What a total fraud of a ‘withdrawal’! ‘After months of negotiations, the United States and Afghanistan completed drafts of a strategic partnership agreement on Sunday that pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of combat troops at the end of 2014.’ Further about this ‘agreement’ between the US government and itself at the New York Times article titled… With Pact, U.S. Agrees to Help Afghans for Years to Come …It’s time to throw the Republicans out of hte White House! Oh, wait? In our ‘democracy’ the US population only has a choice between two sets of Republicans- Republicans or Republicrats.

Sgt. Robert Bales is the Obama Administrations ‘Invisible Man’. He is also the Pentagon’s stealth killer and the American war machine’s hidden ‘hero’. He is the guy now taking the lone fall for what a group of American soldiers collectively did as they slaughtered down a total of 17 civilians, including 9 children in the middle of the night.

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(Robert Fisk) ‘The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn’t forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army’s top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen’s words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

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Everyone from the US Department of Defense to the School of the Americas knows it takes a village to raze a death squad, or vice versa. According to the manual, if you want to storm houses in the middle of the night, gather the male family members for execution, shoot everyone in the head, gather stray bodies into a pile, pour gasoline over them and burn them, then repeat the operation in a neighboring village, you need a death squad, possibly two, especially if everyone’s drunk. US forces have pulled off so many of these massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it’s a wonder military analysts don’t recognize the Panjwayi raid as a textbook operation. If the official US spin is to be believed, and one drunken staff sergeant can do the work of 15-20, I’m thinking our entire NATO force in Afghanistan could be reduced by the same factor without jeopardizing US kill goals.

US Army killer, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales

“It is not possible for only one American soldier to come out of his base, kill a number of people far away, burn the bodies, go to another house and kill civilians there, then walk at least 2 kilometers and enter another house, kill civilians and burn them,” said Abdul Rahim Ayubi, a lawmaker from Kandahar province who visited the area on Monday. See the latest AP report Afghan recounts US soldier shooting his father.

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Headlines about Sunday’s midnight massacre in Kandahar transformed quickly from NATO FORCES RAID to become LONE GUNMAN KILLS 16, as the attributed sources shifted from Afghan locals on the scene to US military spokesmen. One might argue it’s in the interest of national security to attribute the murders in Balandi and Alkozai to a solitary stalker, to tamp the swelling anger of the Afghan populace, but what’s the truth? Making a rare concession, the NYT has revised its headline a 3rd time to read LONE SOLDIER SAID TO BE KILLER OF 16 AFGHANS, and the BBC puts “ACTED ALONE” in quotes. (UPDATE: AP adds “allegedly” and LA Times “apparently”)
 
Pundits stroke our soldiers’ egos by asking could one special forces soldier alone kill so many (?!), but more difficult to imagine is how a rogue fighter can equip himself and pass through multiple security defenses unobserved. Also doubtful is how and why a stealth assassin would burn the victims’ bodies as he moved about. Easier to believe is that damage control decided it best that one man take the fall for his comrades, God and country, probably the one too drunk to object.

SUNDAY- Drunken US soldiers kill 16 Afghanistan civilians, nine of them children. The US military is claiming the massacre was the work of one soldier who “wandered” inside homes in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district, but witnesses report it was a squad who laughed as they shot the families and tried to burn the bodies. US Army defenders might argue mouths agape that it doesn’t make sense, what would US NATO forces accomplish by doing that? State terrorism is no accident. Whether by directive, unleashing berserkers, or enlisting young men with mental deficiencies, TROOPS KILL KIDS.
 
For our remedial readers I’ll note that Tony and I are under fire for raising that point at an Occupy GA. What’s the vigilante posse got to say about the US soldiers in the village of Zangabad? Just part of the ugly job of war? Happens everyday? Yes it does.

‘More than half of Afghan children under the age of five are chronically malnourished, according to the joint report by the World Bank and the government.’ The full responsibility for this lies with the US military Commander in Chief, Barack Obama. See AFP report Afghan child hunger among worst in world: report ….How many Afghan children have actually died from the hunger caused by the US government and its troops occupying Afghanistan?

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Unfortunately, many if not most of these same Americans would easily buy into the US going to war with Iran if the new war was presented by the US propaganda machine to them all nice and properly…. More than half of Americans back Obama's Koran apology. …An apology is not near enough though. The US has spent decades destroying Afghanistan, and it’s not just about some few burnt Qurans anymore. Plus, you cannot be planning for a war with Iran and expect anybody to take your ‘apology’ seriously, Barack. Bring ALL the troops home now!

Does anybody in the US really believe that the American military has won over the Hearts and Minds of the people in Afghanistan and Iraq, let alone in other parts of the Middle East?
 
Our government’s military is a corporate modeled occupation army and not one fit to over Hearts and Minds of those whose lands they occupy. For example, read Just Plain Stupidity Or A Failure By Design? … Burning the Quran; Urinating On Dead Bodies … In that commentary the author talks about the ‘brainless’ behavior of the US occupation forces. But could it be any other way? Racist military men and women hardly are the best conduit for winning people over to supporting the US. They are just over there to do a ‘job’, make a ‘career’ for themselves in the US military, and then get back home and grab some of the extras that the military offers up to its hires.

“Who has given the license to kill and in what court? Who has declared that they can hit anyone they like?”
 
“How many ‘high level targets’ could there possibly be?”
 
“What kind of democracy is America,” Safdar asks, “where people do not ask these questions?”
 
From Kathy Kelly’s commentary on CounterPunch today “All of us ask, ‘Why?’ They kill people with computers and they can’t tell us why." They also kill people with plain old fashioned bombs and guns too. Why does the US occupy Afghanistan? Why do the American people mainly sit passively by like a herd of sheep?

‘The U.S. government and the American commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan apologized after Afghan laborers found charred copies of the Koran while collecting rubbish at the sprawling Bagram Airbase, about an hour’s drive north of Kabul.’ See Reuters Six killed, many wounded in Afghan Koran protests.

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How long will the US and European populations sit back passively allowing their governments’ troops to kill children repeatedly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Asia and Africa? Here is the latest atrocity by US/ NATO troops… NATO airstrike killed eight children: Karzai

Thirty year military veteran, Brian Cloughley, writes in the latest online weekend edition of CounterPunch just exactly what he thinks about Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, who continues to head up the U.S. Central Command in Asia. The following is what he has to say in brief…

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They condemn those of us in America who rebel against their fascist Corporate leadership and presumption of ownership of every aspect of our lives, calling it “Freedom” while their Pig-Slaves break our heads with clubs and plastic bullets. And in the case of Oscar Grant, lead and copper bullets.
While cheering rebellions in countries which have denied “deprived” the Poor Little Rich Boys like Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch, Shell, “stolen” their claim to have Corporate Control over their ports and their oil. And they actually finance and organize the so-called “spontaneous” rebellions like in Libya and now, Syria. Never mind they’re also paying Other Peoples Money And Lives to put down REAL grass roots movements in Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen… And Turkey.
Turkey is now paying back their Corporate Overlords for the U.S. and NATO PUBLICLY FUNDED Terror War against the Kurds and Albania. The Slave-Caliph Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemns Syria for responding violently to violent attacks while continuing to suppress, with the help of his Puppet Masters in London and Washington, the Kurdish People actually having a right to life.
Lick them Pentagon Boots, “caliph” Erdogan. They’re your masters and you are their dog. Just like the New Puppet Regime in Libya, and the somewhat more established Puppet Regimes in Tel Aviv, Kabul, and Baghdad.
Be the little whipped hound for racist bastards who call you “ragheads” and “sand-niggers” and “muzzle monkeys”.
You might wear golden chains and a gold collar, but they’re still a collar and chain.
Just like the Oakland, Denver, Colorado Springs and New York Police departments violently suppressing freedom here, in the very homeland of your puppet-masters and, at their bidding.

I guess it would be for the anti-Taliban extremists who huddle in their extended fortress behind a very expensive shield. They get to take advantage of not having to fight the Taliban themselves, instead using the U.S. and NATO (same difference) Corporate thugs to do their killing for them.
Apparently biding their time until the NATO installed Corporate Puppet Regime fails,
Reminds me of vultures and jackals, eating the leftovers from the kill of more aggressive predators. And yes, I just DID call the U.S. Army “predators”. You no likey, me no givey damn you no likey. Simple as that.
The Karzhai Puppet Regime slaves and lackeys will enjoy their scraps of Human meat, even, you know, when the more aggressive predators kill a few of the carrion fowl and jackals, the jackals and vultures will feast on the flesh of their on pack just as heartily as they do on the flesh of “The Other Side”.
But then, they were always like that, and did the same kind of subservient boot-licking for the Soviets and the British during past failed conquests.
And one needn’t worry about their survival after America limps off the fields defeated. They know how to exist in a cockroach style colony, or a rat pack. They made their pathetic “living” eating the garbage and sewage of the Taliban when the Taliban were their masters. Boot polish tastes the same no matter which set of masters wears the boots.

Said, in different words, that the illegal conquest Iraqi Oilfields and National Prison-camp Ghetto Rebuilding has been secured and that the Iraqi Puppet Army and Police are sufficiently trained in Western Style Police Brutality.
What a victory for Righteousness and Decency!
Strange that they never found all those WMDs, though, ain’t it? Meanwhile neighboring Syria and Iran are targeted and Guess Which Really Stupid Lie They’re Telling Us to justify that? Go on, guess…
Ok I’ll tell you. WMDs. Apparently a nation like the U.S. which employs torture and assassinations that have historically killed about twenty times as many non-combatants as they do “terrorists” and many of whose political leaders believe they should establish a fundamentalist religious dictatorship worldwide, is the only nation morally fit to have WMDs. Add in that the U.S., which has more of every class of weapon than the entire rest of the world combined, is also the only nation to have used all three classes of WMD, Biological, Nuclear and Chemical.
And routinely uses gas and is experimenting with mass Pain weapons against “their own” citizens. Sort of a high-tech version of what they accuse Gadafi and Hussein of doing.
And make no mistake, the American Cop or Soldier using torture or killing anybody anywhere in the world, gets just as big a sadistic thrill from his use of violence as any of Saddam or Moammar’s worst Gestapo-esque Goon Squad member.
They get a bigger thrill when the victim is a Child, elderly or disabled.
Yeah. Even the CSPD. I bet they show the Explorers videos of their torture sessions to weed out those who aren’t as depraved as Real Cops.
There’s also the matter of Afghanistan….

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Yeah, these things. For a long time shoemakers have known that the best configuration for a shoe sole would be a bare foot. Which doesn’t hold up as well on jagged rocks and hot or cold concrete etc.
 
So Vibram made shoes that mimic the human foot as closely as possible and they really are good shoes. One would think that the Army, which spends a whole bunch of time and money treating feet and ankles injured by marching or simply standing in the regular boots, would welcome something that would give you a tactical advantage. A HUGE tactical advantage.
 
Well, there’s Military Tradition, you see, and Military Tradition dictates shiny black boots. They finally “got religion” on that score when they discovered that Polished Black Boots show up bigger than shit on infrared imaging. They were spending beaucoup d’argent on camouflage fatigues that didn’t show up on Infrared cameras and (ahem) rifle sights but making the soldiers wear what amounted to great big signs screaming “Here we are, shoot us!” Actually it took them about a decade after that was leaked to the general public and two decades after the Army knew about it. It’s like the British tradition of wearing bright red shirts with a freakin’ white “X” right over the prime target region of the human torso. The U.S. Army with one-quart canteens in battle zones where the temperature is hotter than Texas and dry dry dry and you need to drink a quart every half hour or so.

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There’s an old joke about an “Elephant Repellent” that’s guaranteed to keep elephants away from you.
When it’s noted that there’s not an elephant for hundreds of miles around, the punch line, from the person who has already taken the money, “See how well it works?”
So, this weekend the Homeland Insecurity Thieves conned many Americans, bigger than shit. Told us there was “credible evidence” Friday morning of three recent travellers from the Middle East who were supposed to make car bombs and make them go BOOM and kill up a whole buncha people and we have to be diligent and keep looking for these guys even though there’s no picture, no names, just “beware of Arabic looking fellows” and other racist crap. We’re supposed to profile every dark skinned individual, look at every dark person as a potential murderer. What are we supposed to do, dial 9 1 1 every time a Negro enters the general area?
I mean, it sure sounds like that’s the general “non-racist” intent, right?
But anybody who notices that the threatened by unknown, un-named anonymous Terrorists and tipped off by an anonymous snitch… man, that’s mighty convenient ain’t it? And the threat never was carried out, my what a surprise… but the High Paid Liars at Homeland Security get to say “See? we prevented a terror attack and did it so well that you don’t have to know any of the details, not even how much we got paid to skin you gullible bastards outta your bread errr ‘protect you’, yeah, that’s the ticket”.
It’s called “selling a Hog”, people. It’s one of the oldest confidence games there is.
The government is taxing us to build super-secret Magic Invisible Shields to keep out the giant fire-breathing mutant flying earthworms.
You say you’ve never seen any of those giant fire breathing mutant flying earthworms? See how well it worked… now pay up….

As is so often true in death penalty cases. From 1979 til 1991 he was propped up by mostly the Reagan Regime as a counter to the Iranian revolution. Who are also the chief “witnesses” against him in the matter of killing a few thousand Iraqi citizens. With their active involvement. Their active PAID involvement, because they a) don’t work cheap and b) don’t actually work. “They” being a cast of villains like Reagan, Bush the Elder, Ollie North, the Miami Cuban Cartel, Richard Secord, Donald Rumsfeld, Admiral Poindexter, traitors and murderers all. Selling stolen arms for stolen money and getting Americans killed in the process, like the Marines in Beirut. (Lt Col North, three words, Ollie… Semper… Fi… Bitch)
They got several times as many people killed by their Other Puppets, like the Salvadoran death squads, the Contras, the Medellin Cartel, to bring more people into Capitalist Slavery in the name of “Freedom”.
And they’re still sending their brainless minions to kill for their own profit.
Any of y’all soldiers assigned to read our blog, dudes, get smart and desert. Split, boogie, depart, sortez… Get Out Of The Slaughter Machine. Your Military is owned by the same Rich Bitches who owned Saddam’s Army and financed al Qa’eda. They don’t give a rat’s ass about your lives any more than they did the 2800 they had killed on 9/11 or the 300 Marines they had murdered in Beirut or the uncounted thousands of Nicaraguan priests, nuns, nurses, doctors, teachers, orphan children and other civilians they “liberated” with American-bought bullets to the heads.

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Hard to imagine we’d come to look at Guantanamo as a lesser evil. Gitmo held terror suspects without charges, indefinitely, secretly, and tortured them, to death sometimes. At least they and their families back home were safe from the pretext of a drone strike or special ops night raid. The targeted assassination of released 5-year Guantanamo alumn ISN 801 Sabar Lal Melma in Afghanistan raises the question: what constitutes enough cause to send a death squad after a suspected illegal combatant? The US didn’t have the evidence to bring charges against Melma, who was finally released in 2007 after an outpouring of Afghan voices vouched for his innocence, yet the US military retained suspicion enough to send NATO commandos into his home this weekend to execute the former detainee in front of his kids. It would seem if Obama has a problem with Guantanamo, it’s that illegal rendition and imprisonment is not extrajudicial enough.

From Wikipedia: The My Lai Massacre (Vietnamese: thảm sát Mỹ Lai [tʰɐ̃ːm ʂɐ̌ːt mǐˀ lɐːj]; English pronunciation: /ˌmiːˈlaɪ/ ( listen), also /ˌmiːˈleɪ, ˌmaɪˈlaɪ/,[1] Vietnamese: [mǐˀlɐːj]) was the mass murder of 347–504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968, conducted by “Charlie” company, 1st battalion, 20th infantry, 11th infantry brigade, of the Americal Division, United States Army. All of the victims were civilians and most were women, children (including babies), and elderly people. Many of the victims were raped, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.[2]
The massacre took place in the hamlets of Mỹ Lai and My Khe of Sơn Mỹ village during the Vietnam War.[3][4] While 26 US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at Mỹ Lai, only 2nd Lt. William Calley, a platoon leader in charlie company, was convicted of killing 22 villagers. Originally given a life sentence, he served three and a half years under house arrest.
When the incident became public knowledge in 1969, it prompted widespread outrage around the world. The massacre also increased domestic opposition to the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Three US servicemen who made an effort to halt the massacre and protect the wounded were later denounced by US Congressmen. They received hate mail, death threats and found mutilated animals on their doorsteps.[5] It would take 30 years before they were honored for their efforts.[6]
The massacre is also known as the ‘Sơn Mỹ Massacre’ (Vietnamese: thảm sát Sơn Mỹ) or sometimes as the ‘Song Mỹ Massacre.’[7] The US military codeword for the hamlet was Pinkville.[8]“
 
