Glenn: American rage at Pakistan over the punishment of a CIA-cooperating Pakistani doctor is quite revealing

hypocrisy 'r' us...

glenn greenwald...

Americans of all types — Democrats and Republicans, even some Good Progressives — are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Their fury tracks the standard American media narrative: by punishing Dr. Afridi for the “crime” of helping the U.S. find bin Laden, Pakistan has revealed that it sympathizes with Al Qaeda and is hostile to the U.S. (NPR headline: “33 Years In Prison For Pakistani Doctor Who Aided Hunt For Bin Laden”; NYT headline: “Prison Term for Helping C.I.A. Find Bin Laden”). Except that’s a woefully incomplete narrative: incomplete to the point of being quite misleading.

What Dr. Afridi actually did was concoct a pretextual vaccination program, whereby Pakistani children would be injected with a single Hepatitis B vaccine, with the hope of gaining access to the Abbottabad house where the CIA believed bin Laden was located. The plan was that, under the ruse of vaccinating the children in that province, he would obtain DNA samples that could confirm the presence in the suspected house of the bin Laden family. But the vaccine program he was administering was fake: as Wired‘s public health reporter Maryn McKenna detailed, “since only one of three doses was delivered, the vaccination was effectively useless.” An on-the-ground Guardian investigation documented that ”while the vaccine doses themselves were genuine, the medical professionals involved were not following procedures. In an area called Nawa Sher, they did not return a month after the first dose to provide the required second batch. Instead, according to local officials and residents, the team moved on.”

That means that numerous Pakistani children who thought they were being vaccinated against Hepatitis B were in fact left exposed to the virus. Worse, international health workers have long faced serious problems in many parts of the world — including remote Muslim areas — in convincing people that the vaccines they want to give to their children are genuine rather than Western plots to harm them. These suspicions have prevented the eradication of polio and the containment of other preventable diseases in many areas, including in parts of Pakistan. This faux CIA vaccination program will, for obvious and entirely foreseeable reasons, significantly exacerbate that problem.

As McKenna wrote this week, this fake CIA vaccination program was “a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations” and thus “endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination is actually a covert campaign to harm Muslim children.” She further notes that while this suspicion “seems fantastic” to oh-so-sophisticated Western ears — what kind of primitive people would harbor suspicions about Western vaccine programs? – there are actually “perfectly good reasons to distrust vaccination campaigns” from the West (in 1996, for instance, 11 children died in Nigeria when Pfizer, ostensibly to combat a meningitis outbreak, conducted drug trials — experiments — on Nigerian children that did not comport with binding safety standards in the U.S.).

[...]

In fact, the U.S. Government tries to impose the harshest possible sentences on Americans who do far less than Dr. Afridi did in Pakistan. The Obama administration charged former NSA official Thomas Drake with espionage and tried to imprison him for decades merely because he exposed serious waste, corruption and illegality in surveillance programs — without the slightest indication of any harm to national security. Right now, they’re charging Bradley Manning with “aiding the enemy” — Al Qaeda — and attempting to impose life imprisonment on the 23-year-old Army Private, merely because he leaked information to the world showing serious war crimes and other government deceit (something The New York Times does frequently) which nobody suggests was done in collaboration with or even with any intent to help Al Qaeda or any other foreign entity. Given all that, just imagine how harshly they’d try to punish an American who secretly collaborated with a foreign intelligence service — who created a fake vaccine program for American kids — to enable secret military action on U.S. soil without their knowledge.

my country... patético...

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Gareth Porter: None of the official line on bin Laden is true

gareth porter has one of the more credible reputations in investigative journalism and in this truthout exclusive, blows the lid off the inflated and conflated mythology being dispensed as fact...

A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a "senior intelligence official" briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden's compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, "continued to direct even tactical details of the group's management." Bin Laden was, "not just a strategic thinker for the group," said the official. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions." The official called the bin Laden compound, "an active command and control center."

