BFP Nightly Quote

 “The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.”-Charles Bukowski  

International Newsworthy

Mullen Demands Pakistan Launch a Military Offensive Against North Waziristan

Egyptian Army Clears Tahrir Square with Force

Libya Transitional Council Rebels in Total Disarray

China Blames Pakistan for Harboring Uyghur Terrorists

Russia Accuses US of Fueling Georgian ‘Revanchism’

Mongolia Military Trains with US, Buys Fighters from Russia

US Grows a Tree of Tension with Iran

Turkey: Military Resignation Strategy Backfires

* * * *

National Newsworthy

CIA Forced to Release Long Secret Official History of Bay of Pigs Invasion

Wall Street-ers Top Obama Re-election Supporters: Even more than 2008!

Debt Deal Barely Changes DOD Mega Spending Expectations

Who Gains from Debt Deal? The Pentagon, For One

Report: US Contractor in Iraq Charges Pentagon $900 for $7 Control Switch

Landsdowne Partners Sell Entire $850 Million Stake in Goldman Sachs

Manufacturing Growth Hits Lowest Levels in 2 Years

‘Israeli Style’ Airports in Ex America

* * * *

Noteworthy Editorials

U.S. ‘Black Hole’ Prison’s Activities Kept Secret

The Development of ‘Privacy Killing Technologies’: A Link to the Murdoch Scandal?

Debt Posturing

Kurram: Operation Eye-Wash in Pakistan

Why are Banks Bulldozing Foreclosures?

* * * *

BFP Nightly Funnies

“According to reports, Apple now has more cash on hand than the U.S. government. Which sounds impressive until you realize that Radio Shack has more cash on hand… Actually, the big difference between Apple and the government is that their stuff is made in China, while we’re owned by China. Two different things.” –Jay Leno

* * * *

BFP Nightly Video Potpourri 

Video 1: John Pilger on War by Other Means

Video 2: Rense & Susan Lindauer on NATO’s Libyan War Crimes

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Corey Pein recounts the creation of the recently launched groundbreaking site warisbusiness.com, a nonpartisan site covering military contracting, the global arms trade and the lobby, and how he began the project with two assumptions: The first- a lot of people are making money from war, while enjoying the comforts of anonymity (such people were once plainly called profiteers), and the second: Privatizing war inevitably prolongs it, creating what economists call a “perverse incentive.” Mr. Pein discusses the bought out generals and the militarization of the economy, and the latest on the ‘Rent-A-Generals’ exposé. He talks about scandals such as Mina Corp and the subsequent cover up, US Embassies as marketing arms of military corporations, the win-win outcome of elections for the Pentagon contractors and arms makers, Wikileaks, and more!

Corey Pein is an award-winning investigative reporter and long-form narrative journalist who writes about the military industrial complex, money, politics and violence from London, UK. Previously, he has lived in New Mexico, Oregon, Georgia and in Southeast Asia. His latest project is warisbusiness.com, a startup news site covering military contracting and the global arms trade. Mr. Pein has worked on staff at Columbia Journalism Review, Willamette Week, the Santa Fe Reporter and IHT ThaiDay, and contributed to Salon, Slate, The American Prospect, and CounterPunch, among others.

Here is our guest Corey Pein unplugged!

Note- Boiling Frogs selects warisbusiness.com as the best website of 2010!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

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.

Hekmatyar would go on to become the darling of the agency and receive the bulk of the U.S. and Saudi aid coming in for the war against the Soviet Union, including a monopoly on Stinger missiles. Although an ISI and CIA favorite, Hekmatyar’s legitimacy as a fighter, his effectiveness, his loyalties and even his goals raised doubts in the Peshawar-based American press corps. According to CBS News stringer Kurt Lohbeck in his book, Holy War, Unholy Victory, Hekmatyar’s reputation was an elaborate ruse concocted by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI to elicit Congressional support for the Mujahideen, and little else. “Gulbuddin had no effective fighting organization. He had not a single commander with any military reputation for fighting the Soviets or the Afghan regime. He had made alliances with top regime military figures. And he had killed numerous other Mujahiddin commanders. Yet the United States government and the covert agencies were doing their best to convert that lie into reality.”

The man largely responsible for peddling Hekmatyar’s dubious credentials to Washington was Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, who had been carefully shoehorned into strategic positions on both the House Appropriations Committee and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by then Republican congressman from Wyoming, Dick Cheney. Following the war against the Soviets, Hekmatyar’s reputation didn’t save him when his failure to establish a Pakistani friendly government in Kabul lost him Saudi and American sponsorship. But while American influence flowed to the Taliban, Hekmatyar continued to lobby for sponsorship and a return to power by acquiring political asylum in Iran, trying to join ranks with Al Qaeda and cutting deals with the Taliban.

Marked for death by the CIA following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Hekmatyar survived a Predator drone attack in May 2002 but continued to rally Taliban fighters against the United States and coalition forces. On February 19, 2003 both the United States Department of State and the United States treasury declared Hekmatyar a “global terrorist.”

Reportedly now aligned with the Taliban, Hekmatyar’s power base resides in the provinces near Kabul and the scattered pockets of Pashtun communities in the north and northeast. Yet, despite his label as a terrorist and major narcotics trafficker, his Hesb-i-Islami party supported Hamid Karzai’s reelection bid in the August 20, 2009 elections and he is now reportedly being courted by special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke in the hopes of luring him into a relationship with the Afghan government.

As twisted as the original U.S. support for Islamic extremism may seem today following the events of 9/11 and nearly 9 years of war, the idea that Hekmatyar might somehow once again be on America’s go-to list as a potential messiah for Washington goes beyond the pale of rational thinking and into the realm of  Colonel Kurtz. Empowering Hekmatyar  as a “method” for destabilizing Afghanistan in the early 1970’s was at least, “unsound.” Putting him back into a position of power and influence in Kabul as a method for resolving America’s growing Afghan crisis reveals that the method is insane. Or, in the words of Captain Willard, “I don’t see any method at all.”

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Last Friday as I was searching the headlines for noteworthy and interesting news articles I came across a fairly lengthy and detailed story on Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi. Considering the saturated state of this recent CIA slaying story and the reporting source, I almost skipped the article, but then, something caught my eye; something easy to miss with the naked eye, at least those of gullible US Media readers-believers. It wasn’t the story itself, nor was it the flowery details in an attempt to make it a possible future ‘Hollywood Action Drama’ worthy of a six figure movie rights offer. It also wasn’t due to the authors, since neither one of them was familiar to me. No, it was none of that. What caught my attention and held it there for the next few hours was the very calculative and selective usage of a word in the title; Victim:

“In Afghanistan attack, CIA fell victim to series of miscalculations about informant”

With that word, victim, in mind, I quickly checked a few other media sites, and sure enough the word was there. I will give you a couple of quick examples, starting with NY Daily News:

Among the CIA victims, including several contractors, was a mother of three who directed operations and intelligence gathering at Forward Operating Base Chapman, a secretive site in Khowst province on the Pakistan border that also houses a State Department reconstruction team.

