Tag Archives: Osama-Bin-Laden

Michael Snyder ~ Is Obama Starting A War With Syria Just To Distract Us From All The Scandals?

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The Economic Collapse blog June 13 2013

Well, isn’t that convenient?  At the moment when the Obama administration is feeling more heat then ever before, it starts another war.  Suddenly everyone in the mainstream media is talking all about Syria and not about the IRS scandal, Benghazi,NSA snooping or any of the other political scandals that have popped up in recent weeks.  As if on cue, Obama made headlines all over the globe on Thursday by claiming that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the rebels “multiple times”, and that the U.S. was now ready to do more to assist the rebels.  That assistance is reportedly going to include “military support” for the rebels and a no-fly zone over at least part of Syria is being discussed.  Without a doubt, these are acts of war, and this conflict is not going to end until Assad has been ousted.  But Assad will not go quietly.  And all it would take is for Assad to fire a couple of missiles at Tel Aviv for a huge regional war to erupt in the Middle East.  And what happens if Russia or China decides to get involved in the conflict in Syria?  Obama is playing with fire, but he has shown again and again that he is willing to do virtually anything if it will benefit him politically.

As far as the Obama administration is concerned, there is no such thing as a coincidence.  The timing of this announcement regarding Syria was not an accident.  If Obama wanted to use chemical weapons as an excuse to go after Syria he could have done it weeks ago, or he could have waited several more months before taking action.  He chose to do it right now for a reason, and hopefully the American people will be able to see right through this.

So exactly what are we going to be doing for the Syrian rebels?  Well, we will definitely be arming them and training them.  And it is probably reasonable to assume that there will be American “advisers” on the ground inside Syria helping to organize the Syrian resistance.  In fact, according to Debka, a large U.S. Marine force has already been deployed to the Jordanian border with Syria.

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Tony Cartalucci ~ Hypocrisy: US Arms Al Qaeda In Syria, Mass-Slaughters Civilians In Afghanistan

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theintelhub.com February 13 2013

Image: Just some of the corporate members of the US-Qatar Business Council, whose president just so happens to sit on the same board of directors of the Middle East Policy Center as Karen AbuZayd, co-author of one of many conveniently timed UN Human Rights Council reports on Syria.

AFP has reported that a recent NATO airstrike in Afghanistan has killed over 10 civilians in an all-too-familiar headline glossed over by the Western media in an exercise of both depravity and hypocrisy.

RT’s article, “NATO airstrike kills 10 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children – officials,” notes in particular that up to 11,864 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2011, and that civilian deaths before 2007 were not even tracked by the UN.

Such facts reveal alarming hypocrisy as the UN keeps almost daily, inflated tallies of civilian deaths elsewhere, in particular, in nations like Libya and Syria where Western interests have been heavily involved in regime change and in dire need of manipulating public perception worldwide.

The United Nations had in fact pieced together a dubious report crafted from “witness accounts” compiled not in Syria, or even beyond its borders in a refugee camp, but instead, in Geneva by “witnesses” supplied by the so-called Syrian “opposition.”

Worse yet, that UN report was co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council.

Its board of directors includes Exxon men, CIA agents, representatives of the Saudi Binladin Group (Osama Bin Laden’s family business), former ambassadors to Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, Al Jazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

In other words, the very underwriters of the armed militancy that is consuming Syria are sitting along side the head of the UN commission producing reports portraying the Syrian government as guilty of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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Naomi Wolf ~ JSoc: Obama’s Secret Assassins

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guardian.co.uk February 3 2013

The president has a clandestine network targeting a ‘kill list’ justified by secret laws. How is that different than a death squad?

US Navy Seals on a night mission in the Middle East. Seal Team 6, which killed Osama bin Laden, is a secret elite unit that works closely with the CIA. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror”. It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation’s contemporary history.

Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.

Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.

Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes.

JSoc morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more “flexibility” to expand its operations globally.

JSoc operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States. In the words of Wired magazine:

“JSoc operates with practically no accountability.”