The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden's hideout, "the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation," and administration officials could not resist leaking to reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden's trusted courier from al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden's role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real story, told here for the first time, is that bin Laden was in the compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the al-Qaeda leadership.

i am not going to immediately claim that everything porter reports in this story is true - after all, how could i? - but i will go so far as to say that it's completely plausible... and, if it is true, what a glimpse it provides behind the smoke and mirrors of our government and its campaign of endless war...

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Glenn: The War on Terror is the end in itself, and Terrorism is merely its pretext

as with so many other things i've posted about on this blog, i find myself endlessly posting about and repeating the same sad litany of abuses and outrages time after time...

glenn greenwald...

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s summary execution one year ago, many predicted that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. Here’s what has happened since then:

*With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without a single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.
* For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.
* With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror.
* Construction neared completion for a sprawling new site in Utah for the National Security Agency to enable massive domestic surveillance and to achieve “the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration.”
* President Obama authorized the use of “signature” drone strikes in Yemen, whereby the CIA can target people for death “even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known.”
* The U.S. formally expanded its drone attacks in Somalia, “reopening a base for the unmanned aircraft on the island nation of Seychelles.”
* A U.S. drone killed 16-year-old Pakistani Tariq Aziz, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed, three days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest civilian deaths from U.S. drones (another of Tariq’s cousins had been killed in 2010).
* NATO airstrikes continued to extinguish the lives of Afghan children; in just the last 24 hours, 5 more Afghan children were killed by the ongoing war.
* The FBI increased its aggressive attempts to recruit young Muslim-American males into Terror plots which the FBI concocts, funds, encourages, directs and enables, while prosecuting more and more Muslims in the U.S. for crimes grounded in their political views and speech.

Does it sound like the War on Terror and its accompanying civil liberties erosions are ending, or going in the opposite direction? The morning after the bin Laden killing, I wrote that the killing of bin Laden would likely re-ignite American excitement over militarism and would thus likely further fuel, rather than retard, the War and its various implications. As always: combatting Terrorism is not the end of the War on Terror; the War on Terror is the end in itself, and Terrorism is merely its pretext.

 as much as it pains me to say it (and it pains me every time i do say it), i believe the u.s. has quite deliberately and consciously fostered a strategy of endless war... there is so much money to be made from ceaselessly fighting yet another menacing enemy that our super-rich elites and all those who profit immensely from war and military action that they will never allow it to come to a halt, even if it means engaging in deliberately provocative acts carefully calculated to inflame conflict...

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Glenn exposes the manipulation and hypocrisy behind the latest Obama-Osama hype

glenn shows it for what it is, a bald-faced abuse of executive power all in the name of secrecy and national security...

Selective bin Laden leaking

The WH tells a court the bin Laden raid is top secret, as it keeps leaking snippets to glorify the President

a worthwhile read...

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Constantly celebrating the people we kill

glenn comments on the celebratory atmosphere surrounding gadhafi's killing (and bin laden and al awlaki and al awlaki's son and al qaeda leaders and countless victims of drone attacks)...

Constantly celebrating the people we kill — dancing over their corpses — is now one of the most significant and common American rituals shaping our political culture. One of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that this mentality has become fully bipartisan. And it’s hard to see how this will change any time soon: once one goes down that road, it’s very difficult to turn around and go back. That’s true both individually and of a nation.

personally, i'd like to be celebrating a revival of a national devotion to the common good of all as so clearly described in the declaration of independence and the preamble to the constitution...

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The Navy SEAL team that took out bin Laden goes down

this is just too damn coincidental... i'm certainly not one to see conspiracies behind every bush, but c'mon... these guys have been cruising around the af-pak theater forever and now, just a few months after they nail public enemy number one, their chopper gets hit...? was there something that someone on that team knew that they were afraid would be talked about...? i used to believe in coincidences but, ya know what...? i don't any more...

A NATO helicopter has crashed in eastern Afghanistan during a battle with the Taliban, killing at least 31 US and seven Afghan soldiers, a statement from the Afghan president's office said.

