherish.
All of the “values” that the politicians falsely parade as important, even sacrosanct, are instrumentalized as false fronts that belie the dark undercurrents dragging humanity towards a barren “New World Order” of globalized degeneracy and despair.
Nation-state self-determination, sovereignty, territorial integrity – all vital components of world peace, prosperity, and democracy are meaningless to the elites, except for their propaganda value.
A meta-national project of top down control, enforced by anonymous elites, controls how we think, feel, and live.
This dystopian present has rendered political choices moot. Choices are non-choices, puppet shows sold by empty words and conflicting narratives — all bereft of substance.
The real agenda is unspeakable. The real agenda must be unspeakable, because it is poison, a dark distillate of degenerate barbarism, mostly hidden from view.
This real agenda, masked beneath the Big Lies, and the stories told by scripted “politicians”, bares its sanguine teeth, and imposes its dark will with barely a whimper. There are no “mistakes”. It’s all by design.
War planners knew full well that the sanctions imposed prior to the invasion of Iraq were targeting children. They accurately predicted when the plants would fail, and how many lives would be lost.
A Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document accurately predicted that,
“IT PROBABLY WILL TAKE AT LEAST SIX MONTHS (TO JUNE 1991) BEFORE THE (water treatment) SYSTEM IS FULLY DEGRADED.” And that,
“FAILING TO SECURE SUPPLIES WILL RESULT IN A SHORTAGE OF
PURE DRINKING WATER FOR MUCH OF THE POPULATION. THIS COULD LEAD
TO INCREASED INCIDENCES, IF NOT EPIDEMICS, OF DISEASE … “
The end result? Over 500,000 children under the age of five were killed, with intent (murder), in addition to over one million other people, none of whom who had committed a crime.
The “West” regularly targets innocent people, including children, with a view to weakening the morale of countries about to be conquered. Madeleine Albright infamously intoned that the “price (murdering 500,000 children) … is worth it”, in one of the rare moments when dark truths and media messaging intersect.
War planners also knew that they were supporting al Qaeda ground troops in Libya when they exploited the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) clause to bomb the sovereign state of Libya, to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi, to destroy water infrastructure, to loot, to plunder, to commit genocide, and to set up an ISIS strongehold. Prior to the invasion, Libya’s standard of living was the highest in Africa. There were no mistakes.
The weapons ratline from Libya to Syria was not a mistake either. The West intentionally funded its terrorist proxies so that they would be well provisioned to invade Syria. The weaponization and training of its terrorist foot soldiers supplements the terrorists’ now dwindling additional sources of income such as funding from illicit drugs, the plunder of historical Syrian artifacts, the theft of Syrian oil resources, and so on. All planned by the West. Again, no mistakes.
Equally degenerate is the fact that the Western intelligence agencies, allied with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan’s ISIS, perpetuate the degeneracy by raising new recruits into the culture of the un-islamic, Wahhabi ideology. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky explains in America’s “War on Terrorism” that
“In 1979, the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in Afghanistan: With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, who wanted to turn the Afghan Jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually, more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad. ”
Just as the CIA, through the Pakistani ISI, creates “radicals” by indoctrinating children in “madrasah” schools, so too ISIS indoctrinates Syrian children in the ways of the degenerate Wahhabi ideology in ISIS occupied areas of Syria.
Samuel Westrop writes in “U.K: Jihadists as Charity Workers”, that
“ISIS has supplemented its violence with dawa’h programs – a system of social provision, or ‘soft-power outreach’ – in areas under its control. A key component of this dawa’h … is providing educational outreach initiatives ‘as part of its wider strategy to foster a new generation of Syrians in support of its ideological agenda.’ “
The cancer of this un-islamic ideology is intentionally promoted in occupied areas of secular, pluralist, democratic Syria with a view to “weaponizing” children, and to destroying the country with an internalized cancer of Wahhabism and violence.
None of this is accidental. All of it is the fruit of considerable forethought and pre-planning by the imperial “West”, its allies, and their intelligence agencies.