An eighth American victim was a State Department worker. An Afghan also was killed in the attack and six other Americans were wounded.

…

And the next excerpt from the so-called lefty PBS:

Families of some of the CIA victims have released information about their lives. Harold Brown Jr., 37, from Massachusetts, had a wife and three children; Jeremy Wise, 35, was a former Navy SEAL and worked as a security contractor; Scott Michael Roberson, 39, worked as a security officer and had a wife who was eight months pregnant; and Dane Clak Paresi, 46, was a contractor and retired soldier.

…

First, let’s get the very simple facts straight here:

These were not some CIA paper pushers in some office building overseas, nor were they the stereotyped useless undercover social butterflies hanging out in embassies’ cocktail parties. These were the other breed: Combatants in the so-called war zone, actually in the heart of the combat zone, engaged in combat involving the deadliest of attacks using unmanned drones. As for the other two Blackwater contractors, I don’t have to tell you what they do. Do I?

With our military guys who get killed in wars, this same media reports using words such as combat casualties, killed, slain… Please be my guest and comb through the unfortunately plentiful reports on US military casualties. In fact here is the straight forward definition of casualty by the military:

A casualty is a member of personnel unable to fulfill their duties within a military organization due to death or incapacitation by injury or illness.

And here is how it is defined by encyclopedia

A hostile casualty is any person who is killed in action or wounded by any civilian, paramilitary, terrorist, or military force that may or may not represent a nation or state. Also included in this classification are persons killed or wounded accidentally either by friendly fire or by fratricide, which occurs when troops are mistakenly thought to be an enemy force.

As for general usage of Victims of War, this is what usually is meant:

…to those who may be described as the victims of war-that is, noncombatant civilians and those no longer able to take part in hostilities.

I know what you are thinking; kind of. Why split hairs over some terminology usage that may or may not have been calculated, selected, and then given to the public by the media.  And, that’s exactly why I ended up spending several hours researching after coming across that article by the Washington Post.

I spent a few hours combing through the Washington Post archives. I am sure I wasn’t able to check hundreds of their semi-fiction reportage, but I’d say dozens of articles should suffice to establish selective usage of the word victim when it hardly applies, and never using the word where it would be 100% correct and applicable.

Wouldn’t you, or almost anyone, even those with only a minute trace of comprehension-knowledge-brain-common sense, consider the civilian casualties, when it’s comprised of babies, toddlers, grandmothers, as victims of war? As victims? Every dictionary, encyclopedia, and everyone with certified expertise in the English language, would say ‘YES.’

Then how is it that when reporting on established, 100% confirmed, civilian casualties of US combat attacks that include innocent children, this same Washington Post does not use the word victim; not even once? Not in relation to the family members of those children and mothers killed; as in “…the uncle of one of the victims…’ or something like ‘these children fell victim to inaccurate…’ I could go on and list dozens of links from past articles on major heart wrenching civilian casualties of our senseless and perpetual war(s), and show you the absence of the word victim in all. Or you can easily do that yourself: visit Washington Post, enter the key words ‘Afghanistan civilian casualties war’ in the box, click on search, comb through tens if not hundreds of resultant articles on civilian casualties of our war, and look for the word ‘victim.’

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The occupied government of Afghanistan and the United Nations have both concluded that U.S.-led troops recently dragged eight sleeping children out of their beds, handcuffed some of them, and shot them all dead. While this apparently constitutes an everyday act of kindness, far less intriguing than the vicious singeing of his pubic hairs by Captain Underpants, it is at least a variation on the ordinary American technique of murdering men, women, and children by the dozens with unmanned drones.

Also this week in Afghanistan, eight CIA assassins (see if you can find a more appropriate name for them) were murdered by a suicide bombing that one of them apparently executed against the other seven. The Taliban in Pakistan claims credit and describes the mass-murder as revenge for the CIA’s drone killings. And we thought unmanned drones were War Perfected because none of the right people would have to risk their lives. Oops. Perhaps Detroit-bound passengers risked theirs unwittingly.

The CIA has declared its intention to seek revenge for the suicide strike. Who knows what the assassination of sleeping students was revenge for. Perhaps the next lunatic to try blowing up something in the United States will be seeking revenge for whatever Obama does to avenge the victims (television viewers?) of the Crotch Crusader. Certainly there will be numerous more acts of violence driven by longings for revenge against the drone pilots and the shooters of students.

In a civilized world, the alternative to vengeance is justice. Often we can even set aside feelings of revenge as long as we are able to act so as to deter more crime. But at the same time that the puppet president of Afghanistan is demanding the arrest of the troops who shot the handcuffed children, the puppet government of Iraq is facing up to the refusal of the United States to seriously prosecute the Blackwater assassins of innocent Iraqis. Justice will not be permitted as an alternative to vengeance — the mere idea is anti-American.

No one so much as blinks at the CIA’s avowal of vengeance for the recent suicide attack, never mind the illegality, because the entire illegal war on Afghanistan/Pakistan was launched and is still maintained as a pretended act of revenge for the crimes of 9-11. Of course, we’re not bombing the flight schools or the German and Spanish hotels. Of course , we admit that there are fewer than 100 members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Of course we openly seek massive permanent bases and an oil pipeline. Of course, Obama’s decisions are all electoral calculations computed by the calculus of cowardice. Of course, we’re prosecuting the Butt Bomber as a criminal, just as we always used to prosecute criminals as criminals. Of course, revenge would not be a legal justification for war even if we could persuade ourselves it was a sane one. But the war is publicly understood as revenge, the resistance by its victims is understood as revenge, the escalation is understood as revenge for the resistance, and an eye for an eye slowly makes the whole world blind.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: nothing is ever remotely as horrible as war. So, nothing can ever constitute a justification for launching or escalating or continuing a war. Dragging children out of bed and killing them is not a freak blip in the course of a war. It is war reduced to a comprehensible scale. It’s less war, not worse war. Everything we are spending our grandchildren’s unearned pay on, borrowed from China at great expense, all of it is for the murdering of human beings. And it will remain so for eternity, no matter how many times you chant “Support Duh Troops.”

I know many soldiers and mercenaries had few other options, given our failure to invest in any other industries. I know they’ve been lied to. I know they’re scared and tired. But they wouldn’t be there if we brought them home. And I support a full investment in their physical and mental and economic recovery. What I don’t support is anyone participating in these wars, and that includes every single American who is not putting every spare moment into demanding that Congress stop forking over the money.

It’s blood money. It’s payment for murder. It cannot be defended. It cannot be permitted. We must stop it now [1]. We must shut down [2] the place it comes from.

Not another dime. Not another dollar. Not another death. Not another thought of revenge.

