Matthew Hoh Resigns Over U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan

I feel that our strategies in Afghanistan are not pursing goals that are worthy of sacrificing our young men and women or spending the billions we’re doing there,” Hoh said. “I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them — not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West. The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them. Full article.

The Cover-Up Continues

In Britain earlier this month, a two-judge High Court panel rejected arguments made first by the Bush team and now by the Obama team and decided to make public seven redacted paragraphs in American intelligence documents relating to torture allegations by a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay. The prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British national, says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and at a C.I.A.-run prison outside Kabul before being transferred to Guantánamo. He was freed in February. To block the release of those paragraphs, the Bush administration threatened to cut its intelligence-sharing with Britain, an inappropriate threat that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeated. The objective is to avoid official confirmation of wrongdoing that might be used in lawsuits against government officials and contractors, and might help create a public clamor for prosecuting those responsible. President Obama calls that a distracting exercise in “looking back.” What it really is is justice. Full article.

Gunmen storm UN guest house in Kabul, 12 dead

KABUL – Terrified U.N. workers scrambled over the roof or leaped from windows to escape choking smoke and gunfire after being awakened at dawn Wednesday when Taliban militants wearing police uniforms stormed a residential hotel packed with foreigners.

The assault, which killed 11 people including three militants, was one of a series of brazen attacks aimed at undermining the Nov. 7 presidential election runoff. It underscored the risks facing U.N. and Afghan officials in organizing the vote and the massive challenge for the U.S.-led military force in curbing the determined insurgency. Full article.

Changing the World

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them. This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class. Full article.

A war of terror in Pakistan

The bigger story is that the Taliban are not, in fact, gone from Swat, so even the stated goal of the mission has actually not been accomplished. The Pakistani Army’s new counter-insurgency strategy is to arm local militias to fight the Taliban, which means that the Army is circulating even more weaponry in the area, leading to its further destabilization. Also, there is a reign of terror being unleashed in these “war zones,” and its author is the Pakistani military, rather than the Taliban. Dead bodies have been dumped in the middle of towns, and experts agree that the marks on these bodies are consistent with the Pakistani military’s torture techniques. Cell-phone videos circulating on the Web show military personnel breaking into homes, and dragging away and torturing people. Full article.

Ellsberg: From Vietnam to Afghanistan

brilliant brilliant interview on afghanistan: “more troops, more drone attacks, more death squads – more taliban we will be facing, however unpopular they might be” (dan ellsberg, who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the pentagon papers, a top-secret pentagon study of US government decision-making about the vietnam war, which led to the end of the war). watch interview.

LAPD freaks out America with new Orwellian ad

After the 9/11 attacks, we were told the solution to terrorism was to have citizens spy on each other, and not to, say, elect a competent government. That’s when TIPS (Terrorist Information and Prevention System) was born, an initiative to recruit one million volunteers in 10 cities across the country that encouraged them to report suspicious activity that might be terrorism-related. An investigative political journalist, Ritt Goldstein, observed in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald that TIPS would provide America with a higher percentage of “citizen spies” than the former East Germany had under the notorious Stasi secret police. Full article.

Welcome to Slackistan: Pakistan’s first ever slacker movie

Visitors to Islamabad, the small but perfectly formed capital of Pakistan, could be forgiven for thinking that the only things to rock the place were terrorist attacks. But they would be wrong. The city, population approximately 600,000, forms the backdrop for the country’s first slacker movie. Titled Slackistan, the low-budget independent film from first-time British director Hammad Khan features the Pakistani young and privileged as they drift around in a rarefied world of cars, dating, drinking and parties. Worrying only about what to wear and where to go, this group of fashionably-dressed kids could be in Orange County or New York’s Upper East Side. Full article.

Seymour Hersh: Military Is Waging War Against The White House

Hersh considers the worsening situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the principal test of the Obama presidency, which will require the cooperation of the top military brass. Obama must face up to the military, Hersh said. “He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon.” If he doesn’t, according to Hersh, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.” Full article.

Two car bombs kill scores in downtown Baghdad

The blasts, one from a car bomb and the other possibly a truck bomb, targeted the Justice Ministry and the Baghdad Governorate in central Baghdad. Both buildings are close to the Foreign Ministry and Finance Ministry, which were blown up in August, killing 132 people and wounding up to 600. Security had been tightened sharply across Baghdad in the wake of the earlier blasts, which eroded confidence in the Iraqi government’s security gains ahead of national elections in January. The explosion at the Governorate was about 500 metres from the site of the Foreign Ministry blast. Full article.

Agent Orange Tribunal Backs Vietnamese Victims

After hearing testimony from 27 victims and expert witnesses, the tribunal ruled that Vietnamese Agent Orange victims and their families are entitled to full compensation from the US government and the companies that manufactured and supplied the chemical. The judgment also requires the defendants to restore the environment to pre-war conditions and remove all traces of dioxin from Vietnam. Additionally, it concluded that the Vietnamese State should be compensated for the costs of caring for victims and restoring the environment. Full article.