Whereas the West proclaims that it is spreading democracy, it is spreading terrorism, Wahhabism, death and destruction on each and every one of its pre-planned imperial invasions.
Syria’s stand against the Western agencies of death and destruction is a stand for all of humanity against the dark forces that fester beneath our politician’s empty words and the courtesan media’s toxic lies.
July 28, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Afghanistan, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Iraq, Libya, Middle East |
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Ramzan Kadyrov has accused the US authorities of instigating the civil war in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, and called on senior politicians in these states to set aside their differences and unite in the face of what he sees as a common enemy.
“During the 37 years of the war in Afghanistan peace has not become closer, not even by a single step. The United States used the excuse of fighting their own Bin Laden to unleash a decades-long civil war there. America and NATO could have solved the Afghan problem in just two years, but they need this eternal bloody cauldron in Afghanistan that takes the lives of many thousands of young Muslims,” the acting head of the Chechen Republic stated in comments on the latest terrorist attack in Kabul.
Kadyrov expressed his position in a post on Instagram – a medium he normally uses for communication with the public.
In the message, he emphasized that the United States and its NATO allies have artificially created the instability in the region. “Step by step they start wars in Muslim countries. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen are now facing the threat of losing their sovereignty,” Kadyrov wrote.
The Chechen leader also called on all Afghanistan’s leaders to set aside personal ambitions and ethnic and religious differences to unite in the face of the common threat. “Once Pashtu, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Sunnis, Shia all join their ranks, no one would ever be able to impose some external will on you,” he wrote.
At least 80 people were killed and 231 injured as a result of a bomb blast at a mass rally in Afghanistan capital Kabul on July 23. The Islamic State terrorist group (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Kadyrov has repeatedly accused the United States and other Western nations of deliberate policies aimed at destroying Muslim countries and the Muslim faith. In February last year he said IS had been “spawned” by the West to incite hatred towards Muslims all over the world. Kadyrov also suggested the West was backing the terrorist group in order to distract public attention from numerous problems in the Middle East, in the hope of destroying Islamic nations from within. In November he accused the Turkish authorities of aiding Western nations’ plot to weaken and destroy Islam by assisting Islamic State and its allies in Syria.
Kadyrov also previously claimed that he possessed information that the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been personally recruited to work for the US by General David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA and former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. At that time, Kadyrov claimed IS “was acting on orders from the West and Europe.”
Read more:
Chechen leader blames US for bloodshed in Afghanistan & other Muslim nations
July 25, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism | Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIL, ISIS, Libya, NATO, Syria, United States, Yemen |
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Iran’s Parliament (Majlis) speaker has condemned the recent deadly bombing in Afghanistan, saying that terrorist attacks are being carried out in the troubled Asian country to create rifts among the people.
“I am of the opinion that terrorism, extremism and threats against the lives of innocent people are unacceptable at all times and in all places and are in stark contrast with religious and Islamic values,” Speaker Ali Larijani wrote in a message of condolence to Fazal Hadi Muslimyar, the chairman of the Afghan Senate, on Sunday evening.
At least 80 people lost their lives and 231 others sustained injuries, some seriously, on Saturday when a bomb explosion hit a peaceful demonstration by members of the ethnic Hazara community in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
The Takfiri Daesh terrorist group later claimed responsibility for the bombing.
Larijani expressed sympathy with the Afghan nation and government as well as the victims’ families over the bomb attack and wished for the immediate recovery of those wounded.
“Unfortunately, by spreading insecurity to other regions, certain parties sponsoring terrorism as well as the agents of the Zionist regime (Israel) seek to take revenge from Muslim and innocent nations… for the effective efforts by the governments of Iraq and Syria in fighting terrorism,” he further wrote.
Iraq and Syria have been involved in fighting Takfiri armed groups wreaking havoc in the two countries. Both governments have been successfully pushing the militant groups back from the areas they had overrun.
Larijani also wrote and expressed his condolences to Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi, the speaker of the lower house of the Afghan parliament.
In his message to Ibrahimi, the Iranian parliament speaker expressed concern that terrorist attacks are on the rise across the world, which he said make combating such acts “necessary and inevitable.”