UPDATE:

By David Swanson

Silly me. I thought I could comment on something that was in the news without proving that it was in the news. Maybe this will help:

UN says Afghans slain in troop raid were students

By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer, Thu Dec 31, 1:26 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091231/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan_un [3]

KABUL – The United Nations said Thursday that a weekend raid by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students and warned against nighttime actions by coalition forces because they often cause civilian deaths.

The Afghan government said its investigation has established that all 10 people killed Sunday in a remote village in Kunar province were civilians. Its officials said that eight of those killed were schoolchildren aged 12-14. . . .

UN special representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement that the preliminary UN investigation showed “strong indication” that there were insurgents in the area at the time of the attack.

But, he added, “based on our initial investigation, eight of those killed were students enrolled in local schools.” . . .

Eide said the UN remained concerned about nighttime raids by coalition troops “given that they often result in lethal outcomes for civilians, the dangerous confusion that frequently arises when a family compound is invaded.” . . .

A statement issued Thursday by the Afghan National Security Directorate said the government investigation showed no Afghan forces were involved and “international forces from an unknown address came to the area and without facing any armed resistance, put 10 youth in two rooms and killed them.

“They conducted this operation on their own without informing any security or local authorities of Afghanistan,” the statement said.

___

Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.

I’ve excerpted much of the above article, but not the military denials. Go read them at the link above. Here’s the Los Angeles Times:

Western troops killed civilians, Afghan investigators say

The government investigators say eight of those killed over the weekend in a remote eastern province were boys under 18. Western military officials say there is no evidence to back the claim.
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2009

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan – Afghan government investigators asserted Wednesday that foreign troops had killed 10 civilians in a raid this week, including eight students younger than 18. Western military officials called the charge unsubstantiated and urged a joint investigation. . . .

A statement from the presidential palace said Karzai had offered condolences to the families of the dead, and endorsed the initial findings of an investigative panel that had traveled to Kunar at his behest.

The head of the Afghan delegation, Asadullah Wafa, said 10 males, all civilians, were taken from their homes in Ghazikhan village, in the Narang district, and then shot dead by foreign troops. The report cited the village schoolmaster as identifying eight of them as pupils between the ages of 12 and 17. . . .

Wafa, a close aide to Karzai, suggested that an informant had provided misleading information to Western forces, triggering the strike. Afghan villagers have sometimes tried to settle scores with rival clans or tribes by falsely reporting insurgent activity to the authorities. . . .

laura.king@latimes.com [4]
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

The above article has been dismissed by commenters on progressive websites because it was posted by the progressive website Common Dreams. Never mind that Common Dreams has been right far more often than the Los Angeles Times. Below is a collection of sources put together (and presumably thereby tarnished) by Talking Points Memo:

Afghan Children Handcuffed, Then Killed By American Soldiers
January 1, 2010, 7:38AM
Talking Points Memo
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/r/u/rutabaga_ridgepole/2… [5]

TPM starts with the Times:

From the London Times, December 31, 2009…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece [6]

President Karzai sent a team of investigators to Narang district, in eastern Kunar province, after reports of a massacre first surfaced on Monday.

“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” a statement on President Karzai’s website said.

Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, said that US soldiers flew to Kunar from Kabul, suggesting that they were part of a special forces unit.

Mr Wafa, a former governor of Helmand province, met President Karzai to discuss his findings yesterday. “I spoke to the local headmaster,” he said. “It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack.”

In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. “Seven students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them.”

Directly from Karzai’s website…
http://president.gov.af/Contents/91/Documents/1124/phone_talks_kunar_eng… [7]

President Karzai in a telephone contact expressed condolences and shared grief with the families of the victims of the recent attack in Kunar province.

Following the attack, President Karzai tasked a delegation on Monday led by the Chief of Complaints Commission and composed of representatives from the ministries of Defense, Interior, National Directorate of Security and the Office of Administrative Affairs for an immediate investigation of the incident.

The findings by the delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took 10 people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and 10, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead.

Eight of those shot dead were confirmed as school students by the village school principle.

From the New York Times…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/world/asia/29afghan.html [8]

The governor of Kunar, Fazullah Wahidi, said that “the coalition claimed they were enemy fighters,” but that elders in the district and a delegation sent to the remote area had found that “10 people were killed and all of them were civilians.”

From the United Nations…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34644227/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/ [9]

The United Nations said Thursday that a weekend raid by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students and that it warned against nighttime actions by coalition forces because they often cause civilian deaths.

That last quote is simply from the same AP story I quoted above, but posted on the MSNBC website. The UN special representative, you’ll recall, is named and quoted above.

• Peace and War

This site is maintained by a union shop at MayFirst.org

<Links:
[1] http://defundwar.org
[2] http://peaceoftheaction.org
[3] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091231/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan_un
[4] mailto:laura.king@latimes.com
[5] http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/r/u/rutabaga_ridgepole/2010/01/afghan-children-handcuffed-the.php
[6] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece
[7] http://president.gov.af/Contents/91/Documents/1124/phone_talks_kunar_eng.html
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/world/asia/29afghan.html
[9] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34644227/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

* This article has been published with direct permission from the author. The original publication site: http://www.davidswanson.org/node/2385

As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We’ve seen this pattern from the media again and again. It was particularly disturbing to read Ken Herman’s December 18 interview, Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan, in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN filled with CIA disinformation. The secret campaign was activated before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to sell the American people on financing the coming Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union

Let’s separate the child-like fantasy that has been resurrected over and over again from the true nature of Charlie Wilson and his war effort. From the interview:

“…the former East Texas congressman — immortalized in a book and a movie about his exploits that helped the Afghans drive out the Soviet Union.”

FACT: Covert funding for the mujahideen began long before the Soviet invasion, not after. This covert aid was intended to lure the Soviets into the Afghan trap and hold them there, not drive them out, as claimed by Charlie Wilson. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s national security adviser, have admitted in print (Gates, in his 1997 book, From the Shadows; Brzezinski, 1998 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the U.S. had been secretly undermining its own diplomatic efforts in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan.

The American press failed to report these revelations from high-ranking government officials as news, back then. More recently, Brzezinski’s remarks were addressed in an interview  with Samira Goetschel for her film, Our Own Private Bin Laden.  She asked:

“In your 1998 interview with the French Magazine Le Nouvel Observateur you said that you knowingly increased the probability of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.”

Brzezinski responded:

“The point very simply was this. We knew the Soviets were already conducting operations in Afghanistan. We knew there was opposition in Afghanistan to the progressive effort which had been made by the Soviets to take over. And we felt therefore it made a lot of sense to support those that were resisting. And we decided to do that. Of course this probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do…”

FACT: As we document in our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” the record contradicts Brzezinski’s assumption that the Soviets would have invaded had it not been for his intentional provocation to lure the Soviet’s into the “Afghan trap.”

FACT: It is well documented that Charlie Wilson’s war prolonged Afghanistan’s agony for another six years, provided a secure multibillion-dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism, and set the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. It’s bad enough that a Hollywood film continues to project the propaganda campaign that kept Americans in the dark about America’s role in helping terrorism grow in Afghanistan. At this late date, it is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the Congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan. 

