The Peace Press — Saturday, September 4, 2021 edition
Fake news, disinformation and on some occasions even outright propaganda — — — brought to you by the corporate media and their friends inside the National Security deep state — — — -such fake news and disinformation is communicated regularly through news channels like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS and newspapers like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and nearly every English-printed newspaper, magazine or periodical in the West. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman so acutely observed and wrote about some years ago in their book “Manufacturing Consent: Political Economy of the Mass Media” — — -the media serves as a tool of the establishment and the warfare state to manufacture consent for our Nazi-like foreign policies since 1898.
And as Malcom X so keenly observed a few decades ago:
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
~Malcolm X
So keep on agitating and promoting independent news and independent journalists who, over time, help change the narrative and in doing so, reclaim from the Imperialist Establishment the right to think differently and more rationally based upon a greater factual understanding of the world in which we live and in a way that does not often favor the continuation of the Empire. Democracy and Empire cannot coexist, so if you are truly devoted to the Republic and the Constitution as I am, then you will do everything in your power, legal and illegal, to fundamentally undermine, subvert and destroy the American Empire. Fortunately, much of this work can be performed successfully and peacefully with simple narrative reclamation and the democratization of information. Together, we have the power. Yes, we can.
“Biden’s popular and long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered a big media meltdown that exposed its de facto merger with the military.”
“In the wake of a remarkably successful Taliban offensive capped by the takeover of Kabul, the responses of corporate media provided what may have been the most dramatic demonstration ever of its fealty to the Pentagon and military leadership. The media did so by mounting a full-throated political attack on President Joe Biden’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan and a defense of the military’s desire for an indefinite presence in the country.
Biden’s failure to establish a plan for evacuating tens of thousands of Afghans seeking to the flee the new Taliban regime made him a soft target for the Beltway media’s furious assault. However, it was Biden’s refusal last Spring to keep 4,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan on an indefinite basis — flouting an aggressive Pentagon lobbying campaign — that initially triggered the rage of the military brass.
The media offensive against Biden’s Afghan withdrawal advanced arguments that the military could not to make on its own — at least, not in public. It also provided the military with important cover at the moment when it was at its most vulnerable for its disastrous handling of the entire war.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/09/01/the-beltway-medias-loyalty-to-permanent-war-state/
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“Suppose President Biden came before Congress to announce that ending the war in Afghanistan was only the beginning. In recent years, the United States has used force on the ground or conducted strikes from the air in at least nine countries: not only Afghanistan, but also Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. These wars go on in part because one person wages them. Congress has abdicated its constitutional duty to determine whether, where and whom America should fight.
Mr. Biden inherited this situation, but he need not perpetuate either the ongoing wars or the legal evasions that enable them. He could tell Congress this: It has six months to issue a formal declaration of the wars it wants to continue, or else the troops (and planes and drones) are coming home.
Were he to deliver such an ultimatum, Mr. Biden would, in a stroke, usher in a new era of U.S. foreign policy. Of course, the president would be attacked for shirking his responsibility. But the responsibility to declare war rightly belongs to Congress, and if Congress keeps passing the buck, then Mr. Biden, his successor or the voting public ought to insist that it fulfill its obligations. Otherwise, a lone individual will continue to direct the largest military the world has ever seen, while 333 million Americans fight, pay, and mostly watch our wars unfold.”
https://archive.is/rKDSg#selection-327.0-327.27
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“In the 20 years since the September 11 attacks, the United States government has spent more than $21 trillion at home and overseas on militaristic policies that led to the creation of a vast surveillance apparatus, worsened mass incarceration, intensified the war on immigrant communities, and caused incalculable human suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/01/911-us-has-spent-21-trillion-militarism-home-and-abroad
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Another colossal waste of money on a military establishment that does this nation and the world more harm than good.
“Every congressperson who voted for this should be ashamed,” said Win Without War’s Erica Fein after 14 Democrats joined with Republicans to approve the amendment.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/01/outrageous-and-shameful-house-panel-approves-375b-boost-pentagon-budget
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Major kudos to President Biden for courageously sticking to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Major kudos to President Trump for courageously negotiating the Doha agreement that enabled the withdrawal. But the most major kudos defintely go to the antiwar activists, independent journalists, various websites like antiwar .com and many activist-leaders who persisted and, in doing so, created the safe political spaces for politician-followers like Trump or Biden to step into and end the wars to appease the masses. Ultimately, it is we the people who possess the power to change history.