July 25, 2016
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Afghanistan, Da’esh, Middle East, Zionism |
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Reprieve | July 23, 2016
A little-known Afghan prisoner has been refused clearance to leave Guantánamo Bay, despite an apparent case of mistaken identity by the U.S. government.
Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Board (PRB) ruled this week that Haroon Gul, 33, must continue to be detained indefinitely without charge or trial because his plan for what he would do post-release was insufficient. The Board also seemed unimpressed by Mr. Gul’s insistence that the government’s allegations against him are false.
The Board’s hearing was the first time in nine years that Mr. Gul has been given the opportunity to defend himself. Yet the process was inadequate and unfair. Neither Mr Gul’s attorney nor his military representative were allowed to discuss the allegations with him under attorney-client privilege, nor was he given the chance to rebut the classified allegations against him before the Board.
Mr Gul, who has never been charged nor received a trial since arriving at Guantánamo Bay in 2007, was originally passed to the US military by local Afghan forces, according to a report by Al Jazeera. His wife and young daughter now live in a refugee camp, the report says, but little more is known to the world about him.
Mr. Gul has previously had no defense attorney during his nine years at Guantanamo, despite his desperate and persistent attempts to find one. He was represented at his Periodic Review Board hearing by Reprieve U.S. attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who met him for the first time only four days before the hearing.
His file will become eligible for review in six months time.
Commenting, Reprieve U.S. attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis said:
“We have reason to believe that Haroon is one of the many proven cases of mistaken identity, but without a lawyer, he had no capacity to challenge his detention in federal court, as others did. He was given less than three hours out of the last nine years to prepare with an attorney for this hearing that determined his fate. This is status-quo justice in Guantánamo.
“When I met this bright-eyed, chatty young man I was blown away by his attitude. He was smiling and laughing and making American cultural references that even I didn’t get.
“This denial is slap in the face to Haroon’s persistent efforts to toe the line the government has drawn for its prisoners. Haroon has learned English from scratch; he learned math and science and computers; he has played soccer with fellow detainees and been kind to the guards that lock his cage at night. To this day, he says he does not understand why he’s in there. ‘Why me?’ But day after day he makes the very best of his situation and treats those who have wronged him charitably.
“Haroon is not a bad man, Haroon is not even an irritable or ill-tempered man. He is a man who was tortured into speaking against himself and held captive by my government for nine years without an attorney.
“The allegations against our clients in Guantánamo, to this day, include information that the government admits is wrong. We are still relying on this torture-evidence to keep men hundreds of miles from their families for years on end.
“I went to law school to be a part of the American justice system, but in Guantánamo, I cannot find it.”
July 24, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Human rights, United States |
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Iraq war criminals deserve to be prosecuted. Britain’s Chilcot report is only the most recent example of a worthy cause needing to be addressed. But in 1979, long before false intelligence was used to justify the Iraq war, a heinous war crime was committed against Afghanistan by President’s Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
It’s not just Brzezinski who is culpable. It was the Washington bureaucracy that enabled Brzezinski to activate his Machiavellian plot of intentionally drawing the Soviets into his “Afghan Trap.”
How the Washington bureaucracy enabled Brzezinski’s scheme and why it’s still important today
Once the Soviets took Brzezinski’s bait and crossed the border into Afghanistan on December 27, 1979 the fates of both countries were doomed. As if in a trance, a complacent bureaucracy turned a blind eye to the lack of proof of the American claims that the Soviet invasion was a step towards world domination. Within days the beltway became a cheering squad, enabling Brzezinski to fulfill his imperial dream of giving the Soviets their own “Vietnam.” The bureaucracy’s motivation was simple. Brzezinski was winning the only game in town, the Cold War against the “Evil Empire.” The fact that Brzezinski’s deceitful plot could lead to the death of Afghanistan as a sovereign state did not concern Washington’s elites, either from the right or the left. Predictably, Afghans’ lives have been turned into an endless nightmare that festers to this day. Not only is Brzezinski’s scheme continuing to undermine Afghanistan’s sovereignty, his Russophobia also drives NATO’s unjustified aggression towards Russia today!
