This represents one of the dishonorable acts a politician can commit. Using other people's lives to win an election…….a clear indication of the lack of integrity of an individual who holds the highest office of the land….and the speech sounds like it was modeled after LBJ's equally incoherent speech in the closing days of Viet-Nam. The second article is pure propaganda, witless and without merit.
WASHINGTON — The 10-year security compact that President Barack Obama signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai contains promises the United States and Afghanistan cannot guarantee they will keep, and loopholes for both nations.
The deal signed Tuesday also allows either nation to walk away on a year's notice. That could allow the next U.S. president, or the next Afghan leader, to scuttle a deal negotiated by his or her predecessor.
For Obama, the agreement represents a compromise with Karzai after messy negotiations over U.S. military detention of Afghan suspects and raids on Afghan homes that offend Afghans.
What an IO goldmine for the Taliban……ending a war takes two just as a Tango does. By saying we are done it provides an opponent with victory. There is no other way to spin it. Now the questioning begins (as it should have. Lack of intelligence on Pashtu culture is the root cause of this war. If we had understood Pashtunwalli and the meaning of sanctuary we would have understood Omar's obligation to bin Laden. We didn't because it is not found in the classified enclaves of the intelligence
community….it is found on the many websites regarding Pashtuns and Afghanistan though.)
WASHINGTON — Speaking to a war-weary nation from the epicenter of the fight against terrorism, President Obama signaled the end of what he called “a decade under the dark cloud of war.”
“This time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end,” Obama said before a backdrop of armored military vehicles and a draped U.S. flag at the Bagram air base.
Obama's address to the nation capped a surprise visit that coincided with the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, a mission that has become an unexpected focal point in his campaign for reelection.
Phi Beta Iota: What DefDog forgets is that the Taliban offered to give up Bin Laden, but the Bush-Cheney regime refused that offer. Below are a few headlines to that effect. In retrospect, we now realize that the Taliban's demand for proof was one that Cheney could not accept because Cheney knew with precision that 9/11 was a controlled false flag operation for which Bin Laden was a patsy. Who would have thought we would one day consider the Taliban more honorable (at the time) than our own Administration? The core point is valid: the US went into Afghanistan ignorant, and leaves Afghanistan just as ignorant. The same was true of Viet-Nam. The ideologues in policy dismissed the educated views of the intelligence community in both instances. What we consider important is that between AF-IQ and Libya, this may well be the last tolerated invasion of any country by the US acting unilaterally. Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela — and many others, are now not only in a position to slam down on US acting up, but highly motivated to do so. The era of US carpetbagging is coming to an end, but the USG will be the last to realize this, and will destroy is domestic economy as a final desperate action.
MDMA (known on the street as ecstasy) is showing promise as a psychotherapeutic tool for helping people with post traumatic stress disorder. Here's some info from Vanderbilt University:
Of course, conservatives tend to resist this kind of psychotherapy, even if it has shown promise, because they had a hard time getting beyond the fact that the drug produces euphoria. But one psychotherapist got special permission from the U.S. government to do a study using MDMA to treat PTSD. I think it's past time they expanded the program to try to start helping soldiers NOW. Before MDMA was made illegal, it was being commonly used as a tool of psychotherapy. So there's plenty of collected information on the subject, going all the way back to the eighties.
Phi Beta Iota: 18 US veterans a DAY succeed in killing themselves. A 1000 a month attempt to do so. This is a problem that in a properly managed government would lead to the firing of everyone from the Secretary of Defense down through the Army Chief of Staff to the head of Army personnel. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is a factor, but cognitive dissonance is a greater factor. We also need to remember depleted uranium and bio-chemical left-overs. These people cannot live with what they have done in our name and they live with the toxic environments we fund for them. Because military flag officers have lacked the integrity to dispute illegal unconstitutional orders to wage war on the world, they have put their troops into situations that did not warrant the insertion of our military, and that drawn out over time have destroyed our military and our veterans and therefore our society.
