Thursday, July 29, 2010

Scheer: Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers, 40% of House Democrats vote NO

From: Marcy Winograd
To: pdla@svpal.org
Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 5:57 PM
Subject: [PDLA] Congress Votes to Escalate Afghanistan War -
Waxman Votes NO; Harman Votes for War

Dear Friends, though Congress voted once again to send more troops to
Afghanistan, the good news is that 114 (40% of House Democrats) voted
against the 33-billion dollar supplemental. Among those in the CA
delegation casting a courageous NO vote were Waxman, Becerra, the Sanchez
sisters, Chu, Garamendi, Matsui, Waters, Lee, Eshoo, Filner, Farr, Miller,
Lofgren, & Woosley. Those voting for the escalation included Harman,
Schiff, Sherman, McNerney, Capps (!), Roybal Allard, Berman, Baca. Please
read David Swanson's excellent report below and click on the link to read
how the entire Congress voted. I will make sure their voting records are
distributed widely, so the people know where everyone stands. As Daniel
Ellsberg so eloquently asked at the PDA conference in Ohio last weekend:
Are we doing everything in our power to stop the US occupations? Thank you
to those of you who contacted Congress. Keep the heat on. Peace, Marcy

***

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thank_god_for_the_whistle-blowers_20100728/

Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers

"We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the
Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that
passes for U.S foreign policy."

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: July 28, 2010

What WikiLeaks did was brilliant journalism, and the bleating critics from
the president on down are revealing just how low a regard they have for the
truth. As with Richard Nixon's rage against the publication of the Pentagon
Papers, our leaders are troubled not by the prospect of these revelations
endangering troops but rather endangering their own political careers. It is
our president who unnecessarily sacrifices the lives of our soldiers and not
those in the press who let the public in on the folly of the mission itself.

What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the
Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a
regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to
connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security
interest is doomed. What is revealed on page after page is that none of the
local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our
president's
agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively
homegrown.

Our fixation on al-Qaida has nothing to do with them. President Barack
Obama's
top national security adviser admitted as much when he said last December
that there were fewer than 100 of those foreign fighters left in
Afghanistan. Those who do remain in the region are hunkered down in
Pakistan, and as the leaked documents reveal, that nation is just toying
with us by pretending to cooperate while its intelligence service continues
to support our proclaimed enemies. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal made clear in
his famous report, the battles in Afghanistan are tribal in nature and the
agendas are local-be they about drugs, religion or the economic power of
military blackmail. The documents contain a steady drumbeat of local hustles
that are certainly deadly but rise to the level of a national security
threat against the U.S. only when we insist on making their history our own.

It has ever been so with the Afghans, and our continued attempt to bend
their passions to our purposes will always lead to horrid results. That is,
in fact, just how their nation came to be the launching pad for the 9/11
attacks, which is the ostensible purpose of our occupation. We meddled in
their history in a grand Cold War adventure to humble the Soviets by
attacking the secular government in Kabul with which Moscow sided.


When presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs intones, "We are in this
region of the world because of what happened on 9/11," he is mouthing a
dangerous half-truth. The opposite is the case: 9/11 happened because the
U.S. was in the region, and not the other way around. Entanglement with
Afghanistan has been based on a tissue of lies since day one, when Jimmy
Carter first decided to throw in with the religious fanatics there, as
current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates revealed in his 1996 memoir. Gates
had served on Carter's National Security Council and in his book exposed
what the publisher touted as "Carter's never-before revealed covert support
to Afghan mujahedeen-six months before the Soviets invaded."


Our government recruited terrorists from the Arab world to go to Afghanistan
and fight in that holy war against godless communism with even greater
enthusiasm during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed the Muslim
fanatics "freedom fighters." As the 9/11 Commission report stated, those
freedom fighters included Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the
alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks.


Three years before that attack, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national
security adviser, was asked in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur if he
regretted "having given arms and advice to future terrorists," and he
answered: "What is most important to the history of the world? Some
stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the
Cold War?"

One of Carter's advisers back then was Richard Holbrooke, now Obama's top
civilian adviser on Afghanistan. Clearly he knows quite a bit about stirring
up Muslims, and someone should ask him about the brilliant decision to give
heat-seeking Stinger rockets to those same fanatics who then turned them
against our side, according to the recently disclosed documents. They never
learn. It was Holbrooke who helped design the Vietnam-era assassination
programs exposed in the Pentagon Papers and now replicated in the
Afghanistan documents.

Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who risked much to make the record of the Vietnam
War public, we learned about the madness that Holbrooke and others were
creating. We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the
Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that
passes for U.S foreign policy.

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