How Brzezinski activated his Russophobic Imperial Dream that now dominates Washington
In 1977 when Brzezinski stepped into the Oval office as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, his Russophobia was a well-known fact from Washington to Moscow. It was no surprise that he was not content with the American moderates’ pragmatic Cold War acceptance of coexistence with the Soviet state. The Polish born Brzezinski represented the ascendency of a radical new breed of compulsive xenophobic Eastern European intellectual bent on holding Soviet/American policy hostage to their pre-World War II world view. According to Brzezinski biographer Patrick Vaughan, Brzezinski rejected the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union itself, calling it “a cauldron of conquered nationalities brutally consolidated over centuries of Russian expansion.”
Racism is not a basis for a rational foreign policy
A phobia is defined as an extreme or irrational fear. Therefore it is reasonable to define a Russophobe as one who has an irrational fear of Russians. Simply put, a Russophobe hates Russians for being Russian! That’s called racism, pure and simple, not the basis of creating rational foreign policy. The Beltway should have demanded that a well-known Russophobe like Brzezinski back his claims with proof that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the first step to taking over the world. Instead, the Washington Bureaucracy dined out on his fantasy and we have been living with the consequences ever since.
The Bureaucracy knows Brzezinski has always been a Russophobe
Paul Warnke, President Carter’s SALT II negotiator put Brzezinski’s racial bias this way in an interview we conducted with him in 1993. “It was almost an ethnic thing with Zbig, basically that inbred Polish attitude toward the Russians. And that of course that was what frustrated the Carter Administration. [Secretary of State] Vance felt very much the way that I did. Brzezinski felt the opposite. And Carter couldn’t decide which one of them he was going to follow. So it adds up to a recipe for indecision.” Warnke went on to say that he believed the Soviets would never have invaded Afghanistan in the first place if Carter had not fallen victim to Brzezinski’s irrational attitude toward détente and his undermining of SALT II. In our own research into the causes of the Soviet invasion we did prove Warnke’s assumption that there would have been no invasion without Brzezinski’s willful use of entrapment.
At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in 1995, a high-level group of former US and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the US had assigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why did the US choose an ideologically-biased position when there were any number of verifiable fact-based explanations for why the Soviets invaded? To former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one specific individual. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole.” Turner said. “[T]he fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important.” What Turner was suggesting in 1995 was that Brzezinski’s well-known Russophobia led him to take unjustifiable advantage of a Soviet miscalculation.
The conference revealed that “self-fulfilling prophecies,” “a dubious deductive apparatus,” and “decisions that provoked as often as they deterred” provided the operating system for more than a decade of Cold War policy under Presidents Carter and Reagan. Numerous scholars pondered Brzezinski’s decision-making process before, during and after the Soviet invasion. Dr. Carol Saivetz of Harvard University testified, “Whether or not Zbig was from Poland or from someplace else, he had a world view, and he tended to interpret events as they unfolded in light of it. To some extent, his fears became self-fulfilling prophecies… Nobody looked at Afghanistan and what was happening there all by itself.”
But it wasn’t until the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview that Brzezinski boasted that he had provoked the invasion, by getting Carter to authorize a presidential finding to intentionally suck the Soviets in, six months before Moscow considered invading. Yet, despite Brzezinski’s admission, Washington’s entire political spectrum continued to embrace his original false narrative, that the Soviets were embarked on world conquest.
Brzezinski’s Russophobia is still the basis of U.S. foreign policy towards Russia
For Brzezinski, getting the Soviets to invade Afghanistan was an opportunity to shift Washington toward an unrelenting hard line against the Soviet Union. By using deceit combined with covert action, he created the conditions needed to provoke a Soviet defensive response, which he then used as evidence of Soviet expansion. However, after Brzezinski’s exaggerations and outright lies about Soviet intentions became accepted, they found a home in America’s imagination and never left. US foreign policy, since that time, has operated in a delusion of triumphalism, provoking international incidents and then capitalizing on the chaos.
