More Proof of the Pak Army/Militant Dance in S. Waziristan

[If Operation Rah-e-Nijat was really a war to eliminate the Tehreek Taliban in S. Waziristan, alleged to be at least 10,000 fighters, then where are they, if the resistance is about over?  The answer is that the Army and the ever-present American drones just watched them walk away.  As of Friday, 450 terrorists had been killed, and several thousand had relocated to N. Waziristan and to Khyber, where they can escalate their war against the good people of Peshawar on one side, and Parachinar, on the other.  If you want to read about the brave exploits of the Pakistani defenders in killing this dozen "miscreants," then follow the link.]

12 militants killed in SWA as resistance fades

 

 

The Media As Enablers of Government Lies

by James Bovard
by James Bovard
Recently by James Bovard: Eight Years of Big Lies on Afghanistan

Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public.

In 1936, New York Times White House correspondent Turner Catledge said that President Roosevelt’s “first instinct was always to lie.” But the Washington press corps covered up Roosevelt’s dishonesty almost as thoroughly as they hid his use of a wheelchair in daily life.

President Bill Clinton benefited from a press corps that often treated his falsehoods as nonevents – or even petty triumphs. Newsweek White House correspondent Howard Fineman commented that Clinton’s “great strength is his insincerity…. I’ve decided Bill Clinton is at his most genuine when he’s the most phony…. We know he doesn’t mean what he says.”

Flora Lewis, a New York Times columnist, writing three weeks before 9/11, commented in a review of a book on U.S. government lies on the Vietnam War, “There will probably never be a return to the discretion, really collusion, with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.” But within months of her comment, the media had proven itself as craven as ever. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who did some of the best exposés of George W. Bush’s falsehoods in his first term, noted that it was not until July 2002 that “the White House press corps showed its teeth” in response to administration deceptions. Even the exposés of FBI and CIA intelligence failures in May 2002 did not end the “phase of alliance” between the White House and the press, as political scientist Martha Kumar observed.

Deference to the government is now the trademark of the American media – at least at times when the truth could have the greatest impact. The media were grossly negligent in failing to question or examine Bush’s claims on the road to war. When journalists dug up the truth, editors sometimes ignored or buried their reports. Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained that, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “There was an attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war; why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?’” New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller explained the press’s conduct at a Bush press conference just before he invaded Iraq: “I think we were very deferential because … nobody wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.”

After the war started, the falsehood of Bush’s claims was often treated as a one-day story, buried in the back of the front section or on the editorial page. Afterward, most papers quickly returned to printing the president’s proclamations as gospel. Eric Alterman, author of When Presidents Lie, observed,

Virtually every major news media outlet devoted more attention to the lies and dissimulations of one New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, than to those of the president and vice president of the United States regarding Iraq. Given that these two deceptions took place virtually simultaneously, they demonstrate that while some forms of deliberate deception remain intolerable in public life, those of the U.S. commander in chief are not among them.

Docility

The media’s docility to the Bush administration repeated the pattern established during the first Gulf War (and during much of the Vietnam War). Chris Hedges, who covered the 1990–91 Gulf War for the New York Times, later explained, “The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.” Hedges noted that journalists were “eager to be of service to the State,” which “made it easier to do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie.”

Far from being irate about presidential lies, the media often enjoy sharing a laugh with the commander in chief over such technical inaccuracies. On March 24, 2004, President Bush performed a skit for those attending the Radio and Television Correspondents’ annual dinner in which he showed slides of himself crawling around his office peaking behind curtains while he quipped to the crowd, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…. Nope, no weapons over there…. Maybe under here?”

Bush’s comic bit got one of the biggest laughs of the night. The Washington Post Style section hailed the evening’s performance with a headline – “George Bush, Entertainer in Chief.” The media dignitaries made no fuss over the comments – until a mini-firestorm erupted a few days later, spurred by criticism by Democrats and soldiers who had fought in Iraq. Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher, labeled the press’s reaction as “one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of the American media, and presidency.”

