That Tuesday morning in 2001? It was a gorgeous day in New York. It was about
8:40 or 8:45 and I was either making breakfast for Art and me or had just
finished eating it. I was listening to WNYC, the NPR affiliate, as I did each
morning back then. The announcer in the studio stopped reporting whatever he
was reporting at the time, and began describing what he was seeing as he looked
out of the window and saw a plane crash into one of the twin towers. He said
something about an accident. What accident? How could it be an accident when it
was such a beautiful day? I listened to that station constantly for hours as
everything that was happening in downtown Manhattan where it was located, was
being described. For days afterward, there was this terrible burning smell in
the air in Westbury, 33 miles from midtown Manhattan.
The Vietnam War? I marched against the war in Manhattan, on Long Island, and
twice in Washington, DC. And I travelled illegally with a huge group of women
to Toronto to meet women from North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. That was quite
an adventure. It taught me that I could never be a member of the"hard left".
They are as fascistic as the "hard right". They segregated white women from
women of color as we entered the building, we had to use different doors. And
there were three of us from Long Island for whom no overnight arrangements had
been made so we were sent to the Lesbian House. But the lesbians didn't want us
and made us sleep in the basement on the cement floor. Actually, we were lucky
because when the police raided the house in the middle of the night and
arrested people, they never found us.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2019 2:43 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Afghanistan in 2019: Fewer US Troops, More CIA
Torture and Killings
So much has gone on since the stupid attacks by George Bush, that I don't
really know my thinking at the time. But I had already damned George I for his
attack on Kuwait. I was strongly in favor of going after Ronald Reagan and
Ollie North and the CIA drug pushers. I remember listening to Howard Stern on
the morning of the Tower Collapse. He went Ape, demanding the government take
instant action with missiles and bombs and mass slaughter. I was stunned.
Just like that, a rational man...weird but rational, and he went bonkers. I
look back and wonder how much further from reality we have been led, since 2001?
I do look back to a time in the early and mid 60's, when I was mostly reading
the newspapers and watching the networks for my base news. I actually
supported the attack on Vietnam. I try not to relive those days, I was also a
Born Again Christian...we Christians all loved to hate. I know that becoming
totally blind made a change in attitude, but I still find it hard to go back
and try to sort out why I thought some of the things I thought.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/5/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When I read this article, I thought back to 2001. There was no Blind
Democracy list back then, or not one that I knew about. I think I was
still mostly using a dos computer. But I read an article sent from
somewhere or other, written by an Afghani American or perhaps a Brit,
and he was begging the US government not to make war on Afghanistan.
He described the poverty of the people and what they'd already been
through. He pointed out that Afghanistan had nothing to do with the
9/11 attacks. I already knew, before reading the article, that I was
opposed to the US taking revenge on Afghanistan for what had happened.
I knew, perhaps 2 or 3 people who agreed with me. But everyone else,
and I mean everyone, absolutely supported what the US was about to do.
And then in 2003, there were all those brave people expressing
opposition to attacking Iraq, but saying that of course, attacking
Iraq was a very different matter from attacking Afghanistan which,
they believed, was perfectly justified. By the time 2014 came along,
even Sylvie was supporting US intervention in Syria, as was, I
believe, Amy Goodman. The voices of sanity like Seymour Hersh and the
British reporter from The Independent, whose name escapes me, and a
few others, are sidelined. Whatever rationality existed within our
State Department and the Pentagon, as well as mainstream journalists, is long
gone, gone way before Donald Trump ever appeared on the scene in an important
role.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2019 1:19 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Afghanistan in 2019: Fewer US Troops,
More CIA Torture and Killings
Where do we turn when the Liars tell us so many lies that they begin
believing their own lies?
Carl Jarvis
On 1/4/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Afghanistan in 2019: Fewer US Troops, More CIA Torture and Killings
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
03 January 19
No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American
empire as much as Afghanistan. There is virtually no possibility of a
military victory over the Taliban and little chance of leaving behind
a self-sustaining democracy - facts that Washington's policy
community has mostly been unable to accept.. It is a vestigial limb
of empire, and it is time to let it go.
- Op-Ed by Robert D. Kaplan, The New York Times, January 1, 2019
This is the voice of American imperialism speaking through one of its
more reliable hand-puppets. Foreign Policy has twice named Robert
Kaplan one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers." In his op-ed, Kaplan
blames Afghanistan's current problems on the illegal US war on Iraq
in 2003, adding parenthetically and without further explanation:
"which I mistakenly supported." The unintended joke here is that he
frames the Iraq War as a mistake largely because it diverted the US
from nation-building in Afghanistan. Yes, he says exactly that. He
has nothing to say about either war's criminality or US atrocities.
Those are not serious concerns for the imperial mindset - those are
just the necessary inconveniences of maintaining an empire. He even
appears unaware that his formulation about Afghanistan and the
decline of the American empire perfectly fits the historical reality
of US defeat in Vietnam.
On New Year's Eve, the day before Kaplan's op-ed, the lengthy lead
story in the Times was headlined: "CIA-Led Afghan Forces Leave Grim
Trail of Abuse."