Brzezinski’s current status as the almost mystical “wise elder” of American foreign policy should be viewed with extreme caution given the means by which he achieved it. Today, the legacy of Brzezinski’s Russophobic ideological agenda continues through many acolytes including his two sons, as they carry on the Brzezinski lineage by aggressively pushing beltway polices towards dangerous confrontations with Russia. Tragically, Brzezinski’s legacy also lives on in the failed state of Afghanistan as the hated Taliban are poised to take over again. While all this horror is happening to the Afghan people, NATO forces are using Brzezinski’s homeland of Poland to push provocatively against Russia’s border.
The role that Brzezinski played, as well as those officials who enabled him to cause the death of Afghanistan while intentionally triggering the rise of Islamic extremism, must be examined. Building to a trial, even in absentia, will begin the desperately needed process of breaking the trance-like hold Brzezinski’s Russophobia still has on Washington’s foreign policy that is denying its core role in creating Islamic extremism and driving America to the brink of nuclear war with Russia.
No matter whom the next president is, if we are to save America, this forty year old crime against Afghanistan must first be made right.
July 21, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Afghanistan, NATO, Russia, United States |
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Denmark has decided to spare its former Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen the embarrassment his British colleague Tony Blair experienced for involving his country in the war in Iraq by keeping vital documents away from the public eye.
Unlike the United Kingdom, which last week published the Chilcot Report, which unleashed strong criticism of Tony Blair’s Iraqi venture, Denmark decided to block a secret note regarding the 2003 Iraq War from public access, obviously with the intention of shielding its former Prime Minister and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen from similar scrutiny.
Whereas a batch of documents, including communications between Blair and former US President George W. Bush, were made available for public download after the publication of the Chilcot Report, a similar 14-year old document written by Rasmussen amid preparations for the US-led invasion of Iraq will be kept under wraps, Jyllands-Posten reported.
According to Denmark’s parliamentary ombudsman, Danish law prohibits the publication of such material, which was described as “potentially damaging for other countries.” Therefore, the document will be kept classified in accordance with the controversial 2013 Freedom of Information Law.
The debated document relates to a meeting between Rasmussen and then-US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in 2002, which is widely believed to have pushed Denmark into the US-led campaign to oust former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Remarkably, Copenhagen opposes the very idea of shedding light on Denmark’s involvement in the bloody war, which threw Iraq into chaos and left millions dead as the nation was turned into a battleground. In 2015, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen controversially cancelled a government inquiry into the Iraq War shortly after taking office.
A number of opposition politicians have been calling for the document to be made public, despite the perpetual blockade by the government. The background for Denmark’s military involvement in the wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan should be examined through an independent investigation, the Red-Green Alliance stated. According to party spokesperson Eva Flyvholm, Denmark should investigate this painful period to be able to learn from its mistakes and look forward, the Danish newspaper Extra Bladet reported.
Denmark has been a loyal NATO associate ever since it joined the alliance as a founding member. Over the past decades, Danish soldiers fought in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya. Anders Fogh Rasmussen was Danish Prime Minister from 2001 to 2009, whereupon he went on to become NATO Secretary General and remained in office until October 2014.
July 15, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark, Iraq, Iraq War, Libya, NATO, Paul Wolfowitz |
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The Global War on Terror, 2001-2016: Fifteen Years of the 9/11 Cover Up
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – First part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Looking back with hindsight fifteen years after the transformative events of September 11, 2001, the quality of life for most people has significantly declined since 9/11. Beginning immediately on the very day of infamy, the forces of authoritarian reaction began to ramp up the power of unbridled militarism abroad and greatly expanded police powers at home, all in the name of combating Islamic terrorism. But what really happened on 9/11? Who did what to whom? Who is telling the truth and who is lying?
In the fifteen years since 9/11 a vast and multi-faceted citizens’ movement has done much of the investigative work that our thoroughly corrupted governments refused to do on our behalf. Why have there been no genuine investigations by officialdom into the originating event of the Global War on Terror? How was the federal investigation of the 9/11 crime transformed into a federally orchestrated cover up?
