Dean Henderson: CIA Created Afghan Heroin Trade

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has good reasons for trying to shut down US investigations into corruption in his government. The Afghan aristocracy has always run the nation's heroin trade. But it was the CIA that created it. In 1933 King Mohammed Zaher Shah took the throne in Afghanistan, ruling the country in feudalistic fashion until he was disposed by his cousin Mohammed Daoud in 1973. A handful of families, including the Karzais and the Kalilzidads owned nearly all arable land, while most Afghans languished amidst some of the planet's worst poverty. Finally, they'd had enough. In April 1978 King Daoud was killed in a revolution led by Nor Mohammed Taraki , who became President. Taraki embarked upon an ambitious land reform program to help poor Afghan sharecroppers who were traditionally forced to work the land owned by the king and his cronies. He built schools for women, who were banned from education under the monarchy. He opened Afghan universities to the poor and introduced free health care. When counter revolutionary bandits began to burn down universities and girl's schools, many Afghan's saw the hand of the CIA. By April 1979, a full seven months before the much ballyhooed Soviet "invasion" of Afghanistan, US officials were meeting with corrupt Afghan warlords and oligarchs bent on overthrowing Taraki. As the campaign of sabotage intensified, Kabul revolutionaries called on Soviet leader Leonid Brezynev to send troops to repel the bandits. Brezynev refused. The situation deteriorated. Pro Taraki militants, convinced of a CIA destabilization plot, assassinated CIA Kabul Chief of Station Spike Dubbs. On July 3, 1979 President Carter signed the first national security directive authorizing secret aid to Afghan warlords. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said later that he had convinced Carter that in his, "opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." Brzezinski, who co founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, was baiting the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. The embattled Taraki appointed Tabizullah Amin as cabinet minister in charge of land reform. Amin launched a brutal campaign of terror against political opponents, turning world opinion against the previously celebrated Taraki government. 

Gordon Duff: Israel's Abuse of Legal Palestinian Sovereignty!!

Generally, it is a "given" that the West, America, Britain, France and Germany, are oblivious to any conflict involving Israel. When 15 civilians were killed by an American F 16, bombing a civilian neighborhood in Gaza, non Islamic leaders turned away, failing to offer what would normally be words of sympathy and respect. Their silence, the shame of it, is easy to understand. They have found themselves "in bed" with something unclean. Their silence, the shame of it, is easy to understand. They have found themselves "in bed" with something unclean. Their silence is de-facto recognition of a lie. Neither Gaza nor the West Bank or Golan Heights have been part of Israel, nor was Israel mandated by any recognized international authority as a "Jewish state." In fact, there is no established treaty that has ever outlined any of Israel's borders. If one is accepted as "law," the other should be equally considered. In 1917, Lord Balfour had no right to speak for the Ottoman Empire, the recognized government of Palestine, nor did he have authority to speak for the signatories of the Versailles Treaty two years into the future. Two documents, both of an earlier era, have exactly the same validity, the "Balfour Declaration" and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Both documents are devoid of authentication, and though their historical impact has been immense, neither document was created by any recognized entity of standing. The Balfour "Agreement," between Lord Rothschild and one of his financial, gambling partners, truth be told, carried more authority than the promise to pay a gambling debt or an overdue bill from a "bawdy house." The legal political status of both the West Bank and Gaza are quite clear in accordance with international law. These are areas of temporary military occupation, limited by the UN to a matter to a matter of days as a result of the 1967 War. No treaty awarded the land to Israel and, at no time, has Israel formally annexed these territories.  

Tom Engelhart: The Fall of the American Empire: History, Farce, and David Petraeus!

History, it is said, arrives first as tragedy, then as farce. First as Karl Marx, then as the Marx Brothers. In the case of twenty first century America, history arrived first as George W Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the Project for a New America, a shadow government masquerading as a think tank, and an assorted crew of ambitious neocons and neo pundits. Only later did David Petraeus make it onto the scene. It couldn't be clearer now that, from the shirtless FBI agent to the embedded biographer and the other other woman, the fall of David Petraeus is playing out as farce of the first order. What's less obvious is that Petraeus, America's military golden boy and Caesar of celebrity, was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn't know it. Until recently, here was the open secret to Petraeus's life: He may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him. This was, after all, the general who got his first Newsweek cover ("Can This Man Save Iraq?") in 2004 while he was making a mess of a training program for Iraqi forces, and two more before that magazine, too, took the fall. In 2007, he was runner up to Vladimir Putin for Time's "Person of the Year." And long before Paula Broadwell's aptly named biography, All In, was published to hosannas from the usual elite crew, that was par for the course. You didn't need special insider's access to know that Broadwell wasn't the only one with whom the general did calisthenics. the FBI didn't need to investigate. Even before she came on the scene, scads of columnists, pundits, reporters, and politicians were in bed with him. Weirdly enough, many of them still are. Typical was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams mournfully discussing the "painful" resignation of "Dave" "the most prominent and best known general of the modern era." Adoring media people treated him like the next military Messiah, a combination of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Ulysses S Grant rolled into one fabulous pinata.    