FACT: America’s mistake in Afghanistan was not “the endgame” problem depicted by “Charlie Wilson’s War.” The problem was in the conceptual framework created by America’s Cold War policy makers in the first place that made Afghanistan the bleeding ground it remains to this day.

FACT: Charlie Wilson’s War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end­ public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. The world was remade with the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, a Communist empire destroyed and the West’s pre-eminence assured. But the price in human suffering in Afghanistan and the impact on our democratic freedoms has yet to be understood.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration.  Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

This recent article by Time Magazine on Agent Orange in Vietnam opened up a floodgate of emotions I had thought I had gotten over with a year ago, after my own personal first-hand experiences there. The article was fairly well-written, that is, considering the publication. Here are some excerpts:

This lonely section of the abandoned Danang air base was once crawling with U.S. airmen and machines. It was here where giant orange drums were stored and the herbicides they contained were mixed and loaded onto waiting planes. Whatever sloshed out soaked into the soil and eventually seeped into the water supply. Thirty years later, the rare visitor to the former U.S. air base is provided with rubber boots and protective clothing. Residue from Agent Orange, which was sprayed to deny enemy troops jungle cover, remains so toxic that this patch of land is considered one of the most contaminated pieces of real estate in the country. A recent study indicates that even three decades after the war ended, the cancer-causing dioxins are at levels 300 to 400 times higher than what is deemed to be safe.

After years of meetings, signings and photo ops, the U.S. held another ceremony in Vietnam on Dec. 16 to sign yet another memorandum of understanding as part of the continuing effort to manage Agent Orange’s dark legacy. Yet there are grumblings that little — if anything — has been done to clean up the most contaminated sites. Since 2007, Congress has allocated a total of $6 million to help address Agent Orange issues in Vietnam. Not only does the amount not begin to scratch the surface of the problem or get rid of the tons of toxic soil around the nation, but there are questions about how the money is being spent.

Groups caring for children born with horrific deformities from Agent Orange — such as malformed limbs and no eyes — are wondering why they haven’t seen any of that money. Bedridden and unable to feed themselves, many patients need round-the-clock care. As they age, and parents die, who is going to look after them? asks Nguyen Thi Hien, director of the Danang Association of Victims of Agent Orange.

You can read the entire article here.

I spent the better part of the year 2008 in Vietnam. I traveled around the country, and was involved in interviewing and recording various children related charities and organizations there. While in the Da Nang area I had an opportunity to visit and interview a family who were victims of Agent Orange – bed-ridden twin men of age 28 and their parents.

The family lived in a village, in a shack, 3.5 miles from the nearest road. I had to walk the entire distance on a very hot and humid day, pass through many rice paddies, and after being chased by an angry water buffalo, I finally made it.

The following 5-minute video includes one of the interview segments I conducted with the parents, and brief footage of the twin’s horrendous condition. Before you watch the video:

• The footage of the Agent Orange victims is very graphic and may be disturbing to some.

• I apologize for the quality of the video: I had to conduct the interview through my translator and overcome my own shock and emotional response, while recording the victims.

Here is my video, recorded in March 2008, near Da Nang, Vietnam:

I want to emphasize these facts from the Time Magazine article:

The U.S. government still spends billions every year on disability payments to those who served in Vietnam — including their children, many of whom are suffering from dioxin-associated cancers and birth defects. Since 2007, Congress has allocated a total of $6 million to help address Agent Orange issues in Vietnam.

And,

Some point out that the U.S. spends only a fraction on Agent Orange cleanup compared to the $50 million it spends every year on searching for the remains of American soldiers missing in action.

And I want to add a few other comparison points:

We spend billions per week on undeclared wars to injure, kill, and destroy. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on fraudulent and wasteful defense contracts. We spend billions on drones and bombs which kill 687 civilians per 14 enemy targets, amounting to a ratio of nearly 50 civilians killed for each undeclared enemy killed…

And when it comes to cleaning up this huge mess we left behind in Vietnam, when it comes to a certain degree of reparation expected from a superpower nation with even a minute amount of moral decency, when it comes to…we go on denying responsibility, arguing irrational technicalities, and do nothing, absolute zilch.

President Gerald Ford had the following to say on February 19, 1976, on the anniversary of the Japanese Internment:

I call upon the American people to affirm with me the unhyphenated American promise that we have learned from the tragedy of that long ago experience-forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American and resolve that this kind of error shall never be made again.

Okay, for this post I am not going to dwell upon President Ford’s consciously chosen words to emphasize our responsibility to treasure liberty and justice only for individual Americans, and not for all humanity (Still- I’m grinding my teeth, and holding my tongue). Now, here is my question:

What is it with all these past lessons of tragedies we later come to admit to and regret?! Because we keep doing the same thing over and over again. Because we seem to always turn around afterwards and start the next vicious cycle again. And it seems we have been making the vicious cycles longer and crueler each time: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, Extraordinary Renditions …

Perhaps a president or two later, we’ll be hearing regrets along the same lines on all the atrocious acts we’ve been engaged in since 2001, in the name of a war on terror, in the name of national security. Perhaps, we’ll be taking a solemn oath or two to not repeat the same atrocious acts. Perhaps we’ll have a law or two written to emphasize and engrave our regrets and commitment to never do the same again… And then, perhaps, there will come another pretext, or something declared and used as pretext, and we’ll go about forgetting all past regrets, declare our previous oaths nullified, and have the previous laws replaced with the opposite of the original and name them ‘patriotic,’ and …there we’ll go repeating history, only making each cycle bigger and worse than the one before.

Am I just being cynical here? I don’t think so. But, what do you think?

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Not much in terms of site updates on this week’s Boiling Frogs Round Up. If you haven’t listened to our interview with Pepe Escobar, please do; click here.

Last week I failed to bring to your attention an interesting and noteworthy interview:

Peter B Collins interviewed David Krikorian, challenger to GOP Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio, on Schmidt’s efforts to squelch Krikorian’s First Amendment rights and the infamous Turkish Lobby’s covert and overt influence of Schmidt’s campaign. Krikorian ran against Mean Jean in 2008 and got 17% of the vote as an independent. After he announced he would challenge her again in 2010 as a Democrat, Schmidt filed legal actions over Krikorian’s sharp criticism of her support from Turkish interests. Schmidt’s lawyer is Bruce Fein, an erstwhile friend of the PBC show for his support of impeachment for Bush and Cheney; Fein is counsel to the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund and an apologist for Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide.

This is a very interesting, and informative interview. You can listen to it here at Peter B Collins’ website. I’m looking forward to your feedback on this; many of you know why.

Rep. Ron Paul on the Escalation in Afghanistan

Congressman Ron Paul has written an excellent editorial piece on our war in Afghanistan and President Obama’s escalation plans now in full action. As always he makes his points clearly and sincerely: No beating around the bush, no gobbledygook stuff, and no special interests or agenda to serve.