Scahill calls JSoc the president’s “paramilitary”. Its budget, which may be in the billions, is secret.

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ Agenda Prevails Over Truth

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Paul Craig Roberts | December 28 2012

In the Western world truth no longer has any meaning. It its place stands agenda.

Agenda is all important, because it is the way Washington achieves hegemony over the world and the American people. 9/11 was the “new Pearl Harbor” that the neoconservatives declared to be necessary for their planned wars against Muslim countries. For the neoconservatives to go forward with their agenda, it was necessary for Americans to be connected to the agenda.

President George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neil, said that prior to 9/11 the first cabinet meeting was about the need to invade Iraq.

9/11 was initially blamed on Afghanistan, and the blame was later shifted to Iraq. Washington’s mobilization against Afghanistan was in place prior to 9/11. The George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) occurred on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Every military person knows that it is not possible to have mobilization for invading a country half way around the world ready in three weeks.

The Orwellian “PATRIOT Act” is another example of planning prior to the event. This vast police state measure could not possibly have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. The bill was already written, sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity. Why? Who wrote it? Why has there been no media investigation of the advanced preparation of this police state legislation?

Evidence that responses to an event were planned prior to what the government said was a surprise event does suggest that the event was engineered to drive an agenda that was already on the books.

Many on the left-wing are immune to evidence that is contrary to the official 9/11 story, because for them 9/11 is refreshing blow-back from the oppressed. That the oppressed struck back is more important to the left-wing than the facts.

The right-wing can’t let go of the fantasy either. America in all its purity and wonderfulness was attacked because evil Muslims cannot stand our goodness. “They hate us for our freedom and democracy.” The right-wing vision of a great and good America wronged is essential to the right-wing’s sustaining ideology, an ideology that is prepared to commit violence in order to prove its righteousness.

Implausible stories can be useful to other agendas and thus be sustained by their use in other arguments. For example, the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama bin Laden is central to Charles Pierson’s story in the November 16-30, 2012, CounterPunch in which Pierson writes about the growing strains on the US-Pakistan alliance. Pierson writes that bin Laden resided next to Pakistan’s largest military academy and that bin Laden “did go next door every Wednesday to use the pool. If the Pakistani government was unaware of bin Laden’s presence this would mark an intelligence failure of heroic proportions.”

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ The 11th Anniversary Of 9/11

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Paul Craig Roberts | September 11 2012

Paul Roberts ~ The article below was written for the Journal of 9/11 Studies for the eleventh anniversary of September 11, 2001, the day that terminated accountable government and American liberty. It is posted here with the agreement of the editors.

In order to understand the improbability of the government’s explanation of 9/11, it is not necessary to know anything about what force or forces brought down the three World Trade Center buildings, what hit the Pentagon or caused the explosion, the flying skills or lack thereof of the alleged hijackers, whether the airliner crashed in Pennsylvania or was shot down, whether cell phone calls made at the altitudes could be received, or any other debated aspect of the controversy.

You only have to know two things.

One is that according to the official story, a handful of Arabs, mainly Saudi Arabians, operating independently of any government and competent intelligence service, men without James Bond and V for Vendetta capabilities, outwitted not only the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, along with all security agencies of America’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad. Not only did the entire intelligence forces of the Western world fail, but on the morning of the attack the entire apparatus of the National Security State simultaneously failed. Airport security failed four times in one hour. NORAD failed. Air Traffic Control failed. The US Air Force failed. The National Security Council failed. Dick Cheney failed. Absolutely nothing worked. The world’s only superpower was helpless at the humiliating mercy of a few undistinguished Arabs.

It is hard to image a more far-fetched story–except for the second thing you need to know: The humiliating failure of US National Security did not result in immediate demands from the President of the United States, from Congress, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from the media for an investigation of how such improbable total failure could have occurred. No one was held accountable for the greatest failure of national security in world history. Instead, the White House dragged its feet for a year resisting any investigation until the persistent demands from 9/11 families for accountability forced President George W. Bush to appoint a political commission, devoid of any experts, to hold a pretend investigation.

