The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Phi Beta Iota: a 59 page memorandum is rocketing around the Internet, entitled Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001. Read the report, which includes very specific details and charts with head and shoulder photos. This material is substantiated not just by the sources cited in the endnotes, but by many other sources such as those reviewed at 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (23) and (indirectly) at Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback (145).
Newsweek November 16, 2009 Cover Story
The Surprising Lessons Of Vietnam
Unraveling the mysteries of Vietnam may prevent us from repeating its mistakes
By Evan Thomas and John Barry
Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, “Let me pass you to General McChrystal.” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: “Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?” Karnow's reply was just as simple: “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place.” [Emphasis added]
Phi Beta Iota: We'll figure out the troop balance, probably by getting serious about Of, By, and Through IQ forces between now and July 2010–we do that or both the Democrats and Republicans are toast in November 2010. What merits deep reflection below is the mental health angle that ties in with the Fort Hood massacre. And while we're on that topic, RUSH AND CRUSH is the new paradigm for surviving armed attacks. See, Shout, Rush & Crush. Absent a gattling gun, no one should be able to hit more than three people with this strategy, and two of those will almost certainly live. From Virgiia Polytechnic to Fort Hood, citizens standing like sheep waiting to be murdered, is an indictment of our culture, education, and lack of leadership.
New Afghan War Headache: Not Enough Troops Available?
David Wood, 11/6/09
Just to maintain the 16 current brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan is, let's see, three times 16 is 48 and – oops! We're already out of BCTs! And here's the White House blithely batting around numbers like 40,000 more troops. That's roughly eight BCTs, which do not exist.
Below the fold: two key paragraphs on stress, battle performance after multipe tour, and suicides.
Continue reading “Journal: Out of Troops, Strategy, & Leadership”
Chuck Spinney Sends…..
The announcement by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he will not run for reelection is the exclamation point on the utter collapse of the Obama adminstration's Middle East policy. Launched to great expectations — the appointment of George Mitchell, Obama's Cairo declaration that the plight of the Palestinians is intolerable — it is now in complete disarray. It is, without doubt, the first major defeat for Obama's hope-and-change foreign policy.
Here's how it unraveled.
Continue reading “Journal: Obama-Clinton Implode Middle East”
… because, even though Obama may think he is weighing his policy “options,” the Pentagon is busily politically engineering the the flow of infrastructure funds needed to lock in the constituent support for its Long War.
2014 or Bust: The Pentagon’s Afghan Building Boom
Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, November 06, 2009
In our day, the American way of war, especially against lightly armed guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists, has proved remarkably heavy. Elephantine might be the appropriate word. The Pentagon likes to talk about its “footprint” on the geopolitical landscape. In terms of the infrastructure it’s built in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps “crater” would be a more reasonable image.
American wars are now gargantuan undertakings. The prospective withdrawal of significant numbers/most/all American forces from Iraq, for instance, will — in terms of time and effort — make the 2003 invasion look like the vaunted “cakewalk” it was supposed to be. According to Pentagon estimates, more than 1.5 million (yes, that is “million”) pieces of U.S. equipment need to be removed from the country. Just stop and take that in for a second.
Of course, it’s a less surprising figure when you realize that the Pentagon managed to build, furnish, and supply almost 300 bases, macro to micro, in Iraq alone in the war years. And some of those bases were — and still are — the size of small American towns with tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, and others, as well as massive perimeters, multiple bus routes, full-scale PX’s, fast-food outlets, movie theaters, and the like.
The Elephant in the Room: A war of ideas within Islam
Backward views hold sway in much of the Muslim world. And yet there is hope.
By Rick Santorum Thu, Nov. 5, 2009
The students, one man and two women, wore Western-style clothes and spoke English with little or no accent. They disputed my description of Islam as it's practiced in the Middle East, maintaining that al-Qaeda's version of Islam in no way reflects the Islam that is practiced around the world.
So I asked them a question: Should apostates – Muslims who convert to another religion – be subject to execution?
One of the women quickly said no. She insisted that she was free to leave Islam if she wanted to, and that she knew other people who had done so without a problem – in the United States.
I said I wasn't talking about her and others' freedom of religion in this country. What if they lived in a Muslim-majority country?
Silence. Eventually, the young man blurted out, “That's different.”
Chuck Spinney Sends… America's diplomatic recipe for winning the hearts and minds of “furriners” in the 21st Century:
Mix – Blind unreasoning fear with the
Domestic politics of privatizing embassy protection and the
Domestic politics of huge construction contracts
into neat grand-strategic soufflé, then bake it in the domestic political-economic oven of heated by the coals of the MICC's Long War Against Terrorism and serve hot to a world that hungers for American values.
For those readers who question the political relevance of such a tasty dish, I offer the following op-ed by Simon Tisdall of the Guardian
