Cameron in Afghanistan - "on 911 when the twin towers were blown up"

Our shiny new PM did the first of his obligatory 'visit the troops in Afghanistan' on Friday last - 11 June.

(Pictured right in his desert warfare attire, looking suitably  grim and determined.)

All the usual cringe-inducing stuff - although at least he refrained from being pictured with a rictus grin on his face sitting awkwardly behind a machine gun in an attack helicopter, per his predecessor - but some equally crass stuff nonetheless.

Much of it was devoted to telling his audience how wonderfully heroic they are. Aangirfan has a superb skit on it here - juxtaposing his appeal for them to help him

" ....create a new atmosphere in our country, an atmosphere where we back and revere and support our military.”

and telling them

".... I want to put YOU front and centre of our national life again"

- with pictures of Adolph Hitler and his generals patronising their 'Hitler Youth' with similar hyperbole.

No doubt deeply offensive to those schooled in respect and reverence for their 'betters', but laser accurate analogies that make a telling point.

And the most deeply Freudian of Freudian slips - or should that be "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" ?

"... and its worth remembering why we're here why we're fighting - what this is all about. This not a war of choice, it is a war of necessity; this not a war of occupation, it's a war of obligation.

On 9/11, WHEN THE TWIN TOWERS WERE BLOWN UP

and so many BRITISH people died as well as Americans, almost every single person that took part in that attack was trained here in Afghanistan by al Qaeda ...."

Followed by more deeply patronising 'Santa Claus and the Tooth fairy' stuff about destroying their bases helping the Afghans to look after themselves before "going home with our heads held high"  etc etc.

God we're a wonderful country eh?

The brief 911 reference is on You Tube here

For those with a strong stomach, a video of the entire speech proudly adorns the Number 10 Downing Street web site here. The 911 bit is around 3 minutes in. It is an object lesson in what is required of our sock-puppet politicians - and David Cameron demonstrates just how much of a master sock-puppet he really is.

Gun Sights for Jesus

US military personnel taking aim at 'the enemy' with their fancy Trijicon ACOG gun sights can do so secure in the knowledge that they are 'shooting for Jesus'. May be that will make the more religiously-inclined among them feel better about killing 'Ragheads'; but what of the locals they claim to be training to do the job for themselves?

The picture is of a group of them - no doubt devout Muslims all - being trained with 'Jesus rifles'. Wonder how they're going to feel about that when they find out?

My guess is that those doing the training will have good reason to feel even less secure in the loyalty and reliability of their charges than they do already.

Stupid? - Pig-bloody-ignorant? - Is there a a word or phrase in the English language that can adequately describe the insufferable sanctimonious arrogance of the US Military, its sponsors and suppliers?

This from ABC News:

... with additional pictures here

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as “the light of the world.” John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions “have always been there” and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is “not Christian.” The company has said the practice began under its founder, Glyn Bindon, a devout Christian from South Africa who was killed in a 2003 plane crash.
The company’s vision is described on its Web site: “Guided by our values, we endeavor to have our products used wherever precision aiming solutions are required to protect individual freedom.”
“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”
Spokespeople for the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps both said their services were unaware of the biblical markings. They said officials were discussing what steps, if any, to take in the wake of the ABCNews.com report. It is not known how many Trijicon sights are currently in use by the U.S. military.
The biblical references appear in the same type font and size as the model numbers on the company’s Advanced Combat Optical Guides, called the ACOG.
A photo on a Department of Defense Web site shows Iraqi soldiers being trained by U.S. troops with a rifle equipped with the bible-coded sights.
“It’s wrong, it violates the Constitution, it violates a number of federal laws,” said Michael “Mikey” Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group that seeks to preserve the separation of church and state in the military.
‘Firearms of Jesus Christ’
“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.
Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”
He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”
According to a government contracting watchdog group, fedspending.org, Trijicon had more than $100 million in government contracts in fiscal year 2008. The Michigan company won a $33 million Pentagon contract in July, 2009 for a new machine gun optic, according to Defense Industry Daily. The company’s earnings from the U.S. military jumped significantly after 2005, when it won a $660 million long-term contract to supply the Marine Corps with sights.
“This is probably the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,” said Weinstein. “It’s literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun against the people that we’re fighting. We’re emboldening an enemy.”

