Apparently, our General staff is shot through with Little Caesars who fancy themselves the masters of the universe or something. Last year it was McChrystal and insubordination. This year it is Caldwell, a three-star in charge of training Afghan troops who stands accused of using psy-ops against visiting American Senators and Congressmen so they would give the war effort more troops . He needs to be relieved of command immediately and his ass needs to be on a plane bound for Washington for a public humiliation and firing. The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators. The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation. “My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. “I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.” The list of targeted visitors was long, according to interviews with members of the IO team and internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone. Those singled out in the campaign included senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin; Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and a host of influential think-tank analysts. The incident offers an indication of just how desperate the U.S. command in Afghanistan is to spin American civilian leaders into supporting an increasingly unpopular war. According to the Defense Department’s own definition, psy-ops – the use of propaganda and psychological tactics to influence emotions and behaviors – are supposed to be used exclusively on “hostile foreign groups.” Federal law forbids the military from practicing psy-ops on Americans, and each defense authorization bill comes with a “propaganda rider” that also prohibits such manipulation. “Everyone in the psy-ops, intel, and IO community knows you’re not supposed to target Americans,” says a veteran member of another psy-ops team who has run operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s what you learn on day one.” Of course, we all realize that it goes on. Images are manipulated and messages are massaged. Before they appear before Congress, Generals confer with image consultants to lead the star-struck officials before them where they want them to go. But this is a whole new level of evil. Not only did Caldwell intentionally violate U.S. laws against propagandizing American legislators, he punished the guy who stood up and said it was wrong. If that isn’t intent and malice of forthought, I don’t know what is. Congressional delegations – known in military jargon as CODELs – are no strangers to spin. U.S. lawmakers routinely take trips to the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they receive carefully orchestrated briefings and visit local markets before posing for souvenir photos in helmets and flak jackets. Informally, the trips are a way for generals to lobby congressmen and provide first-hand updates on the war. But what Caldwell was looking for was more than the usual background briefings on senators. According to Holmes, the general wanted the IO team to provide a “deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds.” The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” he demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?” According to experts on intelligence policy, asking a psy-ops team to direct its expertise against visiting dignitaries would be like the president asking the CIA to put together background dossiers on congressional opponents. Holmes was even expected to sit in on Caldwell’s meetings with the senators and take notes, without divulging his background. “Putting your propaganda people in a room with senators doesn’t look good,” says John Pike, a leading military analyst. “It doesn’t pass the smell test. Any decent propaganda operator would tell you that.” At a minimum, the use of the IO team against U.S. senators was a misue of vital resources designed to combat the enemy; it cost American taxpayers roughly $6 million to deploy Holmes and his team in Afghanistan for a year. But Caldwell seemed more eager to advance his own career than to defeat the Taliban. “We called it Operation Fourth Star,” says Holmes. “Caldwell seemed far more focused on the Americans and the funding stream than he was on the Afghans. We were there to teach and train the Afghans. But for the first four months it was all about the U.S. Later he even started talking about targeting the NATO populations.” At one point, according to Holmes, Caldwell wanted to break up the IO team and give each general on his staff their own personal spokesperson with psy-ops training. Remember the blurbs in the news about unnamed politicians whose records had been improperly accessed? Maybe it wasn’t just one guy at the State Department . Maybe he was the fall guy, but the real culprits were these psy-ops folks accessing records on politicians before visits. My Senator, Claire McCaskill, is a pretty high profile member of the Armed Services Committee and she has made several trips to Afghanistan. Was she one of those against whom these tactics were employed? Caldwell shouldn’t just get to walk away from the mess he created like McChrystal did, though. He needs to face criminal charges, and possibly he needs to face war crimes charges if an intrepid prosecutor can build that case. He needs to hang high and be made an example of. He definitely needs to lose his rank and his bennies. He needs to be made to suffer public humiliation. If he is not, then the civilians have ceded control and we aren’t that far from being ruled by a de facto military junta, and that is not the country I want to live in. I’ve been saying it for -weeks- months over a year …it is time for Obama to channel Truman and fire a whole bunch of these flag rank f***heads and pin stars on the shoulders of men like Lt. Colonel Holmes, Paul Yingling and Bob Bateman. Believe me yet?
