$6 billion US tax dollars per month go to Afghanistan
even though it's well known the country is strictly controlled by organized crime.
2/27/12, "Obama Apologizes for Koran Burning as Afghan Riots Continue," Bloomberg,
"We will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible,” Obama said in a letter delivered by U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker....
Karzai appealed for calm yesterday, asking people to await the outcome of the investigation. NATO officials have promised to prosecute perpetrators of the burning “through an open trial, as soon as possible,” according to an e-mailed statement from Karzai’s press office today.
A German ISAF officer, Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, told reporters yesterday that the force hoped to issue as statement as early as today on how the incident unfolded. George Little, the Pentagon’s press secretary, said today that he expected results of the inquiry to be made public “within days” of its completion." ...
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2/28/12, "We Don't Belong There," American Thinker, Ned Barnett
"The BBC reports that four desecrated copies of the Koran were being used by captured Muslim terrorists to pass messages among fellow prisoners. The Washington Times confirmed this, reporting that defiled copies of the Koran contained extremist messages and inscriptions. These radical Muslim prisoners ignored the prohibition on even touching the Koran without first purifying themselves, perverting Holy texts into tools of propaganda.
Yet the Afghan-in-the-street crowds are not protesting the acts of those Muslim terrorists who defiled their own Holy books. The Karzai government is also ignoring the acts of the incarcerated Muslim terrorists, who had no compunction about violating the purity of their own sacred Koran. They've gotten a "free pass" for their acts of desecration while all blame -- both official and unofficial -- is heaped on Americans."...
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Subcontractors are impossible to trace."...7/25/11, "U.S. trucking funds end up in Taliban hands," Reuters
Citation for $6 billion/month tax dollars to Afghan. at above link.
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2000 cases of corruption have been reported but no prosecutions have taken place.
10/11/11, "AP Exclusive: Afghanistan obstructs graft probes," AP, Adam Goldman and Heidi Vogt
"A major investigation into an influential Afghan governor accused of taking bribes has been shut down and its top prosecutor transferred to a unit that doesn't handle corruption cases, Afghan and U.S. officials said.
The closing of the investigation into the former governor of Kapisa province, Ghulam Qawis Abu Bakr, comes on the heels of a grim, unpublicized assessment by U.S. officials that no substantive corruption prosecutions were taking place in Afghanistan despite President Hamid Karzai's pledge to root out graft.
The Abu Bakr investigation raises troubling questions yet again about how much U.S. taxpayer money is lining the pockets of powerful Afghan officials, and whether the U.S. is doing all it can to persuade Karzai to crack down on corruption. It also suggests that the lax prosecution of corruption has pervaded all levels of government.
U.S. officials had hoped the case would be the first conviction of a relatively significant person in Afghan government. While most of Abu Bakr's influence is in Kapisa province, he is also connected to the Hizb-e-Islami political party, which the government has been trying to court in hopes of getting the group to cut its ties with militants.Abu Bakr was suspended as governor after CIA Director David Petraeus, then the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, presented Karzai with documentation showing that he was colluding with the Taliban, according to an Afghan official in Kabul with direct knowledge of the incident.
In the two years since Karzai unveiled a new anti-corruption task force, powerful government figures have been accused of corruption and even investigated, but seldom brought to court. It appears that Abu Bakr will be no exception.
Most of the approximately 2,000 cases investigated by the anti-corruption unit since its birth in 2009 have stalled, said a NATO official familiar with the unit, who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive matters. The 28 convictions so far have all been of minor players. The attorney general's office has been infiltrated by power brokers, ranging from lawmakers to warlords, who are systematically blocking cases, the NATO official said.
In general, little has come of Karzai's promises after a fraud-marred 2009 election that he would make rooting out graft a priority. In fact, a corruption scandal in the interim involving the country's largest private bank has incriminated a number of Karzai allies, including relatives.
The first evidence that corruption was not being taken seriously in the attorney general's office came in the summer of 2010, when a Karzai aide was arrested on charges of accepting a car in exchange for his help in thwarting a corruption case. Karzai ordered the release of the aide, Mohammad Zia Salehi....
Current and former U.S. officials said the American administration was trying to downplay their anti-corruption work in its Afghanistan policy because it was such a failure.
The case against Abu Bakr opened last year after allegations surface d he had received a $200,000 bribe in exchange for the contract to build a cell tower, an Afghan official said.