On 9/11 Doubts Were Immediate

On September 11, 2001, a neighbor telephoned and said, “turn on the TV.” I assumed that a hurricane, possibly a bad one from the sound of the neighbor’s voice, was headed our way, and turned on the TV to determine whether we needed to shutter the house and leave.

What I saw was black smoke from upper floors of one of the World Trade Center towers. It didn’t seem to be much of a fire, and the reports were that the fire was under control. While I was trying to figure out why every TV network had its main news anchor covering an office fire, TV cameras showed an airplane hitting the other tower. It was then that I learned that both towers had been hit by airliners.

Cameras showed people standing at the hole in the side of the tower looking out. This didn’t surprise me. The airliner was minute compared to the massive building. But what was going on? Two accidents, one on top of the other?

The towers—the three-fourths or four-fifths of the buildings beneath the plane strikes–were standing, apparently largely undamaged. There were no signs of fire except in the vicinity of where the airliners had hit. Suddenly, one of the towers blew up, disintegrated, and disappeared in fine dust. Before one could make any sense of this, the same thing happened to the second tower, and it too disappeared into fine dust.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6alf9_xswA

The TV news anchors compared the disintegration of the towers to controlled demolition. There were numerous reports of explosions throughout the towers from the base or sub-basements to the top. (Once the government put out the story of terrorist attack, references to controlled demolition and explosions disappeared from the print and TV media.) This made sense to me. Someone had blown up the buildings. It was completely obvious that the towers had not fallen down from asymmetrical structural damage. They had blown up.

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ Friday’s Jobs Report: More Lies From “Our” Big Brother

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Paul Craig Roberts | August 4 2012

In his report on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs and unemployment report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes: “The July employment and unemployment numbers published today, August 3rd, were worthless and likely misleading. . . . Suspecting at one time that the jobs numbers were being rigged against him by his own Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), President Richard M. Nixon proposed a new approach to reporting the numbers. Although the proposed changes never were implemented, several decades later the BLS adopted reporting methods that were somewhat parallel to the late president’s thinking.”

I will spare the readers an explanation of Williams’ account of the manipulation that is occurring as it is too arcane for the general reader.

Instead, Let’s just apply common sense. According to the BLS, there were 163,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs created in July. This figure is about 13,000 more jobs than is needed to keep pace with population growth. Therefore, the unemployment rate should have declined fractionally. Instead, the unemployment rate (U3) rose from 8.2% to 8.3%.

In case you missed the point, new jobs, a net figure, rose and so did the unemployment rate!

Moreover, the alternative, but much less reported, jobs report from the Household Survey found that the economy lost 195,000 jobs in July.

The government that lies to you about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about Iraq’s al Qaeda connections, about the Taliban in Afghanistan, about Osama bin Laden, about Libya and Gadhafi, about Iranian nukes, about Syria, about Pakistan, about Yemen and Somalia, about Bradley Manning, about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, indeed about everything under the sun, also lies to you about jobs, unemployment, economic recovery, GDP growth, 9/11, the “terrorist threat,” everything. Try to find anything that the government has said over the past 6 presidential terms that is not a lie.

Other than some minor insignificant detail, “your” government has been consistently lying to you about everything of importance.

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Gordon Duff ~ America, The Society Of Deception, Hard Evidence Of Mass Mind Control

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Veterans Today | July 27 2012 | Thanks, Laura

Evidence on Why Americans Are So Gullible

Oswald, November 22, 1963, Watching The Kennedy Assassination From The Sidewalk

I will be featuring several videos.  I know that sitting through a video isn’t always considered worthwhile when more worthwhile pursuits are available.  Thus, I will try to catch your attention with a “shortie” and hope you can find time for the others.

What is at stake is your own ability to make rational judgements and simply making all of us more capable human beings.  There is a reason for being “more capable” as we have proven, beyond any dispute to have no sense whatsoever.

Americans race from one series of NWO (I refuse to define what this means) hand fed conspiracy “bull” to another with mindless pap in the middle peddled as either mainstream news or commentary.