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As Libya descended further into chaos, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, for the second time addressed the nation on state TV. However, Gaddafi’s argument that he was not the leader is simply a denial of responsibility. Al Jazeera’s Laurence Lee reports.
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Click here to view this media Every day, Glenn Beck gets a little more shrill and a little more weird. Yesterday, his show was interrupted for President Obama’s statement on Libya, which gave him even more grist for his mill. But don’t write him off as a lunatic. He is one of the most calculating and dangerous blowhards ever to grace our airwaves. This clip comes shortly after President Obama’s statement on Libya. No matter whether one is conservative or liberal, Libya is a complicated situation with many ramifications. It’s true that we want to be on the side of the true proponents of a democracy there, and everyone agrees that Qaddafi is an evil despot who is not going to go without leaving death, destruction and havoc in his wake. But if you’re Glenn Beck, you somehow twist this up in order to make President Obama look like a subversive rebel with a deep love of revolution. He rants about how the administration has not made public statements about Iran or Libya and those brave young fighters for democracy. He holds those freedom fighters up as heroes and martyrs, then turns right around and damns protesters in Wisconsin as agitators out to wreck the country. The only way to go there is if you understand Beck’s perspective as a raging American exceptionalist who applauds freedom fighters in other countries while believing this country is perfectly fine with the oligarchs in charge. Here’s a transcript of his little rant: He might be busy, his wife just hired a personal shopper. [evidently referring to Michelle Obama...] What are these people thinking? Back to the rebellious kids, I guess. What’s happening in Wisconsin. It’s just those kids and workers, just like you. Obama was worried about the assault on the unions immediately, but not about the hippie dope radicals who are having Woodstock in the capitol, whose MO is to bring down the US AND the free market. There are reports now of vandalism in the Wisconsin capitol and it is spreading. Is there nothing sacred? Who are we? The world has to know what America stands for and who we are and that they can count on American principles and values. We don’t know them ourselves. We’ve destroyed our relationships with Great Britain and Egypt. We did that a long time ago. Now we learn that the last telephone call President Obama had with the Saudi Arabians ended in a huge disagreement. You can attack a warship and not worry about it because we’re not going to do anything. Iran can send warships for the first time through the Suez Canal and the President says zero. Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? By the way we walk, I can’t tell. We have a president who apparently loves instability and revolution. And that is the antithesis of those two words: Social Security. Yes, Beck actually managed to tie the term (but not with the same meaning) Social Security to instability in the Middle East. He ranted like this for the entire show. But here’s why he matters. He plays to the timid older people who are frightened by any change, much less the kinds of sea change we’re seeing in the world right now. When he talks about revolution spreading from Egypt to Europe to this country and conflates the protests in Wisconsin with the revolution in Libya, he’s appealing to the people who are terrified that a nuclear holocaust is right around the corner. He thrives on this stuff, and so do they. It’s part and parcel of the larger strategy to erode confidence and emphasize chaos in order to impose authoritarian-style politics in this country. Beck is an expert at it, and as weird and whacko as he may seem to anyone who bothers to read a newspaper, he’s also singing to the hearts of the silent fearful ones.
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Click here to view this media {YouTube} CNN’s Ben Wedeman (twitter: @bencnn ) gives a firsthand account from a rally in Benghazi, Libya. While the madman Muammar Gadhafi holes up in some bunker in Tripoli, inflicting mayhem and mass murder, other areas of Libya are celebrating their first taste of freedom in forty years, and are deliriously happy. Here is the full version of the song being sung at the start of the clip. “سوف نبقى هنا”, which translates to “We Will Stay Here”. Gadhafi will leave.
