Colonel Kurtz: Did they say why [Captain] Willard, why they want to terminate my command?

Captain Willard: They told me, that you had gone totally insane and uh, that your methods were unsound.

Colonel Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Captain Willard: I don’t see any method at all, Sir.

Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now

One thing that remains consistent over the last 30 years in observing America’s participation in Afghanistan is that mistakes and errors of judgment, no matter how egregious or self-defeating, never seem to get corrected. In fact, in its effort to rationalize a growing culture of war-making from Vietnam to Afghanistan, America has come around to embracing the insanity of the fictional Colonel Kurtz.

Without a care for the consequences, the U.S. first fostered Islamic extremists in the 1980s (repackaging them for public consumption as “fiercely religious freedom fighters”), then endorsed the rise of the Taliban by claiming they were a “cleansing” force (apparently for these same fiercely religious freedom fighters). According to former CIA operative Milt Bearden, the U.S. also helped facilitate the Arab infiltration of Central Asia by assisting Al Qaeda and ultimately redirecting Osama bin Laden out of the Sudan and into Afghanistan. The Washington beltway and a large segment of the media reveled in the genius of their new “method,” for undoing communist influence and securing Central Asia.

Once a person with a cause has been linked to a policy and established in Washington, that person remains forever as the go-to person regardless of their subsequent history. One such example is the Afghan terrorist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who, like Mephistopheles appears and reappears in the Afghan narrative at various points in time only to vanish in a puff of smoke.

Hekmatyar’s reputation was established back in the late 1960s as a high school student when he joined the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and then attended the Mahtab Qala military school in Kabul. By the early 1970s Hekmatyar had become radicalized by extremist Islam and joined the Nahzat-e-Jawanane Musalman (Muslim Youth Movement). As an engineering student at Kabul University he became known for throwing acid at women dressed in Western clothes and for murdering a fellow student from a Maoist faction of the PDPA. Imprisoned by King Zahir Shah’s police for the murder, Hekmatyar was freed following a 1973 coup by the King’s cousin Mohammed Daoud and communist PDPA leader Babrak Karmal and fled to Pakistan.

Hekmatyar joined with Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Jamaat-e-Islami (Islamic Party) in a Pakistani plan designed by their Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to destabilize Afghanistan with cross border raids. Dissatisfied with the radical Jamaat’s political approach after failing to stir an uprising in Afghanistan, Hekmatyar formed his own more radical party, the Hisb-e Islami (Islamic Party) and came to the attention of the CIA. In 1979, Hekmatyar helped to precipitate the Soviet invasion by engaging Afghanistan’s desperate Marxist President Hafizullah Amin in a power sharing arrangement. According to the British publication The Round Table of April 1981, (No. 282) the Soviets panicked when they realized Amin had set December 29^th  as the date for dissidents of the regime and their tribal supporters to march on Kabul. Read more ?

And here we are: 2010. Hope you had a pleasant and peaceful holiday season, and Happy New Year to all of you.

I had a fairly quiet and peaceful few days: fireplace, music, and trying to catch up with my reading – which means juggling 3 or 4 books simultaneously. Of course everything, almost every minute, was centered around my now 17-month old daughter (thus, the picture . I also was able to read one fiction book; from beginning to end, and that was so very refreshing. I know some of you are frowning and thinking: why in the world would she consider reading fiction refreshing?! Fair enough. I say refreshing because for the last…many years I’ve been busy reading, and reading, only nonfiction, and mainly political and legal books. Although needed, enlightening, and highly informative, they are mostly…how should I put it…GRIM; high dosages of realism, but nonetheless grim. So in a way it felt liberating to grab a fiction work guiltlessly and immerse myself in a so-not-real world of fiction. What did I read? Well, I won’t tell you, because the label of ‘shallow-book-reader’ may be used against me one day!!

Our production team will start their work on our video project on January 11.  I think we should have our first experimental piece up by early February, if not sooner. I also know they’ll be reading this last sentence and jump to e-mail me with ‘How is that for a little pressure?!!!’ Truly exciting.

