On Thursday morning our favorite sock monkey had this to say about the US war in Afghanistan:
"Administration officials say this review isn't a referendum on the strategy itself, but a close look at how it's being implemented; a gut check on what's working and what's not. And there are things that are working. U.S. led operations in the southern part of the country have pushed insurgent groups out of key areas. Special forces raids have captured or killed hundreds of insurgent leaders in the past few months."
Yes, there are things that are really working in Afghanistan: airstrikes are working wonders, civilians are benefiting immensely, operations in the south are clearly driving somebody out, and JSOC (special forces) raids - well they are definitely working. Astounding really. And the evidence offered? Martin says,
"Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says some progress was inevitable."This is the same Anthony Cordesman who weighed in on Mr. Holbrooke on Tuesday's ATC and summed up his work in Af-Pak as follows:
"Mahatma Gandhi, had he been involved, could not have done better."Now why didn't I think of Mahatma Gandhi when I thought of Richard Holbrooke? I guess that what experts like Cordesman are for - and why NPR returns to him again and again.
13 comments:
I heard that this morning and sympathized with the Soviet era Russians. I searched NPR for Rachel Martin and, when I saw her picture I remembered the sock monkey piece from a week or so ago. Columbia School of Journalism, no less. A regular knockoff of Prof. Siegheil himself.
You can learn more about Afghanistan from watching those eighties movies Rambo III and The Beast than listening to NationalPentagonRadio.
"As bad as Iraq is I can guarantee you Afghanistan is 100 times worse." - Chris Hedges
Dan
Mahatma Ghandi would have been on the side of the occupied, but hey, that's a minor point, right?
This might be in the running for the "NPR Best of the Worst"
and the bbc is just a bad
17Dec10, Owenbennetjones was completely unbelievable in the audacity of his anked water-carrying for the dead and now decaying anglo empire. He was all gruff with some plice chief in Kashmir, about the use of torture. When the chief of police mentioned that the U.S. used torture, ole owenbennet got all up-tight and indignant, reminding him how these things are thoroughly investigated in the U.S., and some even went to jail! And his next guest was from the ICRR, who complained about the IRCC's not being allowed in some places in Kashmir. All with perfect indignation.
I could go on and on about the sheer hypocracy of this all, but I'm too busy, and too upset. Monty Python had it pretty much correct:
English Pig-dogs.
sorry, I meant: ICRC, international committee of the red cross. We barred them from all sorts of sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If only Mahatma Ghandi had had drones...
Can NPR "News" get any more absurd?
I heard that this morning and sympathized with the Soviet era Russians."
..especially since they had to get their news from National Pravda Radio.
It's really hard to take the claims of "progress" in Afghanistan seriously, given who is making them -- Obama and the generals, all of whom have a vested interest in making things look "good" for themselves.
Ralph Nader is right: Obama is a con man. Obama no more tells the truth about Afghanistan than Johnson did about Vietnam.
As Eric Stoner (adjunct professor at St. Peter's College) points out
Record levels of violence in Afghanistan do not equal progress
"While President Obama plans to tell the country today that we are on the right track in Afghanistan, the truth is that there is more violence and death here than at any point since the US invasion. The surge in US troops in recent months has led to more soldiers, more Afghan civilians and more humanitarian workers being killed this year than any year to date. How this equates with progress is beyond me."
Cordesman is a flippant shill.
It should be remembered that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by an extremist right-wing organization because he was doing his utmost to prevent India from being partitioned. The charge was that he was conceding too much to the Muslims. Had he succeeded, there would be no Pakistan today, and the US would be dealing directly with India, who have never kowtowed to America. Until, sadly, recently.
One wonders if an 'aortic tear' can be staged. There I go, on my Wellstone/JFK theorizing again...
It's been nine years of happy news from NPR, NINE YEARS, longer than WWII, Korea, WWI, and NPR continues to Blacklist anyone that dissents to the left.
The experts that were right are blacklisted why the Neo-con, GOP warmongers who have a NINE YEAR record of being wrong are still featured in NPR reporting.
No surprise that NPR blacklisted this story:
Humanitarian access in Afghanistan 'worst for 30 years
"According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), access to those most in need of support is the worst it has been for 30 years, Reuters reports.
Violence is at its worst since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, the organisation notes, and some 700 foreign troops have died in Afghanistan this year.
On top of this, 1,271 civilians lost their lives in the first half of 2010 - 21 percent more than in 2009."
NPR reporting "don't ask, don't tell" not one single on air report.
FUN with NPR's search featureusing: "red cross" Afghanistan
no one on air report.
I'm gradually transitioning into vacation mode, which means I have time to get to Family of Secrets, Russ Baker's book. On page 17 we find just how ridiculous the notion that GHW Bush was new to the CIA when Ford appointed him is:
"Poppy" Bush's own role with intelligence appears to date back as early as the Second World War, when he joined the Navy at age eighteen. On arriving at his training base in Norfolk, VA, in the fall of 1942, Bush was trained not only as the pilot of a torpedo bomber but also as a photographic officer, responsible for crucial, highly sensitive aerial surveillance. On his way to his ship, the USS San Jacinto, Bush stopped off in Pearl Harbor for meetings with military intelligence officers assigned to the Joint Intelligence Center [Poppy's a sock-monkey pop-up too?!] for the Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA).
After mastering the technique of operating the handheld K-20 aerial camera and film processing, Bush recruited and trained other pilots and crewmen. His own flight team became part bomber unit, part spy unit. The information they obtained about the Japanese navy, as well as crucial intelligence on Japanese land-based defenses, was forwarded to the U.S. Navy's intelligence center at Pearl Harbor and to the Marine Corps for use in planning amphibious landings in order to reduce casualties.
The so-called Operation Snapshot was so hush-hush that, under naval regulations in effect at the time, even revealing its name would lead to court-martial. According to a book by Robert Stinnet, a fellow flier, Admiral Marc Mitscher hit the "bulkhead" when he saw that Bush's team had filed a report in which they actually referred by name to their top-secret project. The three people above Bush in his command chain were made take razor blades to the pages of the report and remove the forbidden language.
The lessor was apparently not lost on Bush. From that moment forward, as every Bush researcher has learned, Bush's life would honor the principle: no names, no paper trail, no fingerprints. If you wanted to know what Bush had done, you had to have the patience of a sleuth yourself.
gDog: I have long thought "Poppy" was an Ollie North that didn't get caught.
edk
Post a Comment