The statement on Saturday said a Chinook helicopter had crashed in Syedabad in central Maidan Wardak province, west of capital Kabul, and identified the Americans as special forces troops.

More than 20 US navy SEALs from the broader unit that killed Osama bin Laden were among those killed in the crash, though none of the victims were involved in that raid, the New York Times reported.

The troops from SEAL Team Six were flown by a crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, according to one current and one former US official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because families are still being notified.

One source said the team was thought to include 22 SEALs, three air force air controllers, seven Afghan army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew.

referring to the disclaimer from the nyt (in bold above), i long ago stopped considering that particular "paper of record" to be any bastion of truth... and, yeah, ok, i may be stretching here, but the nyt telling me ANYTHING doesn't necessarily make it so...

meanwhile, we're all supposed to cluck-cluck and feel sad and properly patriotic for those good and true fighting men who lost their lives... well, i got news... patriotism is bullshit... what i feel sadness for is those souls who lost their lives in the service of our super-rich elites and the spouses, children and other loved ones they left behind...

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Has the government engaging in torture become as accepted as government official lying when the truth is inconvenient?

an articulate voice of reason, all too rare in today's public discourse...

morris davis...

In the fall of 2005, when I was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I sat down for a lengthy discussion with a veteran member of the prosecution team, a Marine Corps officer with an extensive background in criminal prosecution. We discussed a case that caused him concern, one he said he was not comfortable prosecuting. After describing some of the specifics of the detainee’s treatment at Guantanamo, which was documented in official records, the prosecutor said: “Sir, they fucked with him and they fucked with him until now he’s as crazy as a shit-house rat.” In an interview with Bob Woodward published in the Washington Post in January 2009, Susan Crawford, the Bush administration official who supervised the military commissions, explained why she refused to send the same case to trial when it reached her desk in the spring of 2008. “We tortured Qahtani,” she said, “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”

The alleged torture of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, Syed Saleem Shahzad, and Mohammed al Qahtani by government agents that signed the Convention Against Torture begs the question, is a law that is ignored worth the paper it is written on?

Some people dismiss the Geneva Conventions as “quaint,” and some believe “law” and “war” have no place in the same sentence; but few who make the military a profession hold such mistaken beliefs. Service members understand that war is hell and the law of war constrains the hellishness. It is a code of conduct developed by warriors over centuries on battlefields around the world.

The law of war is drilled into every U.S. service member from the start of basic training. It is reinforced regularly and tested during combat exercises in the belief that engrained values survive the fog and friction of war. Honor matters to service members. The failure to abide by the law of war dishonors the military profession and discredits military professionals. Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock pled guilty in March and accepted responsibility for his role in murdering innocent Afghan civilians, telling the court, “I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on how I lost my moral compass.”

Nothing is further from the profession of arms than the cowardice of terrorism. The mass murder of innocent civilians, sending children into crowded markets on suicide missions, and hiding explosives in the trunks of cars to kill and maim indiscriminately—calling those who use such tactics “combatants” gives them more status than they deserve.

[...]

Those who bias the torture debate by pandering to fear and casting it as “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” are as disingenuous as those who try to justify terrorism by perverting Islam. It is not a choice of one or the other. There is nothing inconsistent in holding torturers and terrorists accountable for acts that break the law.

[...]

Who decides which obligations are truly obligatory and which means go too far to ever justify the ends? Chemical weapons may have been a fast and convenient way to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in the rugged Tora Bora region in late 2001 and may have killed Bin Laden a decade earlier, but is effectiveness, or that it might work, or that others do it justification to violate the Chemical Weapons Convention prohibitions and commit a war crime? If the standard is the United States decides ad hoc which commitments it will honor and which it will not then it should be honest and repudiate those it considers non-binding and the sense to stop the hypocritical criticism of others that fail to live up to its “do as we say, not as we do” example. On the other hand, if the United States means what it says about the rule of law, it has to demonstrate that it practices what it purports to preach.

