By Dave Lindorff (with apologies to Clement Clark Moore)

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the land
Not a creature was stirring in Afghanistan.
The bedrooms were bunkered with piles of hard stones
To protect from attacks by the Predator drones.
The children were huddled, afraid, in their beds
While visions of night raiders danced in their heads.

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

Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the
Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime
Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain
is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British
leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in
2003.

Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday,
news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that
the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the
public about the country’s involvement in war planning.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published
documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British
special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been
instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”

By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace
Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop
level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the
ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American
war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western
world as Armistice Day.