Common Sense in a Coma

By Robert C. Koehler

“Then there is the issue of how the Afghans will be able to pay for their greatly enlarged police and military, which by some estimates will require $10 billion a year to sustain come 2014 — 10 times the Afghan government’s annual tax revenues.”

Of all the ironic absurdities and preposterous twists in the war on — I mean the war to promote — terror, this quote from the New York Times back in April, which I came upon as I was researching something called the Strategic Partnership Declaration between the United States and Afghanistan, felt the most like a mugging.

Panetta’s latest lie connecting Iraq to 9/11 and WMDs; Bradley Manning Update

By Keith Olbermann
Countdown with Olbermann

“So if [Leon Panetta] is trying to remind us of the lying and the cheating, which I participated in, in the previous Administration, more power to him.” ~Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former State Dept. Chief of Staff, on Leon Panetta’s latest lie to the troops that we invaded Iraq because of WMDs and 9/11.

In addition to the propaganda, Col. Wilkerson discusses the unconscionable treatment of Bradley Manning who allegedly leaked diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

Interview with Osama bin Laden: Denies his Involvement in 9/11

Full text of Pakistani paper’s Sept 29, 2001 “exclusive” interview

By Daily Ummat in Urdu
(Translation into English by BBC Worldwide Monitoring September 29, 2001
Global Research Editor’s Note:

We bring to the attention of our readers the following text of Osama bin Laden’s interview with Ummat, a Pakistani daily, published in Karachi on September 28, 2001. It was translated into English by the BBC World Monitoring Service and made public on September 29, 2001.

The authenticity of this interview, which is available in recognized electronic news archives, is confirmed. Osama bin Laden categorically denies his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden’s statements in this interview are markedly different from those made in the alleged Osama video tapes.

In this interview, Osama bin Laden exhibits an understanding of US foreign policy. He expresses his views regarding the loss of life on 9/11. He also makes statements as to who, in his opinion, might be the likely perpetrator of the September 11 attacks.

This is an important text which has not been brought to the attention of Western public opinion.

The Face of the Enemy

Faces of the Enemy

copyright © 2011 Betsy L. Angert. Empathy And Education; BeThink or BeThink.org

Today, Americans walk it back, belatedly, and too late to bring home American and allied troops who died in battle, government officials released recordings. The media distributes and discusses these en masse. Those prominent in the press and public office say “the people have the right to know,” exactly what the tale that could have been told decades ago. Osama Bin Laden was never more than human, a tragic hero, a comical character, just as you or me..

America’s Global War against Planet Earth

Deconstructing the US Military

By Dana Visalli
Global Research

While in Kabul in March of this year, I visited the U.S. military base in that city, Camp Eggers . Knowing I would need a pretext to gain entry, I typed up a letter offering to give a presentation on wildlife in Afghanistan , which I had been studying. When approaching the base, one passes through an initial checkpoint, where a Hummer topped with a machine-gun nest stands guard. Then there is a 100-yard walk down a narrow corridor between high concrete blast walls, at which point one arrives at a guarded entry point through the wall. I showed my passport and letter, and was escorted through a second layer of blast walls to a little wooden information booth in this still-peripheral circle of defense. The pimply young lad manning the booth was flustered by my request; he had never seen anything quite like it. He did what all soldiers do when faced with something new; he phoned his superior for orders on how to proceed.

The Kill Team

How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon

Sport killing a 15-year-old, farmer Gul Mudin

By Mark Boal
Rolling Stones

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

…………
PHOTOS: War Crimes…………VIDEO: Death Zone……….VIDEO: Motorcycle Kill

More US War Crimes: Mutagenic Weaponry

By Gar Smith
Environmentalists Against War

A series of disturbing reports from Iraq and Vietnam (backed up by a horrific collection of videos) have exposed a hidden legacy of war — weapons that continue to create victims years after the conflict ends. Washington’s Mutagenic Weapons — technologies that poison cell tissue and ransack the human DNA far into the future — have targeted babies and children as the latest form of war’s “collateral damage.” [WARNING: Graphic images in the videos below]

America the Dutiful

By Richard Volaar

Feasting on the Whitey-House

My senior year in high school (no, I will not tell you) I won the Veterans Affairs Voice of Democracy speechwriting competition for the central section of California.  When I think back to the soaring prose and metaphors I used to describe how I felt about the land of my birth in those days, I can almost hear the mortars and gunfire on the beaches of Normandy, juxtaposed with the granite faces of El Capitan and Half Dome.  In those days, veterans ate that sort of naïveté up.  The horror of the treatment of Korean War and Viet Nam War veterans had yet to fully sink in to the brains and nervous systems of the veterans of “the Good War.”  Now that the handiwork of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have hit home for the veterans of the Gulf War, I don’t think we need to be shrieking our disappointment at the veterans coming home from Afghanistan; we need to be preventing our children from volunteering for the slaughter in the first place.