[...]

Do decent human beings have the temerity to stand up and insist the law be enforced? Does the United States have the integrity to lead by example, or has the government engaging in torture become as accepted as government official lying when the truth is inconvenient? We need to find our moral compass.

finding something that you've consciously thrown away is a bigger challenge than finding something you've unintentionally lost...

thanks to marcy...

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Hating on Chomsky for telling the truth

there's nothing in today's world more guaranteed to earn vitriol, hatred and death threats than telling the truth...

In a move likely to spark another annual round of healthy controversy, the veteran American linguist, social scientist and human rights campaigner Noam Chomsky was named 2011 winner of the Sydney Peace Prize last night.

Professor Chomsky said he was honoured by the award, whose previous recipients include the South African cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi and the Australian journalist John Pilger.

In recent weeks the 82-year-old has been one of America's most-hated men, subjected to ''obscenities, intellectual hysteria and death threats'' over remarks following the shooting of Osama bin Laden.

The al-Qaeda leader's crimes, he wrote, were vastly exceeded by those of the former president George Bush. ''We might ask how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at his compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic.''

Professor Chomsky said the ill-considered American operation had pushed the world to the brink of war, possibly even nuclear war. ''The commandos who violated Pakistani sovereignty were given orders to fight their way out if necessary. They risked coming into confrontation with the Pakistani army."

as jack nicholson playing colonel nathan r. jessup so famously said, "you can't HANDLE the truth...!"

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Chomsky: Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world

chomsky...

Pakistan is the most dangerous country on Earth, with the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. The revenge killing on Pakistani soil only stoked the anti-American fervor that had long been building. In his new book, “Pakistan: A Hard Country,” Anatol Lieven writes that “if the U.S. ever put Pakistani soldiers in a position where they felt that honor and patriotism required them to fight America, many would be very glad to do so.”

And if Pakistan collapsed, an “absolutely inevitable result would be the flow of large numbers of highly trained ex-soldiers, including explosive experts and engineers, to extremist groups.”

The primary threat is leakage of fissile materials to jihadi hands, a horrendous eventuality.

The Pakistani military has already been pushed to the edge by U.S. attacks on Pakistani sovereignty. One factor is the drone attacks in Pakistan that Obama escalated immediately after the killing of bin Laden, rubbing salt in the wounds.

But there is much more, including the demand that the Pakistani military cooperate in the U.S. war against the Afghan Taliban. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis see the Taliban as fighting a just war of resistance against an invading army, according to Lieven.

The killing of bin Laden could have been the spark that set off a conflagration, with dire consequences, particularly if the invading force had been compelled to fight its way out, as was anticipated.

Perhaps the assassination was perceived as an “act of vengeance,” as [British barrister Geoffrey] Robertson concludes. Whatever the motive, it could hardly have been security.

so, the assassination of bin laden, in line with so many other things the u.s. has done fighting the "war on terror", only serves to REDUCE our security, not INCREASE it...

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More Greenwald on Osama: the Nuremberg connection

excellent, thought-provoking stuff as always...

glenn...

Benjamin Ferencz is a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he prosecuted numerous Nazi war criminals, including some responsible for the deaths of upward of 100,000 innocent people. He gave a fascinating (and shockingly articulate) 13-minute interview yesterday to the CBC in Canada about the bin Laden killing, the Nuremberg principles, and the U.S. role in the world. Without endorsing everything he said, I hope as many people as possible will listen to it.

All of Ferencz's answers are thought-provoking -- including his discussion of how the Nuremberg Principles apply to bin Laden -- but there's one answer he gave which I particularly want to highlight; it was in response to this question: "so what should we have learned from Nuremberg that we still haven't learned"? His answer:

I'm afraid most of the lessons of Nuremberg have passed, unfortunately. The world has accepted them, but the U.S. seems reluctant to do so. The principal lesson we learned from Nuremberg is that a war of aggression -- that means, a war in violation of international law, in violation of the UN charter, and not in self-defense -- is the supreme international crime, because all the other crimes happen in war. And every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone.