 

Adverts to help you out of that box - Not allowed in US

These advertisements are turning heads in various UK airports through December and January. Not allowed in the US of course. Can't have people being encouraged to think in the 'Land of the Free' now can we?

The full series including flash animations can be viewed here.

Should fear of an unknown menace detract from the presence of the world´s largest nuclear arsenal?

Is the ability to influence minds more potent than a deadly force?

If violence against civilians defines terrorism, then how do people in a war zone distinguish friendly forces?





Should a democratically elected government use violence to control a demonstration?

Victory in Afghanistan *!£x$*** ?

General Stanley McChrystal - Commander of US / 'International Security Assistance' Forces in Afghanistan and former commander of 'Special Forces' operations in Iraq - is a convert to 'winning hearts and minds' - or so he would have us believe.

Among one of multiple eye-popping items of double-speak, he had this to say to Stars and Stripes on New Years Day :

“What we are working on is that we’re really focusing on getting counterinsurgency, protecting the people, in the minds of the Afghan people. We are not viewed as occupiers now.”

In light of the relentless toll on the civilian population by the 'Point-Click-kill Brigade' - (or 'Remote Control Warriors' as the US military likes to call them) with their 'Reaper' and 'Predator' drones designed and named especially to 'win hearts and minds' it seems); not to mention Stanley's old buddies who, when there is a smigeon of doubt or they are simply too pumped up to think straight, are inclined to simply execute children in cold blood, Rick Rozoff's recourse to Fyodor Dostoevsky seems apposite:

"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else."

Conspiracy and the Morality of Politicians.

I've been a regular reader of Jean Michael Greer's Blog - 'The Archdruid Report' - since its inception. The guy has a handle on the implications of 'peak-oil/energy' for our globalised industrialised economic/political systems that produces regular keen insights into the way things are likely to unfold. His analyses of human societies' handling of unwelcome change is deeply thoughtful and clearly springs from extensive pondering of the issues it raises. Put all that together with with a certain gift of expression and you have a highly informative and readable blog.

So it happened that I was enjoying his latest piece when I was struck by a couple of jarring notes. They are the subject of this post.

Jean Michael is clearly a gentle man who seeks the best in people. I have no issue with that and admire him for it. But it was his repeated use of the term 'Conspiricist' and his assertion (to paraphrase) that politicians are broadly representative of the populations that they spring from - good and bad - that jarred.

Firstly the term 'Conspiracist'. Like other pejoratives, (Holocaust denier, Anti-semite, Communist, Fascist Flat-Earther etc) its use is generally intended as a debate changer by making those it is applied to appear 'beyond the pale' or 'ridiculous' and thus unworthy of a hearing. So, what is it supposed to mean? and why is it ranked right up there with those other powerful debate changers?

Jean Michael uses it to dismiss those who he sees as proposing wide-ranging or all-encompassing conspiracies as having a significant role in human affairs. Put that way it seems to me that the 'anti-conspiracists' are the ones with some explaining to do. At the most basic level of meaning, it really ought to be beyond dispute that conspiracy by constituent cliques and cabals prior to ANY type of  minuted, publicly accountable meeting or action - from the lowly local club right up to the highest reaches of government decision-making - is actually the driving force behind pretty much any and all collective human endeavour. IOW the Public Agenda is largely driven and determined by hidden, private agendas that are furthered by conspiracy. It is simply the way the world works.

So why is it that the terms 'conspiracist' and 'conspiracy theorist' have become such powerful debate-clinching pejoratives? 

Since it is invariably applied to those suggesting conspiracy and complicity by elements of the State in violence against its own people, I suggest that it has to do with peoples' overwhelming need to believe in the basic good intent of the State, its Government and Agencies. Granted they can be stupid, bungling, incompetent - even corrupt at times, but the idea that they would or could EVER act deliberately and with calculation against the interests of the general population, let alone be involved in persistent gross deception and/or deliberate acts of domestic terrorism, is simply too abhorrent and downright scary to countenance - And that in spite of overwhelming evidence that latter day Western Governments are literally up to their necks in all of those things.

Which brings me to the morality of politicians.

