By David Swanson

FACT CHECK: Is Iraq combat really over for US?
By CALVIN WOODWARD and ROBERT BURNS (AP)
WASHINGTON — Despite President Barack Obama's declaration Tuesday of an end to the combat mission in Iraq, combat almost certainly lies ahead. And in asserting the U.S. has met its responsibilities in Iraq, the president opened the door wide to a debate about the meaning of success in the muddle that most — but not all — American troops are leaving behind. A look at some of the statements Obama made in his Oval Office speech and how they compare with the facts:

___

OBAMA: "Tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended."

           Read more... 

Crossposted from Talkleft

In the Sunday Times: a feature article on the Obama administration’s "shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies."

In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

...The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya.

The Times calls it a stealth war on terror, and says while it began under Bush, it has expanded under Obama. It also points out the risks:

           Read more... 

The Pentagon is rapidly improving its ability to fight wars with robots. This capability is “bringing about the most profound transformation of warfare since the advent of the atom bomb,” says Scientific American, and raises “a host of ethical and legal issues.”

“Robots are pouring onto battlefields as if a new species of mechanotronic alien had just landed on our planet,” the publication says in an editorial on their development in its July issue. “The prospect of androids that hunt down and kill on their own accord (shades of Terminator) should give us all pause. An automatic pilot that makes its own calls about whom to shoot violates the ‘human’ part of international humanitarian law, the one that recognizes that some weapons are so abhorrent that they just should be eliminated.”

           Read more... 

Cross posted from BFD BLOG!

The Pentagon continues to fumble in their handling of their survey distributed to 400,000 service members regarding their perceptions of the impact of gay persons in military service.  Or is is just continued institutional homophobia on the part of elements of the command structure?  On the tenth page of the survey under the section headed:

Throughout this survey, "gay or lesbian" and "homosexual" are used interchangeably"

The first three questions, and possible answers are:

           Read more... 

American doctors in the Middle East routinely approved the torture of captured suspects and denied them critical medications such as insulin, sometimes with lethal consequences, according to a documented report published in the “Utne Reader.”

In Dec., 2002, Defense Secy. Donald Rumsfeld issued a directive allowing interrogators to withhold medical care in nonemergency situations so that “men with injuries including gunshot wounds were denied treatment as a way to make them talk,” writes author Justine Sharrock. Although the directive was soon revoked, “the practice continued,” she said.

Interrogations conducted at the infamous Abu Ghraib correctional facility in Baghdad had to be preapproved by a physician and psychiatrist, and the CIA got like orders for the punishments it inflicted at its sites.

Sharrock quotes medic Andrew Duffy of the 134th medical company of the Iowa National Guard who told her the attitude of Abu Ghraib’s medical officers toward prisoners was “screw these guys” and who said he was ridiculed for trying to save one man’s life using CPR.

           Read more... 

Originally published at Asia Times

Mistah Kurtz - he dead.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

When it comes to American wars, history has a kinky habit of repeating itself as farce over and over again. So now the Pentagon has been plunged into turmoil because General Stanley McChrystal, former United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in Afghanistan, was featured unplugged in a Rolling Stone magazine interview.

Those were the days when the Washington Post used to bring down a president (now the Post, as well as The New York Times, prefer war, on Iraq, on AfPak, on Iran). Gonzo master Hunter S Thompson anyway must be celebrating with heavenly tequila shots in his wild and crazy tomb; Rolling Stone after all managed to bring down a general - to the sound of The End by The Doors.

Which brings us to Francis Ford Coppola using The Doors to start Apocalypse Now - or the US winning the Vietnam War (only) on film. McChrystal could be portrayed as a mix of Captain Willard and the original Mistah Kurtz of Conrad's masterpiece, the literary model for Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz. Both warrior-intellectuals - one about to cross to the heart of darkness, the other already there.

Although hailed by a wildly sycophantic media as a hero, McChrystal, like Willard, is essentially a trained killer, the head of a killing squad in Iraq active way before the "surge", the same "surge" which was sculpted in stone in Washington as paving the way for an American "victory" (while generating profitable side products such as Oscar winner for Best Picture The Hurt Locker).

Sooner or later a Kurtzean McChrystal character will end up in a Hollywood blockbuster. The US lost the war in Vietnam but won it on screen. The US is losing the war in Iraq but it's already winning it on screen. And the US will lose the war in AfPak and will win it on screen.

           Read more... 

Originally published at TomDispatch.com

It couldn’t be worse, could it?  In the Gulf, BP now claims to be retrieving 15,000 barrels of oil a day from the busted pipe 5,000 feet down.  That’s three times the total amount of oil it claimed, bare weeks ago, was coming out of that pipe.  A government panel of experts now suggests that the real figure could be up to 60,000 barrels or 2.5 million gallons a day, the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every four days -- and some independent experts think the figure could actually be closer to 100,000 barrels a day. 