A blanket statement I will make is simple, if you see it, it is a lie. Video one:

If you made it through the four minutes, you saw the mainstream media coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. This is what remembering “news” that you have been conditioned to forget has done:

  • The US Department of Justice admits the Murrah Building was destroyed by explosives, not a truck bomb.
  • You watch while multiple unexploded devices are defused and removed from the building.
  • Later videos and the tale of Tim McVeigh and the Michigan Militia is a fairy tale made up by the FBI

Here is the rub; 20 million people saw this coverage, at the time or on websites. Yet, when Tim McVeigh was executed, 20 million people didn’t show up complaining that the execution was a farce.

If something this simple can be done to America, lies this public, and we have several similar that cover 9/11, including the arrests of the bombing suspects, and we don’t mean “hijackers,” themselves….

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Laura Tyco ~ Former Head Of Star Wars Program Says Cheney Main 9/11 Suspect

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2012 Indy Info | June 20 2012

Official version of events a conspiracy theory, says drills were cover for attacks

The former head of the Star Wars missile defense program under Presidents Ford and Carter has gone public to say that the official version of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory and his main suspect for the architect of the attack is Vice President Dick Cheney.

Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret. flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is the recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President’s Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers Gold Medal (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His Ph.D. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech. He chaired 8 major international conferences, and is one of the country’s foremost experts on National Security.

Bowman worked secretly for the US government on the Star Wars project and was the first to coin the very term in a 1977 secret memo. After Bowman realized that the program was only ever intended to be used as an aggressive and not defensive tool, as part of a plan to initiate a nuclear war with the Soviets, he left the program and campaigned against it.

In an April 4, 2006 interview with The Alex Jones Show aired nationally on the GCN Radio Network, Bowman (pictured below right) stated that at the bare minimum if Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were involved in 9/11 then the government stood down and allowed the attacks to happen. He said it is plausible that the entire chain of military command were unaware of what was taking place and were used as tools by the people pulling the strings behind the attack.

Bowman outlined how the drills on the morning of 9/11 that simulated planes crashing into buildings on the east coast were used as a cover to dupe unwitting air defense personnel into not responding quickly enough to stop the attack.

“The exercises that went on that morning simulating the exact kind of thing that was happening so confused the people in the FAA and NORAD….that they didn’t they didn’t know what was real and what was part of the exercise,” said Bowman

“I think the people who planned and carried out those exercises, they’re the ones that should be the object of investigation.”

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ Are Americans Catching On, Waking Up, Unplugging?

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Paul Craig Roberts |  May 18 2012

In response to the question in the title I can report that most of my readers are. Almost everyone got the point of the last column. They see the absurdity of the government’s claim that the identity of the tough, macho Navy Seals, who allegedly murdered Osama bin Laden, has to be kept secret in order to protect our fierce warriors from reprisals from Muslim terrorists, while those government officials responsible for the torture and deaths of large numbers of Muslims can walk around, identity known, unprotected and safe.

A few members of Congress are also awake, but not very many. Indeed, we are losing two of the most aware–Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Kucinich was redistricted in order to get rid of his independent voice. He carried 75% of the votes from that part of his old district that was included in his new one, but the new voters lacked the intelligence to vote for him. Ron Paul, in our time of tribulation, tried for the Republican presidential nomination on a platform of saving the US Constitution, but those who voted in Republican primaries weren’t interested in saving the US Constitution.

Now we are down to US Rep. Walter Jones. Initially, Jones was a member of the warmonger crowd. He was angered when the French government cast doubt on the George W. Bush regime’s reasons for the need for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jones said at that time that he was renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries.”

Jones unplugged from the Matrix and has been sentient for some time. Recently the tyrant Obama and the government operative Panetta, a political whore who has been in a variety of government positions and is currently Secretary of Warmongering, announced publicly that, the US Constitution notwithstanding, the executive branch no longer needed the authority of Congress to go to war. In our globalist existence, the authority for the US to initiate hostilities against another country comes from the UN, declared Obama and Panetta. If the executive branch can persuade or bribe the UN to give a war OK, Congress is no longer relevant.