Dr. Paul hits some of the most important key words and phrases: Perpetual War, seeking out monsters to destroy abroad, Military Industrial Complex, the War Lobby, bypassing the Constitution, nebulous & never-ending conflicts, domestic liberties, nation-building, war-racketeers…Here are a couple of excerpts:

If anyone still doubted that this administration’s foreign policy would bring any kind of change, this week’s debate on Afghanistan should remove all doubt. The president’s stated justifications for sending more troops to Afghanistan and escalating the war amount to little more than recycling all the false reasons we began the conflict. It is so discouraging to see this coming from our new leadership, when the people were hoping for peace. New polls show that 49 percent of the people favor minding our own business on the world stage, up from 30 percent in 2002. Perpetual war is not solving anything. Indeed continually seeking out monsters to destroy abroad only threatens our security here at home as international resentment against us builds. The people understand this and are becoming increasingly frustrated at not being heard by the decision-makers. The leaders say some things the people want to hear, but change never comes.

We now find ourselves in another foreign policy quagmire with little hope of victory, and not even a definition of victory. Eisenhower said that only an alert and informed electorate could keep these war racketeering pressures at bay. He was right, and the key is for the people to ensure that their elected leaders follow the Constitution. The Constitution requires a declaration of war by Congress in order to legitimately go to war. Bypassing this critical step makes it far too easy to waste resources on nebulous and never-ending conflicts. Without clear goals, the conflicts last forever and drain the country of blood and treasure. The drafters of the Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war precisely because they feared allowing the executive unfettered discretion in military affairs. They understood that making it easy for leaders to wage foreign wars would threaten domestic liberties.

I don’t know about you but I for one always seem to find myself agreeing with Dr. Paul’s view on our foreign policy and the destructiveness of the long-in-power war party. You can read the brief but effective piece here. What do you think?
 

President Obama: Staunch Supporter of our Domestic Enemies?

It certainly appears that way. He’s been vehemently supporting the Patriot Act and its architects & defenders; he’s been relentlessly protecting the previous administrations’ wrongdoers and culprits involved in rendition and torture…And now this: White House wants suit against Yoo dismissed

The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues.
…

Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, worked for the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. He was the author of a 2002 memo that said rough treatment of captives amounts to torture only if it causes the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” The memo also said the president may have the power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.

We’ve been writing and talking about many cases, issues, and points where Obama has been supporting, defending, and continuing the Bush administration’s practices and abuses. Now can we think of any cases, examples, or issues where he, Obama, has actually been opposing or challenging the previous administration’s decisions, policies, or practices? In the Human Rights area? Our civil liberties? War(s)? I didn’t think so either…

The Revolving Doors Keeps Revolving

The revolving door phenomenon has always ranked high among my list of core issues at the heart of diseases that have been inflicted on and metastasized in our nation. A while ago I wrote a piece on this issue titled: The Auctioning of Former Statesmen & Dime a Dozen Generals . Well, here is a recent relevant article on this same disease:

The Army used a loophole in federal ethics law to award lucrative contracts to two recently retired generals, departing from its standard practice for hiring senior advisers, according to public records and interviews.

During the past two years, the Army wanted to bring back two former generals, John Vines and Dan McNeill, to advise commanders as part of its “senior mentor” program. But the service’s program is run by a defense contractor, Northrop Grumman, and federal ethics law prohibits newly retired senior employees from representing a company before their former agency for one year.

That “cooling off” period is designed to prohibit “acts by former government employees which may reasonably give the appearance of making unfair use of prior government employment,” according to ethics regulations. The Army found a way around the rule. Instead of hiring them as defense company subcontractors, as it does for roughly two dozen other Army mentors, the service contracted directly with McNeill and Vines. McNeill received his contract after the Army wrote specific bid solicitations that applied to him and perhaps a few other retired generals. Vines received contracts without competition, records show.

All told, the Army paid McNeill $281,625 from December 2008 through August 2009, federal records show. McNeill told USA Today he also consults for defense firms but declined to name them. He isn’t required to tell the Army about them, either.

Anyway; here is the link to the rest of this Army Times article.

Down the Police State Lane

On Monday I’ll be posting my belated Part IV of The Makings of a Police State series. Meanwhile, here is another item, an additional ingredient, to be added to our boiling pot: Homeland Security Embarks on Big Brother Programs to Read Our Minds and Emotions:

This past February, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a one-year, $2.6 million grant to the Cambridge, MA.-based Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to develop computerized sensors capable of detecting a person’s level of “malintent” — or intention to do harm. It’s only the most recent of numerous contracts awarded to Draper and assorted research outfits by the U.S. government over the past few years under the auspices of a project called “Future Attribute Screening Technologies,” or FAST. It’s the next wave of behavior surveillance from DHS and taxpayers have paid some $20 million on it so far.

Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program will ostensibly detect subjects’ bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. It’s part of a broader “initiative to develop innovative, non-invasive technologies to screen people at security checkpoints,” according to DHS.

The “non-invasive” claim might be a bit of a stretch. A DHS report issued last December outlined some of the possible technological features of FAST, which include “a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor” to measure “heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia,” a “remote eye tracker” that “uses a camera and processing software to track the position and gaze of the eyes (and, in some instances, the entire head),” “thermal cameras that provide detailed information on the changes in the thermal properties of the skin in the face,” and “a high resolution video that allows for highly detailed images of the face and body … and an audio system for analyzing human voice for pitch change.”
…

 
I’ll stop quoting here and urge you to go and read about this mind boggling plan. Once, if, when, it kicks in you may want to think twice before consuming your daily triple shot lattes before your departures. Ladies, you may want to plan departure dates based on your monthly cycle, since some of us know how our body temperature and blood pressure tend to fluctuate crazily during certain times of the month; those of you going through pre-menopause or menopause, you may want to consider not flying all together… I mean come on people; is this for real??!!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Once Upon a Time a General…

Once upon a time there was an Afghani general named Abdul Rahim Wardak. He had studied in both US and Egyptian military schools before joining the army in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, a few years after he joined the army, he decided to defect and joined the Mujahideen movement. We don’t know exactly who in the United States gave him the order to defect, because no one is willing to go on record. However, we know very well that due to their fight against the Communist Soviet Union, the Mujahideen were significantly financed, armed, and trained by the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, along with several other not as significant nations. We also know that back then, when we were supporting, financing, training and cheering for the Mujahideen as ‘freedom fighters,’ those labeled today as terrorist evil-doer radicals, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, were viewed and treated as our allies and entourage. 

Now, back to our General. He joined the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan arm of the Mujahideen and fought against the Soviets. Interestingly, during those years, the mid to late 80s,  our general Wardak was brought to the United States and coached to testify before the US Congress; not once but several times. He was even flown to the US once to receive medical treatment for a wound he received from a scud missile. I am sure you are savvy enough to know that this was considered ‘highly special’ treatment for a Mujahideen fighter in Afghanistan. Our general was truly loved when it came to our CIA and certain high-level people within the Reagan Administration.

