The World We Live In !!

Colonel Imam, 65, is scathing about Britain's move to buy off biddable insurgents and the US surge, warning that the Taleban are "fighting addicts

Perhaps no man alive knows Mullah Omar, his Taleban insurgents and the American military quite so well as “Colonel Imam”, a battle-creased Pakistani officer who wears a faded British paratrooper’s jacket and a turban.

As a top agent for the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, Colonel Imam recruited, trained and armed almost every one of Afghanistan’s prominent insurgents and warlords during the 1980s. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmed Shah Massoud and Jalaluddin Haqqani were all his charges or colleagues at one time.

“I have the Green Beret,” Colonel Imam smiled, recalling the US special forces qualification gained in Fort Bragg in 1973. “But I think this Taleban beret is better.”

He escorted Charlie Wilson, the Texan congressman who funnelled millions of dollars to the Mujahidin, into Afghanistan three times and once took the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, then the CIA’s Deputy Director, to a Mujahidin camp near the border. But his closest relationship was with Mullah Omar, the Taleban’s fugitive leader, whom he taught to fight and survive, and to bring down one superpower and tie down another, over 30 years of war. Read more…

Muslims are numerous but powerless. Divisions among Muslims, especially between Sunni and Shi’ites, have consigned the Muslim Middle East to almost a century of Western control. Muslims cannot even play together. The Islamic Solidarity Games, a regional version of the Olympics, which were to be held in April in Iran, have been cancelled, because the Iranians and the Arabs cannot agree on whether to call the body of water that separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf.

Muslim disunity has made it possible for Israel to dispossess the Palestinians, for the U.S. to invade Iraq, and for the U.S. to rule much of the region through puppets. For example, in exchange for faithful service, Egypt receives $1.5 billion a year from Washington, which enables President Mubarak to buy off opposition. The opposition had rather have the money than support the Palestinians. Therefore, Egypt cooperates with Israel and the U.S. in the blockade of Gaza.

Another factor is the willingness of some Muslims to betray their own kind for U.S. dollars. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman, head of the Foundation for Democracy, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”

by Paul Craig Roberts

Read more…

Less To Cheer

STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL, the famously self-controlled commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, could be forgiven if he let off an expletive when he heard that soldiers under his command had killed 27 civilians on Sunday February 21st. A missile strike on a three-vehicle convoy in an isolated area on the edge of the southern province of Uruzgan wrecked General McChrystal’s vigorous efforts to persuade Afghans that foreigners in their midst are striving to implement a counterinsurgency doctrine of “protecting the people”.

That is not how it looked to Saeed Zahir Zia, a local police chief, who said that he spent all day picking through the devastation to recover body parts and corpses, many of which were so badly mutilated that they were unrecognisable. The victims included women and children and were from the Hazara ethnic group, which is famously anti-Taliban. Read more…

Monday, February 01, 2010
By Amir Mir

LAHORE: Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.

The rapid increase in the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan can be gauged from the fact that only two such strikes were carried out in January 2009, which killed 36 people. The highest number of drone attacks carried out in a single month in 2009 was six, which were conducted in December last year. But the dawn of the New Year has already seen a dozen such attacks. Read more…

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

I often correspond with a long-time Washington DC operator named Leigh Ratiner, who spent 40 years in government, serving under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, with cabinet-level posts in the Defense Department, under the Secretary of the Interior, in the Department of Energy, and in the State Department. Usually I’m prompted to contact him while investigating this or that instance of criminality or stupidity in the federal government. We’re in conversation a lot. “Chris, no disrespect intended,” Leigh once wrote, “but I’m not sure yet that you truly understand how profoundly corrupt the government really is. Lying, perjury, devious deception, law breaking have been a constant pattern in the American government for several decades and have driven us to the point where it has become impossible for an intelligent person to trust the government.” Leigh sometimes goes on for pages like this.

In the annals of lying and devious deception we can now add what will hopefully be remembered as one of the foulest decisions – but not a surprising one – by the Supreme Court to be imposed on the American public, namely the majority opinion in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission. I’ll let the New York Times summarize: “Corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.” Or, better yet, as Leigh Ratiner puts it: “Obama’s failures amount to a thimble of sugar compared to this decision, which is equivalent to a truckload of oil barrels filled with rat poison. The spending limits the court overturned were the unlimited sums of money that Lockheed, Boeing or Bank of America can take out of the corporate treasury and give to NBC in exchange for a two minute spot attacking a candidate without the stockholders’ permission. This is gigantic.” Read more…

Slate | By William Saletan | 11 January 2010

Traitor, Bomber, Soldier, Spy

Stop crying “terrorism” every time we’re attacked.

Afghan police officers inspect the site of a blast in Khost province Photo: REUTERS

Two weeks ago, a Jordanian suicide bomber blew up seven CIA employees at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. The CIA called it a “terrorist attack.” So did the Associated Press in a report published in dozens of news outlets. Other journalists, analysts, commentators, and TV news anchors followed suit. In a Washington Post op-ed published yesterday, CIA Director Leon Panetta said of the fallen officers, “When you are fighting terrorists, there will be risks.”

Terrorists? No, sir. The bombing of the CIA base, like the November massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, was an act of war. It was also espionage. But it wasn’t terrorism. Terrorism targets civilians. The CIA officers killed at the Afghan base, like the soldiers shot down at Fort Hood, were not civilians. They were running a war.

According to the U.S. Code (Title 22, Chapter 38, Section 2656f), “the term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” That’s the definition we apply to other countries when we designate them as state sponsors of terrorism.

The Sept. 11 attacks, which used planes full of civilians to hit the World Trade Center, fit this definition. So did the attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. So did the Taliban’s 2008 bombing of a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. Read more…

Ray McGovern, former senior analyst at the CIA, discusses the rare outspoken exception to the subdued White House press corps, the Obama administration’s refusal to explain the motivations of terrorists, the lack of contextual explanation in US media where history begins anew with each terrorist attack and how the US is fighting battles that Israel started.

via Former CIA Analyst on How the American People are being Duped | America at War.