p.s. Hats off to Gerard!

Dear Obama -

You inherited so much crap from the Republicans when you took office. Before
addressing health care reform, Wall St. regulation, but AFTER the bailouts, you
should have sat down your national security team and said, “Give me the
shortest timetable to pull all troops out of these foreign misadventures.”
Whatever answer they gave you, you should have multiplied by 0.5 and said,
“That’s how much time you have. Chop. Chop.” With the political clout you
would have gained from THAT move, you could have passed health care reform,
etc with a breeze. The deficit would be shrinking, everybody would be happy.
Think of all the pictures of our boys and girls coming home and the hugs and
kisses they’d be getting. You can’t by that kind of midterm election publicity.
I’m sorry you let these generals lead you around by the nose. Now you face the
real possibility of being a one-term president. I thought you were savvy, but
now I think you are malleable and of the opinion of the last person who had
your ear.

Redhorse:  The “real me” is a long-term Quaker “peacenik” who worked as an organizer for the first Test Ban Treaty, and after that consistently with peace organizations and as a college teacher of English, meantime raising four boys, one not my own.
Gerard is my real name. I do not consider my personal details relevant, but since you brought it up and I want to be as open as possible ...I am also way “over the hill” at 96. 
  As to why there is little or no action to get us out of Afghanistan, I think it’s due to the dependence of government and politics, not on the public vote every 2 or 4 years, but on huge amounts of campaign funding money coming from corporations who are the only ones who can afford the present systems.  Also, many of those same corporatioins are making tons of money out of war, and don’t care enough about humanity to stop it.  Instead they spend money and threat of withholding money to control media and create fear so people are reluctant to organize and face into an immensely complicated and inaccessible organization called the MIC.
  Of course it’s much more complicated than this, and I won’t take space here to drag you through it as you already know enough and are intelligent enough.  Maybe the question to ask is “Why don’t you and your friends?  Why don’t millions of others?
  What do you think is the answer?  (And don’t tell me there isn’t any answer. Too much has not even been tried.)

GERARD: Seeing the real you at last—!! How about Hedges or Goodman or someone begins plans for a mass march on D.C. next summer—?

It’s so “old hat” to keep saying “Follow the money”
and yet that’s the fundamental field of action. To understand how the government finances war and war finances the government, round and round, is at least to know why the ordinary people are held hostage to a system, are victimized by a system that is totally lacking in moral backbone and incapable of changing itself.
  Some other, stronger influence is going to have to intercede and stop this malicious circle. What will it be?  Other than a massive citizens’ non-violent protest movement, I don’t see any other way.
Releases of informatioin like the recent WikiLeaks exposure help by exposing hidden truths, but it remains the duty of citizens themselves to reclaim their lost power and stop policies that are literally killing their children and molesting foreign countries illegally.

OFER72: You are correct Sir!! Both parties are corrupt to the core and, “—there isn’t a nickels worth of difference between them—”. Still, I see no civilized option other than the ballot box. Besides complaining, the VOTE seems to be, the only political action the average American will take. We turned the Congress and Presidency over in the last two elections. True—we were betrayed!! But the Dems have to go through the motions and pretend. I’m sayin’, if the VOTE is the only political power we have left, lets set fire to the Republithugs and accept the long road to change. If it makes no difference anyway, what difference does it make. Why not?

      PSMITH makes it clear, that the man-behind-the-man Wall Street/MIC/MSM machine has turned the American political system into window dressing for specisl interest moral cripples. Warwhores,Financiers and Spooks—Oh my!! So, the Dumbocrats and Republithugs, are mere political slight-of-hand, for the murderous international fascists looting our economy, and destroying our freedom. (Helps one understand OLDMANTURTLES irony doesn’t it.) If the fix is indeed in, what sane viable path to civilized cultural change is there?