Within the first few months of 2011, the U.S. and its allies lost three loyal “friends”: Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine el-Abbidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Saad Hariri in Lebanon. While Mubarak and Ali were driven out of power by widespread popular uprisings, Hariri was ousted by the parliament.
Inspired by these liberating developments, pro-democracy rebellions against autocratic rulers (and their Western backers) soon spread to other countries such as Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
As these revolutionary developments tended to politically benefit the “axis of resistance” (consisting of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas) in the Middle East, the US-Israeli “axis of aggression” and their client states in the region mounted an all-out counterrevolutionary offensive.
Caught off-guard by the initial wave of the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, the US and its allies struck back with a vengeance. They employed a number of simultaneous tactics to sabotage the Arab Spring. These included
(1) instigating fake instances of the Arab Spring in countries that were/are headed by insubordinate regimes such as those ruling Iran, Syria and Libya;
(2) co-opting revolutionary movements in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen;
(3) crushing pro-democracy movements against “friendly” regimes ruling countries such as Bahrain, Jordan and Saudi Arabia “before they get out of hand,” as they did in Egypt and Tunisia; and
(4) using the age-old divide and rule trick by playing the sectarian trump card of Sunnis vs. Shias, or Iranians vs. Arabs.
Phi Beta Iota: Meanwhile within the USA, Ron Paul has been bought off and firmly put back in place as part of the controlled opposition, and Occupy has been very successfully squelched by encouraging their inherent tendency to kum-ba-ya themselves to their own early demise. Now the 1% has what is left of Occupy competing for small scholarships to tread water and remain irrelevant. It is still possible to re-ignite the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 possibilities, but each month that passes without public coalescing around this ONE THING that the all can agree on and force upon the corrupt two-party tyranny in Congress, is another stake in the heart of the Republic.
The most persistent and pernicious Big Lie regarding the so-called “Civil War”— more properly called the “War to Prevent Southern Independence”— is this:
Noble and saintly yankees fought the war to abolish slavery; evil Confederates fought to preserve it.
The historical record incontrovertibly refutes this Big Lie and yet it lives on, repeated incessantly by many who know better, and by many, many more who accept without challenge what they were taught in government schools.
Ten days into the uprising in Benghazi, Libya, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council established the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya. The purpose of the Commission was to “investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in Libya.” The broad agenda was to establish the facts of the violations and crimes and to take such actions as to hold the identified perpetrators accountable. On June 15, the Commission presented its first report to the Council. This report was provisional, since the conflict was still ongoing and access to the country was minimal. The June report was no more conclusive than the work of the human rights non-governmental organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch). In some instances, the work of investigators for these NGOs (such as Donatella Rovera of Amnesty) was of higher quality than that of the Commission.
Due to the uncompleted war and then the unsettled security state in the country in its aftermath, the Commission did not return to the field till October 2011, and did not begin any real investigation before December 2011. On March 2, 2012, the Commission finally produced a two hundred-page document that was presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Little fanfare greeted this report’s publication, and the HRC’s deliberation on it was equally restrained.
Nonetheless, the report is fairly revelatory, making two important points:
Some important connections drawn between aid, corruption, and positive change; and also important omissions — conflicts out of the news where paying attention could make a difference.
A popular method for identifying which conflicts necessitate more attention from the international community is to estimate the difference between supply and demand of humanitarian assistance in these conflicts. Supply and demand, however, are very hard to measure in emergencies. This has led to the development of several indicators used to measure ‘forgotten conflicts’.
These indicators are often applied on an annual basis and are intended to generate media attention (to increase donations) and/or support donor operations (to comply with impartiality). Have these efforts been successful? Have they effectively singled out and buttressed forgotten conflicts? Looking back on the past decade, in this blog post I’ll assess which conflicts received the least (and most) attention from international actors.
