While our troops are being gunned down by Afghan allies and the President of Afghanistan is calling Americans “demons,” the Administration remains committed to spending billions in that country and keeping U.S. troops in harm’s way. The solution? Have U.S. troops serve as “Guardian Angels” to protect other U.S. troops so our allies do not kill them while they sleep.
Americans are also now allowed to carry weapons when working in ministries and with Afghan officials. They are also told to position their desks facing the door to see if visitors have come to kill them.
The measures follow the death of two U.S. military officers working in the Afghan Interior Ministry — gunned down at their desks.”Of the approximately 80 NATO service members killed since 2007 by Afghan security forces, more than 75 percent were in the past two years.”
Of course, there is that other possibility — leave the country to its own devices and decisions by pulling out U.S. troops.
Source: Fox
Understand when I first begun looking at this I didnt take into consideration this was quite
probable that what precisely you discussed now seriously existed.
Rachel Maddow To Jon Stewart: Congress Has Acted Like A Dog On Its Hind Legs (VIDEO) (Rachel Maddow on her new book, “Drift: The Unmooring Of The American Military.”)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/30/rachel-maddow-jon-stewart-congress-dog-hind-legs_n_1390941.html?ref=media
(Thanks for the Zinn essay, iskraagent.)
Idealist: Not a problem. Something as radical as the Bill of Rights was only begrudgingly won by the yeoman farmers in 1791 by threatening a 2nd Revolution against the rich landed white guys (many who owned slaves) who were increasingly becoming vulnerable to the pressure from below, so actually it was the threat of mass action by ordinary people that generated such human progress, typical of most of human history. That’s why Marx concluded that in the long run it’s not individuals that make history but rather the masses, which is precisely why epochal markers of society are wars & revolutions.
Here’s a neat essay by the late Howard Zinn on the Bill of Rights:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/BillRights_ZR.html
Ishkra agent
OK good stuff, you confirm my post above that they’re a no allies, only satrapies. See my post on the trials of Alexander the Great in Afganistan.
One logical problem. How did the yeomen force from the 10 amendments?
Was it democratic or at gun point?
@Michael Murray:
I find your comment here and the one by insurance regarding Taiwan’s excellent system pretty awesome. Do doctors in Taiwan make a killing like the doctors here?
@anarmyofficer
Watch your back and the backs of those around you. Remember that some of the people you do business with everyday are the kind of people who will use a woman with a “baby” (really a bomb) and ambulances to attack troops and civilians. Keep the safety off your M9 side arm and keep one in the chamber. I wish the army would issue a nice .45 which you could keep cocked and locked.
Yes, I guess, only if you mean “winning” in the way that Charlie Sheen does.
“We lost the day we started. We win the day we stop.” -Michael Murray
Yes.
To Professor Turley’s immense credit, he has vowed, albeit not publicly but logically, based on his own writings against the murderous hubris of the Obama administration’s policies as articulated by Eric Holder recently in a speech at Northwestern University, to abstain from the 2012 election, since he on principle could never vote for any candidate in the One Party State that has 2 factions bickering over how most effectively to undermine the US Constitution.
The question remains after taking that step: why won’t left leaning liberals like Prof. Turley ever concede that American capitalism is unreformably predatory, generating superprofits to the 1% through unbridled militarism abroad while pauperizing the working people taxpayers at home?
The answer alas likely rests in the notion that, as Marx said, being determines consciousness, not the other way around, and the life of a revered Professor in DC is ultimately at least 50 times more cushy than, say, some shoestring reporter like Jack Reed.
Turley, one would hope, is beginning to see that US foreign policy is necessarily an extension of domestic policy? It’s the same people making both policies after all. When doors get kicked in Baghdad with no warrants abroad it will follow that doors in South Central, LA, Detroit & Brooklyn are next.
Is he somehow unaware that the US is a One Party State with Generals Over the White House that has 2 political factions which bicker over the most efficient ways to transfer wealth from the bottom to the top?
Surely he knows that US foreign policy, regardless of faction in power, has always been liberalism, that is, the extension of US values on the ends of bayonets?
And what are those values? 1st & foremost is abject hypocrisy, like the idea that Iran cannot have nukes while Uncle Sam can. Here’s what Uncle Sam said a few years ago when it was OK for Iran to have nukes:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/when-it-was-okay-for-iran-to-have-nuclear-power/
Uncle Sam’s notion of democracy is hollow & bankrupt since it recognizes only the formal sense, meaning the people typically get a pathetic choice of pulling a lever for one rich white guy candidate over another rich white guy candidate. The fact is there’s zero chance of a bottom up democracy under these formal constraints, that is, it’s inherently a system of top down democracy which is hardly democratic.