At the outset of a political career and discounting the allegiances that political dynasties impose, I guess the aggregate of wannabe politicians are indeed representative of the aggregate of the populations they spring from. Self-evident really and in that sense Jean Michael is quite right in his assertion. However, it is the attributes required to produces a 'successful' political career that are the nub of the matter. 'Successful' here meaning one that achieves ministerial/cabinet/Privy Council Rank in the UK or their equivalents elsewhere.

I suggest that, whatever genuinely altruistic public-service ideals may originally have motivated a politician or 'public servant', it is the progressive compromise and ultimate abandonment of any such principles that is the sine-qua-non of elevation to the high offices of State. The career progression of such an individual can be likened to the degrees of initiation bestowed by a Masonic Order. Following initial elevation by the masses, any further advancement is by invitation and appointment by superior initiates. Ability and merit may have a bearing on the matter but if so, it is ability and merit in the promotion of the official narrative of events and the State's part in them that is the crux of the matter. Such narratives effortlessly accommodate the divisions between the major political parties which boil down to little more than froth. But on their substance, no departure from orthodoxy is tolerated.

Thus, an alliance of superior, freedom-loving democracies is valiantly striving to fight the evil of terrorism and generally to do good in the world; with its heroic armed forces sacrificing their lives selflessly in multiple distant desert countries that we might avoid having to fight their malign evil in our own lands.

Take a step back and try to look at that as might a visitor from another world - or better yet as a young innocent staring at his naked Emperor. It is so self-evidently absurd as to be risible, yet it IS the basic official narrative of the early 21st century, lapped up by a fearful, insecure and gullible population. It is trotted out endlessly by mainstream political parties and media of ALL persuasions in the manner almost of a religious creed and woe-betide anyone - especially an ambitious politician - who dares question it.

It is the sordid realities behind that and other absurd 'official narratives' that the ambitious politician is gradually initiated into such that, by the time the higher degrees are reached, there is little of principle left in the initiate beyond defence  of the existing power structures at any price. My latest (somewhat seasonal) analogy for the relationship between the State and its general population is that, as a matter of rigid orthodoxy, communication is conducted around an intellectual and emotional framework not unlike that of a parent and 5 year old child but absent any altruistic/parental bond - such that the official narratives of most events of importance are massaged to a level of factual accuracy resembling those of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. In other words - in the interests of an over-riding imperative to maintain 'The System' and protect its corrupt, self-serving interests, we are lied to systematically as a matter of time-honoured and sanctified practice - PERIOD. In the immortal words of that venerable Irish muckraker Caud Cockburn therefore: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied".

On the narrow subject of 'conspiracy theories' and terrorism, I personally doubt more than about 10% of all so-called terrorist outrages in the West occur without deep complicity on the part of our SIS's and their 'assets' - its called 'calibrating the level of violence and tension the better to further the policy agenda and secure compliance from a fearful population',  and anyone who thinks that an exaggeration - or more likely absurd - should first of all read up on 'Operation Gladio' as a primer before moving onto the more outrageous stuff. The information is readily available; it is just studiously ignored, other than as the occasional butt of ritualised ridicule, by the MSM.

So personally and in spite of JMG's admonitions, I'll stick with 'conspiracy theory' rather than 'coincidence theory' as a consistently superior explanation of events, with States, their Governments and especially their SI Agencies - per Spymaster extraordinaire Robert Cecil and his foolhardy dissident victim Guy Fawkes - as the model conspirators.

Drone Wars or - The Point, Click, Kill Brigade

"The West did not conquer the world through the superiority of its ideas, values or religion, but through its superiority in applying organized violence....". So said Samuel P Huntington, military/political philosopher and inspiration of Neocons, in his seminal work "The Clash of Civilisations". Whilst the subject of this post is somewhat somewhat narrower, Huntington's aphorism sprang to mind whilst pondering how different things would be in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the Caucasus - indeed the whole world, were it not for the West's overwhelming superiority, both qualitative and quantitative, in military technology.

