[Peace-discuss] Notes

Fri Dec 13 16:04:28 UTC 2019

These notes are a few things we're not being told to pay attention to while 
the Democrats ignore the needs of the people with their impeachment 
proceedings. There's double-digit hours of coverage for impeachment talk 
but no time for discussing US-led wars, trillions spent on US-led wars, 
lives lost or irrevocably changed because of US-led wars, Medicare for All, 
a national jobs program, living-wage jobs, laying potable water pipes to 
every home, cutting the military (I refuse to call it "defense") budget by 
50% (at least) and ending homelessness, handing out tax-free money to every 
citizen, and more.

War and lies: Afghanistan

US presidents Obama, G.W. Bush, and Trump have lied repeatedly.

This report gets no TV coverage (that might make one want to put tough 
questions to former VP Biden) but it's run now during the convenient 
distraction of the Democrats impeachment proceedings.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/ 
-- Craig Whitlock on " At war with the truth: U.S. officials constantly 
said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an 
exclusive Post investigation found."

> The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root
> failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include
> more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with
> people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats
> to aid workers and Afghan officials.

[...]

> In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism
> of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired
> in nearly two decades of warfare.
> 
> With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare
> pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with
> second-guessing and backbiting.
> 
> “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we
> didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general
> who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and
> Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added:
> “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of
> what we were undertaking.”
> 
> “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . .
> 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military
> personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and
> the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”
> 
> Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan,
> many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in
> action, according to Defense Department figures.
> 
> The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp
> relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They
> underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and
> Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver
> on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.
> 
> With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become
> public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies
> were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money
> trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

[...]

> The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders
> struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.
> 
> Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an
> adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of
> foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll?
> According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an
> answer.
> 
> As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from
> foe.
> 
> “They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where
> the good guys and bad guys live,” an unnamed former adviser to an Army
> Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. “It took
> several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that
> information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are
> the bad guys, where are they?’ ”
> 
> The view wasn’t any clearer from the Pentagon.
> 
> “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” Rumsfeld complained in
> a Sept. 8, 2003, snowflake. “We are woefully deficient in human
> intelligence.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGDz_C13GIw -- Jimmy Dore's coverage of 
this Washington Post article includes a summary at the end:

> Jimmy Dore: And you know what's hilarious? Barack Obama used to say this
> was the smart war. This was the smart war. [...] He used to say they
> have a foreign policy of strong and dumb, we want to have strong and
> smart. And the Iraq war was the dumb war, Afghan [war] was the smart
> war[1]. That was the smart war: the one where we go "we have no idea what
> we're doing", "we have no idea who the enemy is", "we don't know where
> the enemy is". But keep sending soldiers there to get killed, right?
> Keep sending soldiers there to get maimed. Wow. And so now you know why
> they have to smear Tulsi when she asks a question about the war, know
> you know why they have to smear her. I'm always suspicious why you're
> not allowed to ask questions about anything, even stupid questions. If
> it's stupid, who cares then? So whenever someone tries to shut you down
> for asking a question there's always something there. And that's what
> they're doing to Tulsi. They're smearing her like crazy because she's on
> to something and they can't have people questioning our wars because
> they know if we did we'd find out all this stuff and the jig would be up
> and we wouldn't be spending a trillion dollars on our defense budget
> every year and some of those people would be out of jobs. Imagine how
> powerful that industry is: they just added $80 billion to all of those
> defense contractors bank accounts. Can you imagine having an industry
> that generates a billion dollars? $80 billion. [...] They added that on
> to the top of the Pentagon budget. I'm just trying to help people wrap
> [their mind] around that number and how much money they're throwing at
> the military and this is what they're trying to do with it. [...] Joe
> Biden tries to pretend that Bernie's the guy who's wasting our money?
> This [article shows] what Joe Biden did.
[1] Obama ran on positioning himself as a peace candidate regarding the war 
in Iraq calling that war "a dumb war; a rash war; a war based not on reason 
but on passion, not on principle but on politics". But the war in 
Afghanistan he said we must continue:

> We’ve got to get the job done [in Afghanistan]. And that requires us to
> have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and
> killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.

There's a related article about this in 
https://nwdailymarker.com/2009/07/afghanistan-its-your-dumb-war-now-president-obama/ 
.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPt_Gzyh4Dg -- RT's report on 
"Trump's $738bn military budget: What does it pay for?"

More war based on lies: Syria

Dan Cohen on "Why was the Syria chemical report redacted"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEwsK40baaI

Caitlin Johnstone on "Journalist: Newsweek Suppressed OPCW Scandal And 
Threatened Me With Legal Action"
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/journalist-newsweek-suppressed-opcw-scandal-and-threatened-me-with-legal-action-7f85f490e610?source=---------3------------------

> A Newsweek journalist has resigned after the publication reportedly
> suppressed his story about the ever-growing OPCW scandal, the revelation
> of immensely significant plot holes in the establishment Syria narrative
> that you can update yourself on by watching this short seven-minute
> video or this more detailed video here.
> 
> “Yesterday I resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish
> newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letter were refused for no
> valid reason,” journalist Tareq Haddad reported today via Twitter.
> 
> “I have collected evidence of how they suppressed the story in addition
> to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US government
> was removed, though it was factually correct,” Haddad said. “I plan on
> publishing these details in full shortly. However, after asking my
> editors for comment, as is journalistic practice, I received an email
> reminding me of confidentiality clauses in my contract. I.e. I was
> threatened with legal action.”
> 
> Haddad added that he is now seeking legal advice and looking into the
> possibility of whistleblower protections for himself, and said at the
> very least he will publish the information he has while omitting
> anything that could subject him to legal retaliation from his former
> employer.
> 
> “I could have kept silent and kept my job, but I would not have been
> able to continue with a clean conscience,” Haddad said. “I will have
> some instability now but the truth is more important.”
> 
> This is the first direct insider report we’re getting on the mass
> media’s conspiracy of silence on the OPCW scandal that I wrote about
> just the other day. In how many other newsrooms is this exact same sort
> of suppression happening, including threats of legal action, to
> journalists who don’t have the courage or ability to leave and speak
> out? There is no logical reason to assume that Haddad is the only one
> encountering such roadblocks from mass media editors; he’s just the only
> one going public about it.
> 
> Newsweek has long been a reliable guard dog and attack dog for the
> US-centralized empire, with examples of stories that its editors did
> permit to go to print including an article by an actual, current
> military intelligence officer explaining why US prosecution of Julian
> Assange is a good thing, fawning puff pieces on the White Helmets, and
> despicable smear jobs on Tulsi Gabbard. The outlet will occasionally
> print oppositional-looking articles like this one by Ian Wilkie
> questioning the establishment Syria narrative, but not without
> immediately turning around and publishing an attack on Wilkie’s piece by
> Eliot Higgins, a former Atlantic Council Senior Fellow who is the
> cofounder of the NED-funded imperial narrative management firm
> Bellingcat. Newsweek also recently published an article attacking Tucker
> Carlson for publicizing the OPCW scandal, basing its criticisms on a
> bogus Bellingcat article I debunked shortly after its publication.

Labor: "Great Employment Numbers: 44% of Fully Employed Make $18,000 a Year 
or Less" -- The Real News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctg_PxNCawI

Let's not forget that under slavery we had full employment. Perhaps 
employment percentages don't tell the story well or get to what we really need.

-J