Al Qaeda

By Dave LIndorff

There are so many things wrong with Obama’s “New and Improved”
Afghanistan War that it’s hard to know where to begin, but I guess the
place to start is with his premise.

If America needs to be fighting in Afghanistan because Al Qaeda
planned and launched the 9-11 attacks from there back in 2001, as the
president claimed in his lackluster address to the cadets at West Point
last week, then we would have to assume either that Al Qaeda is still
there, or that if we were not there fighting, that Al Qaeda would be
back to plan more attacks.

By Dave Lindorff

Nobody in the corporate media mentions it, but the war in
Afghanistan which President Barack Obama just ramped up by 50% this
year, with the dispatch, first of 17,000 troops last spring and now
with another 30,000 troops, to begin deployment on Christmas, is being
fought on the shaky legal basis of a hastily passed Authorization for
the Use of Military Force (AUMF) voted by Congress back in October
2001, more than three years before Obama was even elected to the Senate.

That AUMF was the handiwork of President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney, and it was rammed through House and Senate with
almost no debate in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and then used to
justify most of the subsequent assaults on the Constitution and Bill of
Rights that are still haunting America and the world today.

By Dave LIndorff

Merry Xmas Jarheads!! The Man of Peace, Nobel Laureate-to-be
President Barack Obama, your latest commander-in-chief, is going to be
shipping you out as a holiday gift to the people of Afghanistan.

You will be delivering bullets and bombs, with my name and the name
of other American taxpayers on them, to the long-suffering people of
Afghanistan by December 25, according to press reports ahead of the Mr.
Hope and Change’s planned nationwide speech tonight.

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also add 74,000 private contractors who are doing jobs normally done by uniformed military, and about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and Australia. That’s 164,000 foreign soldiers fighting against Taliban fighters.

By Dave Lindorff

 When doctors started reporting that some of the victims of the US bombing of several villages in Farah Province last week—an attack that left between 117 and 147 civilians dead, most of them women and children—were turning up with deep, sharp burns on their body that “looked like” they’d been caused by white phosphorus, the US military was quick to deny responsibility.

US officials—who initially denied that the US had even bombed any civilians in Farah despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including massive craters where houses had once stood—insisted that “no white phosphorus” was used in the attacks on several villages in Farah.

Official military policy on the use of white phosphorus is to only use the high-intensity, self-igniting material as a smoke screen during battles or to illuminate targets, not as a weapon against human beings—even enemy troops.

by Dave Lindorff

In reversing himself and declaring that the US government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the US military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

It may well be that, as Obama says, release of those photos could lead to anger in the Islamic world and perhaps to recruitment gains among groups like Al Qaeda that are attacking American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but this is only true because at the same time, the Obama administration is opposing taking any legal action against the people who authorized and promoted that torture.

By Dave Lindorff

We’re been here before, many times.

The US causes massive civilian deaths through its indiscriminate use of heavy air power, and then tries to claim it’s the enemy’s fault for “hiding” among the civilians and “using them as shields.”

In Vietnam, where the US was fighting against a local revolutionary movement that was seeking to overthrow the puppet regime backed by America, American planes routinely bombed and napalmed villages, claiming that the Viet Cong were hiding amongst the peasants. Women, old men and children would die in droves—several million of them by the time that war was over--and we’d be told it was all the fault of the Communists, who, we were told, had no regard for innocent life.