Yes, we can.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/31/biden-speech-transcript-us-completes-afghanistan-withdrawal
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“The US-Western propaganda, which has afflicted our collective understanding of Afghanistan for twenty years and counting, has been so overpowering to the point that we are left without the slightest understanding of the dynamics that led to the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/09/02/propaganda-and-failed-narratives-new-understanding-afghanistan-must
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“Just over two months before the military mission in Kabul — along with broader American delusions — collapsed, the Center for International Policy released a report on America’s failed and futile Afghanistan adventure. It was a war that took four lives and five limbs from soldiers I commanded. Two bled to death, one died at a base hospital, another — shot through the jaw — later overdosed, and one more lives as a triple amputee. The oldest was 28 — on his third tour — the youngest couldn’t legally buy a beer when we deployed; not one earned more than $40,000 a year for his trouble. All bravely spun their wheels on a mission that couldn’t be accomplished, in a war that shouldn’t have continued.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2021/09/02/the-perils-of-forgetting-learn-from-the-afghan-war-or-repeat-it/
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“A majority of Americans support pulling troops out of Afghanistan and ending America’s longest war, according to a new poll released this week.
A study from Pew Research Center, conducted prior to the last troop leaving Afghanistan this week, found 54 percent of U.S. adults said the decision to withdraw troops from the country was the right one, while 42 percent said they think it was the wrong move. “
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/570312-majority-favors-us-troop-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-poll
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Airstrikes upon Afghanistan is an example of a war that continues — — — -a war with bombs and without troops is still a war.
“A drone strike in Kabul that the US claims targeted ISIS-K killed 10 civilians, including 7 children”
https://news.antiwar.com/2021/08/31/we-are-not-done-with-you-yet-biden-threatens-more-airstrikes-against-isis-k-in-afghanistan/
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“The bombing of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under the UN Charter because Afghanistan did not attack the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, writes Marjorie Cohn.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/09/02/biden-threatens-more-illegal-war-in-afghanistan/
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One million people murdered since the beginning of the war on terror. Again, is our foreign policy really so different from the Nazis? Perhaps in scope only?
“The ‘forever wars’ waged by the US since the 9/11 attacks have so far cost more than $8 trillion, according to new report by Brown University.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/costs-war-deaths/
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“If one scans this week’s headlines they are all gloom and doom, running from despair and humiliation to disaster and debacle. But rarely do you see calls for a fundamental reset of the failed U.S. foreign policy of perpetual wars and a rethink the global leadership paradigm.
This is not surprising, since the mainstream media are, with rare exceptions, an essential part of the powerful lobby MICIMATT (the term coined by the former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, who was responsible for Ronald Reagan’s morning briefs) that is actually in charge of this policy.
MICIMATT means “Military-Industrial-Congress-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank” complex. Here are some results of its activity for the last 20 years.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Edward_Lozansky/2021/09/01/afghanistan-is-a-debacle-but-you-aint-seen-nothing-yet/
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“CACI is a well-known company with a $907 million contract in Afghanistan — it also has undisclosed ties to think tanks opposed to withdrawal.”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/08/27/how-the-defense-industry-helped-prolong-the-war-in-afghanistan/
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“Before he stole $169 million and fled his failed state in disgrace, Afghanistan’s puppet President Ashraf Ghani was formed in elite American universities, given US citizenship, trained in neoliberal economics by the World Bank, glorified in the media as an “incorruptible” technocrat, and coached by powerful DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council.”
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/09/02/afghanistan-ashraf-ghani-corrupt/
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“On behalf of the American people, President Biden must hold military leadership accountable.”
“If a soldier or Marine loses a weapon or equipment on a field exercise, regardless of size or cost, he or she is subject to legal action and the most severe ridicule. However, if a commanding general allows thousands of enemy to escape destruction or weapons and equipment to fall into the hands of the enemy, far too often the general miraculously evades accountability. When the fiasco in Kabul ends, this must not happen.