The character of the Washington press corps also shone bright in its nonresponse to the Downing Street Memo. On May 1, 2005, the London Times printed a memo from a British cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, that reported the findings of the visit by Britain’s intelligence chief to Washington to confer with CIA chief George Tenet and other top Bush administration officials. The memo quoted the intelligence chief:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

The fact that the top level of the British government was aware that the Bush administration was fixing – i.e., manipulating and contriving – intelligence and facts to justify going to war was a bombshell in the United Kingdom. The decision to “fix” facts was illustrated by the torrent of false accusations and statements that Bush and his top officials made against Iraq in the following months. Throughout 2002, Bush continued to say that he had hoped to avoid going to war with Saddam. In his State of the Union address in late January 2003 and in his subsequent speeches, he talked about the United States as a victim, repeatedly asserting that “if war is forced upon us, we will fight.” Bush had long since decided to attack, regardless of how many UN weapons inspectors Saddam permitted to roam Iraq.

Yet the memo was almost completely ignored by the American mainstream media for the first month after its publication in Britain. As Salon columnist Joe Conason commented, “To judge by their responses, the leading lights of the Washington press corps are more embarrassed than the White House is by the revelations in the Downing Street memo.”

Deceit has become ritualized in U.S. foreign policy. From 2002 onwards, the White House Iraq Group spewed out false information that the New York Times and other prominent media outlets routinely accepted without criticism or verification. After many of the assertions were later discovered to be false, the White House and much of the media treated the falsehoods as irrelevant to the legitimacy of the U.S. invasion. The lack of attention paid to political lies is itself symptomatic of the bias in favor of submitting to rulers regardless of how much people are defrauded.

Katrina

Hurricane Katrina provided an opportunity for the media to ritually renounce their own servility. As the nonresponse and pervasive debacle became undeniable and the death count soared to more than a thousand, many talking heads pointed out the government’s “failures” and proudly showed their indignation. A New York Times headline summed up the broadcast media’s change in tone: “Reporters Turn From Deference to Outrage.” One BBC commentator observed, “Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina,” which he suggested could provide an antidote to the “timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.” NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams explained, “By dint of the fact that our country was hit [in 2001] we’ve offered a preponderance of the benefit of the doubt [to the government] over the past couple [sic] of years. Perhaps … this is the story that brings a healthy amount of cynicism back to a news media known for it.” But such periodic affirmations of independence are as credible as an alcoholic who, regaining consciousness after tumbling down the stairs, piously announces the end of his boozing days. There will be other bottles – and other stairs.

The pursuit of respectability in Washington usually entails acquiescing to government lies. Many if not most members of the Washington press corps are government dependents. Few Washington journalists have the will to expose government lies. That would require placing one in an explicitly adversarial position to the government. It is not that the typical journalist is intentionally covering up government lies, but that his radar is not set to detect such occurrences. Lies rarely register in Washington journalists’ minds because they are usually supplicants for government information, not dogged pursuers of the truth. Raising troublesome questions will not help you get any “silver platter” stories.

The vast majority of the media docilely repeated Bush’s claims through most of his presidency. Television networks very likely devoted a hundred times as much air time to peddling government falsehoods as they did to exposing them. The constant barrage of falsehood drowns out the occasional blips of truth. The government only needs the number of people who recognize its lies to be small enough that its latest power play will not be thwarted. The goal is not to prevent well-informed citizens from being nauseated or disgusted by the president’s lies. Instead, it is to neutralize the mass reaction to presidential falsehoods, even those that have catastrophic consequences.

If Americans wish to retain the remnants of their liberty, they cannot trust the media to warn them about government tyranny. In order to recognize government deceit, there is no substitute for more citizens to make more effort to find the truth for themselves.

November 6, 2009

James Bovard [send him mail] is the author of the just-released Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. He serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website.

Copyright © 2009 Future of Freedom Foundation

Congressman Reveals 5-Year Prison Term for Health Insurance Evasion

PELOSI: Buy a $15,000 Policy or Go to Jail

JCT Confirms Failure to Comply with Democrats’ Mandate Can Lead to 5 Years in Jail

Friday, November 06, 2009

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail.  The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said:  “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail.  It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

- – - – - – - – - -

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2]

- – - – - – - – - -

“Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses.  Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties.  The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration.  Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates.  Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.

According to the Congressional Budget Office the lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill would cost $15,000 in 2016.