These lessons were hailed throughout the world -- I hailed them, I was involved in them -- and it saddens me to no end when Americans are asked: why don't you support the Nuremberg principles on aggression? And the response is: Nuremberg? That was then, this is now. Forget it.

To be candid, I've been tempted several times to simply stop writing about the bin Laden killing, because passions are so intense and viewpoints so entrenched, more so than any other issue I've written about. There's a strong desire to believe that the U.S. -- for the first time in a long time -- did something unquestionably noble and just, and anything which even calls that narrative into question provokes little more than hostility and resentment. Nonetheless, the bin Laden killing is going to shape how many people view many issues for quite some time, and there are still some issues very worth examining.

One bothersome aspect about the reaction to this event is the notion that bin Laden is some sort of singular evil, someone so beyond the pale of what is acceptable that no decent person would question what happened here: he killed civilians on American soil and the normal debates just don't apply to him. Thus, anyone who even questions whether this was the right thing to do, as President Obama put it, "needs to have their head examined" (presumably that includes Benjamin Ferencz). In other words, so uniquely evil is bin Laden that unquestioningly affirming the rightness of this action is not just a matter of politics and morality but mental health. Thus, despite the lingering questions about what happened, it's time, announced John Kerry, to "shut up and move on." I know Kerry is speaking for a lot of people: let's all agree this was Good and stop examining it. Tempting as that might be -- and it is absolutely far easier to adhere to that demand than defy it -- there is real harm from leaving some of these questions unexamined.

my country has moved so far from its principles... so very sad...

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Chomsky: more on the execution of Osama

as with my previous post citing glenn greenwald, noam chomsky makes a typically articulate, well-reasoned case against the u.s. policy of extrajudicial assassinations and, for good measure, throws in the incredibly offensive use of a native american hero to identify the target...

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

as my brother said in our conversation yesterday, it's more than a little disturbing to tune in to the news channels and get the flavor-of-the-week, "all osama, all the time"...

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Glenn: the case against the execution of Osama

leave it to glenn to make a powerful, reasoned argument for due process and the rule of law, principles we seem to have forsaken in the united states...

The Allied powers could easily have taken every Nazi war criminal they found and summarily executed them without many people caring. But they didn't do that, and the reason they didn't is because how the Nazis were punished would determine not only the character of the punishing nations, but more importantly, would set the standards for how future punishment would be doled out. Here was the very first paragraph uttered by lead Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson when he stood up to deliver his Opening Statement:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

And here was the last thing he said:

Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law."

I actually believe in those precepts. And if those principles were good enough for those responsible for Nazi atrocities, they are good enough for the likes of Osama bin Laden. It's possible they weren't applicable here; if he couldn't be safely captured because of his attempted resistance, then capturing him wasn't a reasonable possibility. But it seems increasingly clear that the objective here was to kill, not capture him, no matter what his conduct was. That, at the very least, raises a whole host of important questions about what we endorse and who we are that deserves serious examination -- much more than has been prompted by this celebrated killing.

i am adamantly opposed to killing in any form except in the purest case of self-defense, and i am even more opposed to its glorification...

was bin laden a bad man...? i think that's beyond question... did he deserve extrajudicial assassination...? no... he deserved what any country that espouses due process and the rule of law would require without hesitation - a trial in which there would be a full accounting of his crimes and appropriate punishment meted out accordingly... was bin laden even the one behind the 9/11 tragedy...? without due process, we will never know...

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Rejoicing in a corpse with half its head blown off

observing the orgasmic reactions of the news media over bin laden's murder from here in afghanistan is an interesting experience to say the least...

probably about half the afghans i know have said over the past few years that they aren't so sure that bin laden even existed, suspecting rather that he was a myth concocted and nurtured to feed the insatiable u.s. need for a "great satan"... in any case, the most common afghan reaction to the bin laden story was to ask those of us from the u.s. how WE felt about it, to remind us repeatedly that they had told us all along that he was in pakistan and to insist, as they have done ever since i've been coming here, that pakistan is the principal - if not the only - real source of the continuing violence in their country...

it's also interesting to note the hand-wringing in the u.s. over releasing the photo of bin laden's corpse... here in the house, we have access to a number of news channels in india and they splashed the photo all over their news reports within hours of the story breaking... whether they were the real thing or not is open to question, of course, but i can assure you, there was no hand-wringing...

meanwhile, back in the u.s., the blood lust is at fever pitch...

from glenn...

The Washington Times Editorial Page:

Those primitive, bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics sure do love to glorify death and violence.

yes, those nasty, vicious muslim fanatics...

meanwhile, i will sit here at my laptop for a while longer before heading off for a shower, breakfast, and spending the day working around a houseful of some of the most gentle, polite, good-natured, devout afghan muslims it's been my privilege to know...

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Juan Cole: Walmart does better background checks on its store clerks than the CIA and Jordanian intelligence did on al-Balawi

i think professor cole, an individual not known for his pursuit of conspiracy theories, hits the nail on the head... the united states is being led by a very small group of people totally dedicated to the massive profit machine of endless war... they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by fostering terrorism, radicalization, and the vicious social injustice, death and destruction that sparks both...

Al-Qaeda is twisted and evil, and has committed mass murder. Neither the US nor Israel is responsible for violent crackpots being violent crackpots. Al-Qaeda or a Taliban affiliate turned al-Balawi to the dark side. Gandhi and Martin Luther King taught us the proper response to social injustice. But what we have to remember is that there can be a handful of al-Balawis, or there can be thousands or hundreds of thousands. It depends on how many Abu Ghraibs, Fallujahs, Lebanons and Gazas the United States initiates or supports to the hilt. Unjust wars and occupations radicalize people. The American Right wing secretly knows this, but likes the vicious circle it produces. Wars make profits for the military-industrial complex, and the resulting terrorism terrifies the clueless US public and helps hawks win elections, allowing them to pursue further wars. And so it goes, until the Republic is bankrupted and in ruins and its unemployed have to live in tent cities.

So, yes, this al-Balawi person was going to help Jordan and the US find al-Qaeda leaders Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Sure he was. Walmart does better background checks on its store clerks than the CIA and Jordanian intelligence did on this guy.

ya gotta ask yourself... if the background information was all there to be discovered, which it apparently was, why wasn't it pursued...? once again, we are being asked to believe the all-encompassing excuse of incompetence, a myth that has been diligently fostered since 9/11... 'scuse me, but i ain't buyin' it, not for a minute...

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Is Osama dead, alive or just a cardboard poster boy for endless war...?

i'm glad to see this possibility getting a little more traction in the traditional media, even if it IS the uk media... i have harbored a nagging suspicion for a very long time that the "war on terror" was a red herring, carefully crafted to keep us in a perpetual state of war... do ya s'pose that maybe, just maybe, some of the truth is starting to emerge...?

Undeterred, Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find him. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror.

This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. After all, there are the plethora of 'Bin Laden tapes' to prove it.

Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff?

What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?

Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts.

like i've repeatedly said, at this point in my advanced state of cynicism, i believe everything and i believe nothing...

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From the dawn of time until 2003, there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq

juan cole takes the recent comments of one of the world's preeminent dicks - cheney - about his concerns over "wasting" the "sacrifices" the u.s. has made in iraq and tosses them into the dumpster where they so rightly belong...

a sample...

First of all, Cheney didn't make any sacrifices in Iraq. He deferred his own military service five times because he 'had other things to do.' The 'sacrifices' were caused because he purveyed falsehoods to the US public in order to get up that war, hinting around that Saddam was in bed with Usama Bin Laden and telling senators that Iraq was two years away from having a nuclear bomb. So the sacrifices were of other people's children, and his role was merely that of an Aztec high priest cutting the heart out of the victims.

why can't this despicable bastard simply retreat to his "undisclosed location" and leave the rest of us in peace...?