“From the moment American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines arrived at Kabul Airport, they behaved with extraordinary self-control and gallantry in the face of thousands of refugees desperate to reach safety. Because the human and material cost of America’s intervention in Afghanistan is finally coming to a close, this makes the loss of American service members at the Kabul airport particularly heartbreaking. It should not have happened.
For some reason, the senior military leaders responsible for planning and conducting the withdrawal were surprised by the rapid collapse of the Afghan army and police. After listening to General Kenneth McKenzie’s press conference, it seems obvious that he and the planners under his command failed to identify, assess, and develop a plan to control risks involving enemy pressure, interdiction, and penetration of the airport security perimeter. Timing and preparation demanded that senior military leaders plan for the worst case scenario, not the rosy one.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-went-wrong-in-kabul/
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“With the fall of province after province, the evaporation of the Afghan security forces, the chaos at the Kabul airport, and news of a terrorist attack that killed 175 people including 13 American soldiers and 28 Taliban members, commenters of virtually all political persuasions have heavily criticized either the decision to withdraw itself or at least the manner in which it has been carried out.
However, despite the media calling the evacuations a crisis, the real crisis has been the double-decade-long war itself. It began with the first American forces deployed to Afghanistan and is just now coming to a messy end. There were no loud mainstream media calls of humanity when the U.S. allied with dubious warlords, corruption on the level of delivering literal bags of cash to Afghan government officials, and the overwhelming proportion of civilians including women and children killed in drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan mission. Only now, at the end when it looks like a U.S. president is in reach of ending a war, do the humanitarian journalists and armchair commentators care about the people in the country that the U.S. has made into a theater of war. Recall the outrage about the Kurds in northern Syria when President Donald Trump wanted to withdraw troops from there. Has anyone reported on that since then?”
https://medium.com/funboat-diplomacy/bidens-afghanistan-withdrawal-reveals-pro-war-establishment-c40139f4cc77
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“To most Americans the collapse of Afghanistan called into question Washington’s ability to manage the world. After devoting 20 years, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars to creating a stable, democratic, and liberal Afghanistan, the entire Potemkin structure collapsed in 11 days.
However, other crises loom around the globe and, of course, those who demanded that America stay in Afghanistan now insist that Washington take on these new responsibilities, presumably to demonstrate improved levels of competence. Consider the extraordinarily brutal tricorner battle ongoing among Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Tigray.”
https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2021/08/31/barely-out-of-afghanistan-now-america-is-supposed-to-save-tigray-from-ethiopia-and-eritrea/
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“What have we truly accomplished in 20 years of post 9/11 wars, and at what price?” asks co-director of the Cost of War Project.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/01/estimated-cost-post-911-us-wars-hits-8-trillion-nearly-million-people-dead
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““Holy cow, I was living like Scarface…I was paying out anywhere between $300–400,000 per week to $5 million per week at times. All in cash.” Matthew Hoh, U.S. Marine Corps Captain and former State Department official”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/ludicrous-cost-of-afghanistan-war-revealed/278294/?fbclid=IwAR14fUlFqUl9EzNTY3RACs7wieagduPPyS-LmnqZKm2wGHPJZ8ZvQuThzQc
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“The first step in ending war is seeing it for what it is. It’s time to declassify the secrets and the lies.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/09/02/lets-open-books-we-need-truth-commission-afghan-war
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“My longtime colleague at CIA, Mel Goodman, has written an instructive article about our decades-ago co-worker Robert Gates, whom Mel labels the “Poster Child for Bureaucratic Deceit.” Sadly, I can vouch for the correctness of Mel’s findings.
Gates’s case is emblematic of how it is that ambitious, brown-nose functionaries (as well as rising four-stars) can ooze themselves into top positions and do irreparable harm. The only hope of preventing this in the future is to expose how the system now works, so I feel bound to add my two cents (plus a confession for having been Gates’s branch chief 50 years ago).