Why do you suppose the rich landed founders couldn’t ratify the original US Constitution as it was written? Because the vast majority of Americans, the yeoman farmers, demanded AMMENDMENTS, and the 1st 10 added were called the Bill of Rights.
Think about it. The Constitution was totally unacceptable until it was AMMENDED.
And now sadly those ammendments have been abrogated by Bush’s Military Commissions Act, which have been upheld by Obama and even exceeded in hubris, but were initiated originally by Clinton around 1996 when he slammed through (“Bi-partisan consensus” in American English means hold on to your goddam wallet & be vigilant of your rights!) all kinds of Draconian laws as a result of Timothy McVeigh’s actions (not to mention the uber-reactionary Telecommunications Act that allowed schmucks like Rubert Murdoch to flourish) and McVeigh’s actions were merely the blowback (just like 911 was blowback) for Clinton/Reno”s murderous raid of Koresh’s Waco compound, which killed about 90 mostly children and brown women, a feat that Uncle Sam has historically excelled in.
The bottom line is that it’s clear after Turley’s Nationally published articles re: the unprecedented authoritarian & blatantly unconstitutional steps that Obama has taken in regards to the State’s alleged right to summarily execute US citizens — that the honorable Professor Turley will NOT be voting for President in the 2012 election and some of his minions around this blog ought to think that fact through to its logical conclusion.
As with 40 years ago in Southeast Asia:
“We lost the day we started. We win the day we stop.”
(Shorter version of the above verse essay, which I obviously had to update after 2009 to account for President Obama’s incredibly stupid doubling down on the already long-lost cause in The Graveyard of Empires.)
As a veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vientnam 1970-72), I say that Professor Turley needs to stop using the misnomer “ally” and start employing the correct term: “vassal,” or “puppet.” Countries that invade and occupy other countries — like the United States — cannot call their local quisling/dependents “allies,” except as a transparent exercise in self-deception and/or domestic political disinformation. America has no more Afghan “allies” in Afghanistan than we had Iraqi “allies” in Iraq or Vietnamese “allies” in Vietnam.
The American military forces still occupying Afghanistan have only one job remaining: namely, to drag out the retreat so that our corrupt and complicit government may surreptitiously accomplish it without the voter/taxpayers back home noticing that we have lost yet another decade-long debacle at ruinous cost to ourselves and the hapless nations that posed no credible threat to us whatsoever –. in other words, “Saving Face.” Apropos of which hopeless enterprise in ass-covering futility, a little something I concluded more than five years ago:
Bring Home the Buy Time Brigade
The Buy Time Brigade is busted
It’s run out of money and luck
The guy at the top can’t be trusted
Because he does not give a fuck
He starts with his missions “accomplished”
After which he unravels the gain
Then spinning his endless excuses,
He covers up losses and pain
Commanding, Commandments, commanded:
He’s fallen in love with command
Stone deaf to how he’s been backhanded
By voters and their reprimand
The people don’t like what he’s doing
They’ve told him both time and again
They’re tired of his endless pooch-screwing
They want the war over by ten:
That’s minutes, or hours, or bedtime
That doesn’t mean weeks, months, or years
For those who don’t listen, it’s dead time
Like getting tossed out on their ears
The blood and the billions have vanished
It’s time for the twerp to atone
To Dante’s tenth level he’s banished
A new low for just him alone
Or maybe Dick Cheney will join him
To smirk at his armpit and sneer
Which Dubya will take as a coin hymn
A chant to make money and cheer
The Fig Leaf Contingent from Asia
Has come back again to be heard:
“Fuck him and his fucked-up Fantasia!
No Lyndon Baines Bush: Texas turd!”
And no more from old Tricky Dickies
Those Kissingers, Nixons, and Fords
The vampires who left us with hickeys
From bleeding our necks for their gourds
Just cut off the money and maybes
Just quit all the stalling for time
We don’t need these rats with their rabies
To rob us of our last thin dime
The Buy Time Brigade has no reason
Except to die fighting for zilch
To parasites we’re open season:
Our pockets and veins they will filch
Yet still with these gruesome reminders,
Obama has hired the same jerks
Who always advise bloody nonsense:
Like staying with what never works
“We’ll know what we see when we see it,”
Says Holbrooke of what he can’t state:
Like one damned good reason for staying
Where wise ones leave early, not late
Yet greed knows no limits too hyper,
And before all our regiments fade,
It’s past time to pay off the piper
And bring home the Buy Time Brigade
Michael Murry, The Misfortune Teller, Copyright 2006