Brian Cloughley: Another Lost War: Defeated in Afghanistan

We must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and International Security Assistance Forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people that we are in this to win. That is our clear objective. General Petraeus, July 4, 2010. "Clearly, the security situation is improving, the number of enemy initiated attacks is decreasing and the vast majority of the Afghan population lives in areas where peace and stability has already been established." Spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Brigadier General Gunter Katz, November 5, 2012. "Nearly half of Afghans think their country is not moving in the right direction, fear for their family for their family's safety, or are frightened to run into a member of their police or army, according to a nationwide poll." Guardian, UK November 14, 2012. Voutenay sur Cure, France. A week after the spokesman for foreign forces in Afghanistan made his ridiculous pronouncement about peace and stability, four rockets were fired into Kabul city, home to one of the world's most corrupt governments. Mercifully, only one person was killed, and there wasn't much damage, but the militants had made the point that they can continue attacks whenever and wherever they want. The amazing hi tech gadgets of all the foreign forces can do a bit to reduce the number and effectiveness of attacks all over the country, but the fact that a few thousand raggy baggy Taliban, or call the insurgents what you will, can even begin to take on such a massive war machine is astonishing. So far this month they have killed twelve US and British soldiers, who, all of them, have died for nothing, and the politicians and generals continue to feed us upbeat garbage about their lost war. Almost everyone has forgotten the Davis Report of January this year, in which one of the few honorable professional military commentators on the Afghanistan shambles made it clear that "Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and the American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan, that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America's credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan."    

F. William Engdahl: China a Military Threat? China is Nervous as Obama Pivots

To read the mainstream Western media, one would conclude that China has become an economic giant now intent on flexing its military muscle and making a massive arms buildup to do so. China's designated new President, Xi Jinping, has just won both the top Communist party post from predecessor Hu Jintao, as well as the head of the powerful Central Military Commission, giving Xi a full takeover of party and armed forces. A recent BBC analysis, in an article titled China extending military reach, is typical of Western media coverage of China's military program: China's first aircraft carrier will begin sea trials later this year. Late last year, the first pictures were leaked of the prototype of Beijing's new stealth fighter. And US military experts believe that China has begun to deploy the world's first long range ballistic missile capable of hitting a moving ship at sea. In Japan, nationalist politicians like politically ambitious Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara and Toru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka, are gaining popularity with anti China rhetoric, and by claiming Japan must develop capacities to oppose Chinese military ascendency. In May the authoritative New York Times ran an alarming story to the effect that China announced a double digit increase over the previous budget, far less than even the rate of inflation. However, when we examine in detail the actual redeployment and military moves of US Armed Forces in the Asia region following President Obama's announcement of a new Asia Pivot refocus of US military capacities from Western Europe to the Asia region, it becomes clear China is re-acting, in order to attempt to deal with quite real threats to its future sovereignty rather than acting in an aggressive posture. The mere fact that a standing President, Obama, during nationally televised Presidential debates labeled China as an adversary is indicative of the US military posture change. The depth and nature of the US pivot to China is crystal clear, when one takes a closer look at the recent developments in an Asian US Missile Defense deployment, clearly aimed at China and no other.      

Catherin Ruetschlin: Americans Can Enjoy Low Prices Without Suffering Slave Wages

It's the biggest shopping season on the calendar, and retail companies are expecting hundreds of billions of dollars in sales. To meet this demand, retail pulls in around 600,000 seasonal workers on top of a workforce of 15 million. This massive work force is majority female and fairly diverse, people of color comprise about 30 percent of workers in the sector. It is also low paid. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical cashier makes just $18,500 per year for full time work. The nation's largest employer and largest employer of African Americans, Walmart, is engaged in a struggle to keep it that way. Right as we turn to these workers to provide assistance and advice during the holiday season, many retail employees are striking for basic respect, and they deserve it. A new paper by Demos shows that retail employers can afford to pay decent wages, and the benefits would feed back into the economy as higher GDP, more jobs, less poverty, and even higher retail sales. Women and people of color are disproportionately represented in the low wage, year round retail workforce, where almost 40 percent of workers are people of color, and 63 percent are female. These were also the populations hardest hit by the recession, with unemployment rates still topping 14 percent among African Americans, and at 10 percent for Latinos. Since retail is projected to have some of the greatest employment growth in the country over the coming decade, the quality of retail employment matters to the economy's traditionally vulnerable workers who may be compelled to take any job available, and have little recourse to bargain for fair treatment once that employment is secured. There is also plenty of reason for this to be cause for concern, beyond those households who depend on a retail paycheck. The fact is, low wages in the retail sector are not only holding back workers and their families. The study shows that a wage raise at large retail employers to the equivalent of $25,000 per year for a full time worker would lift 1.5 million workers and the family members they support out of poverty or near poverty. 

Robert Jensen: No Thanks for Thanksgiving!!

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self reflective collective fasting. In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model. Since 1970, they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas. Not only is the thought of such a change in this white supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits, which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States. That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable. But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin, the genocide of indigenous people, is of special importance today. It's now routine, even among conservative commentators, to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all of our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful. One vehicle for taming history are various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of US myth building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621, following the Pilgrims first winter. Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders.