"Build That Afghan Prison Now! ..."

Boy, to take a little liberty with the song, what a difference a week makes ...


There, we had President Obama, on the heels of unveiling his "Jobs for America" package, hitting the stump and exhorting Congress to "Pass that bill now!" 


 


Funny, in what I read about the proposal, and Obama's stumping, I don't recall seeing anything about a massive, Fortress-of-Solitude-like Afghan Prison, there were no impassioned cries of "Build that Afghan prison now! ..."


Glenn Greenwald has the dirt;

As the Obama administration announced plans for hundreds of billions of dollars more in domestic budget cuts, it late last week solicited bids for the construction of a massive new prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.  Posted on the aptly named FedBizOps.Gov website which it uses to announce new privatized spending projects, the administration unveiled plans for "the construction of Detention Facility in Parwan (DFIP), Bagram, Afghanistan" which includes "detainee housing capability for approximately 2000 detainees."

Yikes!


McClatchy Newspapers'  Saeed Shah, back in February;

The U.S. plans to hand over the new Bagram to the Afghan military next January, a demanding target that some think it will be unable or unwilling to meet. Afghan guards are due to start arriving this spring to be trained. This appears to be the reason, officially at least, for expanding the capacity so dramatically, from 600 prisoners at the old site to 1,000 currently and up to 2,300 when the new building is completed.


"This will be the enduring detention facility for the next 50, 60 years. It's world class," said Navy Vice Adm. Robert Harward, who's in charge of U.S. detention programs in Afghanistan and who was visiting Bagram. "For the Afghans, this means that they will immediately be able to separate the insurgents from the criminal population."

"For the next 50, 60 years?"


You mean we'll be housing, and feeding and, otherwise taking care of Afghan prisoners (some who may, or may not, be terrorists - they being held with that "Do Not Pass Go" justice system - secret evidence, no charges, no trial - from the previous war criminal administration, which means Obama has looked in the rearview mirror, at least, once), for decades to come, so, like, who's going to pay for this?

One obstacle is funding, though. It costs $5 million a year to maintain the new facility, plus an additional cost per detainee, Garrity said. That's way beyond the budget of the Afghan authorities for a single jail, so it remains unclear how the new prison will be financed.

Oh, let us count the ways ...


More, from Greenwald;

One last point: recall how many people insisted that the killing of Osama bin Laden would lead to a drawdown in the War on Terror generally and the war in Afghanistan specifically.  Since then -- in just four months since bin Laden's corpse was dumped into the ocean -- the U.S. has done the following:  renewed the Patriot Act for four years with no reforms; significantly escalated drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan; tried to assassinate U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with no due process; indicted a 24-year-old Muslim for "material support for Terrorism" for uploading an anti-American YouTube clip after he talked to the son of a Terrorist leader; pressured Iraq to keep U.S. troops in that country; argued that it has the virtually unlimited right to kill anyone it wants anywhere in the world; and now finalized plans to build a sprawling new prison in Afghanistan.

And, he finishes most wryly;

If that's winding things down, I sure would hate to see what a redoubling of the American commitment to Endless War looks like.

Help Me Mr. Wizard! ....


 


Bonus Riffs


Tom Engelhardt: Scamming Washington - Exclusive Letters from the ScamiLeaks Archives


Ambassador Crocker Meets Eddie Izzard


Krugman: Reclaiming America’s Soul


Does He Get To Keep The Bag Man?


Top Ten Cloves: Other Things The CIA Tried To Use With The Afghan Warlords


PNAC Going All Xe On Us


Again, Why Are We In Afghanistan?

Start The Pools ... How Soon McChrystal Becomes A Faux News Analyst?

Take a few days off, and, oh boy, all kinds of things hitting the fan ...

Reading Michael Hastings' 'The Runaway General', it hard to tell if it is a good piece of journalism, or fiction, perhaps a character synopsis for some new HBO mini-series in the offing, about a cock-waving, muscle-headed military commander..

I mean, if General Stanley A. McChrystal were cast in 'Apocalypse Now', while Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore was blabbering about "I love the smell of napalm in the morning .... The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like ...victory ...", the camera would have to pan, to McChrystal, sitting on the beach, eating napalm out his helmet, and muttering what a candy-ass Kilgore was.



Go read 'The Runaway General', for, as you do, throughout, despite all the confidence, bravado and over-the-top machoism of McChrystal, it says over, and over, of how fucked we are in Afghanistan

It is said that he will be going to his meeting with Obama today, resignation letter in-hand, and Obama is going to have to accept it (if it hasn't already been demanded), as part of the show of not being a pansy, and letting a tin-horn commander, and the Pentagon, walk all over him.



No rearview mirrors in the room today.

So, boys and girls, should McChrystal walk out of the Oval Office today, a retired muscle-headed, cock-waving, former military commander, how soon before he beelines it to Faux News, to add fresh meat to their propaganda machine?

Start cutting up the office pool squares ....


Bonus Links

Alex Pareene: Why did Gen. McChrystal talk to Rolling Stone?

C.J. Chivers: General Faces Unease Among His Own Troops, Too

Spencer Ackerman: Biden Probably Wants to Renew His Rolling Stone Subscription

Doris Kearns Goodwin: What Would Lincoln Do?

Yves Smith: Afghanistan: Pentagon Payments to Warlords Undermine Central Government

Here's A Guy Destined To Win All The Toasters, Shavers and Kewpie Dolls

He's no "Opie and the Carnival" here.



Hotshot sniper in one-and-a-half mile double kill

A BRITISH Army sniper has set a new sharpshooting distance record by killing two Taliban machinegunners in Afghanistan from more than 1 miles away.

Craig Harrison, a member of the Household Cavalry, killed the insurgents with consecutive shots — even though they were 3,000ft beyond the most effective range of his rifle.

“The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright,” said Harrison, a Corporal of Horse. “He went straight down and didn’t move.

“The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”

The shooting — which took place while Harrison’s colleagues came under attack — was at such extreme range that the 8.59mm bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target after leaving the barrel of the rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

The distance to Harrison’s two targets was measured by a GPS system at 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles. The previous record for a sniper kill is 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an Al-Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

Holy Bullseye Batman!

Give this man a Kewpie Doll!




Bonus Bonus

You can go HERE, and watch the full episode of "Opie and the Carnival"

Happy Veterans Day ... At Some Point

Wouldn't it have been major kick-ass today, Veterans Day, for President Obama to deal out a little of the "Change We Can Believe In" stuff, show some audacity, put a little shine on that Nobel Prize, and use the day to announce - not hedge, not double-talk - that he will not escalate troops in Flintstoneville (aka Afghanistan).



Maybe, even do it as a stake-in-the-ground, a benchmark, of the beginning of the dismantling, money-bag-by-money-bag, the Military Industrial Complex.

Now, that would be a Veterans Day to shoot off fireworks, one to celebrate, unabashedly.

And, hey, with two breaking stories tonight, a guy can dream;

U.S. ambassador dissents on Afghan troop increase ...Strongly worded cables urge a pause until Kabul government shifts course

AP: Obama Rejects All Afghanistan War Options

We'll have to wait, and see.

Or, we will have to come around again next year, and bemoan the sentiments of two gifted, exceptional writers (both you should bookmark, and/or, RSS follow), this year;

Juan Cole, over on Informed Comment;

The most patriotic way to honor future veterans of foreign wars is not to create any unnecessarily.

And, Barry Crimmins;

This country would rather create veterans than care for them

Crimmins also has a powerful essay up today - Drone Destroyed, Pentagon Dodges Bullet - on the execution of DC Sniper John Muhammad, a veteran;

Muhammad died reviled and despised, just as the USA itself is reviled and despised in so many lands where the murder of innocents seems to Americans, who even bother to consider such such things, as nothing more than a necessary byproduct of the efficient infliction of a long-range plan. Nevertheless, the plan is both crazy and doomed to failure. It drains our country of vital resources urgently needed to sustain life. It mass produces righteously indignant enemies all over the globe. It visits brutality upon our own people as we exist as, and among, those who have lived to almost never talk about it.

And so Mr. Muhammad was put to death as the perfectly secret embodiment of what Veterans Day is not allowed to represent. His soul rotted away after he had participated in the infliction of violence upon nearly defenseless people. When he came home, he saw no reason to abandon what he had learned as a soldier.