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Israel and Gaza - an asymmetrical response added to an already long list of Israeli war crimes

i am at a total loss to explain this without resorting to the most despicable of terms: genocide and war crimes...



juan cole...

Israel blames Hamas for primitive homemade rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli city of Sederot. In 2001-2008, these rockets killed about 15 Israelis and injured 433, and they have damaged property. In the same period, Gazan mortar attacks on Israel have killed 8 Israelis.

Since the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, Israelis have killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly a thousand of them minors. Since fall of 2007, Israel has kept the 1.5 million Gazans under a blockade, interdicting food, fuel and medical supplies to one degree or another. Wreaking collective punishment on civilian populations such as hospital patients denied needed electricity is a crime of war.

The Israelis on Saturday killed 5% of all the Palestinians they have killed since the beginning of 2001! 230 people were slaughtered in a day, over 70 of them innocent civilians. In contrast, from the ceasefire Hamas announced in June, 2008 until Saturday, no Israelis had been killed by Hamas. The infliction of this sort of death toll is known in the law of war as a disproportionate response, and it is a war crime.

and we wonder why the islamic world breeds fundamentalists intent on destroying the u.s. and israel... can you even imagine our response if this kind of atrocity was committed against us...? what about 9/11 you say...? consider this...

America is involved, up to its eyeballs actually. Today, after Israeli air-strikes that killed over 200 Palestinians in Gaza, the Middle East is again seething with rage. Recruiters to the most radical of causes are again cashing in. If Osama Bin Laden is indeed a cave-dweller these days then U.S. intel should be listening out for a booming echo of laughter. Demonstrations across the Arab world and contributors to the ever-proliferating Arabic language news media and blogosphere hold the U.S., and not just Israel, responsible for what happened today (and that is a position taken, for good reasons, by sensible folk, not hard-liners).

while i totally understand the rage in the islamic world, i completely fail to grasp how the rest of the world can stand by and allow atrocities like this to continue unchallenged...

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Bush and bin Laden: "Their prolonged game has made not only the audiences tired but has also transformed the playground into a big pool of blood"

gee... do ya think...?

a stretch of the doctrine of fair use with apologies to juan cole...

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so. It says that a forthcoming French documentary containing interviews with the French soldiers provides proof for the allegation. The argument is that the Bush administration needed Bin Ladin to be at large in order to justify its military expansionism.

Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney
Hasht-e-Sobh
Friday, October 3, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney

Text of article, "Bin-Ladin on the run? The rumour which was fact", by Afghan independent secular daily newspaper Hasht-e Sobh on 29 September

So, the rumour was right: French soldiers trapped Usamah Bin-Ladin, but were not allowed by the Americans to arrest the apparent fugitive leader of Al-Qa`idah. A Bin-Ladin documentary just released by French documentary cinema examines this issue, an issue which has led to heated debate in the French media.

This French documentary shows how the Americans are interested in continuing the game, a bloody and expensive game whose victims are only the unprotected and local people of our dry and dusty country. It was last year that rumours spread about this report in Kabul, but it has not been taken seriously by the media. But watching this revealing French documentary changes the rumours into disturbing facts. "Bin Laden, the failings of a manhunt", produced by Emmanuel Razavi and Eric de Lavarene, two French filmmakers and reporters, assesses and confirms the claims of French soldiers that they could have killed Usamah within two operations, but the American forces prevented them. This film has not been broadcast publicly yet and is to be broadcast by Planet, a French network.

Even though French soldiers have insisted on this in the battlefield many times, the Elysee Palace in Paris and the White House in America have rejected this, and the Afghan leadership does not have any information about it yet!