With the UK military death toll in Afghanistan now substantially higher than for Iraq we are subject to a constant steam of patriotic MSM coverage aimed at bolstering public support for our wars. From the ostentatious ra ra visits of national football and cricket team Reps to our boys (and girls) in Helmand, to the sombre long-focus shots of coffins descending from the rear of Hercules planes at RAF Lynam and the parades through nearby Wootton Bassett. We are regularly treated to earnest patronising lectures from General This and Colonel That on the valour of our service personal in their dual tasks of 'protecting our freedom' and 'helping the Afghans'. Last week there was a National service of commemoration for those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan - and all of this impossible to miss no matter your 'news' sources or degree of attention.

I have no issue with the valour of our service men and women. The loss of a single one is as tragic as is the loss of a son, daughter, husband or father to any family - including afghan and Iraqi families who God knows have suffered rather more than ourselves in these perpetual wars of ours. My issue is with our so-called leaders. In particular their bare-faced lies about the reasons for our involvement together with the sickeningly jingoistic/patriotic masquerade to which the grief of bereaved families is, as a matter of routine, harnessed by them.

However, be all that as it may (or rather IS), were our armed forces, valiant and professional though they undoubtedly are, to be deployed on equal terms with their alleged enemies - ie without monopolistic precision GPS guided air power and with arms limited to aging Kalshnikovs, RPG's and cannibalised mines from the Soviet era - it is unlikely their deployment would last long against similarly armed 'insurgents' who, for the most part, simply see themselves as defending their homeland against foreign invaders.

Which brings me to the 'Point, Click, Kill Brigade' or 'Remote Control Warriors' as the US military likes to characterise them -

The Drone Pilots.

The following is a brief paraphrased resume of articles and interviews published in various US media here, here and here.

Absent serious traffic, it takes a certain USAF Captain (we'll call him Adam) about 45 minutes to drive from his four-bedroom suburban home outside Las Vegas to his place of work at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. He is an instructor and 'Remote Control Warrior' piloting drones flying some 7,500 miles away on 'combat operations' in Afghanistan and that damned commute is likely the most harrowing part of his day.

His first kill in Adam's own words:

"A month after I began flying combat UAVs, me and the crew were watching a trigger house, which gives insurgents a vantage over a roadway to detonate an IED as a vehicle passes. We had spotted two people stringing wires from the house to the road the night before, but that wasn’t enough to go on. This night, however, the figures appeared to pull back a dark spot on the road and crouch, plugging in wires. Seeing that feed, the ground unit gave me clearance to fire, and I launched a missile. I saw it reach one of the men. It landed right at his feet, and - PAUSE - he was gone.”

On his 45 minute drive home Adam noted (with or without irony) the usual illuminated signs cautioning him to "... Drive carefully - this is the most dangerous time of your day". His wife gave him a hug and said she was proud he took his first shot. He’ll never forget the date. It was his daughter’s second birthday, and he had had some cake with her before heading off to work that morning.

The stuff of latter day military heroes eh?

Perhaps the most infamous example to date of the work of these 'Remote Control Warriors' is the attack on a wedding party in June 2009. The BBC and Reuters initially reported the death toll at about 45 with the all usual official obfuscations and equivocations dutifully repeated - they were 'suspected militants', 'suspected insurgents', 'we had solid evidence...' etc ad nauseam - Because of course, if the West suspects an Afghan of being 'A MILITANT', why then it's perfectly OK to incinerate him isn't it? The actual death toll was soon established at over 80, most of them women and children.

Where was the outrage? - Answer: there wasn't any, just the routine mendacity of 'military spokesmen' followed by sheepish embarrassed silence.

With more of the same now almost a daily occurrence it is no longer news at all unless the innocent civilian death toll is more than about 10, in which case it may warrant a paragraph or two on an inside page. And all the while our leaders seriously expect us to believe that we occupy the moral high ground.

The moral high ground. THE MORAL BLOODY HIGH GROUND?

The place we in the West ACTUALLY occupy is more akin to a moral sewer. With the attention span of the general population reduced to the blink of an eye on anything that does not portray us as poor misunderstood heroes or titillate our insatiable appetite for trivia about the lives of our air-head celebrities, or our propensity to self-righteous outrage at the alleged misdeeds of this that or the other villain du-jour.

Here's a video of a 'Kill' - and that from 7,500 miles away with USAF Captain Adam commentating. Don't worry. All is well. These are professionals and their prey ARE after all suspected militants - and in any event mere 'Ragheads' - so that's OK then.

