Tag: Afghanistan

US military plans to extradite stop-lossed Iraq war vet to Iraq for court martial over protest rap song

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Fort Stewart, Ga. – The US military plans to extradite a stop-lossed Iraq war veteran to Iraq “within a few days” to face a court martial for allegedly threatening military officers in a protest rap song he made.

Spc. Marc Hall has been jailed in the Liberty County Jail near Fort Stewart, Ga., since Dec. 11 because he wrote a song called “Stop Loss” about the practice of involuntarily extending military members’ contracts.

“It is our belief that the Army would violate its own regulations by deploying Marc and it would certainly violate his right to due process by making it far more difficult to get witnesses. It appears the Army doesn’t believe it can get a conviction in a fair and public trial. We will do whatever we can to insure he remain in the United States,” said Hall’s civilian attorney, David Gespass. >>>>>>

The first thing to go out the window when an aggressive, warlike nation starts a war (other than the truth) is whatever culture understanding may have existed before.  

For instance: what was the  American pop culture 1960’s view of middle eastern culture?  Belly dance and music, beautiful architecture, snake charming, funny hats. Even children’s story’s like Ali Baba.  

Conversely, what was the 1960’s view of Vietnam? Sub human dirty gooks.  

Today, there’s a piece in the NYT about the beautiful ancient art of Vietnam, which surely never would have occured in the war years:

see more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02…

Before we blew up all the minarets in Bagdad, it was necessary to remove them as objects of beauty, as expressions of humanity — we had to remove the ME from our cultural radar.  How many American children today know about Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves?  And how many worry about hook nosed terrorists?

To know a culture –even a Mickey Mouse pale imitation of the real thing — is to understand the humanity, that there are real children, real families there at the other end of the gun-sights; different from us, yes, but real nonetheless.  

(AP/Huffington Post) — SHAHI KOTO, Pakistan – A roadside bomb killed three U.S. soldiers and partly destroyed a girls’ school in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday in an attack that drew attention to a little-publicized American military training mission in the al-Qaida and Taliban heartland.

They were the first known U.S. military fatalities in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions near the Afghan border and a major victory for militants who have been hit hard by a surge of U.S. missile strikes and a major Pakistani army offensive.

The blast also killed three schoolgirls and a Pakistani soldier who was traveling with the Americans. Two more U.S. soldiers were wounded, along with more than 100 other people, mostly students at the school, officials said.

SCOTT: Well, it certainly informs the vision of people around him. It was the neocon vision for the world. Brzezinski was certainly not a neocon, but on this point he sounds very much like them. You know, when [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Lewis “Scooter”] Libby were working for Cheney, when Cheney was secretary of defense back in 1992, they came up with this defense planning guidance draft which was later disowned, but it was the same thing, that we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. And then there was a JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] strategic document, Joint Vision 2020, which for all I know is still in force, calling for “full spectrum dominance.” And this is a quote from the document: full spectrum dominance means the ability of US forces operating alone or with our allies to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations. I mean, this talk is just insane, but it is the language of geopolitics, and I think it’s the language that people learn in military schools. And that’s why it’s wrong to think it was just neocons. I’ve written something very recently and I’d like to quote it: all thought is socially conditioned, and at the center of large, highly developed societies, all bureaucratic thought is bureaucratically conditioned. But at the heart of dominant societies, this bureaucratic thinking slowly acquires the features of a dominance mindset, and those conditioned by this mindset come to participate in what I call the war machine. We saw it in Britain. And ironically, you know, when Britain started talking about global dominance, it was Sir Halford Mackinder, and the year was 1919, when Britain was already, after World War I, destined to no longer play the role that it played before. It’s a way, I think, of trying to keep the morale up. And I think that Brzezinski, when he wrote that book in 1997, he was worried that America would not be interested in playing the dominance role. And he, of course, is by background a Pole, for whom the great enemy in the world was Russia. And so he was trying to cheer America on to do things which it’s not capable of doing. His metaphor is The Grand Chessboard, which is, of course, a zero-sum model for world politics. The good sense of geopolitics is the way it’s been talked about by, say, Kissinger, when he says it’s seeking a mode of equilibrium in the world. And that, I think, is [inaudible] I think a better model than a chessboard for the world would be a canoe, an overloaded canoe with some very heavy players and it, and the art of geopolitics is to learn not to capsize the canoe.