Continue reading …John Nagl and Nathaniel Fick, both of the Center for a New American Security, had an op-ed in last Sunday’s NY Times. They’re both former military officers, now big think-tank executives, and they decided to report on the Great Progress our armed forces are making in Afghanistan . Mind you, the Afghan government still sucks and the Afghan security forces are still ineffective, but our boys are aces! One of us, Nathaniel, recently flew into Camp Leatherneck in a C-130 transport plane, which had to steer clear of fighter bombers stacked for tens of thousands of feet above the Sangin District of Helmand Province, in southwestern Afghanistan. Singly and in pairs, the jets swooped low to drop their bombs in support of Marine units advancing north through the Helmand River Valley. Half of the violence in Afghanistan takes place in only 9 of its nearly 400 districts, with Sangin ranking among the very worst. Slowly but surely, even in Sangin, the Taliban are being driven from their sanctuaries as the coalition focuses on protecting the Afghan people in key population centers and hubs of economic activity, and along the roads that connect them. Once these areas are cleared, it will be possible to hold them with Afghan troops and a few American advisers — allowing the United States to thin its deployments over time. A significant shift of high-tech intelligence resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, initiated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander, is also having benefits. The coalition led by the United States and NATO has been able to capture or kill far more Taliban leaders in nighttime raids than was possible in the past. The United States certainly can’t kill its way to victory, as it learned in Vietnam and Iraq, but it can put enough pressure on many Taliban fighters to encourage them to switch their allegiance, depriving the enemy of support and giving the coalition more sources of useful intelligence. Ahh… if you have jets dropping bombs on Taliban positions and had to surge US forces to 100,000 troops
Continue reading …The leaderless Middle East uprisings can inspire freedom movements as Latin America did before One challenge facing observers of the uprisings spreading across north Africa and the Middle East is to read them as not so many repetitions of the past but as original experiments that open new political possibilities, relevant well beyond the region, for freedom and democracy. Indeed, our hope is that through this cycle of struggles the Arab world becomes for the next decade what Latin America was for the last – that is, a laboratory of political experimentation between powerful social movements and progressive governments from Argentina to Venezuela, and from Brazil to Bolivia. These revolts have immediately performed a kind of ideological house-cleaning, sweeping away the racist conceptions of a clash of civilisations that consign Arab politics to the past. The multitudes in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi shatter the political stereotypes that Arabs are constrained to the choice between secular dictatorships and fanatical theocracies, or that Muslims are somehow incapable of freedom and democracy. Even calling these struggles “revolutions” seems to mislead commentators who assume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some other past European rebellion against kings and czars. These Arab revolts ignited around the issue of unemployment, and at their centre have been highly educated youth with frustrated ambitions – a population that has much in common with protesting students in London and Rome. Although the primary demand throughout the Arab world focuses on the end to tyranny and authoritarian governments, behind this single cry stands a series of social demands about work and life not only to end dependency and poverty but to give power and autonomy to an intelligent, highly capable population. That Zine al-Avidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Gaddafi leave power is only the first step. The organisation of the revolts resembles what we have seen for more than a decade in other parts of the world, from Seattle to Buenos Aires and Genoa and Cochabamba, Bolivia: a horizontal network that has no single, central leader. Traditional opposition bodies can participate in this network but cannot direct it. Outside observers have tried to designate a leader for the Egyptian revolts since their inception: maybe it’s Mohamed ElBaradei, maybe Google’s head of marketing, Wael Ghonim . They fear that the Muslim Brotherhood or some other body will take control of events. What they don’t understand is that the multitude is able to organise itself without a centre – that the imposition of a leader or being co-opted by a traditional organisation would undermine its power. The prevalence in the revolts of social network tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, are symptoms, not causes, of this organisational structure. These are the modes of expression of an intelligent population capable of using the instruments at hand to organise autonomously. Although these organised network movements refuse central leadership, they must nonetheless consolidate their demands in a new constituent process that links the most active segments of the rebellion to the needs of the population at large. The insurrections of Arab youth are certainly not aimed at a traditional liberal constitution that merely guarantees the division of powers and a regular electoral dynamic, but rather at a form of democracy adequate to the new forms of expression and needs of the multitude. This must include, firstly, constitutional recognition of the freedom of expression – not in the form typical of the dominant media, which is constantly subject to the corruption of governments and economic elites, but one that is represented by the common experiences of network relations. And given that these uprisings were sparked by not only widespread unemployment and poverty but also a generalised sense of by frustrated productive and expressive capacities, especially among young people, a radical constitutional response must invent a common plan to manage natural resources and social production. This is a threshold through which neoliberalism cannot pass and capitalism is put to question. And Islamic rule is completely inadequate to meet these needs. Here insurrection touches on not only the equilibriums of north Africa and the Middle East but also the global system of economic governance. Hence our hope for the cycle of struggles spreading in the Arab world to become like Latin America, to inspire political movements and raise aspirations for freedom and democracy beyond the region. Each revolt, of course, may fail: tyrants may unleash bloody repression; military juntas may try to remain in power; traditional opposition groups may attempt to hijack movements; and religious hierarchies may jockey to take control. But what will not die are the political demands and desires that have been unleashed, the expressions of an intelligent young generation for a different life in which they can put their capacities to use. As long as those demands and desires live, the cycle of struggles will continue. The question is what these new experiments in freedom and democracy will teach the world over the next decade. Tunisia Egypt Protest Libya Middle East Michael Hardt Antonio Negri guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …What Are Gov. Walker’s Plans For The State ‘Badgercare’ Medicaid Program?