9/11 ANALYSIS: From Ronald Reagan and the Soviet-Afghan War to George W Bush and September 11, 2001

[Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives) ]

By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research

This article summarizes earlier writings by the author on 9/11 and the role of Al Qaeda in US foreign policy. For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America’s “War on Terrorism”, Global Research, 2005

“The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books…”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

Things the President Left Out of His Big Speech

Michael Collins

I just read the presidents big speech tonight and it struck me. There were some key lines left out of the speech. You may have had the same response. For the sake of clarity and fairness, I’ve tried to reconstruct the missing lines. I’m sure that the omissions were just an accident. Or maybe that Robert Gibbs may be up to his old tricks again. My insertions are in italics, following the president’s words from the official White House transcript. White House, August 31, 2010 Here goes.

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home. But before I do that, we need a moment of truth. The Iraq war was based on a deliberate lie involving the White House distorting the National intelligence estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The report got it wrong on WMD. There were none. But it concluded that the only way the nonexistent WMD would be used against the United States was in retaliation for a US attack on Iraq that threatened Saddam Hussein. By deleting this information, the Bush-Cheney White House justified a preemptive invasion without any basis, a crime under international law that our nation helped establish after World War II.

Exit Strategy or Essentially Endless?

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Pain on Pain on Play, Repeating

I have these moments from time to time where I am dumbstruck by the absurdity of human behavior, usually my own. But these moments are usually

brief, they pass on and I am always confident that another moment will soon arrive.

Listening to the news on satellite radio this afternoon, I had a moment where “dumb struck” didn’t quite hit the mark. Neither did idiotic. It was an overwhelming feeling that my home planet, Earth I believe it was called, had been taken over by aliens. Aliens whose chief concern seemed to be keeping the remaining residents of the planet so totally distracted and confused that the vast majority of them would remain stunned while these aliens completed their takeover.

Who were/are these aliens and what was their purpose?

John Pilger: There Is a War on Journalism

Decmocracy Now! Interview With John Pilger:

John Pilger, award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. He began his career in journalism nearly half a century ago and has written close to a dozen books and made over fifty documentaries. He lives in London but is in the United States working on a forthcoming documentary about what he calls “the war on the media.” It’s called The War You Don’t See.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: It’s been a week since Rolling Stone published its article on General Stanley McChrystal that eventually led to him being fired by President Obama. In a piece called “The Runaway General,” McChrystal and his top aides openly criticized the President and mocked several top officials. Joe Biden is nicknamed “Bite me.” National Security Adviser General James Jones is described as a “clown.” Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is called a “wounded animal.”

Afghan Leaders Call Surge, “Imbecilic and Tragic”

Veterans Today February 14, 2010         by Gordon Duff ·

WRONG REGION, WRONG ENEMY, WRONG TACTICS, BAD ADVICE

AMERICA RECRUITING 10,000 TERRORISTS A DAY IN AFGHANISTAN

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

“We have millions of young men coming of age, America doesn’t realize this.  Each one will become a fighter with one purpose in life, to free their country and drive out foreign invaders.  Each child you see will be a trained soldier with a Kalashnikov.  We will fight for a century if we have to.  Ask Britain, ask Russia, they know. Why did America have to come here, join with criminal elements, brutal drug lords, mass murderers, people whose only history is brutality toward their own, why was America so stupid as to think we would respect them when they and their stooges rain bombs down on our children?”

He Works. We Wait

“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.

Welcome to Orwell’s world

By John Pilger

Obama’s lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

The Two Faces of Obama

copyright © 2009 Betsy L. Angert. BeThink.org

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
~ Barack Obama (President of the United States. Peace Prize Acceptance Speech. December 10, 2009)

For years, Americans saw live, and in person, or on television screens, Presidential aspirant Barack Obama. Several mused; the man is calm in a crisis. “No drama Obama” was the phrase most often associated with the candidate. Those closely and personally connected to the potential President corroborated what was for most only an observation. The election did not change Barack Obama. His calm demeanor remained intact. Yet, many perceived a difference, not in his response to a predicament, but in the President’s rhetoric. Empathy evolved into escalation. This was perhaps most evident on two occasions, when Mister Obama delivered his Address on the War in Afghanistan, and then again when the Commander-In Chief offered his Remarks in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. After these events, the pensive pondered; what was there all along, Cerebral Discord, the Two Faces of Barack Obama.

The Change: Hope

By Betsy L. Angert

It is said, as individuals, we can achieve all we conceive, if only we truly believe. President Barack Obama once knew this. He lived this veracity. Indeed, candidate Obama’s audacity and accomplishments gave Americans hope. When Barack Obama reached for the sky he realized what no one thought he could. The electorate was energized. People came to expect the country was in for a change. Now, it seems Mister Obama is bogged down by what Eisenhower understood, concerns of the Military Industrial Complex.

Welcome to the Unconquerable Land

By Arial

Caring and Killing

By Robert C. Koehler

Dear Barack . . . Mr. President . . . brilliant, courageous (I once thought) guy I voted for:

You’re great. I mean the way you put words together. As I listened to you on Tuesday night, I thought about the interlocking, dovetail-joint perfection of your language: the crisp-edged certainty of your delivery, the clean precision of your logic, even an acknowledgement of some of the big values (peace, human dignity) so beloved by your voting base.