So how good of a military officer was Mr. Wardak? Not a good one – and this assessment seems to be pretty much unanimous. In fact, this is how he’s been known in that part of the world: “… in the 1980’s, he had garnered a reputation as one of the least accomplished commanders of the American-backed Mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation forces.” If you enter the circles within the Washington DC Afghani diaspora, and if you get close enough to hear the hushed comments, you’d be able to make out words like ‘corrupt,’ ‘ties to drug-running warlords,’ or ‘Afghan mafia.’ But for some ‘mysterious’ reasons our Central Intelligence Agency and hard-core Neocons within our foreign policy arena had deemed this general ultra special and important…

*And the story continues…

Once Upon a Time a Godmother of Neocons…

Once Upon a time there was a woman named Jeane Kirkpatrick, who didn’t really look like a woman but it never mattered, in fact it may have helped her. Jeane was a Democrat, and then, later, she became a Republican. She was on President Reagan’s National Security Council, on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and of course the Defense Policy Review Board. She became the US Ambassador to the United Nations; appointed by President Reagan. Ms. Kirkpatrick was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). She was a hard-core anti-communist, and she was a hawk. But most importantly, she was the woman whom people considered and labeled the Godmother of Neocons.

Ms. Kirkpatrick died in 2006, and here is a widely witnessed account of those who shed the most tears:

“Until the end, she was a cherished mentor to the neo-conservatives. John Bolton – Bush’s outgoing ambassador to the UN and of all her successors there the one who most closely resembled her – publicly wept as he paid tribute to her last week. Perhaps the tears were at the rubble of his President’s Iraq policy, but also for a remarkable woman.”

Before her death, her final ‘known’ government mission was to help pave the way for our preemptive attack on Iraq in 2002:

“…in a final mission, kept secret until her death, to meet Arab envoys in Geneva in 2003 to win them over to the impending invasion of Iraq. Her instructions were to argue that pre-emptive war was justified. But Kirkpatrick knew it wouldn’t work. Instead she made the case that Saddam Hussein had flouted the UN too long and too often.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick, true to her Grand Neocon title, was a strong believer of ‘the end justifies the means.’ She vehemently disagreed with Secretary of State George Schultz on the Iran-Contra affair, in which she supported skimming money off arms sales to fund the Contras. Everything was kosher to her, whether drugs or illegal arms sales, as long as these means served what she considered to be the goal; an imperial US.

Ms. Kirkpatrick similarly, in fact more vehemently, supported our operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 80s where we backed and trained the Mujahideen against the Soviets.  Just like what we sanctioned in Nicaragua, in Afghanistan all deals, no matter how insane or unsavory, were means’ to justify the end. This was one of her mottos most cherished by the hawks and the neocons:

“Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.”

What went unsaid in that quote, but meant and practiced was: Radical Islam, the Taliban, their Madrasas, their terrorizing of women, their heroin business…are perfectly all right, as long as they are on our side, in our camp, on our payroll, instead of on the other side.

Following her ‘direct’ government career, she returned to academia at Georgetown University where for some reason many well-known Neocons, such as James Woolsey and Douglas Feith, chose to flock. And very characteristically our Jeane Patrick continued her contribution to the practice of Neocon-ism…

*And the story continues…

Once Upon a Time a spook…

Once upon a time there was man named Milton Bearden, commonly referred to as Milt. He spent his early years in the state of Washington where his father worked on the Manhattan Project. After a few years with the US Air Force he joined the CIA in 1964.

Milt was CIA’s chosen man for their operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, from 1986 to 1989, when our country was supporting the Mujahideen, he was one of their main men on the ground, working with this coalition of the Taliban, the Saudis and their main man Bin Laden, and the Pakistani ISI. The Director of the CIA, William Casey, was the one who appointed Milt Bearden for this task. Here is Milt’s own words describing his importance in a not very unusual ex-CIA conceited manner:

“For Casey Afghanistan seemed to be possibly one of the keys and so he tapped me one day to go. he said ‘I want you to go to Afghanistan, I want you to go next month and I will give you what ever you need to Win.” To win, yeah he said: “I want you to go out there and win” As opposed to ‘let’s go there and bleed these guys and make it be a Vietnam’, I want you to go and win and whatever you need you can have. He gave me the Stinger Missiles and a billion Dollars!”

He must have done extremely well since he was promoted to CIA Station Chief in Pakistan. In fact he must have done exceedingly well since he was later appointed the chief of the Soviet/East European Division during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and received three glowing medals from the CIA for services rendered.

Milt’s cushy CIA retirement and all those glowing medals must not have been enough, for he then engaged in frenzied marketing and self promotion to get himself entrenched in almost all major US networks and newspapers as a consultant, writer, advisor, and of course as a trusted source – a CIA source to provide quotes and information for scripts at the snap of a finger. He coauthored a book with New York Times reporter James Risen called The Main Enemy. Whether this kind of business arrangement, where a commonly used source partners up with a reporter, presents a conflict of interest or even could be called incestuous, is everyone else’s call.

Most interestingly Mr. Bearden seemed to have lured in the American mainstream media by presenting himself as an outspoken critique of the Bush White House Intelligence policies after the September 11 terrorists’ attack. He suddenly became a major spokesperson on ‘how we created this monster called Osama Bin Laden,’ and the nasty radical Taliban.  And the mainstream media couldn’t get enough of him. Ironically, he happened to be the man after William Casey and Neocons’ Jeane Kirkpatrick’s own hearts in creating the Bin Laden monster, bolstering the radical Taliban brand of Islamism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and kosherizing all dirty deeds as means to justify the end(s).  He didn’t get those medals or promotions for nothing!

Not only that, Mr. Bearden’s speeches and writings seemed to have received the approval of the CIA and the Bush administration. As we all know you don’t get to publish uncensored and unredacted books as an ex-CIA man unless they want you to. This didn’t seem to raise a single eyebrow in the US media or pseudo activist organizations and think tanks.

While cashing in on his CIA past and government approved public persona within the US media, he quietly began to court the Ex-Taliban carpetbagger crowd in Washington DC in order to tap in to the billions of dollars war market cookie jars…

*And the story continues…

The son, and then the circle all came together…

Our General Wardak disappeared from the Afghan scene at the beginning of the civil war in the 1990s. He brought his family to the United States where he settled comfortably with enough wealth from undetermined sources, and he enrolled his son, Hamed, in Georgetown University.

