By Paul Craig Roberts
CounterPunch
...To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Stephen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspiracy--Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks, and Mona Charen--are ecstatic over Obama’s appointments. They don’t see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney.
Not only are Obama’s appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel Lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran.
The unreality in which he US government operates is beyond belief. A bankrupt government that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!
Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan. When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, “Frankly, we don’t have one.” NBC reports: “they’re working on it.”
Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid “mission creep without clear parameters,” the US “needs a clear mission.”
How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed? How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. [Read the rest here.]
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Obama's Justice Department backs Bush secrecy on renditions suit
Stephen C. Webster
Published: Monday February 9, 2009
RawStory.com
An attorney for President Obama's Department of Justice has told the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that it supports the Bush administration's controversial state secrets defense in a lawsuit over the prior president's "extraordinary rendition" program. [Read the rest here.]
Published: Monday February 9, 2009
RawStory.com
An attorney for President Obama's Department of Justice has told the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that it supports the Bush administration's controversial state secrets defense in a lawsuit over the prior president's "extraordinary rendition" program. [Read the rest here.]
Thursday, February 05, 2009
35 Inconvenient Truths
The errors in Al Gore’s movie.
Published by the Science and Public Policy Institute.
Click here to read those 35 inconvenient truths. People who are truly open minded (aka "interested in the truth, not political correctness," will have no fear of clicking that link (as well as the one below). I was entirely on Al Gore's side until I built up my courage and did my own investigating.
If that isn't enough for you, then watch this excellent documentary produced by Britain's Channel 4 Television: The Great Global Warming Swindle (not your typical "loony conspiracy-theorist" gang, eh?).
Obama, of course, is continuing the lie.
Published by the Science and Public Policy Institute.
Click here to read those 35 inconvenient truths. People who are truly open minded (aka "interested in the truth, not political correctness," will have no fear of clicking that link (as well as the one below). I was entirely on Al Gore's side until I built up my courage and did my own investigating.
If that isn't enough for you, then watch this excellent documentary produced by Britain's Channel 4 Television: The Great Global Warming Swindle (not your typical "loony conspiracy-theorist" gang, eh?).
Obama, of course, is continuing the lie.
Obama to Overthrow a U.S. Puppet?
Eric Margolis
Contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada
February 3, 2009
Washington is rife with rumors that the Obama administration plans to dump the US-installed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and replace him by one of four CIA-groomed candidates. The problem is, three new stooges won’t be any better than one old stooge.
London is warning Washington both against a precipitous change of regime in Kabul that would be widely viewed as crass political manipulation. ...
Obama’s dismaying eagerness to expand the war demonstrates political inexperience and a faulty grasp of events in Afghanistan. ... The Afghan War will have to be ended by a political settlement that includes the Taliban-led nationalist alliance that represents over half of Afghanistan’s population, the Pashtun people. There is simply no purely military solution to this grinding conflict – as even the Secretary General of NATO admits.
But instead of diplomacy, the new administration elected to stick its head ever deeper into the Afghan hornet’s nest. The bill for an intensified war will likely reach $4 billion monthly by midyear at a time when the United States is bankrupt and running on borrowed money from China and Japan. ...
Why is President Obama, who came to power on an antiwar platform, committed to expanding a war where there are no vital US interests? Oil is certainly one reason. The proposed route for pipelines taking oil and gas from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea coast run right through Taliban-Pashtun territory. ...
The US and its allies cannot be seen to be defeated by a bunch of Afghan tribesmen. Coming after the epic defeat in Vietnam and the trillion-dollar fiasco in Iraq, defeat in Afghanistan is simply unthinkable to the military-industrial-petroleum-financial complex that still seems to be calling many of the shots in Washington. [Click here to read the rest.]
Contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada
February 3, 2009
Washington is rife with rumors that the Obama administration plans to dump the US-installed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and replace him by one of four CIA-groomed candidates. The problem is, three new stooges won’t be any better than one old stooge.
London is warning Washington both against a precipitous change of regime in Kabul that would be widely viewed as crass political manipulation. ...
Obama’s dismaying eagerness to expand the war demonstrates political inexperience and a faulty grasp of events in Afghanistan. ... The Afghan War will have to be ended by a political settlement that includes the Taliban-led nationalist alliance that represents over half of Afghanistan’s population, the Pashtun people. There is simply no purely military solution to this grinding conflict – as even the Secretary General of NATO admits.
But instead of diplomacy, the new administration elected to stick its head ever deeper into the Afghan hornet’s nest. The bill for an intensified war will likely reach $4 billion monthly by midyear at a time when the United States is bankrupt and running on borrowed money from China and Japan. ...
Why is President Obama, who came to power on an antiwar platform, committed to expanding a war where there are no vital US interests? Oil is certainly one reason. The proposed route for pipelines taking oil and gas from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea coast run right through Taliban-Pashtun territory. ...
The US and its allies cannot be seen to be defeated by a bunch of Afghan tribesmen. Coming after the epic defeat in Vietnam and the trillion-dollar fiasco in Iraq, defeat in Afghanistan is simply unthinkable to the military-industrial-petroleum-financial complex that still seems to be calling many of the shots in Washington. [Click here to read the rest.]
Monday, February 02, 2009
Obama Continues Crime of CIA Rendition
The role of the CIA's controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times
February 1, 2009
Reporting from Washington -- The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.
But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.
Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.
[Read the rest.]
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times
February 1, 2009
Reporting from Washington -- The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.
But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.
Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.
[Read the rest.]
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