JAY: And when you look at President Obama’s own statements during the election campaign when asked about foreign policy, he always rooted himself very clearly in what he said was the tradition of American pragmatic foreign policy, starting with Truman. He even included George Bush senior, Reagan. He never differentiated himself fundamentally, other than with George Bush junior. But the idea, even his opposition to the war in Iraq, had to do with that it was a stupid war that would weaken America’s ability to project power. So if you look at, in terms of Latin America, Afghanistan, his relationship with Russia, in terms of this either change of mindset or traditional, dominant theory of dominance, where do you put him after one year?

SCOTT: Well, as long as he’s trying to look forward to a second term, he’s going to fit into Washington. And I watched Brzezinski’s interview with you-a very good interview, I thought-and I can see how Brzezinski repeatedly said that he’s now no longer inside the system; he’s an outside adviser and remote from the way power decisions are made. I think that’s true. That allows him to be much wiser than he was when he wrote his book or when he had his famous interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998. He is a wise man now, and almost by definition that means he doesn’t have as much influence. The wise are not the people who prevail in Washington. So that Obama, now that he’s at the heart of things, he’s got to live with his joint chiefs, he’s got to live with his Democratic Party. I mean, a lot of us like to think that democracy is the answer, but if we mean by democracy the two-party system that we have, the two-party system is very definitely part of the problem, because he is going to get attacked. If he does anything to pull back from Afghanistan, if he does anything that looks like he’s knuckling under to those outside forces there, he will be jumped on by members of both parties, who are, of course, all elected with the same money from the same big donors. We used to emphasize how the big donors came from the military-industrial complex, but we have to add to that now, having seen what’s happened in the last couple of years, they’ve come also from Wall Street and the big banks. They’re all part of the same -.

Real News Network – February 1, 2010

Full Transcript here

New mindset for US foreign policy? Part 2

Peter Dale Scott: If you unleash the dogs of war it’s not easy to pull them back.

Part 1 of this interview is here.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent books are Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008) and Mosaic Orpheus (poetry, 2009).

This is part one of an interview in which Scott talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war and is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington, but rather is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in society, and about the need for a new kind of American foreign policy.

SCOTT: I think I have talked about the deep state. I prefer now just to talk about deep politics, that there are things which we just don’t face in our society, things we’re not willing to talk about. With respect to Afghanistan, one of the things that we don’t want to face and talk about is the presence of drug trafficking in the plans of the CIA for controlling remote areas of this world. And when you have a number of facts which are not being talked about, our politics becomes more and more like an iceberg, in which the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all. And that’s the part that I call deep politics. The phrase “deep state” is a bit dangerous, ’cause it might make people think that there’s a secret Pentagon and a secret White House, it’s nothing like that. It’s more this matter of the mindset that I’m talking about.

JAY: When you described the war machine, you use the words “drug-corrupted war machine,” and everyone knows that Afghanistan is now the manufacturer of the majority of the world’s heroin, but it doesn’t ever get talked about as a policy issue or as an underlying driving force in this struggle for all sides. So talk about this.

SCOTT: Well, I would say, actually, it has become talked about in the last year, with the beginning of Obama’s campaign. You know, when Bush first went in in 2001, they had a list of the main refineries, and they were never touched, because America’s coalition for developing local support in Afghanistan was made up very largely of warlords who were involved in the drug traffic. Our principal ally was going to be [Ahmad Shah] Massoud, and there was a big debate in Washington, before we went into Afghanistan, whether to make him an ally or not, because they knew he was involved in the drug traffic. Well, he was in fact assassinated, just a day or two before 9/11. But the Northern Alliance, which was the only faction in Afghanistan in that year that was growing poppy, they were our allies. And if you look at almost any newspaper story about drugs in Afghanistan, it’s going to be talking about the Taliban. But the Taliban are getting at most about a tenth of the revenues that are being raised by opium and heroin in Afghanistan, and the vast majority of it is going to the big warlords who essentially make up, to this day, the coalition that are supporting [Hamid] Karzai in Kabul.

Real News Network – January 31, 2010

Full Transcript here

New mindset for US foreign policy?

Peter Dale Scott: The President does not choose the mindset, it chooses the people who become President

I’ve been thinking a lot about our current situation in the government. And the wars. And our current and seemingly never ending involvement with torture.