      I appreciate PROLE putting some reality spin on the war ball, and the insight into BOYARSKY. Questions do control the answers and shape the reality. Our MSM are masters at this type of deception. I’m remembering O.Stones NATURAL BORN KILLER where Harrelson says that MSM “—is a kind of weather—”.

      We are not a powerless people, and the thugs know it. It’s obvious that the VOTE still matters. Look at the attempts to split and confuse us now soaking our airways. If you quit fighting you die. VOTE!!

I ALWAYS knew that this war like the rest are a FRAUD. I did not need to hear it from Wikileaks but I am very glad they exposed this to the average persons living in LALa Land. It is appalling that our troops and millions of innocent people are put in harms way based on LIES. This is not acceptable. War crimes are war crimes and the guilty are guilty.

There is no doubt in my mind that this country and the world is and always was run by REPUBLICONS. Regardless of party affiliation, they are all war-loving, money-making REPUBLICON imperialists. Always were and always will be unless we all join hands to stop them.

Wake-up people!

One doesn’t hear much about it these days but back during the Vietnam war there was talk and concern about how that war had become institutionalized because it had gone on so long.  No one should be so naive as not to know that there are those that profit from war.

Now we have a war that has gone on longer than Vietnam with little apparent benefit.  The temptation in a time of economic uncertainty may be to extend a war beyond the time that makes sense from a military point of view.  The war certainly provides employment for the soldiers that serve, jobs and profits for military contractors and thus acts as sort of an economic stimulus.  If in fact, this war in Afghanistan is being extended for purposes other than military objectives then it will surely end badly as all things do when they are based on falsehoods.

Why would anyone be surprised that the Pakistani intelligence services are running the Taliban? They CREATED the Taliban in the first place and the Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan have been in bed with the CIA since they cosied up to Zia al Haq in the seventies. I think you can probably follow that line of dots to its logical conclusion.

Just think about Goldstein bin Laden and the wars with -insert a name- that never end. Wikileaks is meant to be a ‘truth machine’ and God do we ever need one as an antidote to the lie machine being run by the CIA, the Pentagon and the international mainstream media. Wikileaks and the Rolling Stone story on Mchrystal sound to me like a bell tolling off somewhere in the distance.

‘Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’ John Donne

PSmith,  I believe you have a pretty understanding
what is going on and what is a stake,  we need ur
hammer.

I first listened to the Stockwell tapes I believe in
1987 when they came out.  He is a very passionate
human being.  Phillip Agee also.

“The release of 92,000 pages of secret military documents by the website Wikileaks points to the futility of the war in Afghanistan and the double-dealing of”...Pakistan’s so-called ally, the United States. Pakistan doesn’t owe the U.S. anything. The U.S. has been double-dealing for the last half century and more, pursuing its own self-interest with reckless disregard for the lives and welfare of foreign populations everywhere. As that arch double-dealer H.Kissinger used to reiterate by word and deed, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” Why should it be any different for Pakistan or Afghanistan? 
  “The material, mostly intelligence reports from the ground, gives a pessimistic picture of”…another foreign population(s) confronted by hostile American and British troops occupying their countries. “From a historical perspective, the release of the documents recalls the publication of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War”…and the Goldstone Report during the on-going siege of Gaza. “Their reports, incident by incident in real-time communications, confirm what Afghanistan war critics have been saying”…and what Israeli occupation critics have been saying. But for that cutthroat cheerleader of foreign occupation Boyarsky, it’s all a cause for questioning not the legitimacy of such occupations and their serial crimes but rather the loyalty of the local henchmen enlisted to carry out imperial designs. Boyarsky shares that same warped moral universe of Kissinger.
  “American soldiers are inundated with reports of such collaboration between the insurgents and Pakistani intelligence, which has long sought allies against India.”…and no doubt the “insurgents” are inundated with reports of collaboration between Pakistani intelligence and the U.S. invaders. And Palestinian liberation soldiers are inundated with reports of collaboration between zionazi militants and U.S. ‘intelligence’. “The documents also tell of secret American commando units that kill insurgent commanders but also inflame Afghans by killing civilians”…and other documents tell of not-so-secret Israeli commando units and regular stormtroops that kill and gas civilians - to the great glee and approbation of the bloodthirsty Boyarsky. “White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the release of the documents was ‘a breach of federal law’…but so far, he’s never said that the release of American weaponry to the IDF wehrmacht is also a “a breach of federal law” under the Arms Export Control Act. None of which ever bothered occupation-lover Boyarsky.
“The ‘Secret Archive’ shows how the Obama team has misled us”…as does the Goldstone Report. And yet the blockade and occupation of Gaza continues long after its release, so don’t expect revelatory documents to change the habits of the infamous Occupiers or their dedicated apologists like the despicable Boyarsky. “We and other nations with” our hostile occupation troops are holding whole nations hostage in our endless wars of empire “while terrorists operate from” Washington and London and Tel Aviv government offices far from Afghanistan.

