Tag: GWOT

We were Waiting for 9/11

In the late 90’s I shared an office with a Chinese academic who, because of the fact he belonged to a family of scholars going back many generations, was put in a work-camp on the Mongolian border during the Cultural Revolution during most of his adolescence. This was not a happy experience for him and had left deep scars in him. But he still was a Chinese patriot and we would have friendly arguments about Chinese/American conflicts. He expressed doubts that the U.S. would respond to provocations or crises in any muscular way–he saw us as “soft.” I told him that should we ever be attacked the perpetrators would experience a storm of violence beyond their imagining.

I felt, in those days, an underlying sense of frustration and repressed violence that was a result of being the lone superpower in the world yet, we weren’t able to just assert our superiority and, so it appeared to us, not get the proper respect and deference we deserved. I sensed this in American culture. Here we were, the most successful people on earth and we had no national mission like we did when we “fought” and won the Cold War. Capitalism triumphant, prosperity, but what did it mean? Who are we? Why was the most important news story for months a blow job? Neo-conservative intellectuals did write that only a “a new Pearl Harbor” would bring the U.S. out of its lethargy. They made much of our moral decline and need for a unifying enterprise and I think they were right–they saw us as drifting into hedonism and triviality which we were then and still are doing only now much poorer because of the way we reacted to 9/11.

Permanent Bases U.S. Objective in Afghanistan?

Rahimullah Yusufzai is a Senior Analyst with the Pakistani TV channel Geo TV, and the Resident Editor of The News International in Peshawar, an English newspaper from Pakistan. He’s worked as a correspondent for Time Magazine, BBC World Service, BBC Pashto, BBC Urdu, Geo TV, and ABC News. Mr. Yusufzai has interviewed Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and a range of other militants across the tribal areas of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Here Yusufzai talks from Peshawar, Pakistan with Real News Network’s Paul Jay about the real U.S. objectives in Afghanistan, and notes that the U.S. now has more than 100,000 troops in AfPak fighting at the most a couple of hundred Al Qaeda members, with only 50 of them in Afghanistan.



Real News Network – January 10, 2011

Permanent Bases Objective in Afghan War?

Sen. Lindsay Graham may have revealed the real objective

with an open call for permanent bases in Afghanistan


…transcript follows…

The United States is at war in 75 countries.

From the Washington Post…

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Nobel Prize

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.

“Hold Onto Your Underwear – This Is Not a National Emergency”

by Tom Engelhardt:

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI.  In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire.  More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported.  In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died.  In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226.  Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006.  And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued.  In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport.  (No one was killed.)    

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived.

Read all of it here… it’s worth it.

Security Trumps Everything, or ‘Surging’ in Afghanistan

Zbigniew Brzezinski,

The Grand Chessboard:

For America the chief gepolitical prize is Eurasia… America’s global primacy is directly dependant on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

“About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in it’s enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.

“America’s withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival – would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy.”

“The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.”

The Real News Network’s Paul Jay interviews Zbigniew Brzezinski, former member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State from 1966 to 1968, chairman of the Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force in the 1968 presidential campaign, director of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1976, and principal foreign policy adviser to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential campaign.

From 1977 to 1981, Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He was also a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission (1985), the National Security Council-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1987-1988), and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1987-1989). In 1988, he was co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, and in 2004, he was co-chairman of a Council on Foreign Relations task force that issued the report Iran: Time for a New Approach.



Real News Network – January 13, 2010

Transcript here


The Afghan war and the ‘Grand Chessboard’ Pt.1

Zbigniew Brzezinski on Afghanistan and the American strategy for Eurasia and the world

Part 2 of this interview on the flip…

Security Trumps All


Obama: We Will Do Everything
Possible to Keep America Safe


It’s a big, bad, nasty dangerous world out there. Full of fanatical killers who hate you because you’re free. You got to make sure you’re safe. That’s the most important thing, right?

Everything else ain’t worth sh*t without you’re safe and secure, right?

Right. No question.

I heard on the news today that they’re closer now. In my town.

Sh*t. Now what? I’ve got it! I’ll put up a steel fence around the house. To be safe and secure.

Ahhh, that’s better.

American’s Unitary Executive, STILL a 4th Branch of Govt unto himself

Confirmed: Cheney’s Role in Approving Torture

Edward M. Gomez; SFGate, Dec 17 2008

“… Dick Cheney isn’t sorry about any of it.” In his ABC News interview he “betrayed no second thoughts – and certainly no remorse – about the policies pursued by the administration that he both served and, according to some, led.

Cheney’s dark side – and ours

Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe Columnist, Sep 1, 2009

But Cheney’s role is an old, if still developing story. After all, he warned us five days after Sept. 11 that our government would work on the “dark side.” He told the late Tim Russert, “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.” …

Torture Prosecution by Whom the ICC

It is after all THE stellar marketing ploy.  You are so backed into a corner you can not possibly call yourself a member of the human race if you don’t support prosecution of war crimes.  But.

Afghanistan – A Different Type of Surge

The NGO network in Afghanistan (Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief – ACBAR) reports that the number of civilian casualties caused by all sides has “surged” and that insecurity has spread to previously stable areas.

The number of insurgent attacks for each of the months of May (463), June (569) and July is greater than the number of such attacks in any other months since the end of major hostilities following the international intervention in 2001…

July was reportedly the worst month for Afghan civilians in the past six years, with 260 civilian casualties recorded…

Now, due primarily to a stepped up air operations, Afghanistan, “the good war” is turning bad.

Fugly Foam

Grampy is still the king.  His eyes light up when he sees me.  We have some time to kill before we can check into the campground so we head for the boardwalk.  I watch him savor the beauty of sand dunes and beach grass ten feet below us.  We arrive at the peak of the last dune and look out at the Atlantic Ocean.  I say “Do you like the beach?”  He melts my heart by looking at me with those wide innocent eyes and says it, beach, for the first time in his life.

Cross Your Fingers

…These Guys Are Getting WORSE.

Have a look at this:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

To quote the wise one: ‘I have a bad feeling about this…’