Goodman’s piece was occasioned by Gates’s key role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/09/01/robert-gates-and-those-transfer-cases/
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“Revenge cycles have no end, and they’ve continued to power endless U.S. warfare — as a kind of perpetual emotion machine — in the name of opposing terrorism.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/09/01/bidens-revenge-fueling-madness-militarism-afghanistan
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“Afghanistan remains a poor country that depends heavily on outside aid, and half the population is already facing food shortages. Millions of Afghan children face severe malnutrition, and millions of Afghans are internally displaced. Significant disruption in the flow of aid and trade would drive some parts of the country towards famine, and that disruption is exactly what these terrorism designations would cause. It is as if sanctions advocates looked at the catastrophic humanitarian crisis created in Yemen as a result of the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition war and blockade and thought that they should try to copy that result. If we want to avert a major humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the US should focus on how to help in the delivery of aid rather than discuss punitive and coercive measures.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Daniel_Larison/2021/08/31/dont-wage-economic-war-on-afghanistan/
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“Biden is right to end the forever war in Afghanistan. Now he needs to close the forever prison that it built.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/09/01/now-afghan-war-over-close-gitmo-now
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Diplomacy works when a nation is more concerned about peace than about the profits of perpetual war.
“In each case, US negotiations fail because the interlocutor nation cannot trust that the US really wants to change the foundational hostility in the relationship. In each case, the US demands that the other country makes the concessions the US demands without ever offering to make the core concessions the other country desires. So, negotiations never grow beyond minor negotiations over specific issues because the U.S. consistently breaks its promise that those incremental, trust building negotiations will lead to more substantial ones.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2021/08/31/why-us-negotiations-always-fail/
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“In Washington, the Biden administration must lift cruel sanctions, back diplomacy, and end support for right-wing factions trying to destabilize the elected government.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/09/01/venezuela-dialogue-offers-way-out-crisis
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“America’s forever war — misbegotten, intractable, awash in imperial hubris — is over. Contrary to self-righteous fulminating on the right, the mayhem it left behind belongs not to Biden, but to decades of ruinous decisions by U.S. leaders chasing empire. Confirming our long folly, it ended with a bleakly emblematic airstrike that killed 10 members of an extended Afghan family, 7 of them kids as they were learning to drive for their avowed move to America. For grieving relatives, its final savage lesson was clear: “If you can’t manage to hit the right target, leave Afghanistan to the Afghans.”
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2021/08/30/leaving-bitter-graveyard-empires-afghanistan-everything-crying
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“It is hard to overstate the sociopathy of US national security officials: their casual willingness to blatantly lie about the gravest matters is limitless.”
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/ben-rhodes-book-proves-obama-officials
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“Twenty years after her historic vote against invading Afghanistan, the California congresswoman is still speaking up and taking action.”
““I urged caution because I knew even then that there was no military solution in Afghanistan,” she said. As far as she was concerned, the 60-word resolution amounted to “a blank check for any president to use force anywhere in the world.
For the last two decades, presidents from both parties have relied on the 2001 resolution to wage war around the globe. It has served as the legal justification for everything from Guantánamo Bay, the illegal torture camp the US operates on Cuban soil, to Biden’s recent air strikes in Somalia. Lee has reintroduced legislation to repeal the authorization every year since.
“I don’t think the public wants to see their tax dollars going into nation-building,” she said. “I think they do want to see their tax dollars going for diplomacy, development, humanitarian concerns, trade, aid, and really engaging in the world for global peace and security in a way that prevents the necessity to use force or prevents much of what causes terrorism. Because we know that the seeds of terrorism are sown, in many respects, in despair.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/barbara-lee-profile/
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“Since the US carried out a drone strike in Kabul on Sunday that witnesses say killed 10 civilians, the Pentagon and the White House have defended the bombing, claiming it targeted ISIS-K. But relatives of the victims strongly deny that any of them were affiliated with ISIS and want answers from Washington.