Next Friday I’ll post our interview with Dan Ellsberg; a great interview (due to Dan, not me!).I am really looking forward to your reaction. We covered several interesting issues, and you’ll find out if Dan Ellsberg believes he was conned into voting for President Obama, and whether that makes Obama a con man. You see, very interesting, indeed!

As usual there have been so many disasters, scandals, and hot developments, and only one of me to go over as many as possible, leave out those overly-covered, dispose of the ones not worthy of getting side-tracked on, ignore the few put out there as partisan baits, and save many for another day(s). Here are a few to ponder and hopefully exchange views on:

CIA Black Sites: As if there’s ever been any other color associated with the CIA!

Towards late December the Lithuanian Parliament finally released its findings into a probe of CIA dark activities in Lithuania, and confirmed that the agency operated two ‘Black Sites’ inside the Lithuanian Capital City Vilnius.

The probe also confirmed that at least five CIA planes landed in the city and that Lithuania’s spy agencies didn’t let their border guards inspect those planes. Lithuania’s government is still denying that they were informed of these activities in advance, and Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius called it a “matter of great concern.” Of course, so far the US government has declined to provide any confirmation or comments.

Last August a little bit of description of these sites and the treatment given to these detainees were published in an article:

Their transformations took place in a sensory cocoon: aboard a CIA aircraft, shackled in place, deprived of sight and sound by blindfolds, headsets and hoods.

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The prisoners’ arrival — almost always in diapers — was engineered to achieve that end

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They were stripped, shaved and shoved against walls the moment they arrived. What came next was an escalating menu of interrogation options, culminating in a method used in the Inquisition — waterboarding — to make them think they would drown.

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Follow-up sessions would start with the prisoner standing with his back against a wall and a towel or collar to prevent whiplash wrapped around his neck. He could be thrown against the wall just once “to make a point, or 20 to 30 times consecutively.”

Prisoners so abhorred the repeated slamming that they would remain in so-called stress positions, such as painful kneeling postures, for hours to avoid a return to the wall, according to one Dec. 30, 2004, memo that amounts to a CIA blueprint for breaking a detainee’s will.

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The purpose, of course, was to make them talk. The Bush administration said the United States was in danger of additional assaults after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. CIA interrogators were under orders to get a lot of information, fast. Whether the harsh interrogation methods were necessary to gather the intelligence is still a matter of dispute.

The only glimpse?

The secret overseas “black sites” where the CIA conducted the interrogations are empty now, if not already dismantled. They were never examined by a congressional committee, nor inspected by the international Red Cross.

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The black sites not only imprisoned men but reduced them to a near helpless state. The aim, as outlined in one document, was to teach every detainee “to perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting.”

I don’t have to go any further on the human rights abuses and shameful conduct in not only the ‘black’ facilities in Lithuania, but many others we’ve known about, such as those in Thailand, Poland, and Romania, and others that haven’t been publicized – yet.

Based on Wikipedia, Black Sites are defined as: In military terminology, a black site is a location at which a black project is conducted. Recently, the term has gained notoriety in describing secret prisons operated by the CIA, generally outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction. It can refer to the facilities that are controlled by the CIA used by the US government in its war on terror to detain alleged unlawful enemy combatants.

In August 2007, the New Yorker reported that the CIA has operated black site secret prisons by the direct Presidential order of Bush right after 9/11, and that extreme psychological interrogation measures based at least partially on the Vietnam-Era Phoenix Program were used on detainees. These included sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, keeping prisoners naked indefinitely and photographing them naked to degrade and humiliate them, and forcibly administering drugs by suppositories to further break down their dignity. According to Mayer’s report, CIA officers have taken out professional liability insurance, fearing that they could be criminally prosecuted if what they have already done became public knowledge.

Okay, there you have the CIA and its Black Projects, Black Operations, Black Sites, Black Budget…Has there ever been any shade other than dark, any color other than black associated with this filthy hornets’ nest thriving in the swamps of our foreign policies? Really, has there ever?

Speaking of these black measures of black operations in black sites brings to mind our conduct in Vietnam, and with that, the following:

CIA & the Vicious Cycle of Offenses-Defenses-Offenses-Defenses-Offenses…

The number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan continues to rise. The latest attack in Helmand province this week killed at least 8 civilians, and at least three of those victims were children. Read more ?