Iranian and Afghan elections: Compare and contrast

Iran's tenth presidential election was held on 12 June 2009.

Afghanistan's second presidential election under its Western-imposed Post-Taliban constitution was held on 20 August 2009.

Compare and contrast:

Iran - There was little by way of build up to the elections in the Western MSM and what there was did not have that unmistakable air of Establishment orchestration to it. Before the polls closed (pace Ukraine's Yushchenko and Georgia's Saakashvili), the principle Iranian challenger, Mir-Hossain Mousavi, claimed victory. The morning after the election, Iran's official news agency announced that, with 2/3 the votes counted, the incumbent Ahmadinejad had won with 63% of the votes cast. All hell broke loose in both the Western MSM and on the Steets of Tehran.

Throughout the following 6 weeks, during what had clearly been pre-planned and orchestrated to become yet another US-friendly 'colour revolution' to follow those of Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan - The 'Twitter' tool having been polished and honed in the meantime - Western media were as one in sustained shrill condemnation of the elections. The parallels with those earlier events were uncanny, except that this time it failed. Three months later and all is quiet with not a shred of the evidence we were assured at the time was overwhelming having been produced - But never mind. The consolation prize is that 'FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS' is now firmly embedded in western public conciousness, thanks to our supine and ghastly MSM.

Afganistan - There was a big build up in the Western MSM. On the whole it's tone was grave and a little subdued, with the forebodings of Western officialdom palpable: it was to be "a laudable democratic process", "this embryonic democracy deserved our support and assistance" and similar - ad nauseam (The air of Establishment orchestration this time foetid and quite unmissable). Then the elections took place and MSM commentary very quickly subsided into embarrassed, self-concious silence. Two months later and still we have no definitive official result - though corrupt western-backed Karzai and his drug-trafficking war-lord henchmen have clearly stolen it again.

Then a couple of days ago, one Peter Galbraith, the man in charge of the UN election monitoring operation, courageously breaks ranks, declares the elections to have been grossly fraudulent and is - naturally and totally predictably - sacked for his honesty.

And all the while our mendacious 'leaders', in the fashion of squabbling parrots, STILL continue to insist that our military presence in that benighted country has a noble purpose, when anyone with half a brain can see the thoroughly sordid, self-serving nature of its true purpose staring them in the face.

We are being systematically lied to and, as with the naked emperor, the lie is so big, in your face and screamingly bloody obvious, that nobody will even admit to noticing it - let alone doing anything about it.

Torture: The Justification

"Our aim is to put you in hell so you will tell the truth. These are the orders we have from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell." --- US soldier to Abu Ghraib detainee [1]

Coming out of the woodwork ... as if from the woodcut of waterboarding in the Spanish Inquisition, stepping out, into our lives, assuming three dimensional features, taking on flesh tones, inhaling and exhaling... figures who declare with serious faces that ... torture .... Works.

They tell us:

• We will extract confessions from you.
• We know that you know what we want.
• We will tell you what we know about you and your co-conspirators and what we know that you know.
• We will tell you again and again and again and again until you tell us what we have told you so that we may know the truth. [2]
• We will pour jugs of water onto your face till you choke and struggle against your binds, to purify you.
• We will tell you that if you don't talk that you will surely die.
• We will put you in coffin-sized boxes for hours.
• We will throw you against the walls. Repeatedly.
• We will strip you naked and set dogs upon you.
• We will deny you sleep for days upon days.
• We will tell you that we will not ever stop until you have made your peace with us and confess freely and fully.
• We will slap you and beat you until you tell us what we want.
• We are, you must know, a merciful people, a kind people, a just, and a moral people.
• There are no more merciful, more kind, more just, more moral people than us.
• We are so just and moral that we can do these things to you and not be sullied by it.
• We remain moral and righteous as we beat you because our intentions are so pure. [3]
• We are protecting Americans' lives and if we have to suffocate you or beat you to death, we do so in the name of the American people, whose lives are more precious than your pitiful lying life.
• Our morality and justice is so great – Lord Be Praised - that you envy us this righteous life that we live, which is why you hate us so.
• But we are stronger and mightier than you.
• For we have God on our side.
• And you, you have nothing but superstition.
• We spit on your Quran.
• We are God's soldiers. [4]
• We will put your heads on sticks and rock your world. [5]
• We will demonstrate the superiority of our All Mighty compared to your pitiful heathen beliefs.
• We shall turn your life into a living hell.
• We shall teach you a lesson that you will not forget, nor your family, nor your neighbors, nor your mosque, nor your countrymen.
• In the Middle East, in Asia, in the world as a whole, we are the One.
• For you have no power. We have it all.