The outcome of the people’s inquiry points compellingly to the conclusion that the real culprits behind the 9/11 attacks were not a group of Islamic jihadists acting alone out of no other motivation than religious zealotry. Rather, the dominant group directing the 9/11 false flag event was composed primarily of Israel First neoconservatives who sought to demonize Muslims in order to create the necessary malleable enemy required for their purposes. The real culprits of 9/11 used the event to create a replacement enemy meant to revitalize the vast military and national security apparatus that was fast becoming obsolete following the end of the Cold War with the demise of the Soviet Union.
One of the objectives of the 9/11 criminals was to traumatize whole populations thereby making them more compliant and subject to manipulation. From the opening hours of the 9/11 debacle, the murder and mayhem was immediately blamed, without any forensic investigation whatsoever, on Muslim extremists said to be hostile to the West. The event was thereby framed within a pre-existing geopolitical concept already dubbed by Samuel Huntington as “a clash of civilizations.” The effect of the instant interpretation was to cast the Jewish state’s regional enemies as part of a larger Islamic conspiracy to undermine “the West.”
Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was meant to signal that the core political economy of the USA, the so-called permanent war economy, should continue even though the Cold War had ended. The fabricated story line introduced on 9/11 was consistent with Huntington’s assessment that the new post-Cold War conflicts would cut across religious and cultural spheres of human interaction. With Huntington and Bernard Lewis as their guides, the authors of the 9/11 psychological operation have developed a false concept of “the West” as an exclusively Judeo-Christian construct. This post-9/11 interpretation has involved the creation of a false assumption that the history of Islamic religion, culture and philosophy is entirely external to the history of Western Civilization.
The characterization of Islam as a new and aberrant strain of influence in Europe and throughout the so-called “West” misrepresents the deep history of cross-cultural interaction. The Zionist-directed campaign to mischaracterize Muslims as a recent and alien injection into Western Civilization fails to take into account the importance of Islamic advances in mathematics, architecture, medicine and art in the genesis of the European Renaissance. As Edward Said has reminded us, there is an especially rich heritage in the Iberian peninsula of cross-fertilization between Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars. Their collaborative exchanges flourished especially in Cordoba, the Iberian jewel of the Islamic caliphate of Al-Andalus.
Since 2001 the culprits of 9/11 have hired, armed, organized, and directed various mercenary proxy armies that fight under Islamic flags. With assistance being channeled especially through the CIA and Mossad safe haven of Saudi Arabia, these mercenary forces have done the bidding of their Zio-American patrons. Western-supported mercenary forces, including al-Qaeda and its supposed antagonistic cousin the “Islamic State” [ISIL, ISIS, IS, Daesh], have been deployed in a series of false flag terror events designed to keep alive anti-Muslim fear and loathing in Western minds.
Moreover, units of the so-called “Islamic State”, which funnel stolen oil to the European Union through Turkey, are regularly deployed throughout the Grand Chessboard of Eurasia. The aim is to give justification for Western military operations aimed ultimately at preparing the ground for the expansion of Greater Israel. The world’s dominant military-industrial complex has been covertly harnessed to this project of expansion. A crucial part of this network of military-industrial power lies in the Zionist-controlled mainstream media and institutions of higher education. These agencies have been co-opted to become instruments of the Islamophobic propaganda so crucial to preparing Western public opinion for aggressive invasions of Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and most recently Syria.
The deceptive façade of the Global War on Terror is meant to disguise this military and psychological system of aggressive warfare combined with engineered pollution of the mental environment with the toxin of hyped up Islamophobia.
Dr. Kevin Barrett has characterized the Global War on Terror as a global war on Muslims for Israel. Noam Chomsky disagrees. He has made himself a very significant nemesis to Kevin Barrett. Barrett is one of the most unrelenting researchers and publicists in the 9/11 Truth Movement. So far Chomsky has been quite effective in deploying his enormous prestige to prevent the citizens’ investigation on 9/11 from receiving a fair hearing, but especially in the foundation-funded platforms of progressive, Left, and anti-war activism.