Hamed Wardak, a quite chubby and ambitious young man, arrived at Georgetown University, and by the time he got to his senior level he was taken under the wings of one of his professors as her protégé. That professor was none other than our Jeane Kirkpatrick, the proud Godmother of the Neocons. Our savvy readers will understand that this was not due to chance and Hamed’s stars being all aligned. After all, his General father had done his job well serving Kirkpatrick’s and other Neocons’ foreign policy objectives at all costs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As mentioned earlier, his General father was flown to the US several times and coached by this crowd to give speeches before the US Congress to obtain funds for their overt and covert operations involving the Saudis, Pakistanis and Taliban. So no, these relationships don’t evaporate and disappear. Wardak and his family were accommodated quite well after they were brought to the US, and the Neocons’ future plans for Afghanistan would have plenty of roles for the Wardak family to fill.

Wardak Junior was a known figure among the radical pro-Taliban sympathizers in Washington DC circles. Here are a few quotes from an excellent piece written on the Wardak(s) and Karzai(s):

“During this period, he flirted with pro-Taliban sympathies, due both to his ethnic Pashtun fervor and peer pressure from young DC-area extremists.

Gradually, however, Hamed came under the influence of Kirkpatrick’s philosophical soul mates, notably Marin Strmecki, a Republican essayist and political facilitator with the Smith Richardson Foundation. Strmecki worked at the Pentagon under Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, along with Lewis “Scooter” Libby – and Zalmay Khalilzad. It was during Hamed Wardak’s reappraisal of the world, via these American political heavyweights, that he came into contact with a group of upwardly-mobile players on Washington’s Afghan-American scene: the Karzais; specifically, two of the six Karzai boys – Qayum and Mahmood. Unlike their younger brother Hamid, who had spent much of his life in Pakistan, Mahmood and Qayum were accomplished US-based businessmen.”

The Karzai brothers took a great interest in Wardak Junior, and he enjoyed the benefits of the Karzais’ flashy and high-flying friends. After the September 11 Terror Attacks, the Karzais made Hamed the Vice President of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, which was founded by Mahmood Karzai. As I mentioned briefly in my piece, our Neocon Ex-Congressman Don Ritter happens to be the co-founder of this organization. Hamed was also appointed to an advisor’s post with President Karzai’s first Finance Minister, Ashraf Ghani. No small accomplishment for the barely 30 year old Hamed!

Hamed Wardak’s most productive venture in tapping into the US Defense Sector Pot(s) of Gold began with joining a Washington DC contracting firm, Technologists Inc., founded by Aziz Azimi, who happened to be a very close buddy of Qayum Karzai. Here is a further detail on this by e-Ariana:

“Hamed Wardak’s new alliances proved extraordinarily advantageous as George W. Bush launched his “war on terror,” particularly with Khalilzad and Strmecki enjoying direct access to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office.”

Do you want to check out the kind of contracts, the kind of millions, we are talking about with Technologists Inc.? Here is one for you:

Technologists, Inc., Rosslyn, Va., was awarded on Jan. 5, 2009, a $96,090,519 firm fixed price contract for the construction of an Afghanistan National Police National Training Center. Work will be performed in Maydan Wardak, Afghanistan, and is expected to be completed by Mar. 31, 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Web bids were solicited on Oct. 1, 2008, and 13 bids were received. U.S. Army Engineer District, Afghanistan, is the contracting activity (W917PM-09-C-0005).

That’s right. Just one of these contracts is worth nearly $100 million for connected Afghan carpetbaggers cashing in on wars suffered by ordinary American tax payers and US soldiers.

Back to the Wardaks and Karzais:

…

“By the time Khalilzad took up his ambassadorship to Kabul in Dec. 2004, Strmecki had been appointed Rumsfeld’s “Afghanistan Policy Co-ordinator.” That same month, Karzai removed his Minister of Defence, the Northern Alliance’s Mohammed Fahim, a Tajik. Faim’s replacement: Rahim Wardak.”

You heard it right. Our General Wardak was promoted and taken back to Afghanistan to serve in Karzai’s regime as the Minister of Defense. Was he given citizenship when he was brought back to the US to settle? No one is really talking. Did anyone in Afghanistan question having US citizens in their quasi democratic government posts? No one in the US media is reporting. If you are trusted within the Afghan diaspora in the DC area you’ll hear hushed comments about Wardak, his corrupt practices, and the rumors, fairly consistent rumors, of his close connections to the poppy world.

Back to Wardak Junior in Washington DC; With his dad now in Afghanistan as the Defense Minister, and with his Karzai partners and friends, he was busy running from one pot of gold to another:

“During this period, Hamed Wardak’s Washington DC-based firm, Technologists Inc. (Ti), benefited from several large contracts, some arranged directly with the US Defense Department, others via the Afghan Ministry of Defence. Ti’s website boasts that it was the first Afghan-American firm to be awarded a prime contract by the US government. Its portfolio has been fattened by a cornucopia of construction projects, including border crossing stations and the ANA’s Logistics and Command Headquarters, a counter-narcotics “campus” where the US Drug Enforcement Agency and its Afghan counterparts will be based [Emphasis Added] cell block renovations to Kabul’s huge Pul-i-Charkhi prison, and three industrial parks.”

Now recall the hushed voices about our General Wardak’s possible shady connections to heroin and mafia in Afghanistan among the Afghani diaspora in the Washington DC area. Now this same general happens to become the Minister of Defense, while his son runs companies with contracts for services rendered to our very own US Drug Enforcement Agency in Afghanistan, which is supposed to be fighting the heroin trade over there. Could it get more ridiculous and ironic than this?!

Of course it can. As I was working on this piece this New York Times headline popped up on my screen:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

I am not going to get side tracked and criticize this NY Times article and its timing. After all, Karzai’s heroin connection and mafia characters have been known for a long time. The New York Times piece is probably timed and written to serve a draft or new operation plan for Afghanistan where we’ll be installing another crook to replace Karzai, but this new crook will be handpicked by this administration and enrich their slate of contractors…

Okay, so now we have Hamed Wardak with his Defense Minister father’s rumored heroin past and present, we have his extremely close ties to the Karzais with their heroin and crime network and connections. In a good and just world this would mean the end of Wardak. But that’s not the kind of world we live in. Hamed and his companies and connections, both in Afghanistan and in the US, are still cashing in; big time.

Here is one of our characters who hasn’t made an appearance for several pages: Milt Bearden, the EX-CIA Rambo in Afghanistan in the 80s, the US media darling on Osama Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taliban…you name it, the shrewd self promoter with books and movies:

Milt Bearden must have been pretty familiar with our General Wardak since he was on the ground in Afghanistan serving his masters at the CIA and the Whitehouse, including the great advocator of ‘use any means,’ our Godmother of Neocons, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Operation Cyclone must certainly have brought him in contact with involved Taliban Generals, including our General, Osama Bin Laden, and other key ISI operators, and his dealings must certainly have included the major heroin operations tapped into to further fund these ‘freedom fighters.’ In fact, our Spook dealt extensively with Hekmatyar, who is considered one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Heroin Operator in Afghanistan – which supplies 90% of the world’s Heroin:

“One U.S. official who had considerable dealings with Mr. Hekmatyar was Milt Bearden, who during the Soviet occupation ran the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s covert program in Afghanistan. He says Mr. Hekmatyar struck him as “quirky and paranoid.””

