The “enemy” … 11 December 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Pakistan, WAR!.34 comments
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Quetta, Pakistan: Smoke and flames rise past residents standing along the wall of a truck terminal where fuel tankers were set ablaze. Militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at trucks loaded with fuel and supplies for Nato troops in Afghanistan | Naseer Ahmed/Reuters
The “enemy” … gets a vote.
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It’s hard… 30 November 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Culture of Death, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Pakistan, Total fucking lunatics, WAR!.61 comments
The White House hasn’t had success brightening relations between the two countries. | AP Photo
It’s hard out there for a pretzel. Especially one in the “brightening” business (who made up that line?!).
From the Politico article… firing on all engines it seems:
[“W]e have shown the limits of what carrots-only can do” as an approach, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said Monday during an Aspen Institute forum in Washington. “In early 2010, under the energetic leadership of Richard Holbrooke, the United States put together a very large and comprehensive assistance program for Pakistan. … It turned out to be too much. Pakistan choked on some of it and didn’t believe the rest.”
Blair said the carrots the Obama team offered to Pakistan coincided with some progress — followed by substantial backsliding. . . . .
Covers all the bases: We tried for the ungrateful Pakis, but too hard… too many carrots no sticks. We were too good for them! Who knew. Our man in Islamabad died from the effort but before he died, he was very energetic (what a fucking crock).
We’re not believable – because we try too hard! – but we did manage to slap some sense into the renegade Pakis. Then, somehow, it was all sloppy muddy at the top of the mountain and we slid back down to a ruined base camp.
Makes about as much sense as the quotes in the report.
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Options 25 November 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, AFRICOM, Culture of Death, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Iran, Iraq War, Israel/AIPAC, Moscow, NORCOM, Pakistan, Total fucking lunatics, WAR!.83 comments
Don’t worry! It can’t be the twilight of the American Empire, we still have options for war…. that table, the one reserved for war options, is loaded to the gills!!! We never empty that table…
You want Northern War? Southern War (always tasty! and a bonifide Reagan favorite!)? War in the East?! War in the West ??? Or, best for last… multidirectional war: Iran and China!!
We have options.
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Snicker Snax…. a second cartoon in the gallery also dealt with sabre rattling at China, employing a wicked satire of Slob. YUM.
I present you… 2 May 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, Israel/AIPAC, Pakistan, Riyadh, Total fucking lunatics, WAR!.79 comments
This is the compound where Bin Laden is believed to have lived in the last few years. [DPA]
.. the compound. The million dollar… high, high walled compound.
From a gallery at der spiegel. Another glamour shot. And another.
Frankly it looks more like the Garrido ”garden estate”, the sad trash heap where Tracy DuGard was held for 18 years in an unincorporated part of … oh, the far reaches of the East Bay.
Clearing … 1 May 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Pakistan, WAR!.51 comments
Cotton Candy the rabbit takes part in a show jumping event at the Kaninhop Club in the village of Jena, Germany. Competitors hop over a variety of different sized mini-jumps. The more jumps they clear the higher their score and there is also normally a time element
[Action Press / Rex Features]
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Clearing hurdles. Next!
Perched… 22 December 2010
Posted by marisacat in Afghanistan War, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Pakistan, Paris, Total fucking lunatics, WAR!.68 comments
Pigeons in Paris as heavy snow shut Paris Charles de Gaulle-Roissy airport and forced the Eiffel Tower to be closed to tourists. [Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images]
I dropped in on Asia Times… and found a good piece by Pepe Escobar… I miss the old Pepe of years ago, especially the Pepe from before 2007, ’08, who had never sold Obama Brand Crap.
But, one takes what one can get.
Just the last section…
It’s a gas, gas, gas
And here’s where The Year of the Drone merges with what the late, great deconstructionist Jacques Lacan would qualify as “the unsayable”: the invisible, dangerous liaisons between the “war on terror” and the energy war, as in the topography of the war on terror matching all the key 21st-century sources of energy from the Middle East to Central Asia.
This implies a key Pipelineistan chapter – the never-ending saga of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which has been at the very core of the troubled Washington-Kabul marriage since the mid-1990s.