February 24, 2011 No Comment
enlarge HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel on the plans to slash Wisconsin’s “Badgercare” Medicaid program . As I’ve said before, I believe this is part of a larger plan to undercut the use of the state programs as a safety net for the new national health care program: WASHINGTON — So far, most of the attention on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) budget repair bill has focused on the section that would strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. Less noticed is a provision in the 144-page piece of legislation that could dramatically change the state’s Medicaid program. The bill would grant the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) sweeping authority to making changes to the state’s Medicaid program — which covers one in five residents — with virtually no public scrutiny. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, Walker’s plan would use “emergency” powers to allow DHS to restrict eligibility, raise premiums and change reimbursements — all moves traditionally controlled by the legislature. Jon Peacock, research director of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, equated it to if President Obama gave Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius total power to rewrite Medicare policy, even though it wouldn’t save any money in the current fiscal year. “That’s what you have here in what’s being proposed,” said Peacock. “If President Obama proposed that, there would be rallies all over the country, and we would be marching out there arm in arm with Tea Party members, protesting against it.” “While the provision may result in significant savings in the future, it has been included on the list because it would remove the entire Legislature from determining substantial elements of the medical assistance program,” concluded the fiscal bureau’s analysis. Part of the reason that advocates are so alarmed at the legislation is that the man who heads DHS is Dennis Smith , someone who has advocated for states to leave the Medicaid program. In a December 2009 article for the Heritage Foundation, Smith, who was then on staff at the conservative think tank, advocated against health care reform proposals being considered by Congress and argued it would be smart for states to leave the Medicaid program.
Continue reading …The Rand Paul ‘Chainsaw’ Massacre: ABC’s Apocalyptic Take on ‘Radical,’ ‘Controversial’ Senator
February 24, 2011 No Comment
According to Nightline anchors Terry Moran and Bill Weir, new Republican Senator Rand Paul is “radical,” “controversial” and longs to take a chainsaw to the Department of Education. Using hyperbolic language, Weir profiled Paul for Wednesday's program.
Continue reading …Chris Jansing, Karen Hunter Gang Up on Pro-Life Pastor Over Provocative Billboard
February 24, 2011 No Comment
Journalist Karen Hunter belittled Pastor Stephen Broden over his provocative pro-life billboard on MSNBC's “Jansing & Co.” Thursday, calling the ad “racial,” “sexist,” and “completely offensive.” Host Chris Jansing didn't do much moderating over the segment, essentially giving Hunter a pass for her statements and further pressing Broden on the billboard. Pastor Broden is a board member of pro-life group Life Always that sponsored a billboard in New York City claiming that “The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American Is In the Womb.” From the start of the interview, Jansing pressed Broden to admit that the ad may be offensive to minority communities. “Can you understand why some people say this ad offends communities of color?” Jansing asked. She later turned to Hunter, who is a journalist and has co-authored multiple best-selling books with African-American celebrities. Jansing threw her a softball, simply asking her if she thought it racist, sexist, and/or offensive.
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