Painting by the Numbers

[Winstonm]

The U.S. killed another umpteen Afghan civilians yesterday - we may have even wounded an armed resister in the process. But the Af-Pak onslaught is bringing serious pressure on the U.S. methods of war and the indescriminate killing of civilians.

 

Wary of more bad headlines about misguided bombs and Afghan wedding parties blown to bits, the leaders of the free world decided to create a cover story to explain the deaths - but it was so ludicrous that even they couldn't swallow it so abandoned it the next day. However, that didn't stop CNN from doing their duty as the Spinmeister Extraordinaire for the Pentagon.

 

This was the story handed out yesterday by the Pentagon about a U.S. bombing that took the lives of a number of Afghanistan civilians. From CNN, who dutifully aired the story as if "U.S. officials believe" is all you have to say to produce real news .

 

But U.S. officials believe the Taliban deliberately engineered a ground attack against Afghan and U.S. forces, expecting the United States would call in airstrikes. They said the Taliban were then prepared to kill the civilians.

 

A senior U.S. military official said there was "very reliable intelligence" that Taliban fighters rounded up three families, including women and children, and killed them with grenades.

 

The official would not allow his name to be used because a preliminary investigation into the matter is ongoing and no conclusions have been reached.

 

Their bodies, shrapnel wounds visible, were then put into the backs of trucks and driven through the area in an effort to convince villagers that the U.S. military operation had killed them. The official said he did not know who drove the trucks -- other Taliban or local Afghans forced into duty.

 

"No one is disputing people died, it's how they died," the official said.

 

"What we do have is strong evidence to support that a number of women and children were killed by the Taliban and their bodies were driven by locals as evidence of U.S. bombing," the official said.

 

I don't think the President is seen by the military as being in charge of the military - not this military. I think it is defying him and leading him exactly where Patraeus wants to go.

 

I don't think Obama has the guts to challenge the decisions made by General Patraeus, or the political will to stand up to best war machine Spinmeisters money can buy - the U.S. press corps.

 

We have arrived at Military-Idustrial Complex Nirvana: a state of perpertual war.

 

And we are all guilty of allowing it to happen.

[Winstonm]

For all the conspiracy theorists out there, here is a doozy how the bad guys could know in advance that the U.S. would become involved with this ambush of some Afghan police and that it would all end with a U.S. airstrike, and the bad guys would know all this in time to plan to take out these villagers with hand grenades and then execute that plan just to make the U.S. Army look bad.

 

Next day follow up from McClatchy:

 

The seven-hour incident began on Sunday when Afghan police were patrolling a road and "fell into a deliberate, prepared ambush," said Col. Gregory Julian , a U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan .

 

Some of the officers were killed, prompting the police to call in the Afghan Army . The Army then came under attack, and the provincial governor called in U.S. forces to help. The U.S. forces eventually called in air support, said Julian, and after the airstrike began, the Taliban moved into two remote villages separated by poppy fields "where heavy enemy fire came from," and the fight continued into the night.

 

The U.S. dropped 13 bombs "on select isolated buildings where enemy fire come from," Julian

 

The Afghan leader is NOT happy:

 

Karzai has long pleaded with the U.S. to minimize civilian deaths during its operations.  "The airstrikes are not acceptable," he told CNN. "This is something that we've raised in the Afghan government very clearly, that terrorism is not in the Afghan villages, not in Afghan homes. And you cannot defeat terrorists by airstrikes."

 

Mr. Karzai, you do not grasp the point of the bombings - the point of the bombings is not to defeat terrorists - the point of the bombings is to explode bombs so more bombs will be needed to replace those exploded, thus further enriching those companies that make bombs, giving them more power to sell us on the idea of more need for even more war, yadi, yadi, yada....

 

It's called perpetual war and it makes people rich.

 

"If there's one lesson I draw from the past, it is the importance of our staying engaged," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Friday at Forward Operating Base Airborne in northern Afghanistan, shortly before heading back to Washington.

 

"And if there's a lesson for Americans and the international community, it's that we don't dare turn our backs on Afghanistan. This will work if we stay engaged."

 

See? Staying engaged=perpertual war.

 

And we Americans are dumb enough to swallow this crap because its wrapped in the flag.

[Winstonm]

And more evidence that the military is running the foreign policy show. Here we have Ray "The Desert Ox" Odierno going on about....

 

“There is potential that they can handle the mission starting 1 July,” Odierno said of the possibility of Iraqi forces taking over operations in Mosul as per the agreement. At the same time, he seemed willing to confirm that troops would remain, and seemed irked at people who were waiting for the long-promised US victory over the insurgents, declaring “it’s not going to end, OK? There’ll always be some sort of low-level insurgency in Iraq for the next 5, 10, 15 years.”

 

Lest we forget, the point of the surge was to stabilize Iraq enough to withdraw our troops - Obama said the surge (really, a Patraeus Payola System) had been wildly successful. And now we can't withdraw - so....does that mean the surge has been wildly UNsuccessful???

[luke warm]

i know what you mean, winston... now msnbc has joined the ranks of spinmeisters... bastards... how they expect anyone to believe the taliban is responsible for this is beyond me

[Winstonm]

Story #1 is that the Taliban used grenades to make it look like the villagers had been killed by U.S. bombs.