This was too much for the awakened US Rep. Walter Jones. He has introduced House Congressional Resolution 107, which clearly states that the president’s use of US military in an act of aggression without the consent of Congress is an impeachable offense.

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ Does The West Have A Future?

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Paul Craig Roberts | May 10 2012

Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they build one, they probably built more.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder woman and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect–what, fake plots? In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives.

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Alex Jones ~ Obama to Grandstand Over Boogie Man Osama’s Demise

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 TheAlexJonesChannel | April 29 2012

Alex Jones focuses in on the crumbling government narratives and the known liars patching them together, including the on-going hoax surrounding the account we’ve been given of boogie man Osama’s demise. Barack Obama is poised to grandstand over the alleged death of Bin Laden on the May Day anniversary celebrations traditionally shared by pagans, socialists and the Illuminati in a lead up to his re-election bid for 2012. Meanwhile, House committee members led by Rep. Darrell Issa are making preparations to slap contempt charges on Attorney General Eric Holder over his role in covering up the Fast & Furious scandal and providing Congress with false information and misleading statements. Also, even establishment lapdog publications like the New York Times now admit the extensive role of the FBI in setting up alleged terror plots, often admittedly using entrapment to frame patsies as would be bombers in the public’s mind.

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Charles P. Pierce ~ Why the Hell Are We in Afghanistan?

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Esquire Magazine | RS_News | April 16 2012

OPINION ~ The attacks, they said, were “orchestrated.” Or, if the people reporting them were being particularly precise, the attacks were “carefully orchestrated.” The order of the adverbs is the order of battle. In Kabul on Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked the Afghan parliament building, and several embassies, and a NATO base. There also were attacks in the provinces. Those people old enough to remember the Tet Offensive can be excused if they mention the obvious parallels. Whatever its historical ambiguity as a military operation, Tet was a mind-quake in the United States. It forced the country to face squarely the sheer mendacity of its own government’s statements about the war as a war. It redefined for the United States what “winning” in Vietnam meant and it redefined it as an impossibility. In Afgantsy, his admirably lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.

But the fact is that, in terms of the domestic reaction it provoked, Tet was closer to a beginning than it was to an end. The war would grind on for seven more years, two years longer than the Americans chose to stay with it. The domestic antiwar movement was just building toward a crescendo that few people could imagine; the shootings at Kent State were still two years away. Lyndon Johnson was still president, and the presumptive nominee of his party. Nixon was still something of an underdog. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. – they were still alive. The Vietnam War was just beginning to reach all corners of American society like a dark, living thing with a thousand faces.

Now, though, we’ve been in Afghanistan for 11 years – for 3,844 days, for nearly 520 billion dollars – and the war is less of a presence in our lives than Hilary Rosen is. The country has soured on the war; in an ABC-Washington Post poll taken two weeks ago, 66 percent of the respondents said they thought the war was not worth fighting. At the end of March, a CNN poll showed 72 percent of the people polled disapproved of the war. What happened in Kabul over the weekend was not Tet because Tet was the beginning of something, and the attacks on Sunday were not. What happened in Kabul was not Tet because there is no sign yet that there is the political will in this country of ours to put its money where its polling mouth is. The issues in the election are jobs and the economy, not the suppurating business in which the country never heavily invested its time or its attention anyway. It has been a war in a bell jar. It was conducted off the books and (relatively, but not really) on the cheap. It was such a secondary thing that, when George W. Bush and the unspeakable Richard Cheney wanted to gin up a case for war in Iraq, they were able to strip the military in Afghanistan and hardly anyone noticed or cared, except the people who had to live with the consequences in the field. It is shapeless now, with no discernable beginning, middle, or end. With Iraq wound down, there are rockets being fired at the parliament building, and the most basic questions are not being asked.

What in the hell are we doing over there anymore?

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Chris Hedges ~ Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

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Chris Hedges | Truthdig | January 16 2012

Chris Hedges

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Section 1031 of the bill defines a “covered person”—one subject to detention—as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”

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