Abu Bakr lives in Mahmud-i-Raqi, the capital of Kapisa province, in a large house. He has three other houses in Kabul, all built, according to the original witness statements, with stone and gravel paid for by foreign donations intended for roads, schools and clinics.
About 20 witnesses said the governor forced local construction companies to give him truckloads of gravel and stone for his expensive homes, according to the officials. The witnesses reportedly said the governor threatened to halt their construction projects if he didn't get what he wanted.
However, when prosecutors traveled to Kapisa in late June to get more evidence, the witnesses were no longer willing to cooperate.
"They changed their story," the Afghan official said. Prosecutors also met with Abu Bakr, who denied everything.
Only one witness was still willing to testify, a man named Shah Agha who said Abu Bakr shut down his rock-crushing plant after he refused to donate 100 trucks of gravel — worth about $10,500 — for the construction of one of his houses. Agha said within an hour of giving his statement in Kabul, his phone started ringing.
"It was people, friends, asking me why I had talked against Abu Bakr," Agha told the AP. He said his testimony could only have gotten out so quickly if someone inside the attorney general's office was tipping people off."...
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9/25/11, "Government by crime syndicate," LA Times, Op-ed, Sarah Chayes,"In Afghanistan and elsewhere, rampant corruption threatens security and the rule of law."
"Afghanistan is controlled by a structured, mafiaesque system, in which money flows upward via purchase of office, kickbacks or "sweets" in return for permission to extract resources (of which more varieties exist in impoverished Afghanistan than one might think) and protection in case of legal or international scrutiny. Those foolish enough to raise objections are punished. The result is a system that selects for criminality, excluding and marginalizing the very men and women of probity
- most needed to build a sustainable state....
- Otherwise known as rampant public corruption."...
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"There is a concerted campaign underway to ensure that the War on Terror bonanza continues unimpeded in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, and even despite Leon Panetta's acknowledgment that Al Qaeda has a grand total of "fewer than two dozen key operatives" on the entire planet. That effort relies primarily on touting a growing villainous alliance -- the scariest since Marvel Comic's Masters of Evil -- between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (mostly in Yemen) and the al Shabab group in Somalia. To accomplish this, all the standard fear-mongering propaganda is being trotted out, and the War on Terror apparatus is simply being re-directed to those nations. Most notably,
- the establishment media is being used to disseminate these messages,
The Obama administrationhas escalated the existing drone program and begun a new CIA drone campaign in Yemen (one that just killed numerous people over the weekend); it also, contrary to public denials, provided the arms to Saudi Arabia to attack a rebel group in Northern Yemen. Yemen is also the justification for
- Obama's attempt to institutionalize a
- a new enemy was needed,
- Yemen and Somalia are the New War on Terror Battlegrounds.
- "Al Qaeda's Yemen branch has aided Somalia militants, U.S. says,"
While there's nothing notable about this corrupt journalistic practice -- granting anonymity to government officials to spout the official line and uncritically printing it is the heart and soul of Real National Security Journalism -- there are a couple of particularly egregious passages in this article worth noting. To underscore how mindlessly devoted Bennett is to promoting the government line, consider this passage:
In a sign of the expanding front, U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at suspected militants in Yemen in May, and in Somalia in June. They were the first known U.S. military attacks in Yemen since 2002 and in Somalia since 2009.
That claim is factually false, in a very significant way. In December, 2009, U.S. cruise missile carrying cluster bombs were dropped in Yemen, killing 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children. Cables released by WikiLeaks subsequently revealed that the Obama administration perpetrated that attack, as well as a second air strike that same month (which targeted Awlaki). In May, 2010, the Obama administration launched another attack in that country, one that
- "killed the province's deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight,"
- to falsely and publicly claim sole responsibility.
Yet here we have the LA Times' Bennett, serving his government directors, telling his readers that the drone attacks in May of this year "were the first known U.S. military attacks in Yemen since 2002." What makes that so inexcusable -- aside from how factually false it is, and how bizarre it is that a reporter writing about Yemen wouldn't know that -- is that those 2009 and 2010 attacks, which Bennett concealed from his readers, are playing a very significant role in why there is a Terrorism problem in Yemen in the first place. As The Christian Science Monitor explained when reporting on the 2009 American cluster bomb attack in Yemen:
Just as high civilian casualties in US attacks on militants have fed extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same phenomenon is now playing out in Yemen, says Yemen specialist Gregory Johnsen.