If you only type in My Lai into google search, you’ll also get a bunch of right-wing horse-shit like “Lt Calley was framed” and the chorus that any VietNamese killed in the war were Unlawful Combatants. I used to hear that crap all the time because I lived very near Ft Bliss. I don’t speak much Annamese, the official language of both VietNams, More people spoke French than Annamese anyway. The one word I recognized in that whole descriptor was “sát” which means “kill”.

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Which is a smack to the back of the head to all those who told us in 1984 that the Police State setup from the BOOK of the same name couldn’t possibly happen in America because it was all about Socialist Dystopia and nobody, no not ever, could set up a CAPITALIST dictatorship. God, they’re stupid.
 
But here’s what the post 9/11 “patriotism” has gotten us. Eight years of a moron for president, an evil moron but a moron. His crew of more intelligent evil people used the occasion to make it unpatriotic to question their plans to deregulate American industries. We’ve seen a 9/11 worth of dead Americans every single month due to denial of Health Care. We’ve seen pollution that al Qa’eda could only hope to inflict on any one small town, done daily and across the nation. We’ve seen our national surplus turned upside down, and many multiples of the amount of that surplus in debt, due to the Wars started by the aforementioned Moron in response to 9/11. The badly misnamed USA PATRIOT Act is being invoked against Julian Assange and Wikileaks in response to their telling the TRUTH about 9/11 and the aforementioned wars, the moron who started them and the morons who still follow his leadership even though it’s destroyed what used to be America. Those Morons have banded together into Right Wing Terrorist Groups such as the TeaParty, Minutemen and other “patriotic” front-ends for the Ku Klux Klan. They’ll be flying plenty of the Hate Flag. By Tea-Klan MORONS such as this couple who made their Wedding into a Hate-fest. Yep, that’s right, they’re celebrating their wedding with symbols of Starting A Racist War which killed half a million Americans in order to keep according to the 1860 census 3,950,528 Americans in perpetual bondage based on the color of their skin.

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CW57, one of the local DumFox stations, aired an “infomercial” for a seminar, books and training videos on how to take advantage of the housing market crash, telling the Gullible that if they buy the properties ON CREDIT (even though they’re targeting people who are already in bankruptcy and facing foreclosure) then sell them to rich real estate developers for tens of times what the houses are currently priced, financed on both transactions with an Adjustable Rate Mortgage by the same investment banks which wrote a blank rubber check for the last time this scam was perpetrated. Now, the paper they hung on us last time, it wasn’t the primary cause of the Recession Massive Economic Collapse it was just (normally, as everybody knows, I avoid cliché like the plague, but I’m going out on a limb and doing it anyway) the straw that broke the camel’s back.
30 straight years of unfunded Reaganomics, the collapse of the infrastructure, such as levies, bridges, roads, other privately owned public utilities, unfunded war-for-profit where those who made the profit from other people dying paid no taxes on the blood money, destruction of the unions, done at public expense and again for private profiteers, and the legalization of Predatory Capitalism and relaxing every rule set in place to correct These Same Causes during the Great Depression of the 1930s… provided both the rest of the burden that poor camel was carrying AND starved and beat the living Hell out of him so he was incapable of carrying the burden.
Fox uses the standard disclaimer that “The views expressed in this broadcast do not reflect those of NewsCorp” what a bunch of lying pukes. Fox News has spent BILLIONS of dollars ranting that this type of unfunded speculative investment could not possibly have harmed the economy. Nor that the Corporations getting welfare subsidies AND huge tax breaks, would increase the budget and double-trouble it by their obscene tax breaks.

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