The TAPI inter-government agreement was finally signed in mid-December. Make no mistake; this is Washington in overdrive. The Washington-backed Asian Development Bank is to come up with the bulk of the $7.6 billion (and counting) financial package. The 2,000 kilometer-long TAPI – to be built by an international consortium – should snake through a very dodgy 735 kilometers of Afghanistan and 800 kilometers of Pakistan.
Hype apart, there’s no hard evidence that TAPI will “stabilize” Afghanistan or contribute to India and Pakistan trading kisses instead of insults. AfPak in this case are both transit countries. Most of the Afghan stretch will be underground – much as the US-supported BTC from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan, Turkey. In theory, local villages will be paid to guard the pipeline. But that still does not guarantee security to a steel serpent crossing western Afghanistan and then going east through Kandahar.
Once again in theory, TAPI is indeed a steel Silk Road between Central and South Asia. If TAPI is ever built – and that’s still a big “if” – certainly it will mark a monster crossover of Pipelineistan with the US Empire of Bases. Because none other than the Pentagon and NATO will provide the overall security. And that means the Atlanticist West forever embedded in AfPak. One can imagine what the Taliban on both sides – not to mention disgruntled Pashtuns in general – will make of that.
And even if TAPI is built, this still does not mean that its key competitor, the $7.3 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the “peace pipeline”, has lost the battle – much to Washington’s horror. The Indians have said that much – they are now chasing insurance giants of the Lloyds variety. And Pakistan definitely wants both TAPI and IPI.
TAPI theoretically should be finished by 2014. Surprise! That’s exactly the deadline year (for now …) for American troops to exit Afghanistan. No one will be exiting anything. Finally, the whole AfPak imbroglio will be revealed for what it is; a Pipelineistan gambit.
Meanwhile, enjoy the Year of the Drone. And while we’re at it, here’s some breaking news. The 2011 Pentagon/NATO strategy for AfPak is already established: wait for the Taliban spring/summer offensive to see where they’re at. And then drone them to death. Call it Drone Eye for the Bad Guy.
Oh surely by now, for the numbers game of killing, we’ve surpassed Hitler. Unless of course one shoves the Russian dead in his column. Which I imagine we do….
sigh 21 December 2010
Posted by marisacat in DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Lie Down Fall Down Dems, Pakistan, Sex / Reproductive Health, Total fucking lunatics.66 comments
Punjab, Pakistan: Women displaced by floods sit on a bench outside a hospital in Basira village [Muhammed Muheisen/AP]
Nader has a decent piece up at C-Punch on the whole flap doodle the US – well, Holder et alia – is carrying on about / against Wikileaks…
Thomas Blanton, the esteemed director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University described Washington’s hyper-reaction to Wikileaks’ transmission of information to some major media in various countries as “Wikimania.”
In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday, Blanton urged the Justice Department to cool it. Wikileaks and newspapers like The New Yorks Times and London’s Guardian, he said, are publishers protected by the First Amendment. The disclosures are the first small installment of a predicted much larger forthcoming trove of non-public information from both governments and global corporations. …
The people running our lives are simply berserk. The hirelings are pathetic. Who can have any shred of respect for any of this ??
Consider what Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel in George W. Bush’s Justice Department just wrote:
“In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward, with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like. I have a hard time squaring the anger the government is directing towards Wikileaks with its top officials openly violating classification rules and opportunistically revealing without authorization top secret information.”
On the other hand, if Mr. Holder goes the narrow route to obtain an indictment of Mr. Assange, he will risk a public relations debacle by vindictively displaying prosecutorial abuse (i.e. fixing the law around the enforcement bias.) Double standards have no place in the Justice Department. …
That last line is a bit of a dissemble. I don’t think the DoJ has any trouble at all with double standards. In fact, double standards seem to have a long standing seat at the table. I would say that double standards sits on a lovely, soft, down filled love seat.
And last, I doubt any of us can feign surprise….
Over-reaction by the Obama administration could lead to censoring the Internet, undermining Secretary Clinton’s Internet Freedom initiative, which criticized China’s controls and lauded hacktivism in that country, and divert attention from the massive over classification of documents by the Executive Branch.