Fort Hood Shootings: Don’t Let Racism Hide Truth

RedBedHead

 

November 6, 2009 BY NOW EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET KNOWS about the killing of 12 people and wounding of 31 others at Fort Hood in Texas. There’s no doubt that this is a tragedy for the families and friends of the slain. But from a tragedy like this there will inevitably issue forth a second tragedy – the racist, anti-Muslim hysteria that will follow because the man – Major Nidal Malik Hasan – was from a Palestinian background. And that hysteria – already in evidence in online newspaper comments boxes – will obscure the real issues and the real reasons for this tragedy. Hiding from the truth will only ensure more tragedies like this in the future. So, let’s go through some of the truths. 1) The sheer racism involved in immediately speculating on the religion of the shooter. Back in May, an Army Sgt. stationed in Iraq and suffering from PTSD shot and killed five of his fellow soldiers. That man’s name – John Russell – was Anglo Saxon. Nobody speculated on the role of his religion in the killing. In this instance, as an article in the New York Times makes clear, Hasan, who joined the military out of patriotism, faced harassment for being Muslim and wanted out, even pursuing a failed legal route to early discharge. As a psychiatrist, he had counseled many returning vets who suffered PTSD. The combination of these two things apparently made him “mortified” at the prospect of being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. 2) This racism also provides a cover for the fact that men and women trained to kill and who experience the brutality of enforcing occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, suffer from mental breakdowns, suicides and commit murders at far higher rates than the general population. A 2007 CBS News investigation into military suicides found: “Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror… had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)” And according to an article in the Washington Post, based in part upon an investigation by the Colorado Springs Newspaper, the rate of homicides amongst veterans from the Fourth Infantry Division’s Fourth Brigade were 114 times higher than the rate amongst the general population in Colorado Springs, where they are stationed stateside. “During their deployment, some soldiers killed civilians at random — in some cases at point-blank range — used banned stun guns on captives, pushed people off bridges, loaded weapons with illegal hollow-point bullets, abused drugs and occasionally mutilated the bodies of Iraqis, according to accounts the Gazette attributed to soldiers who said they witnessed the events.” Another study by the New York Times found that at least 120 people had been killed by returning vets. However, the Times itself assumes that this is a conservative number since it was reached only by looking at newspaper reports and it only includes active-duty soldiers and new veterans. The CBS survey used government statistics. 3) The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the destruction of infrastructure and social networks that will take generations to repair. The media and government are utter, utter hypocrites to condemn these murders while taking no note – or reporting as simply normal operation procedure – the families slaughtered wholesale by US drones that fire missiles at wedding and funeral parties, into Pakistani villages. In Afghanistan alone there have been an estimated 8,400 – 28,000 direct and indirect civilian deaths caused by ISAF and US forces. 4) Mass murder has become as American as apple pie with dozens killed in spree murders this year alone. What is it about American society that brings about such a large number of these types of violent acts? The roots have to be found in the fact that America is the world’s biggest, most violent empire, whose means of domination and largest single budget outlay goes towards the military. This year alone the military will take up to $700 billion directly with more indirectly through military aid to countries such as Israel and Colombia. This is a country jacked on violence. America, as the wealthiest nation on earth, also had the third highest levels of inequality and poverty in a study by the OECD released in 2008. The only two countries above the US were Turkey and Mexico. The combination of poverty and glorified violence, in the shadow of historically unprecedented levels of wealth creation is key to understanding the prevalence of violence in America. There is a danger that in the days following the Fort Hood shootings, the right and the media will whip up terrible racism. Arguing wherever possible the real reasons for this terrible act will be an important part of the ideological struggle to maintain the momentum of opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We mustn’t allow the truth to drown in a sea of racist filth.

:: Article nr. 59782 sent on 06-nov-2009 14:34 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=59782

Link: redioactive.blogspot.com/2009/11/fort-hood-shootings-dont-let-racism.html

Has Zardari or Musharraf given US access to Pakistan’s nukes?

[Has Zardari or Musharraf given US access to Pakistan's nukes?]

 

A Pakistani Abdali missile, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, is displayed in the country’s capital Islamabad

US, Pakistan negotiate nuke security deal: report

(AFP) – 5 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The United States has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine.

The journalist wrote that during meetings with current and former officials in Washington and Pakistan, he was told that the agreements would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis.

At the same time, the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities, the report says.

The principal fear was that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead, Hersh notes.

The Pakistani nuclear doctrine calls for the warheads and their triggers to be stored separately from each other, and from their delivery devices.