In the meantime, we just learned from the Los Angeles Times that -- go figure -- the “primary responsibility for safety and other inspections” on the oil rig that blew in the Gulf “rested not with the U.S. government but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands,” and that those impoverished islands had outsourced their responsibilities to private companies.  Go BP!  We also learned that the relief wells sure to staunch the flow of oil by “early August” could take far longer, fail, or even make matters significantly worse; that BP cut every corner in the book to save money when drilling its well; and, oh, that evidently even the heavens are angry at the oil giant, since on Tuesday a lightning strike put its sole drill/retrieval ship in the Gulf out of action for hours, leaving all that oil pouring into the water unimpeded.  However bad the bad news is, each new dawn it only seems to get worse, as does the “collateral damage,” whether to pelicans or the Gulf's beaches and wetlands.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, that war equivalent of BP’s Gulf disaster, things are similarly trending downward at a startling pace as the news from there grows ever grimmer.  The model American offensive in the southern town of Marja, declared a "success" in early May, has faltered badly and has been labeled by Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal a “bleeding ulcer”; the “government in a box” that he claimed the U.S. would merrily roll out after U.S. and Afghan troops decisively shoved the Taliban aside, is still in absentia, and the Taliban remain all too present; Afghan President Hamid Karzai now openly indicates that he thinks the Americans can’t win in his country and he’s planning accordingly; the much ballyhooed American “offensive” in Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, has once again been delayed; corruption increases; American and NATO death tolls grow worse by the month as support for the war in the U.S. sinks; the “collateral damage” only increases; and this week, in a piece in the New York Times, we were told things are so bad that a serious drawdown of forces in 2011 is considered unlikely.  Go figure (again)!

           Read more... 

What the United Nations independent investigator on extrajudicial killings would like is for countries that employ surprise drone attacks to first prove they have attempted to capture or incapacitate suspects. The investigator, Philip Alston, issued a 29-page report Wednesday that the New York Times termed “Highly Critical” of such attacks by the U.S. and, says the Associated Press, “called on countries to lay out rules and safeguards for carrying out the strikes.” By going after terrorist networks, Alston warned, the U.S. example “could quickly lead to a situation in which dozens of countries carry out ‘competing drone attacks’ outside their borders against people ‘labeled as terrorists by one group or another,’” Charlie Savage reported for the Times. “I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe,” Alston is quoted as saying. “This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the U.N. Charter,” Alston pointed out.

           Read more... 

The fighting in Afghanistan this week has resulted in the deaths of Canadian Colonel Geoff Parker, 42, of Oakville, Ontario, and U.S. Colonel John McHugh, 46, of W. Caldwell, New Jersey. It also claimed the lives of Lieutenant Colonels Paul Bartz, 43, of Waterloo, Wis., and Thomas Belkofer, 44, of Perrysburg, Ohio. Other fatalities were Staff Sgt. Richard Tieman, 28, of Waynesboro, Pa., and Specialist Joshua Tomlinson, 24, of Dubberly, La.

The four officers were killed in Kabul, The New York Times reported May 21, when “A suicide bomber in a minibus drove into their convoy (of armored sports utility vehicles), killing the four officers, two other American servicemen and 12 Afghan civilians in a passing bus.” The total number of U.S. service member deaths since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan eight years ago now stands at 1,064. The number of contractors killed in the fighting has been put at around 300. And in 2008 alone it is estimated that nearly 4,000 Afghan civilians perished.

This writer deeply regrets each and every one of those deaths, especially those of the 12 innocent Afghan civilians this week. They likely would all be alive today if President George W. Bush had not chosen to invade a country that never attacked America and which the U.S. oil industry has long coveted for a pipeline route. They would be alive if President Barack Obama had withdrawn U.S. troops. Instead, he has escalated the conflict and increased “defense” spending to a record $708 billion for fiscal 2011---a step which will only make the U.S. military-industrial complex(MIC) more powerful. For those associated with MIC, however, “defense” spending means jobs and prosperity.

On the other side of the world from Afghanistan, in the lovely town of Broken Arrow, Okla., defense contractor L-3 opened a new facility last November because since 2001 it has “almost tripled annual bookings and annual sales,” according to local company vice president Greg Campbell. Its employment of area residents has grown steadily to 100, an increase of 30 in the past five years.

           Read more... 

Afghan Escalation Funding
More War, Fewer Jobs, Poor Excuses
By David Swanson, TomDispatch.com

Isn’t it time to call what Congress will soon vote on by its right name: war escalation funding?

Early in 2009, President Barack Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan with 21,000 "combat" troops, 13,000 "support" troops, and at least 5,000 mercenaries, without any serious debate in Congress or the corporate media.  The President sent the first 17,000 troops prior to developing any plan for Afghanistan, leaving the impression that escalation was, somehow, an end in itself.  Certainly it didn't accomplish anything else, a conclusion evident in downbeat reports on the Afghan war situation issued this month by both the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon.

So it seemed like progress for our representative government when, last fall, the media began to engage in a debate over whether further escalation in Afghanistan made sense.  Granted, this was largely a public debate between the commander-in-chief and his generals (who should probably have been punished with removal from office for insubordinate behavior), but members of Congress at least popped up in cameo roles.

           Read more...