This report is based on months of reporting on night raids, torture,
and summary executions of Afghan civilians carried out by CIA-trained
death squads, euphemistically called "strike forces" in the paper.
The instances described in the report are horrifying and savage. In
one, the death squad puts bags over the heads of two brothers,
executing them with their families in the next room. For good
measure, the death squad blew up the room where the bodies lay.
Perhaps it's just another sign of American psychic numbing, but the
Times story seems to have provoked little response from other media,
from politicians of any stripe, or from the public. More American war
crimes in some Muslim country? Well, Happy New Year!
The US invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, under Operation
Enduring Freedom, accusing the Taliban of harboring some of the 9/11
attackers, most of whom were Saudis. More to the point, the US has
been creating havoc in Afghanistan at least since 1979, when we
started training the mujahedeen to fight the Russians only to receive
"our" Islamist radicals' blowback at the Twin Towers. Afghanistan is
a country about the size of Texas with a population of about 35
million (almost 40% literate). Some 63% of the population is under 25
years old and so has little conscious memory of a time when Afghans
weren't the targets of the American war machine.
Presently the US has about 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, but nobody
now quite knows how long they'll be there. Mostly what US troops do
is protect the official government from the apparent majority of the
population that prefers the Taliban or some imaginary other option.
The Afghan government controls little more than half the country most
of the time. All sides have been killing civilians at the rate of
about 8,000 a year for several years now, with the US and allies
doing most of the killing. At least 18 CIA operatives were killed in
Afghanistan from 2001 to 2017. This disproportionately deadly toll
has not done much to win the hearts and minds of the people, but in
seventeen years, the US hasn't figured out how to do anything else
better than create carnage.
The CIA-run death squad campaign isn't new, but it has been seriously
expanded during the past two years. Death squad personnel run into
the thousands, mostly Afghans, but are recruited, trained, equipped,
and controlled by CIA agents or CIA contractors. They operate
independently of the US military command, typically without the
military's knowledge. They are effectively terrorist cells. They
carry out night raids, long opposed by the Afghan government and the
population at large. The night raids target civilians the CIA thinks
it has reason to assassinate or capture and torture. The Times report
describes survivors of night raids, all of whom insist on their
innocence. There is no official accountability for these terrorist
tactics:
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A. would not comment, nor would Afghans
directly involved with the forces. Afghan security officials in Kabul
tried to play down the level of the forces' autonomy and the nature
of their abuses. When pressed with details of specific cases, they
did not respond.
And there is no evidence that these terrorist tactics are doing any
good in a country that has despised foreign invaders for centuries.
Virtually the same US terror tactics failed spectacularly in Vietnam.
There the CIA mounted the infamous Phoenix Program to terrorize South
Vietnamese villages with CIA-run death squads who "neutralized more
than 80,000 real or suspected Viet Cong.
Once Osama bin Laden escaped capture in 2001, the US war in
Afghanistan lacked any clear mission. The Bush administration and the
military shifted their attention to making war on Iraq instead.
Failing to disengage sensibly from Afghanistan, the US let the war
drift on mindlessly. In 2009, President Obama declared Afghanistan
the "smart war" and decided to escalate it without really figuring
out why. Obama relied particularly on CIA drones to kill massive
numbers of people, mostly civilians, ultimately to no useful purpose.
In 2016, President Trump campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan.
Once in office, trump appointed Mike Pompeo to run the CIA. Pompeo
set out to expand CIA killing, particularly with the death squads
discreetly called "strike forces" by the Times. This paramilitary
escalation, primarily against the Taliban, was first reported in
October 2017, creating little stir. Six months later, the CIA still
denied the story was true. In the fall of 2017, Pompeo expressed US
policy this way:
We can't perform our mission if we're not aggressive. This is
unforgiving, relentless. You pick the word. Every minute, we have to
be focused on crushing our enemies.
At the same time, the Institute for Public Policy had a different
perspective, offered by former State Department career officer
Matthew Hoh, who served in Afghanistan. Hoh had resigned in 2009 in
protest against the Obama administration escalation of the war there.
Calling the 2017 CIA's expanded death squads part of "the broader war
campaign of the United States in the Muslim world," Hoh accurately predicted:
This CIA program of using Afghan militias to conduct commando raids,
the vast majority of which will be used against civilians despite
what the CIA states, falls in line with American plans to escalate
the use of air and artillery strikes against the Afghan people in
Taliban-held areas, almost all of whom are Pashtuns. Again, the
purpose of this campaign is not to achieve a political settlement or
reconciliation, but to brutally subjugate and punish the people,
mostly rural Pashtuns, who support the Taliban and will not give in
to the corrupt American run government in Kabul.
Since 2001, the US has watched passively as three presidents waged
war on Afghanistan, each committing war crimes and crimes against
humanity that would surely, in a just society, constitute impeachable
offenses.
For all the public splutter of self-designated serious people over
the possible withdrawal of 2,000 US troops from Syria, the absence of
real reaction to how badly it's all going in Afghanistan is sort of
amazing (or would be for anyone still capable of amazement).
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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio,
TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the
Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of
America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine,
and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
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