The arrangement serves as a safeguard in case of a quickly escalating confrontation with India but also makes the weapons vulnerable during shipment and reassembly, the report points out.

“We give comfort to each other, and the comfort level is good, because everybody respects everybody’s integrity,” Hersh quoted Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari as telling him in an interview about the security relationship with Washington.

“Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban,” Zardari went on to say. “A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It’s a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many.”

Meanwhile, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf acknowledged that his government had given US State Department nonproliferation experts insight into the command and control of the Pakistani arsenal and its on-site safety and security procedures, the report said

McChrystal Wrong For Attempts to Influence Policy

Ruger: Military leaders have a duty to stay out of politics

William Ruger, TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, is a very confident man and quite talented, according to many who have followed his career or worked for him over the years.

Unfortunately, confidence and talent frequently combine to produce hubris and an inability to recognize one’s bounds.

McChrystal’s many statements on the lack of easy answers and the difficulties we face even understanding the conflict in Afghanistan suggest that arrogance.The general’s public lobbying for his preferred counter-insurgency strategy and for a significant troop increase reveal that he does not understand the boundaries of civil-military relations. His behavior has been inappropriate at best and a sign of continuing problems in U.S. civil-military relations.

In a liberal democracy, civil-military relations should be characterized by civilian dominance. The president and the Congress should make policy and the military should implement it. Indeed, as Peter Feaver of Duke University (and a member of the Bush administration) argued, civilians even have “a right to be wrong.”

As experts in the “management of violence,” military leaders should have broad discretion in carrying out missions at the operational and tactical levels. Given their greater knowledge of warfare, soldiers should be permitted a voice in the councils of war and provide frank advice to our leaders without fear of punishment.

However, military leaders should not try to publicly influence policy or public opinion. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a thinly veiled rebuke of McChrystal’s campaign, said: “it is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilian and military alike — provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately.” Whether that advice is accepted or rejected, troops should then, as Michael Desch of the University of Notre Dame argued, “salute and obey” — or resign.

Though it does not excuse his overt foray into the policy debate, McChrystal’s behavior is not surprising given how frequently military leaders have inappropriately enmeshed themselves in public political debates since Vietnam. For example, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell attempted to directly and publicly shape U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War. He publishied two pieces criticizing the kind of policies President Bill Clinton favored while proposing a more restrained vision of U.S. strategy now known as the Powell Doctrine.

By contrast, Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acted as a cheerleader for President George W. Bush’s Iraq policies while Gen. David Petraeus wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post at the height of the 2004 presidential campaign highlighting progress being made in Iraq. The politicking has filtered down to the troops, exemplified most prominently by a New York Times op-ed by a group of enlisted personnel offering their view of our Iraq policy.

Despite recent problems in civil-military relations, civilian control in the U.S. is not directly threatened. And McChrystal is hardly President Barack Obama’s Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur, who won acclaim during World War II was public in his disdain for President Harry Truman’s management of the Korean War. Truman fired him.

However, we need to be vigilant about too much military influence on policies that are ultimately political in nature and which thus need to be determined by civilian leaders who are not boxed in by their subordinates. Otherwise, we risk indirect military rule.

McChrystal’s bid to publicly influence our Afghanistan policy at such a critical juncture in an important and winnable fight was wrong. However, it would be a mistake to severely punish or even fire him. Instead, the Obama administration’s measured but firm response through Gates was well-calibrated to the offense.

Given the daunting abilities that warranted his selection as commander in the first place, it would be best for all of us for McChrystal to continue his exceptional leadership in Kabul, advise his superiors when called upon, and focus on completing the task that our civilian leaders give him. And active duty military personnel would be well-advised to see this as a teachable moment that reminds them of their duty to stay out of politics for the health of the republic they sacrifice so much to defend.

Ruger, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, is an

assistant professor of political science.

Thousands of Japanese protest U.S. base plan

By Isabel Reynolds

GINOWAN, Japan (Reuters) – Thousands of Japanese gathered in sweltering heat on the southern island of Okinawa on Sunday to demand that a U.S. Marine base be moved out of the region, days ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama.

The row over the re-siting of the Futenma air base threatens to stall a realignment of the 47,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan and sour defense ties between the two countries, seen as key in a region home to a rising China and an unpredictable North Korea.

It could also prove a domestic headache for Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose support ratings have slipped since his landslide election victory in August.