 

No one believed that.

 

So now we have story #2

 

The preliminary report said Taliban fighters herded Afghan villagers into houses to use as human shields while they fired on coalition forces in two villages in Farah. The report said that U.S. forces had responded to a call for help from Afghan forces and that militants attacked the troops from several locations.

[Winstonm]

How refreshing - only 72 hours removed from the slaughter we finally get story #3:

 

The strike, which is now being called by far the deadliest single incident since the 2001 US invasion, has outraged the civilian population and led President Hamid Karzai to demand that the US put an end to all air strikes in the troubled nation.

 

The concession that they had killed 50 people, while insisting most of them were insurgents, flew in the face of reports from numerous sources and comments from a myriad of Afghan officials. Still, it was a step up from previous claim that the Taliban had rounded up all the people ahead of time, killed them with hand grenades, packed the bodies into houses, then fooled the US into leveling the houses. Yesterday, they admitted that claim was “thinly sourced.”

 

From the Pentagon to English Dictionary:

Thinly sourced=Bullshit

[Winstonm]

And now, well over a month after the fact when no one cares and it is no longer news, we finally start getting the truth from the Pentagon:

 

 

Pentagon Admits ‘Problems’ in Farah Air Strike

Doesn't Dispute Afghan Govt's Civilian Toll

by Jason Ditz, June 08, 2009

 

Just over a month after US air strikes ripped through the Farah Province, killing a record number of civilians for a single incident, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declared that “there were some problems with some tactics, techniques and procedures” that led to the killings.

 

The announcement echoed similar statements made by officials off-the-record last week, when they conceded that the toll was at least in part caused by the military’s failure to follow rules which had been put into place specifically to prevent the killing of civilians.

 

Perhaps an even bigger revelation was that Morrell admitted that the number of civilians killed was “very similar” to the numbers the Afghan government had presented. Afghan officials have said up to 130-150 civilians were killed in the attack, the majority of them children.

 

At the time those numbers were initially revealed, the US condemned them. At one point they alleged that the entire incident had been invented by the Taliban just to make them look bad, and later they claimed that the villagers were exaggerating because the government was paying $2,000 in compensation for each slain civilian. It seems that at least we’ve gotten to the end of the long, winding road of US denial and one month later they have reached the same conclusion reached by the local officials: that this is the single deadliest US attack on civilians since the war began

[jdonn]

Outrage is down, but annoyance, deja vu, and sighing are all on a steep rise.

[Al_U_Card]

Outrage is down, but annoyance, deja vu, and sighing are all on a steep rise.

Yeah, everyone dies eventually.

 

How about your family and friends? Now (by careless agression) or later (naturally)?

 

Wouldn't bother you, would it? :)

[Winstonm]

Outrage is down, but annoyance, deja vu, and sighing are all on a steep rise.

Exactly the response the Pentagon hoped for.

 

It seems as long as it is brown people getting killed, nobody gives a *****.

[jdonn]

Outrage is down, but annoyance, deja vu, and sighing are all on a steep rise.

Yeah, everyone dies eventually.

 

How about your family and friends? Now (by careless agression) or later (naturally)?

 

Wouldn't bother you, would it? :ph34r:

I bet it wouldn't bother someone in Afghanistan.

[jdonn]

Outrage is down, but annoyance, deja vu, and sighing are all on a steep rise.

Exactly the response the Pentagon hoped for.

 

It seems as long as it is brown people getting killed, nobody gives a *****.

Would you feel better if I said I have no idea what color the people who got killed are?

[Al_U_Card]

Once you are sufficiently anesthetized, it makes no difference either way. You cease to be sentient.

 

Can you tell me why you want to defend not feeling that killing innocents is an outrage?

[luke warm]

Once you are sufficiently anesthetized, it makes no difference either way. You cease to be sentient.

 

Can you tell me why you want to defend not feeling that killing innocents is an outrage?

is that what he's doing?

[Al_U_Card]

Once you are sufficiently anesthetized, it makes no difference either way. You cease to be sentient.

 

Can you tell me why you want to defend not feeling that killing innocents is an outrage?

is that what he's doing?

Letterman got his idea for the Top Ten from somewhere....

 

Thou shalt not kill.

 

Sound familiar?

 

Inuring youth with a culture of violence (as perceived through video games and culturally accepted memes) only leads them to accept as normal and even inevitable that others must die as a consequence of their existence.

 

It makes them feel secure and helps to promote the fear-based "at least it is not me" mind-set.

[kenrexford]

What? You don't get it?

 

I mean, if people die over there and Bush is President, "Bush Lied People Died." If people die over there and Obama is President, it is not even news, or the military is engaging in a coup against Obama, or something.

 

If Bush predicts that the economy will do X if we do Y, but the economy does a Zinger, Bush blew it because he's a greedy idiot. If Obama predicts that the economy will do X if we do Y, but the economy does a Zinger, he recalculates what X should have really been with after the fact analysis, deciding that it was actually going to be Zinger plus a Doozie, predicts backwards that doing Y got rid of the Doozie part, and claims after-the-fact success, and we applaud because he's so smart in retrospect.