REDHORSE,

  I am all for getting Republicans out too, however
fellow Viet Vet, if you remember it was the Democrats
that put us there, it was the Democrats that had the
Gulf of Tonkin lie.  Both of these parties are in this
game together, is that to hard to see??

Be very careful when believing that vested interests are blaming Pakistan. 

We have a long history as a species (and the trend is getting *worse*) of quickly
blaming someone else for their own failures.  The Afghanis realizing that things
are not unfolding as they wanted might want to shift blame to someone else, even
better when there is an air of plausibility and the recipient is not in the room.

Same deal with NATO and their brass.  Instead of reflecting on their own possible
failures, just blame Afghanis, call them warlords or hillbillies.

Do I believe the official line?  Not particularly.  We’ve all been burned by them so
many times before to the point where the Pakistani Foreign minister has more
credibility than a Pentagon spokesman.

WOW!! And WOW again!! Everything said here, so far, has been said here before. Damage, what the elite call “blowback”,and more again. Thrill murder, assassination, spooks, shadow men, double agents, corporate mercenaries, hit men, citizen informers, MSM police state propagandists, a looted economy, untouchable, financial, “above the law”  sharks and thieves, open congressional bribery, suspended liberty and civil rights, gutted social progams, and no end in sight.

      What are “—We the people—” left with? Shock and moral outrage mean nothing. Calls for reason mean nothing. Even when confronted with the truth and the ballot, fascism continues its’ ascent, and we remain emotionally frozen, in shock and unable to take action. Like sheep in a pen being slaughtered by wolves we bleat, mill and dream of the magical catalyst that will wake us from this nightmare. Liberty has been stolen, the country is being reduced to a ghetto (think Warsaw) and dreams of apocalypse replace meaning, real life, liberty and happiness.

      I could never shake the feeling, that the terrified VietNamese I encountered, were the same poor people I’d grown up with in East Texas, and the war was a hollow lie. There are some things so bad, it doesn’t matter who did them. Truth and love go begging, justice becomes a sideshow and the attendent reality subsumes the lives of the participants forever. The damage is absolute, we become prisoners of the horror that fills the moral vacuum, and like Tantalus, real life can been seen and heard but never experienced. I love my country so much, why did it decide to make me its’ enemy?

      Psychopathic megalomaniacal narcissists are incapable of moral action and reason. The psychic/emotional vampire is not human. It feeds on the lifeforce and emotional health and financial wealth of others. Washington is a disease killing us all. Do you not see that? Get the Republicans out!!

Nobody has to date mentioned that US is providing assitance to uzbeks, tajiks, and pashtuns to hate each other more than ever before.

US-nato appears to be winning hearts of uzbek and tajik masters of people and wars. But, how ab the minds?
Maybe nato-us did not have to win their minds as all the warlords, american, european, and afghan are fascistic; i.e., are for meritocracy, rule by diktat; oops, rule by law; free speech as long as they only speak [from podium looking dwn on u in myriad ways]or thru media only they own.

As for winning hearts of an afghan woman, nato-us shld simply abduct a few and europenize them; treat the lavishly, etc.

And women are made by nature just like me. Thus, they know that where their hearts are, the minds are always there.
They, knew—and in spite of being smallheads and us big, too, big heads, damn it—that u cannot separate feelings [hearts] from minds.

I won the heart of my woman ages ago, but not the mind. So, the generalzation, and the deduction from it was not true for my wife.

But, then, nature [? god]plays all kinds of tricks on us. I cld even become president of grenada! tnx

Yeah, we cannot have this breaching of Federal law, especially with all the breaching and stretching it took to make it that way.

Balkas, they are delivering Freedom and Democracy,

If they just happen to come accross a bunch of real
estate that might be good for a natural gas and petro
pipeline, all the better.

US-nato designed to defeat taliban and to kill bin laden only? And not for chunk[s] of land, keeping the three ethnoses inside artificial borders; puppetization of much of a dysfunctional empire, and playing one ethnos against the other two and vice-versa? tnx

What gets me, everyone is acting real surprised
that the enemy has weapons.

  That isn’t the way U.S. wars are supposed to be fought.

The enemy isn’t supposed to be allowed weapons to defend
themselves…....These guys don’t play fair…..or by
U.S. rules of war.
  Don’t they know, they are supposed to come out with
their hands up and get machine gunned…..??????????

What stopped the war in Vietnam?  Drafted soldiers, “grunts” who refused to fight and risk their lives for insane officers—instead they “fragged” them, i.e. rolled a hand grenade into their tents.

The military has learned this lesson.  Now the grunts “volunteer” because their families, or what’s left of them, are too poor to send them to school, or even feed them.  And if the ignorant poor are not enough canon fodder for the capitalist war machine, then “consultants” are hired for exorbitant fees.  These mercenaries could be from death squads from Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Israel, etc. i.e our “allies”. 

Then, of course, there are the uber mecenaries, trained by taxpayers for our special forces (Seals, Rangers, whatever) and now using their taxpayer training to work for corporations for thousands a day, with no accountability whatsoever.  They’ll be in our streets soon, just like they were in New Orleans.

So today the Senate denied a climate bill, and money to schools and teachers, i.e. social spending, but did pass another 10 billions dollars for our corporate war machine, to kill and plunder more of the poorest, outgunned, brown heathens, take their equity of natural resources, profit from all the destruction and then pillage what’s left.

Great country we have here.  Land of the free and the brave!!

Ah, Pakistan. Another awesome ally in the middle east, like Saudi-Arabia and Israel.

We need fewer friends.

When the war end.I hate it so much.Taliban and other must stop there war now.Million of people were killed by the war.We have the lesson,is not?

So 5 or 6 years ago I watched a man on Democracy Now discuss Pakistan’s involvement with and support of the Taliban and certain warlords. He stated that Pakistan wanted a weak and destabilized Afghanistan. He pointed out that the Bush administration knew the score but kept pointing its fingers at Iran as the problem both because they could not admit that Pakistan was not the friend they said it was and because they wanted an excuse to bomb Iran on behalf of Israel.

So now the Obama administration finds itself in the position and reacts the same identical way. Ralph Nader pointed out that Obama was a whiteman in a blackman’s skin. Little did the average American realize that that white man was GW Bush!

The Sgt who leaked these documents is a hero. But these documents will have no more impact on the cessation of this useless and needless war than throwing a bucket of yellow in a sea of green. Americans are too busy looking for jobs, fighting foreclosures, and oh, I forgot, doing drugs and living on their unemployment instead of seeking jobs. I’m confused about what exactly it is they doing but whatever it is it will not keep this war mad administration from continuing to spend us into bankruptcy instead of a better economy. The money being appropriated to this war would give us a single payer health care system and create jobs. Instead, it makes the rich richer and the country ever poorer!