“Okinawa’s future is for us, the Okinawan people to decide,” Ginowan mayor Yoichi Iha told a supportive crowd which spilled out of an open-air theater by the beach. “We cannot let America decide for us.”

Organizers put the number of protesters at 21,000.

Under a 2006 U.S.-Japan agreement, the Futenma Marine base in the center of the city of Ginowan is set to be closed and replaced with a facility built partly on reclaimed land at Henoko, a remoter part of the island, by 2014.

The deal, which Washington wants to push through after years of what a military official called “painful” negotiations, is part of a wider plan to re-organize U.S. troops and reduce the burden on Okinawa by moving up to 8,000 Marines to Guam.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has urged Japan to approve the plan ahead of Obama’s visit, which is scheduled to start on November 12.

EMOTIVE ISSUE

Hatoyama, who has vowed to build a more equal relationship with the United States, said in the run-up to his August election victory the base should be moved off the island.

That view was supported by 70 percent of Okinawa residents in a poll published this month by the Mainichi newspaper.

“I think getting rid of Futenma would be a good starting point for the removal of all the U.S. bases from Okinawa,” said a 60-year-old woman at Sunday’s protest, who gave her name only as Shinzato.

Okinawa, controlled by the United States until 1972, makes up only 0.6 percent of Japan’s land mass, but hosts about half the U.S. troops in Japan. Those who live near the bases complain of noise, crime, pollution and accidents.

“It’s such a wonderful place. It makes no sense to build it here,” said Hiroshi Ashitomi, a long-time anti-base campaigner.

Environmentalists are anxious to protect marine life including coral and rare dugongs in nearby waters.

Others have different priorities.

“Nature is important, but the primary responsibility of a politician is to protect people’s lives and property,” said Kosuke Gushi, a regional assemblyman with the opposition Liberal Democratic Party that signed off on the plan while in government.

He and other backers of the existing plan, including Ginowan businessmen, say they are concerned re-opening the issue will mean an indefinite delay to the closure of Futenma, where a 2004 helicopter crash added to fears over safety.

Gushi also sees the row as potentially undermining Japan’s U.S.-dependent security policy, leaving the country vulnerable.

“If we can’t provide the bases as we have pledged to do under the U.S.-Japan security treaty, the Americans could pull out and say they are no longer responsible,” Gushi said.

Hatoyama has said he needs time to review the existing base plan, but his Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa has more or less endorsed the current agreement.

(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

More troops? Only if U.S. wants more Afghan chaos

Most remember that the initial U.S. objective was to defeat the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden. But today, eight years after the first U.S. soldiers were dispatched there, few can explain why the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan has tripled in the last 18 months, or what Washington hopes to achieve there now that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda warriors have apparently fled to Pakistan.

For thousands of soldiers and their loved ones, though, the increasingly amorphous U.S. mission in Afghanistan has brought extraordinary financial and familial sacrifice, life-altering injuries and even death. The debate over whether to put still more troops in harm’s way would doubtless be a short one if every American adult were equally at risk of conscription.

Soon, President Barack Obama will decide whether this country’s national security interests justify exposing as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops to mortal peril in a country that has more than earned its reputation as the graveyard of empires.

Our conclusion is that they do not, and that president should undertake to reduce, rather than enlarge, the American military footprint in Afghanistan.

If bin Laden and Al Qaeda have left Afghanistan, why are U.S. troops still there?

Al Qaeda flourished in Afghanistan by allying itself with the Taliban, a radical Islamic organization that seized control of the Afghan government in the civil strife following the end of the Soviet Afghan War. Allied forces who invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 quickly drove Taliban forces from Afghanistan’s major cities and across the frontier into Pakistan, but the organization has since regrouped as an insurgency that contests the Afghan and Pakistani governments for control of significant swaths of territory in both countries.

The current U.S. objective is to keep the Taliban down and support the government of President Hamid Karzai, who broke with the Taliban in 1999 and has been trying to rally Afghans around his tenuous regime since he became the country’s leader in 2001.

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House of Non-Representatives Empowers Itself to Take Your Money

[The Democrats have exposed themselves as the communists that they really are, in the passage of this government program of extortion, intended to enslave everyone to the dictates of the pharmaceutical industry.  The communist-Democrats will find it completely impossible to either enforce the mandatory program, or collect penalties from the millions who cannot, or will not comply.  This is the sorry state of our Union.  It is clearly time to abolish this sham of a government and institute new government.]