 

If Bush builds up a budget deficit with Dem Congress agreement, he tricked the Dems. If Obama doubles down with the same Dem Congress, he is proving to be fiscally responsible and only spending what he has, despite the Republicans.

 

If Bush drinks too much when younger, he's a drunk. If Obama snorts cocaine when he's younger, he has more of a wealth of experience and thus more empathy.

 

Don't you understand this yet?

[jdonn]

Once you are sufficiently anesthetized, it makes no difference either way. You cease to be sentient.

 

Can you tell me why you want to defend not feeling that killing innocents is an outrage?

I didn't defend anything. But too many innocent people die every day for me to be outraged at each of them.

 

Can you tell me why you want to defend not feeling that the same thread beginning 4 times a week is annoying?

[hrothgar]

Spare me the oversimplistic simplistic bullshit

 

For example:

 

If Bush drinks too much when younger, he's a drunk.  If Obama snorts cocaine when he's younger, he has more of a wealth of experience and thus more empathy.

 

Don't you understand this yet?

 

There's a world of difference between Bush's descent into full blown alcoholism and Obama's experiments with cocaine.

 

Bush has an addictive personality. In recent years, he substituted religion for booze and blow. However, the same pathologies are readily apparant.

 

Personally, I think that we'd all be in a lot better place if Bush had never kicked the sauce and spent the last eight years or so face down in a pool of vomit rather than playing figurehead as the world self destructed.

[Lobowolf]

Thou shalt not kill.

 

Sound familiar?

More accurately, "Thou shalt not murder." Or so I'm told.

[vuroth]

Once you are sufficiently anesthetized, it makes no difference either way. You cease to be sentient.

 

Can you tell me why you want to defend not feeling that killing innocents is an outrage?

I must not be very smart, because I just never figured this out.

 

Why are Afghanistan and Iraq so outrageous, where we know human rights denials and killings take place all the time, but we're at least trying to change that, and yet North Korea, where we know human rights denials and killings are also taking place, but where we're not lifting a finger to help a populace who CANNOT help themselves, is above reproach? Why is our moral position in NK the higher ground here?

 

It's not that I'm not outraged from time to time by some of the things that are happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, but why when we weren't there and it wasn't on the news (say a decade ago) was it LESS worthy of outrage?

 

V

[cherdanno]

Outrage is down, but annoyance, deja vu, and sighing are all on a steep rise.

Yeah, everyone dies eventually.

 

How about your family and friends? Now (by careless agression) or later (naturally)?

 

Wouldn't bother you, would it? :)

I bet it wouldn't bother someone in Afghanistan.

I didn't know you were so fond of making failed analogies Josh.

[kenrexford]

Spare me the oversimplistic simplistic bullshit

 

For example:

 

If Bush drinks too much when younger, he's a drunk.  If Obama snorts cocaine when he's younger, he has more of a wealth of experience and thus more empathy.

 

Don't you understand this yet?

 

There's a world of difference between Bush's descent into full blown alcoholism and Obama's experiments with cocaine.

 

Bush has an addictive personality. In recent years, he substituted religion for booze and blow. However, the same pathologies are readily apparant.

 

Personally, I think that we'd all be in a lot better place if Bush had never kicked the sauce and spent the last eight years or so face down in a pool of vomit rather than playing figurehead as the world self destructed.

That was a trap that I was sure someone would fall into.

 

The "for example" you offered was quite the easy one to attack, as I expected. What? No specific defense of the other three actually important issues?

 

BTW -- I voted for Obama. So, do not get all ready to claim "Republican talking points" as your attack.

 

If I wake up one morning after a great party and find red ***** in my toilet, I get worried. If I find blue ***** in my toilet, I get really worried. But, whether the ***** is blue or red, it's still *****.

[hrothgar]

That was a trap that I was sure someone would fall into.

 

The "for example" you offered was quite the easy one to attack, as I expected. What? No specific defense of the other three actually important issues?

In what way is "I said something stupid" a trap?

 

Hate to break this to you, but claiming that you deliberately said something dumb in no way lends credibility to the rest of your argument.

 

As a cunning plan, this is worthy of Baldrick.

 

I readily admit, I plucked the low hanging fruit...

 

That whole nasty work thing has a way of interferring with debate especially when I have major deliverables due. For whats its worth, I think that the rest of your examples are equally flawed. It just takes a bit more time t explain why...

[Al_U_Card]

Afghanistan has been a sinkhole for fruitless combat since the time of Alexander (likely longer....).

The presence of the "combattants" was always conquest for acquisition, be it empire or heroin or oil or idealogy.

The issue is only clouded, it is not suborned by the justification nor by pretending that the overarching lack of humanity is a valid reason for it's existence.

 

Who benefits? There lies the answer. Not the people of Afghanistan nor of the U.S.

[Lobowolf]

It seems as long as it is brown people getting killed, nobody gives a *****.

I think human nature is generally that it's a proximity issue. Right or wrong, most people would be more disturbed by reading of the death of someone in their city than in another country, regardless of race.