And, digressing for a moment, Joe Sudbay, on AmericaBlog, rings in on the Death Penalty;

As with any execution, there's been extensive discussion about the pros and cons of the death penalty. To me, that is not the act of a truly civilized society. An article in today's Washington Post looked at the death penalty's "'closure' myth":

Stanford University psychiatrist David Spiegel believes that the theory that executions provide closure is "naive, unfounded, pop-psychology." Contrary to expectations, Spiegel says, witnessing executions not only fails to provide closure but also often causes symptoms of acute stress. "Witnessing trauma," he says, "is not far removed from experiencing it."

Spiegel has concluded that "true closure is achieved only through extensive grief work." This process requires families to acknowledge and bear their loss as well as to put it into perspective. It necessitates a network of support systems: counselors who will sit with, listen to and work with survivors; work environments flexible enough to accommodate counseling sessions and the down time that is a natural result of grief and stress; and victim assistance programs that make sure those things happen.

It just seems craven for politicians to promise "closure" from the death penalty when it's not true. It also seems barbaric.

It was "craven" and "barbaric" for The Commander Guy to launch two wars like he didn't know whether to piss, or wind his wrist watch, thereby, producing hundreds-of-thousands of new veterans, to be used as props in jingoistic parades, and file footage to run in the background of two idiot-talking-heads, arguing about more war.

It sure would be nice for Obama to show some cojones with his upcoming decision.

Maybe, just maybe, we can next year, or, in the immediate future Veterans Days, count, and herald, the number of veterans (and Gold Star Mothers) we didn't produce.

Again, Why Are We In Afghanistan?

One of the things said, about waging war in Afghanistan, is that everyone else - the British, the Russians - failed, that this is a country that has no history, no concept, of centralized government.

But, geez, when it comes to devaluing the lives of their woman, they suddenly become legislative pros

Afghanistan passes 'barbaric' law diminishing women's rights ... Rehashed legislation allows husbands to deny wives food if they fail to obey sexual demands

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.

The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

"It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her," the US charity Human Rights Watch said.

If you recall, earlier this year, they passed laws allowing husbands to rape their wives.

The Afghan woman told the bold, brave step of protesting, but, were shouted down, by men, as "whores" and "enemies of Islam"

If we want to do something good in Afghanistan, like secure peace, make the area safe, than we can land a bevy of cargo planes, offer all the Afghan woman that wish to, passage and citizenship in the United States (or another friendly country that values the basic rights of woman) and leave the male population there to become adept at goat fucking.

They might go hungry, with no one to make their dinner, but, hey, they won't have any resistance to their "sexual demands".

Melissa McEwan, equally outraged, over on Shakesville, urges readers to contact our State Department, complete with sample copy of a letter you can send to Secretary Clinton.

Please do so, and add in the idea of airlifting the Afghan woman outta there.

A spoonful of sugar helps the history go down ... Edward Copeland Review of 'Charlie Wilson's War'

Enjoying the after-glow of the New England Patriots run to perfection (though, the media, in the post-game coverage should have been able to come up with something better, that repetitively, over-and-over, asking "What's it feel like to be 16-0?" ... If the producers were on top of it, they could have cashed in with Alzheimer drug commercials), a nice lazy, Sunday, the lull before the storm (another 7" inches+ of snow due to come tonight) ...

So pull up with the cup of coffee and check out Edward Copeland's review of "Charlie Wilson's War"

Copeland says that "the true story of Charlie Wilson's War, Mike Nichols' best feature film in decades" and, in his crosspost of it on The Reaction notes "As it so happens, I was planning to post on my film blog today a review of Charlie Wilson's War, which now proves particularly timely in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination ..."

Visit Edward Copeland on Film and read the review "A spoonful of sugar helps the history go down"

(Copeland also writes the blog Copeland Institute for Lower Learning, which also warrants a visit)

"They will have flies walking across their eyeballs"

No, the above title isn't from an upcoming Discovery Channel program, nor is it booming out of a trailer of bloody, gore-filled scenes of a Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez movie.

It is from J. Cofer Black, former CIA veteran and now vice chairman of Blackwater USA, allegedly describing to President Bush the outcome of invading Afghanistan after September 11th, from one of a trio of articles in Salon today.