"It is incredibly dangerous what the US is trying to do in Yemen at the moment because it really fits into AQAP’s broader strategy, in which it says Yemen is not different from Iraq and Afghanistan," says Mr. Johnsen of Princeton University in New Jersey, who adds that AQAP can recruit militants from outside Yemen as well."They are able to make the argument that Yemen is a legitimate front for jihad… They've been making that argument since 2007, but incidents like this are all sort of fodder for their argument." If you drop cluster bombs in a country and slaughter dozens of women and children with drones and then kill a popular governor, you're going to spawn pervasive amounts of anger and hostility towards the responsible foreign country and also embolden the message of extremists that they are under attack from the U.S and jihad is thus warranted: a shocking observation, I know -- but readers of the LA Times, or at least this article on the supposed emerging threat, would have no idea that the U.S. has even been doing that in Yemen. That the U.S. is creating the very Terrorism problem it claims to be combating is one of the most crucial points in discussions of American Terrorism policy -- it was one explicitly recognized even by a Rumsfeld-created Terrorism task force back in 2004 -- but it barely is heard in American political discourse. Further bolstering that fact is the work of Noor Berham, who has spent three years systematically documenting the results of American drone attacks in Pakistan with on-the-scene photojournalism:
Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important -- and unreported -- truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan's tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit. . . .
According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalise the population. "There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can't find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.
"The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they're doing is far greater."
Even when the drones hit the right compound, the force of the blast is such that neighbours' houses, often made of baked mud, are also demolished, crushing those inside, said Noor Behram. One of the photographs shows a tangle of debris he said were the- remains of five houses blitzed together.
Because this kind of reporting is so dangerous, most media outlets rely on the claims of American and Pakistani officials and thus dutifully print their allegations about the number of "militants" killed by the strike. Berham, however, insists that those claims are deceitful in what they omit, and that the U.S. is doing far more harm than good with these drone attacks in terms of its stated goal (eliminating Terrorism). Further evidence for that fact is supplied by Harper's Index for May, 2011, which notes:
Minimum number of people killed by CIA drone attacks in Pakistan last year : 607
Number of those who appeared on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists : 2
American media reports such as the one appearing this weekend in the LA Times reflexively depict escalating American military attacks as a response to the growing Terrorist threat rather than as what they are: a leading cause of that threat. One might also take cognizance of the obvious connection between these escalating attacks under Obama and the
Independently, note this amazing passage from that LA Times article, regarding how these anonymous officials learned of what they are claiming concerning an AQAP/Shabab grand alliance:
That claim presumably refers to the secret Mogadishu prison Scahill revealed, the one the CIA pays Somali agents to guard and at which they're constantly present. The notion that Somali authorities generously "allowed" the CIA to "interview" prisoners there mindlessly disseminates CIA propaganda and ignores the facts Scahill revealed: that this is effectively a U.S.-maintained-and-engineered prison. And, of course, there is no discussion of the legal and human rights repercussions of interrogating prisoners in secret facilities beyond the reach of human rights monitoring agencies, nor any discussion of the role such practices play inThe CIA gained other information when Somali authorities allowed them to interview Shabab militants imprisoned in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, U.S. officials said. The CIA asked about the militants' ability to launch attacks outside Somalia as well as the group's command structure.
- further spawning anti-American sentiment.
Just behold how little has changed in political and media circles when it comes to the War on Terror. The propaganda and policy tactics are virtually identical; only the names and places change. So we have anonymous officials continuously hyping the New Terrorist threat and the New Terrorist Masterminds, reporters who do nothing but uncritically pass it all along, civilian slaughter and secret prisons and interrogations simply transferred to the new Battlegrounds, and all new pretexts for not only continuing, but escalating, the War on Terror under a new brand name. The War on Terror is
- the ultimate self-perpetuating industry: it endlessly spawns its own justification."
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9/19/10, "U.S. contractor accused of fraud still winning big Afghan projects," McClatchy, Marisa Taylor and Warren P. Stroebel
"USAID hasn't been an aggressive watchdog in Afghanistan, partly because it's under political pressure to pump billions into the country without regard to the quality of the work, Jackson said. It also lacks the resources and expertise to monitor the projects, she said." (parag. 21)
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April 21, 2011, Karzai incited anti-US riots in Afghanistan in which torture and death resulted:
4/2/11, "More violence over Koran burning," Reuters, Ismael Sameem, Montreal Gazette
"Afghan and UN officials said insurgents had incited violence at peaceful protests. Marches in Kabul, the western city of Herat and northern Tahar province ended without unrest."...
Some were beaten and stoned to death, one's throat was slit."....
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