Historic, Obama-backed health care bill passes House

Speaker Nancy Pelosi smiles at a press conference after the House passed the health care overhaul bill on Saturday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a victory for President Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed landmark health care legislation Saturday night to expand coverage to tens of millions who lack it and place tough new restrictions on the insurance industry. Republican opposition was nearly unanimous.

The 220-215 vote cleared the way for the Senate to begin a long-delayed debate on the issue that has come to overshadow all others in Congress.

A triumphant Speaker Nancy Pelosi likened the legislation to the passage of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare 30 years later — and Obama issued a statement saying, “I look forward to signing it into law by the end of the year.”

“It provides coverage for 96% of Americans. It offers everyone, regardless of health or income, the peace of mind that comes from knowing they will have access to affordable health care when they need it,” said Rep. John Dingell, the 83-year-old Michigan lawmaker who has introduced national health insurance in every Congress since succeeding his father in 1955.

In the run-up to a final vote, conservatives from the two political parties joined forces to impose tough new restrictions on abortion coverage in insurance policies to be sold to many individuals and small groups. They prevailed on a roll call of 240-194.

Ironically, that only solidified support for the legislation, clearing the way for conservative Democrats to vote for it.

The legislation would require most Americans to carry insurance and provide federal subsidies to those who otherwise could not afford it. Large companies would have to offer coverage to their employees. Both consumers and companies would be slapped with penalties if they defied the government’s mandates.

If the Ayatollah Khomeini was an enemy of the United States ruling elite, why did he adopt the CIA’s security service?

If the Ayatollah Khomeini was an enemy of the United States ruling elite, why did he adopt the CIA’s security service?

Historical and Investigative Research – 23 Feb 2006
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/savak.htm
___________________________________________________________

SAVAK was the accronym for the Iranian Shah (King) Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s feared security service, which routinely tortured and assassinated dissidents, and spied on everybody. It had been created by the CIA after the CIA installed the shah in power in a 1953 coup d’état.[1]

In 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – who as a dissident leader had been denouncing SAVAK — came to power after the revolutionary forces deposed the shah. The next year, the Washington Post wrote an interesting article with the title: “Khomeini Is Reported to Have a SAVAK of His Own.”[1a] And what was Khomeini’s own SAVAK like? It was none other than SAVAK itself. Here is what the Washington Post writes (emphases are mine):

“Though it came to power denouncing the shah’s dreaded SAVAK secret service, the government of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has created a new internal security and intelligence operation, apparently with a similar organizational structure and some of the same faces as its predecessor.

The new organization is called SAVAMA. It is run, according to U.S. sources and Iranian exile sources here and in Paris, by Gen. Hossein Fardoust, who was deputy chief of SAVAK under the former shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and a friend from boyhood of the deposed monarch.

…‘SAVAK is alive and kicking’ in the form of SAVAMA, claims Ali Tabatabai, former press counselor at the Iranian Embassy in Washington under the shah… now president of the Iran Freedom Foundation in Bethesda [Maryland, near Washington D.C.]… ‘There are large numbers of former SAVAK people’ in the new organization, he says. ‘In fact, with the exception of the bureau chiefs [who ran the individual sections of SAVAK] the whole organization seems to be intact.’

In Paris, a French lawyer who specializes in representing Iranian exiles told Washington Post correspondent Ronald Koven that ‘SAVAMA is SAVAK without any change in structure. They just replaced some of the chiefs…

…Tabatabai, who claims he has good sources on the situation in Tehran, says that SAVAMA’s organization ‘is almost a carbon copy’ of SAVAK’s, with nine bureaus. These, he said, cover personnel, collection of foreign intelligence, collection of domestic intelligence, surveillance of its own agents and security of its own agents and security of government buildings, communications, finances, analysis of collected intelligence, counterintelligence, and recruitment and training.”