Boy, I'll bet that phrase gives the Neocons - Norman Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Little Billy Kristol, and, heck, even Vice President Dick Cheney - raging hard-ons.

And what a missed opportunity to aid the Army in meeting their recruiting goals.

Just think, they could have replaced the iconic "Uncle Sam Wants You" posters, with much more graphic, horrific depictions, of dead terrorists lying in the desert, a close-up of one (so you can see the flies walking across their eyeballs), and more littered in the distance.

A wave of Army recruiters, sitting in the living rooms across Nowheresville, USA, going through their pitch, about the benefits, the call-to-duty, serving your country, and building up to the chest-thumping, lump-in-the-throat clincher, how you, little John Doe recruit, will see the blazing day of righteous victory when you watch the flies walking across their eyeballs (Far-Fetched? It seems quite clear The Commander Guy bought it).

Perhaps the CIA could have had one of their deep-cover, front companies put out a video game, a war video game, where, for all the terrorists you kill, you earn the flies that you will gleefully (and, if you have Neocon tendencies, with hard-on) place on their eyeballs (which the above-referenced Army Recruiter gives a copy to the little John Doe recruits, as a "gift")

Instead of telling us to "go shopping" The Commander Guy could have rallied the country around the collection of flies.

"No flies on his head" would become a jingoistic talking point, rather then a derisive put-down.

Instead of waterboarding, we'd be talking about "flyboarding".

The Republicans could have, instead of taunting their counterparts in Congress with "Defeatocrats" and "Cut and Run", could have, with veins popping on their foreheads, voices coursed from passion, saying the Democrats want to "protect the flies" ... "Fly Appeasers" and the like.

Who knows the impact this would have had, if the military dropped leaflets, that new "Flies-Walking-Across-Eyeballs" recruiting poster sketch, that maybe the insurgents, terrorists, Al Qaeda in Iraq, even those infamous "dead-enders" would have paled at such a thought and immediately thrown down their arms ... Heck, they may even would have been at the head-of-the-list on planning the "Liberation Parades" throughout Baghdad.

L. Paul Bremmer, and The Commander Guy, wouldn't have had to dismantle the Iraqi Army.

The donations to the Bush Library, or the Freedom Institute, would be flooding in at record pace

The references to his presidency wouldn't hover around Hoover, but, rather, resplendently ride next Roosevelt.

Bush would become "Lord of the Flies", the de facto leader of the Neocon tribe.

Hmmm ... Wait a minute ... None of that is even close, and he's already become something like that ....

Never Mind ...

The Salon Blackwater Trio Links

Ben Van Heuvelen: The Bush administration's ties to Blackwater; Blamed in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the private security firm has long ties to the White House and prominent Republicans, including Ken Starr.

P.W. Singer: The dark truth about Blackwater; Outsourcing the war to private military contractors such as Blackwater has shattered the United States' moral authority and its ability to win the nation's wars -- including Iraq.

Blackwater by the numbers; A congressional memo looks into the private security contractor's activities in Iraq, the State Department's responses and taxpayer costs.

Top Ten Cloves: Ways President Bush Can Sweeten The Offer To Secure A New War Czar

News Item: Why I Declined To Serve

10. First guy to find the missing emails gets the job!

9. Since we'll be pulling all the strings anyway, what about if we give him both the job of War Czar and Attorney General?

8. To make sure the War Czars wars are funded, will launch new policy program, "No Czar Left Behind"

7. If single, and with the Secretary of State being single, will throw in White House Wedding if the two hit it off

6. Blowjobs. the I know we're Republicans, but isn't there an intern or someone here somewhere that can give the guy blowjobs.

5. How about we just say we have a War Czar? ... Just like we said we had proof Saddam was buying uranium and in bed with Al Qaeda

4. No restrictions; New War Czar is free to say what he likes, maybe come up with those colorful, pithy sayings like Rumsfield did

3. New War Czar would get to move his girlfriend into a high-paying State Department job - Just like Paul Wolfowitz

2. New War Czar gets to fire three additional U.S. Attorneys and replace them with his friends

1. Will put it in the contract that the new War Czar doesn't actually have to go or visit Iraq or Afghanistan


"Howdy, Pardner ... You wanna be my War Czar?"