With the somewhat recent revelation that some suicides in 2006 were questionable at best, I’m reminded of the things happening in 2006 and why more investigations into the Bush administration are necessary.

Report Casts Doubt On Guantanamo Suicides

by The Associated Press [via NPR]

January 18, 2010

Three Guantanamo Bay detainees whose deaths were ruled a suicide in 2006 apparently were transported from their cells hours before their deaths to a secret site on the island, according to an article in Harper’s magazine.

The published account released Monday raises serious questions about whether the three detainees actually died by hanging themselves in their cells and suggests the U.S. government is covering up details of what precisely happened in the hours before the deaths.

I first read about the suicides through that NPR article. It says the suicides likely happened at a facility near the main Gitmo facility, referred to as “Camp No.” The justification for setting up these facilities and for using this kind of interrogation technique is apparently 9/11:

After the terror attacks on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA set up a number of so-called “black” sites around the world, where harsh interrogations of terrorism-era suspects took place.

The Harper’s article suggested such a site at Guantanamo Bay may have belonged to the CIA or to the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

I remember 9/11. I remember how it was used as the justification for everything. I remember how people were tortured after 9/11 because they wouldn’t link 9/11 to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. I remember how the administration saw an opportunity with 9/11 and they went for it. When it didn’t work they tortured. They lied. They made up other claims that Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Last time there was a whistleblower revealing evidence to hamper the Bush administration’s plans, I remember how they outed his CIA agent wife.

I remember how their link from 9/11 to Saddam Hussein, al-Libi gave bad information to authorities because he was tortured. And this information was revealed in a DIA report that Dick Cheney read. And he committed suicide. I wrote about it, in fact.

I’ll quote from myself, again. May 15, 2009:

Joe Wilson was sent by the CIA to investigate claims of Iraq trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Africa:

Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division (CPD) — not by his wife — largely because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate committee report.

Cheney had asked for more information on an intelligence report earlier on the same day questioning the link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In response to his request, the CIA sent Wilson to Africa, and an aide to Cheney testified that he had no idea his request would result in that trip.

So, he wanted information but didn’t think they’d send someone to get information?

The DIA in question had some very interesting and useful information. You’re definitely going to want to read this:

WASHINGTON — A government document raises doubts about claims that Al Qaeda members received training for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, as Senate Democrats yesterday defended their push for a report on how the Bush administration handled prewar intelligence.

   […]

   The document from February 2002 showed that the agency questioned the reliability of Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training took place, the report said.

   The agency concluded that al-Libi probably misled the interrogators deliberately, and he recanted the statements in January, according to the document made public by Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The DIA report said that the links between al Qaeda and Iraq were probably not to be trusted and that al-Libi’s information was bad. This was made all the more strange when, in the midst of the Plame scandal, Karl Rove sent an email to the reporter Matthew Cooper, saying not to “get too far out” on Joe Wilson, the whistleblower, because the administration had information to discredit his findings and it was going to start declassifying things soon.

If they had this information, I don’t understand. This whole incident happened because Cheney asked the CIA for more information on the Iraq-AQ link and the Niger yellowcake. The CIA asked Joe Wilson to go to Niger because of his expertise on the subject, and Cheney says that the CIA misinterpreted his request and that he never wanted a trip to Niger. If there were information already to cast doubt on Wilson’s new information then why ask for any new information? It already existed!

Valerie Plame’s work consisted of monitoring WMDs going into and out of Iraq and Iran.  

Just had a gold star couple come in the shop looking for a flagpole on which they want to fly a USMC flag along with the US flag.  Their son was killed two weeks ago in Afghanistan two months into his fifth tour.  

Man, what do ya say, what can ya say.  I offered our condolences professionally and personally but whats that really mean.  Sometimes even in a simple job like this, selling flags, reality strikes home.

“White House to Main Street” Town Hall: Elyria, OH

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

A recent change of the guard in the Massachusetts Senate race force the President to reveal he is working.  We, the American people, are waiting, just as we have been for months and months.  For a full year, countless citizens have felt as though they were patient.  Yet, the President did not seem to have their interests at heart.  True change has not come.  Countless constituents anticipate none is forthcoming.  Three hundred and sixty five plus have gone by and the American people are tired of being patient.