Notes

1. From Andy Worthington, 'Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed tells his story'.
2. "Understandably unable to resist the effects of the torture, Binyam proceeded to confess to whatever wild theories were put to him by his torturers. 'They had fed me enough through their questions for me to make up what they wanted to hear,' he said. 'I confessed to it all. There was the plot to build a dirty nuclear bomb, and another to blow up apartments in New York with their gas pipes.' As Rose noted, 'This - supposedly the brainchild of the 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - always sounded improbable: it was never quite clear how gas pipes might become weapons.'"Binyam added, 'I said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had given me a false passport after I was stopped the first time in Karachi and that I had met Osama bin Laden 30 times. None of it was true. The British could have stopped the torture because they knew I had tried to use the same passport at Karachi both times. That should have told them that what I was saying under torture wasn't true. But so far as I know, they did nothing.'" From Worthington, 'Seven Years of Torture'.
3. "Obama credited not Mr. Bush but the former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael V. Hayden and the former director of national intelligence Mike McConnell, who 'really had America's security interests in mind when they acted, and I think were mindful of American values and ideals.'" (From Helene Cooper and Stolberg Gay Stolberg, 'Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of Taliban', New York Times, March 7, 2009.
4. "'You are the sovereign. Your name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb,' a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes, reflecting on what lay ahead for them." The scene was reported by Agence France-Presse on Nov. 6, 2004" (From Mark Crispin Miller, 'Bush and Cheney's War on the Enlightenment', in Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips (eds.), Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006) 193. - And, "At Fallujah, the Marines used napalm and white phosphorous - weapons banned by international law - to immolate the people living there, and saw that it was good; for in King David they thought they could see themselves, Agence France-Presse observed: "'The marines drew parallels from the verse with their present situation, where they perceive themselves as warriors fighting barbaric men opposed to all that is good in the world.'" Miller, 'Bush and Cheney's War', 194.
5. "With regret," the Russian official said, "I have to say that you are going to get the hell kicked out of you [in Afghanistan]." One of the Americans responded... "We're going to kill them," the U.S. official asserted. "We're going to put their heads on sticks. We're going to rock their world." From Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 103.

Source: Dennis Loo

'BLOWBACK?' - Here's what it means:

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to NBC’s David Gregory:

"Osama Bin Laden? We Knew He was Your Operator"

....or 'as ye sow - so shall ye reap.

Pipelineistan goes Af-Pak

Cracking stuff from one of my favourite Geo-Political commentators, Pepe Escobar. Nothing really new in it but it does a superb job of integrating and explaining the seething cauldron of disparate interests that comprise the rapidly developing 'Great Game' in Central and South Asia. It's too long to post here in full but is published in Toms Dispatch and Asia Times and well worth the time to read and digest - IMHO.

Here's a brief snippet:

The Real Afghan War

In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question -- why Afghanistan matters -- is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.

And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as they imagined it, that the U.S. Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on the defensive.

Think of Afghanistan, then, as an overlooked subplot in the ongoing Liquid War. After all, an overarching goal of U.S. foreign policy since President Richard Nixon's era in the early 1970s has been to split Russia and China. The leadership of the SCO has been focused on this since the U.S. Congress passed the Silk Road Strategy Act five days before beginning the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. That act clearly identified American geo-strategic interests from the Black Sea to western China with building a mosaic of American protectorates in Central Asia and militarizing the Eurasian energy corridor.

... And to think, we virtually NEVER hear the words 'Gas', 'Oil' or 'Pipeline' from Western politicians and the MSM in the context of NATO/UK/US involvements and wars in the region. It is a telling illustration of just how crass the world view of the bulk of US/Western populations is that we continue to lap up the sentimental, fearful, patriotic jingoistic 'War on Terror' crap that passes for serious analysis of what is actually going on in the world.