This opening part introduces my essay, “9/11 and the Zionist Question: Is Noam Chomsky a Disinfo Agent for Israel?” In due course the larger paper will be published in its entirety here at American Herald Tribune. This essay explores the antagonisms between Kevin Barrett and Noam Chomsky with particular emphasis on the research and scholarship on false flag terrorism and especially on the contested events of 9/11. The argument is advanced that Prof. Chomsky has quite purposely promoted an agenda of cover up on 9/11, reducing himself to the level of crude propagandists and paid proponents of the dominant 9/11 narrative such as Jonathan Kay and Michael Shermer.
In the fifteen years since 9/11 the concerted and continuing cover up of the truth has become an enormous element of the overall 9/11 crime. Growing understanding of the role of mass media and institutions of higher learning in maintaining this cover up is fast eroding the credibility of these strategic agencies. The health of free and democratic societies depends on an informed citizenry who more often than not are deceived by the very agencies supposed to be responsible for public education.
You will read “Noam Chomsky as the Left’s Trojan Horse” in the next part.
July 13, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | 9/11, Afghanistan, CIA, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Middle East, Somalia, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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Afghanistan keeps dropping out of the headlines. Despite its endless bleeding, its Enduring Freedom torment, caused by America’s anti-communist obsession, and perpetrated by its imperialist instinct for world control at all costs, it’s just not interesting for the thrill-seeking msm, and is embarrassing to its lame-duck Nobel laureate president.
It doesn’t get much help from Hollywood, either. No Bob Hopes, who was once the bedrock of WWII-era United Service Organizations (USO), exhorting idealistic troops to fight a very real fascism, a genuine threat. He refashioned his skits to fit Vietnam, to exhort depressed, doped, reluctant troops to fight a nebulous communism that it turns out wasn’t a threat at all.
Steve Colbert went to Iraq in 2008, though he was no fan of Bush II or the war, more out of pity for the thousands of young Americans marooned there. He had Obama order Commanding General Odierno to shave him bald, and joked about how the troops must love Iraq as they kept coming back, earning enough air miles for a free trip to Afghanistan.
Most entertainers stuck to the safe Kuwaiti backwater. Not many takers to entertain in Kabul or Helman, the only vaguely safe spots in Afghanistan anymore. Robin Williams went to Kandahar airfield (“Good Morning, Afghanistan!”), the last time to the safer Kuwait in 2013, just months before he committed suicide.
In 2007, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly sharply criticized the USO for not sending more celebrities to Afghanistan. “As far as I know, the only famous people in the past year were (country music singer) Toby Keith and me.“ On a 2012 trip to Camp Leatherneck, the best USO could come up with were the likes of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders Allyson Traylor, Brittany Evans and Kelsi Reich; and former American Idol contestants Diana DeGarmo and Ace Young.
It’s hard to blame even those entertainers who are Islamophobic bigots and actually ‘support the troops’, as helicopter is the preferred way to get from the Kabul embassy to the airport, an uncomfortable reminder of another recent US war.
Airbrushing the ‘Sacred War’
Canadian Bruce Cockburn’s peacenik fans disowned him and burnt his dvds after he went to Kabul in 2009 to visit his brother, Captain John Cockburn, a medical doctor, and to play a concert for Canadian troops. He performed his 1984 song “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” and was temporarily awarded an actual rocket launcher by the military.
Cockburn has always gone his own way, a Christian mystic, and stated that, while unsure of the original Invasion of Afghanistan, he supported Canada’s role there. Given Canada’s role as nursemaid vs drone dropper, and Cockburn’s sense of family over politics, his position makes some sense (though the rocket launcher business is at best self-parody, at worst, obscene).
There have been almost no films to entertain us about what the western troops in Afghanistan are up to. Last year’s Rock the Kasbah was not really about the war or US presence, and fell flat, despite Bill Murray. The most talked-about is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a 2016 comedy-drama film about a second-rate TV reporter, Kim Baker, based on the memoir The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2011) by Kim Barker, starring Tina Fey.
Barker, formerly South Asia bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, told Vanity Fair in May that her intent was to write a dark comedy “people would actually read.” She refers to Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen Heller as her models.
