The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people." That's no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization. The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/27/yemen/index.html?
Last year, President Obama and his administration ruled out sending U.S. ground forces into Pakistan. Instead, the White House said, America’s clandestine operations there would be waged solely by remote-control — with Predator and Reaper drones. “There is a red line,” said special envoy Richard Holbrooke. “And the red line is unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: No foreign troops on our soil.”
Yet today, three U.S. soldiers were killed and two more were wounded by an improvised bomb in Pakistan. The area was known “as a Taliban stronghold,” the New York Times notes. But the “Pakistani military had declared cleared of the militants.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/3-gis-killed-in-pakistan-when-do-we-start-treating-this-like-a-real-war/
The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”
Tricking battlefield opponents has been a part of war since guys started beating each other with bones and sticks. But these days, such moves are harder to pull off, the DSB notes in a January report (.pdf) first unearthed by InsideDefense.com.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/pentagon-report-calls-for-office-of-strategic-deception/
One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administration's indefinite imprisoning of "War on Terror" detainees without charges of any kind. So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object: a "legal black hole." Liberal editorial pages routinely cited the refusal to charge the detainees — not the interrogation practices there — in order to brand the camp a "dungeon," a "gulag," a "tropical purgatory," and a "black-hole embarrassment."
http://salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/22/detention/index.html?
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the U.S. 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.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-military-weapons-inscribed-secret-jesus-bible-codes/story?id=9575794
Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers have attacked buildings in the heart of the Afghan capital, Kabul, setting off explosions and sparking gun battles.
Fighting erupted near the Serena Hotel and the presidential palace, although Afghan President Hamid Karzai says security has now been restored.
The Taliban said 20 of its fighters had taken part in the attack on Kabul.
Two civilians and three security personnel have been killed plus 71 others wounded, officials say.
Seven attackers had also been killed, Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8329140.stm
*REPOSTED FROM THE 18TH – THINK MY PROVIDER SCREWED UP – IT HAD VAMOOSED*
Dick Cheney says President Obama is “trying to pretend that we are not at war” with terrorists. There is only one thing I have to say about that: I sure hope so.
Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which ones they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil — nothing would make us more secure — and we would be reducing the reward for killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to exactly what he’s worth: 10 cents and an autographed picture of Dick Cheney.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/opinion/17friedman.html
Ignoring or downplaying Western crimes is a standard feature of the corporate Western media. On rare occasions when a broadcaster or newspaper breaks ranks and reports 'our' crimes honestly, it is instructive to observe the response from the rest of the media. Do they follow suit, perhaps digging deeper for details, devoting space to profiles of the victims and interviews with grieving relatives, humanising all concerned? Do they put the crimes in perspective as the inevitable consequence of rapacious Western power? Or do they look away?
One such case is a report that American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed. Kabul-based Times correspondent Jerome Starkey reported the shocking accusations about the joint US-Afghan operation. But the rest of the UK news media have buried the report.
http://medialens.org/alerts/10/100111_were_afghan_children.php
Wall Street Vampires: Lately, a lot of Americans, myself included, have used the blood-sucking monsters as a metaphor to describe the Wall Street billionaires who rule us, and who are ruining us. Like so many awful stories of the past few years, it turns out that these Wall Street vampire-billionaires really exist, literally. Like all vampires, they live in remote castles, and feed themselves by luring poor, desperate humans into their dens, hooking them into blood-pumping machines, and sucking out their plasma for mind-boggling profits.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/145044/cerberus_capital:_literally_blood-sucking_the_poor_to_make_their_billions
The media is a better source of intelligence than Defense Department assets, according to Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Obama’s top military intelligence officer in Afghanistan. This is one of many scathing denigrations of the U.S. intelligence community found in a report put forth by General Flynn earlier this week – an assessment published by a D.C-based think tank that has rubbed Pentagon officials the wrong way.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-30980-Afghanistan-Headlines-Examiner~y2010m1d9-US-spy-chief-calls-for-cultural-overhaul-of-defense-intelligence