The main question that arises is the extent to which the "Bin Laden on the run" project is a problem for America and Afghanistan. Seven years of suicide bombing and explosions, blood and violence, unmanned fighter planes, and old vehicles full of explosives, all to catch a long-bearded Arab whom America apparently hates? And an Arab who worked for the CIA in the name of Allah, and who now, also in the name of that same Allah, has conducted a jihad against that same CIA?

Facing the facts in this Usamah film is a bitter and disturbing experience and will make you nervous and wish that what it is that you are watching is just a baseless rumour, or a figment of Hollywood's imagination. But it is not. The pictures are real and you are facing a debate in documentary form. The only justification for the bloody presence of America in Afghanistan is the ambiguous existence of Usamah Bin-Ladin and the Al-Qa'idah terrorist network.

George Bush, with his "war on terror" project, has transformed the middle east and Afghanistan into an inflamed bomb ready to explode, but has not found out anything about his beloved lost Usamah Bin-Ladin so far.

What is seen, and the film also emphases this, is that all these slogans, this fighting and killing are a game, a painful and prolonged game whose end even the players do not know and which is running out of control. Apparently, it is a game of cat and mouse, just like "Tom and Jerry", the famous cartoon. But it is a reality that the stubborn one from Texas does not want to catch the mouse - unlike credulous Tom - and that the long-bearded Wahhabi Arab does not want to hide - unlike the intelligent and roaming Jerry. Their prolonged game has made not only the audiences tired but has also transformed the playground into a big pool of blood.

There have always been questions that neither the politicians have been willing to answer, nor the independent western media to raise. If Usamah is not the lost one of the Americans, then who is? What are the Americans searching for in Afghanistan and who are they looking for? The main media in the West remained silent before the report of the Usamah Bin-Ladin arrest by French soldiers. And, through a news boycott, they reduced a certain fact to a rumour.

Certainly, they will do the same before this film, too. But instead they will try to complicate the scenario. More painful than anything else is the political fair in Kabul, a poor fair where everyone offers his despicable commodity - a combination of generous western customers and thankful sellers of the country. Everyone knows the fact, like "an obvious secret", but no one wants to irritate the delicate minds of their nervous guests, guests who will be staying at home until the new year.

Politicians try to forget such news in Kabul, and this is the advice they give to the people. Forgetting and ignoring such facts is possible, but how can we forget and ignore the bombs exploding next to our houses every day?

let's hope this story grows legs...

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Note to the New Yorker - the world as you know it does NOT end at the Hudson River [UPDATE]

no one likes satire better than i do, but in these days of heightened sensitivity to goddam near EVERYTHING, the line between good satire and outright offensiveness is thin... the new yorker, a purported bastion of good taste and high-brow sophistication, should have known better... yes, i know that manhattanites think the world ends at the hudson river, but my guess is that there are also plenty of manhattanites who think the new yorker shot itself in the foot...

al jazeera english...



let's face it... the new yorker could have saved their asses AND themselves a whole lot of trouble by simply captioning the cover with something like "How the lunatic fringe sees the Obamas" or "Fear-mongering at its finest" or SOMETHING, ferchrissake, that would have left no doubt as to the satirical intent... leaving the cover to stand alone was simply an invitation to a very justified firestorm that tarred not only the magazine but also, by association, one of its finest contributors, sy hersh...

[UPDATE]

next week's new yorker cover, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that turnabout is fair play...

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Richard Clarke puts "terrorist attacks will help my candidate" comments in their proper perspective

finally, somebody with the common sense and the proper qualifications to offer an intelligent critique weighs in on the total nonsense that's being bandied about out there...

from think progress...

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) distanced himself from chief strategist Charlie Black’s comments that a terrorist attack would be a “big advantage” to the McCain campaign. “If he said that, and I do not know the context, I strenuously disagree,” McCain told reporters.

Later in the day on MSNBC, former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke told Keith Olbermann that if McCain was serious in his outrage, he should fire Black immediately. He also criticized Black for basically encouraging terrorists such as Osama bin Laden to manipulate American politics.

speaking with keith olbermann, richard clarke nails charlie black and john mccain to the wall...

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