Sounds good. She knows Afghanistan is a disaster, falling apart, crumbling “chunk by chunk”. The US lost Afghanistan twice: once in the 1990s, and then again in 2003. The initial supporters felt betrayed. “The Americans lost in Afghanistan as soon as they left for Iraq,” wails one Afghan to Barker. The lack of “benchmarks … without really articulating what you are trying to do—it makes it very difficult to achieve anything remotely resembling stability there.” Uh, hu.
Her book is hardly incisive, with only the faintest echoes of her heroes Vonnegut and Heller:
“Is she scared of me?” asks a warlord to her translator Farouq.
“What’s going on?” asks Baker.
“He wants to know if you are scared of him.”
“Oh, no. He seems like a perfectly nice guy. Totally harmless. Perfectly kind.”
Translator to warlord: “Of course she is scared of you. You are a big and terrifying man. But I told her you are a friend of the Chicago Tribune and I guaranteed her safety.”
But they didn’t make it to the silver screen, where the humour is all bathroom. Barker has but faint praise for the film version of her experience: She was thrilled to be played by Fey. “Friends of mine have said Tina Fey really captured my wry expressions.”
“The Taleban Shuffle”, which at least identifies something relevant, was discarded, along with any critical content, for “Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot” (WTF), a military euphemism for ‘what the fuck’. Frighteningly apt for this “forgotten war”.
Another slang term that fits is FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition/ repair), which is accurate not only for the film, but, as I realized, squirming through the film, for the whole US effort in Afghanistan. It’s Vietnam all over again in spades.
While it is now okay to pan the Iraq invasion (until Hillary takes over), Afghanistan is still America’s ‘sacred war’. No room even for Cockburn’s “unsure of the original invasion” caveat.
But the invasion of Afghanistan was every bit as illegal and fraught with disaster as Iraq.
The UN extended only a limited endorsement of the US invasion in resolution 56/1 calling “for international cooperation to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers, and sponsors of the outrages”. In other words, assuming Osama bin Laden was the perpetrator, capture him, withdraw, and then provide aid to Afghanistan. Nothing about occupation, building a pipeline, bases, Guantanamo, torture prisons, etc.
Faux epiphany
Gone is the brave defiance of the antiwar movement of yesteryear. The Animal House orgies among journalists and military in WTF are creepy, given the context. Kim relates to sleazebag BBC correspondent Tanya her epiphany which made her decide to come: “I noticed the dent in the gym carpet after my stationary bicycle had been moved. I was moving backwards.”
My own epiphany was watching one of the many tasteless drunken orgies (alcohol is, of course, strictly forbidden). FUBAR. After 15 years, America is still moving backwards, drunk driving in the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
Another epiphany was when the heroine triumphs over the Taliban foe, in the guise of a mild-mannered ‘government’ warlord, Ali Massoud Sadiq, who “knows everything”. She had used her ‘feminine wiles’ to extract information from him. He had honourably fallen in love and invited her many times to his office couch.
She kept demuring, but kept coming back for information, finally desperately needing to find her new (Scottish) lover, who had been kidnapped. When asked what she would do for Sadiq, she pulled out a smart phone and showed him a video of him dancing in the street with her. “I will erase this.”
So, instead of coughing up, she becomes a virginal Joan of Arc by blackmailing a besotted lover. Who, along with the other Afghan character, is played by a gringo. I suspect no Afghan-American actor would stoop so low.
That says it all. The morally bankrupt West, the shallow, corrupt media, an aimless, violent military, wreaking havoc on a broken country halfway across the world.
A soldier who had no idea what he was doing, is interviewed by Kim (and as a result targeted by the military brass), showing up at the end of the film on prosthetic legs on a farm in Kentucky where Kim went for ‘closure’. What can I say but “FUBAR”.
If you still harbour any hope for what the US is doing in Afghanistan (the US military has no idea), please see this film. It is even more convincing than Slaughterhouse-Five. But bring a barf bag. And start writing letters to the Taliban, urging restraint when they take power again.
Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism.
July 12, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Afghanistan, United States |
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