Thus, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that our Ex-Spook took an interest in our General’s son, and translated this interest into a close business partnership when our young and chubby Hamed Wardak got closer and closer to big Pots of Gold in Washington DC and his father made it to the Defense Minister position in Afghanistan.

After Hamed Wardak left Technologists Inc. to go further in tapping the US Defense Contractor Gold Pots, and to set up various other front businesses in Afghanistan, many of which happen to be in security sectors, he formed a new front organization, Campaign for a US-Afghan Partnership. Guess who he appointed as the top man for the Board of this ambigious organization? That’s right, none other than our ex-spook, media supplier, Milton Bearden. Check out his glowing background listed on Hamed Wardak’s organization’s website: click here. What exactly this organization does, no one really knows, which should go as another credit to our Mr. Bearden’s CIA background in keeping things convoluted and secretive.

Rumors from the Ex-CIA community in the DC area point to another highly lucrative Wardak company paid by US tax payers, NCL, in Kabul, and hint that their buddy Milt may have been playing a major role there. Because of Mr. Bearden’s cozy relationships no one in the media has been looking for these deeper engagements and lucrative partnerships between him and Hamed Wardak.

With their intimate relationship and close ties with the Bush Whitehouse, especially Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s quarters, the Wardaks and Karzais ran from one pot of gold to another, filled their pockets and probably Swiss accounts, while the conditions kept worsening in Afghanistan, resulting in more civilian deaths and injured, and more US troop casualties there. Then, the Bush-Cheney era came to an end…

If you are holding your breath for our New President to act differently than his predecessor in enriching Wardaks-like carpetbagger war profiteers, go ahead – inhale and exhale. Hamed Wardak has been a supporter of both Hillary Clinton and President Obama, who between them received a total of $20,000 from Mr. Wardak in 2008. A naïve out of Washington person would scratch his head and ask ‘With all these ties, close connections and friendship with Bush Neocons such as Rumsfeld and Khalilzad, why the heck would he support and pay the Obama camp?’ Washington circle people would never ask such questions. They know very well how things are, that each establishment-based administration has its own set of neocons, hawks, and war profiteers.

Soon we’ll know who our new administration has in mind to replace Karzai’s regime. Will it be an insider like our General Wardak? Certainly not impossible. He’s been the man for decades, and they’ve invested a lot in him and his son, and enriched him and his family tremendously. Will it be another puppet just like Karzai but with a new face? Certainly possible. That would mean another group of carpetbagger war profiteers entering the market to grab the pots of gold financed by us, while the Karzais and Wardaks go away and enjoy their hundreds of millions of dollars stashed somewhere.

No matter what, with this kind of foundation, nothing will change for us, the ordinary Americans. Our tax dollars will go to the Wardaks or Wardaks-like parasites. Our soldiers will lose arms and legs, or their lives. The Afghani civilians will continue to suffer death, destruction, and chaos. Because the story of the General, his son, a spook, and the Godmother of Neocons, is only one of hundreds out there, and as long as we sit on the sideline, watch, and do nothing, there will be hundreds, or thousands more in this story, albeit with different faces and names.

We went to Washington to help launch the Afghan American Women’s Association established in honor of a lifetime of humanitarian achievements by Sima Wali. We came away with a clear picture that the women of Afghanistan will continue to have a strong, clear and uncompromising voice in Washington. In listening to the women of this Afghan/American partnership two things were clear: 1. No matter what happens with American foreign policy, Afghan/American women are not going back to the depredations visited upon them by a political system maddened by greed and its dreams of conquest. 2. Afghan/American women will no longer be fooled by politicians who promise democracy and reconstruction but deliver warlordism and corruption.

Our visit was also a chance to update first hand what was new and different in the administration’s AfPak policy from what had gone before. Washington has spent a lot of money in Afghanistan. American soldiers and civilians are dying there. October of this year has been the worst on record. But the debate, anchored as it is in Washington’s needs and perceptions and not Afghanistan’s, continues to circle the most critical issues without ever landing on solutions that might bring on a satisfactory close.

The U.S. has been at war in Afghanistan for eight years. But 9 months into the new administration Washington continues to plow along with a losing game plan and an absence of understanding about the nature of the war, how to end it, or even how to fight it.

The biggest part of the problem that Washington faces is Washington itself. It is now clearer than ever that Washington’s current policy derives from a military agenda and not a civilian one. In fact it may now be impossible for Washington to return to a government orchestrated strategy of nation-building anywhere after thirty years of privatized foreign policy and military buildup that favored profit driven development schemes at the expense of civil society. An entire industry now exists to lobby against any efforts to reverse the trend, change the status quo or even to make private contractors accountable for the taxpayer money they receive. A new book by Allison Stanger, titled “One Nation Under Contract,” outlines the dimensions of a problem where the private sector has become a “shadow government” operating outside the law with billions of federal dollars, but little to no accountability for how or where the money is spent. 

At the Pentagon the problem runs even deeper. The national security state built up during the cold war was designed to protect the US and the west from a Soviet threat. The perceptions created to convey the illusions of strength and invulnerability became a substitute reality to which all others defaulted. Over time, “cold” war became a new normal, rarely challenged by that other normal called reality. But at its core, the new normal was an illusion, based on a phony war and supported by the communal belief that it was better than the cost and terror of a real war that would actually be fought and perhaps lost.

The post cold war national security state on which America’s approach to Afghanistan is based never returned to reality once the cold war was over. In fact, the illusion had so enraptured those in power; they could neither foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union nor accept its demise. But Washington’s blind faith in the new normal disguised its flawed character and as the Clinton and Bush administrations built upon its illusory strength, the stage was set for failure.

That failure has finally occurred in Afghanistan and the consequences will be devastating yet Washington continues along in a dreamlike haze, narrowing the argument to simplistic Vietnam era clichés while the world moves on without it. According to well informed sources, the administration has pushed Hamid Karzai for the run-off election in the belief that it will legitimize his rule in order that General McChrystal can get his troops to go on fighting. What this ignores is that a corrupt, incompetent government stacked with Tajik warlords is abhorrent to everyone in Afghanistan – Pashtun and Tajik alike. 

Washington’s current policy may lead to outright civil war between the majority Pashtun population and the remnants of the so-called Northern Alliance of Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek tribes. Whether this is intended as an intentional prelude to partitioning Afghanistan and redrawing the map of Central Asia remains to be seen. But whatever the end result of Washington’s apparent confusion over policy in Afghanistan, it will have little success until the Afghan people and the population of Pakistan’s Western territories are brought politically into the decision making. Empowering the people of the region to seek positive change would disempower the Taliban and change the game. President Obama still has the credibility to do that, but his window of opportunity is closing fast.
 

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration.  Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media.