“They have to give us answers. Is our blood so worthless, we don’t even get an explanation?” Ramal Ahmadi, a brother of one of the dead, told The Associated Press. Ahmadi said a missile hit his brother’s car as he pulled up the family’s home and children ran out to greet him.”
https://news.antiwar.com/2021/09/02/victims-of-us-drone-strike-in-kabul-want-answers/
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“Whatever threat may have existed was eliminated. So were 10 innocent Afghan civilians. Their names were Zemaray, Naseer, Zameer, Faisal, Farzad, Armin, Benyamin, Sumaya, Ayat, and Malika. Seven of them were children between 2 and 10 years old. According to relatives of the two families who spoke to Al Jazeera, none of them had any connection to ISIS-K, whose operatives American authorities claim to have been targeting. As yet, there is no evidence to the contrary — nor any confirmation that any ISIS-K operative was taken out by the strike — save Pentagon assurances that a clear and present danger was thwarted swiftly and cleanly by a heroic U.S. drone. Also according to Al Jazeera’s sources, those killed in the drone strike had just finished packing up their belongings, preparing to be evacuated to the United States. Of 12-year-old Farzad, one neighbor said: “We could only find his legs.”
None of them should be dead right now.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-casualties-of-peace/
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“While it is technically true that Trump didn’t start any new wars, he didn’t end any wars, even though he campaigned on a platform of ending “endless wars.” He also engaged in numerous murderous actions, as detailed by Caitlin Johnstone, such as:
vetoing the bill to save Yemen from US-backed genocide and actively blocking aid to its people, murdering untold tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, rolling out many world-threatening cold war escalations against Russia, engaging in insane brinkmanship with Iran, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians, and reducing military accountability for those airstrikes.
Trump doubled down on the worst of Obama’s foreign policy actions. He redefined Russia and China as enemies of the United States and led the United States back into a Cold War with them. He pushed for a perpetual increase in the already bloated U.S. military budget. His legacy is one of continued U.S. wars, militarism, aggression, and intervention. There were more U.S. troops in Afghanistan when Trump left office than when he entered office, something that Carafano never mentions.”
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/conservatives-give-bush-and-trump-a-free-pass-on-afghanistan/
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“Continued U.S. backing for Ukraine’s unrealistic territorial ambitions is unwise and dangerous while backing Kiev’s bid for NATO membership, which every U.S. administration beginning with George W. Bush’s has done, is even more reckless. Treating Ukraine as an ally creates serious and growing perils for the American people. The only thing worse than a weak, vulnerable security client, is a weak, vulnerable client that seeks to pursue an aggressive policy that it cannot possibly sustain with its own military resources, and instead expects backing from its powerful benefactor.”
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraine-washington%E2%80%99s-bellicose-security-client-192772
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“It would be easy to blame Donald Trump for the disarray in the transatlantic alliance, but twenty-five years of American exceptionalism is the real culprit. The aggressive expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Clinton and Bush administrations over the objections of our West European allies began a period of discontinuity that still exists. Bush deepened the disarray in 2002 with his “axis of evil” speech that set the stage for the invasion of Iraq. Bush and Barack Obama considered Afghanistan the “good war,” which brought two full decades of chaos throughout Southwest Asia. President Joe Biden contributed to the fault lines within the transatlantic alliance with his failure to consult our allies on the Afghan withdrawal.
A constant feature of the disharmony between the United States and Europe is Washington’s obsession with the use of force against so-called “rogue” states in the Third World. The past five U.S. administrations, including Biden’s, don’t know the difference between a “rogue” state and a “failed” state. The hegemonists in the Bush administration were obsessed with the notion of rogue states, the so-called “axis of evil” that included Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Then-Senator Hillary Clinton supported Bush’s rhetoric by emphasizing that “every nation has to be either with us, or against us,” which channeled such Cold Warriors as the Dulles brothers in the 1950s or the brothers Rostow and Bundy in the 1960s.
U.S. and Israeli military force has created havoc the world over. The removal of Saddam Hussein led to the creation of the Islamic State; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to the creation of Hezbollah; U.S. intervention in Afghanistan led to the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks and greater violence; the use of force in Libya in 2011 led to chaos in North Africa. U.S. wars since 9/11 have cost trillions of dollars and have led to tens of millions of refugees, which has fostered dangerous nationalism in European politics. There have been thousands of U.S. combatant deaths in the wars since 9/11, thousands of severely wounded survivors, thousands of suicides by veterans and active-duty personnel, and tens of thousands of civilian fatalities.”