What Tabatabai is describing above is the security apparatus of a totalitarian police state: the nine bureaus of SAVAK/SAVAMA were spying on ordinary Iranians and even on SAVAK/SAVAMA itself. They were also torturing and murdering ordinary Iranians, as they judged it necessary: “SAVAK used torture systematically as a tool of internal repression.” The Ayatollah Khomeini, of course, installed a totalitarian police state, so from this point of view swallowing SAVAK — which had a great deal of experience running the shah’s totalitarian police state — was convenient. But it was still a perfectly absurd thing for Khomeini to do if he was really an enemy of the US ruling elite, because it was this ruling elite’s CIA that had installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in power and created SAVAK for him, and therefore only an ally of the US ruling elite would welcome the “very close ties that SAVAK, under the shah, [had] maintained with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”

Of course, US officials were very busy telling everybody that the Ayatollah Khomeini (whom they would soon start arming to the teeth, in secret, for the entire duration of the Iran-Iraq war[1b]) was supposedly their enemy, so they rushed to deny that there was really that much SAVAK in SAVAMA. As reported in the same article:

“In Washington, however, U.S. government analysts offer a more subdued assessment.

‘It may be tempting to look at SAVAMA as SAVAK reborn,’ one source said, ‘but that is too fanciful for the facts.’ …U.S. sources say that some vestiges of the previous system could be useful [to new regime]. So, some former SAVAK functionaries — described as ‘lower level’ — who were able to function for the shah without being tainted now work for Khomeini.”

Uh-huh. But as you can see from one of the quotes above, the one thing that both US and Iranian exile sources were definitely agreeing on was that “SAVAMA…is run…by Gen. Hossein Fardoust, who was deputy chief of SAVAK under the former shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi…”

Not only that:

“Fardoust…[was] a longtime friend, classmate and confidant of the shah. Fardoust, Tabatabai says, was also head of a special SAVAK bureau that summarized all intelligence information. Fardoust delivered it personally to the shah daily.”

This Fardoust was not exactly “lower level,” was he? Nor was he merely “tainted”: Fardoust had been running Iran for the shah. It also turns out that “Fardoust’s deputy at SAVAMA is said to be Gen. Ali Mohammed Kaveh, formerly the head of the SAVAK bureau dealing with analysis of collected intelligence.” This Kaveh was not exactly “lower level” either. Finally, “In three former bureaus dealing with personnel organization and summation of intelligence, Tabatabai claims, every member who worked for Fardoust when he was deputy chief of SAVAK still works for him as chief of SAVAMA.”

The US ruling elite did not support Ali Tabatabai’s Iran Freedom Foundation, which wanted to topple Khomeini,[2] and it was awkward for the US ruling elite that Ali Tabatabai was explaining out loud how the Ayatollah was running Iran with the CIA’s SAVAK, just like the shah had before him. It is possible that Tabatabai’s assassination in his Bethesda, Maryland home, shortly after he made the above statements to the press, was unrelated to the CIA.[3] However, it does seem significant that,

“Only Tabatabai was willing to let his name be attached publicly to the foundation. Only Tabatabai was eager to go before television cameras and radio microphones to discuss the positions of the foundation. In the end, said one of the original 10 [founders] who asked that his name not be used, their fears for the safety of their families and themselves were borne out by what happened to Tabatabai. …‘Our object was primarily to expose the true nature of Khomeini,’ he said.

…Tabatabai was president of the foundation as well as its spokesman. Because of his prominent public profile, the Iran Freedom FOUNDATION (IFF) became in turn the most widely known of nine anti-Khomeini groups in the United States.

…In all cases, it was Tabatabai who took the public stage. … He appeared on talk shows, both radio and television, locally, nationally and in Canada. He helped organize a major anti-Khomeini demonstration in Los Angeles earlier this month, designed to bring together the different anti-Khomeini groups.”[4]

In other words, Tabatai had a big mouth, and he was the only person that needed shutting up — everybody else had already gotten the message. With Tabatabai out of the picture, problem solved. And indeed, I was unable to find mention of the SAVAK/SAVAMA identity in newspaper articles since. On the contrary: the next year, The New York Times ‘informed’ the public in a headline that “[SAVAMA] Isn’t Like Savak Under Sha,” stating in the body of the text that “Savak [was] disbanded after the 1979 revolution.”[5] An article in The Christian Science Monitor, the same year, did say that “Savama [was] the name given [to] the reconstituted Savak secret police organization, so long a weapon of terror and torture in the late Shah’s hands,” but it rushed to assure its readers that the reason “many Savak members gladly serve in Savama” was “to save their own skins.”[6]
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Footnotes and Further Reading
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[1] “HOW THE UNITED STATES DESTROYED DEMOCRACY IN IRAN IN 1953: Re-print of 16 April 2000 New York Times article”; with an introduction by Francisco Gil-White; Historical and Investigative Research, 5 January 2006;
http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/iran-coup.htm

[1a] Khomeini Is Reported to Have a SAVAK of His Own; Khomeini Reported to Have Own SAVAK-Style Agency, The Washington Post, June 7, 1980, Saturday, Final Edition, First Section; A1, 1706 words, By Michael Getler, Washington Post Staff Writer

[1b] “Why Bush Sr.’s 1991 Gulf War? To Protect Iranian Islamism: Like father, like son: this is also the purpose of Bush Jr.’s war”; Historical and Investigative Research; 20 December 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/gulfwar.htm

NOTE: The Iran-Iraq war is covered in the section titled: “The suspicious prelude to the 1991 Gulf War: Khomeini, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Iran-Contra affair.
http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/gulfwar.htm#prelude

[2] Exiles plan assault on Iran, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), June 19, 1980, Thursday, Midwestern Edition, The News Briefly; Pg. 2, 206 words, WITH ANALYSIS FROM MONITOR CORRESPONDENTS AROUND THE WORLD, EDITED BY DEBRA K. PIOT, Washington

Iranian emigre sources here say exiled Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar has reached agreement with former generals of the dethroned Shah for a counterrevolution and military moves, based in Iraq, against the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime, Monitor correspondent John Cooley reports.

After several visits to Iraq and a meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Mr. Bakhtiar met Tuesday in Paris, where he lives in exile, with Gen. Gholam Ali Oveissi and Gen. Ahmed Palizban, both of whom have been gathering forces and arms in Iraq for an Iraqi-supported strike against the Ayatollah, the emigres said.

“We know there are military units inside Iran which will support any serious move to restore order. The goal of such a movement would be to establish a military government for two to three years, followed by a popular referendum on the country’s constitutional future,” Ali Akhbar Tabatabai, spokesman for the Iran Freedom Foundation, which supports Mr. Bakhtiar’s cause in the United States, told the Monitor.

The US State Department has shied away from backing Mr. Bakhtiar or the Iran Freedom Foundation…

[3] “Terrorism came to Washington once again yesterday. The chaos and violence of world events crystallized in an instant in a Bethesda home as a gunman pumped bullets into the stomach of Ali Akbar Tabatabai.”

SOURCE: New Case of International Terrorism; Reminder of Vulnerability, The Washington Post, July 23, 1980, Wednesday, Final Edition, First Section; A14, 917 words, By Phil McCombs, Washington Post Staff Writer

[4] Victim Led in Forming Anti-Khomeini Group, The Washington Post, July 23, 1980, Wednesday, Final Edition, First Section; A12, 654 words, By Donnel Nunes, Washington Post Staff Writer

[5] AROUND THE WORLD; Iranian Says Secret Agency Isn’t Like Savak Under Shah, The New York Times, June 1, 1981, Monday, Late City Final Edition, Section A; Page 5, Column 2; Foreign Desk, 183 words, Reuters, TEHERAN, Iran, May 31

FULL TEXT:

“A senior Iranian official said today that Iran has a new intelligence agency but that it is not like the Shah’s hated Savak secret police since it is run along Islamic lines.

Asked at a news conference to confirm the existence of a secret agency called Savama, a Government spokesman, Behzad Nabavi, said, ‘Yes, we have an intelligence organization.’

Revolutionary Iran needs an intelligence agency, Mr. Nabavi said, adding: ‘But of course it does not have the same methods as the C.I.A. or K.G.B. or Savak. It must have Islamic methods and not stray from religious precepts.’

Savak, disbanded after the 1979 revolution, was believed responsible for torturing and killing thousands of suspected political opponents of the Shah. Savak agents ‘were all robbers, drinkers of alcohol, knife-wielders and degenerates,’ Mr. Nabavi said. He did not directly confirm the name Savama, which is believed to stand for the Iranian National Information and Security Organization, or say how long it had existed.”

[6] War between mullahs, leftists staggers Iran, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), August 14, 1981, Friday, Midwestern Edition, Pg. 3, 848 words, By Geoffrey Godsell, Staff correspodent of The Christian Science Monitor