A full throttle attack on Wikileaks is what the government distracters want in order to take away the spotlight of the disclosures on their misdeeds, their waste and their construction of an authoritarian corporate state.
Professor and ex-Bushite Jack Goldsmith summed up his thoughts this way: “The best thing to do….would be to ignore Assange and fix the secrecy system so this does not happen again.”
That presumably is some of what Peter Zatko and his crew are now trying to do at the Pentagon’s famed DARPA unit. That secret initiative may ironically undermine the First Amendment should they succeed too much in hamstringing the Internet earlier advanced by that same Pentagon unit.
The Imperial State, with 30% of its people mired in generational poverty and hunger, sails on.
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Bomb bomb bomb 14 October 2010
Posted by marisacat in 2010 Mid Terms, 2012 Re Election, Culture of Death, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Israel/AIPAC, Pakistan, WAR!.48 comments
Men drive their overloaded donkey cart along a road in Islamabad, Pakistan Picture: AP
… Pakistan.
And how is this better, cleaner, more ethical, less bloody than McCain’s exclamation of Bomb bomb bomb Iran?
So fucking tired of it…… and the parties. And the pols. And the mil. The sickening support for the military and the wars… And Ob, Snob, Knob. And Hillary.
It’s never going to end…
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What… 30 August 2010
Posted by marisacat in 2010 Mid Terms, 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, AFRICOM, Culture of Death, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Iran, Iraq War, Israel/AIPAC, NORCOM, Pakistan, WAR!.45 comments
Phoenix, US: Inmates spend their day under tents at the section that houses undocumented immigrants at the jail in Maricopa County [Darren Hauck/EPA]
What is that they have been saying?
The end to combat in Iraq?
Something like that, weeks of video clips of pulling out men (women too I am sure) and materiel… Tens of thousands of texters and video gamers, I guess they want us to think, left to control and command… and many more tens of thousands of contract paramilitaries left to do the job…
As if we have retreated to base, ceased house to house, ceased night patrols, ceased clear and hold, much less opened the prisons and released the political prisoners and the innocents, relinquished control of the air – it is we who control the air space over Iraq – we have stopped none of that anywhere in the world, including at “home”, tho Homeland is more accurate.
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Oh For Fuck’s Sake… why not just dispatch Barbara to the WH with the Holy Walker Bush Oil of Office and she can annoint Obby as a younger brother to adopted son Bill C?
It smacks of obeisance to the Lord of Texas…
President Obama plans to call former President Bush on Tuesday when he visits Texas to speak to troops, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
Obama will address soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, before he returns to the Oval Office to speak on the formal end of the U.S. military’s “combat mission” in Iraq.
“I don’t believe there are plans to see him, but my sense is, it will be one of the calls he makes tomorrow,” Gibbs told reporters Monday when asked if Obama will speak with Bush.
She can say something so Barbara, so Bushian … like, ”we’ve always liked Negroes. er … Africans. Well… we like some Americans, I know that. More oil Barry?”
AND I see that Simpson survived comparing all of us to nursing calves. No surprise…
Heckuva job Obby.
I even caught the last few mins of his remarks today, and I sure missed the pounding action (maybe below camera view the podium reached out and grabbed him… ). The quote sounded more like a beg to me:
Pounding the lectern, Obama continued:
“Holding this bill hostage is directly detrimental to our economic growth. So I ask Senate Republicans to drop the blockade.”
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So — how long… 22 June 2010
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, Culture of Death, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Iraq War, Pakistan, WAR!.65 comments
President Obama swats at a fly buzzing around his head as he delivers remarks on health care reform, Tuesday, June 22. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
…to Wikileaks letting loose with the film taken at the Garani massacre? 2009, possibly a hundred killed, women and children among them. And clearly on the Foundling’s watch.
From the RS article:
[I]t doesn’t hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government’s darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. “JSOC was a killing machine,” says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down – often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military. “The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming,” says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. “He’d say, ‘Hey – you fucking muscleheads couldn’t find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.’ ”
Even in his new role as America’s leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19. “You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,” McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he’ll add, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.” In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people,” McChrystal recently conceded. snip
What next, I wonder.
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Marisacat 