Ron Paul has a plan: cut $1 trillion from the federal budget, defund the wars and “foreign aid,” and cut the president’s pay to $39,336 — which is, as Politico points out, “a level that the Paul document notes is ‘approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.’”
Now that‘s the kind of egalitarianism I can get behind.
The estimable Angela Keaton crystallized the war in her last post (below). The war becomes difficult for the establishment to talk about when it is presented as it is by the video of injured Iraqi children. They can’t inject their technocratic policy-wonkery, and even nationalistic themes and Exceptionalist rhetoric is grossly misplaced.
Such is the power of video, so I thought I’d post some others from the Afghan war to the same effect. For context, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have seen a sharp rise in 2011.
In a US airstrike in July, 14 civilians were killed, 8 of them children. In May, US soldiers killed a 12 year old Afghan girl in a night raid. In March, nine Afghan boys collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan were annihilated by US airstrikes. US-supported Afghan militias have recently beat children, hammered nails into the feet of a young boy, and gang raped another 13 year old boy. In February of last year, a US night raid killed a teenage girl and two pregnant women. In September of last year, NATO attack helicopters bombed seven civilians, four of them children. A UN report last year found that almost 350 Afghan children were killed in 2009 alone. 
In another video, from back in 2008, the Guardian covers various incidents of atrocities against Afghanistan civilians by coalition forces. It doesn’t allow embedding, so click the link to see it. Here’s a quote from one of the people interviewed the the video’s corresponding article:
“We were walking, I was holding my grandson’s hand, then there was a loud noise and everything went white. When I opened my eyes, everybody was screaming. I was lying metres from where I had been, I was still holding my grandson’s hand but the rest of him was gone. I looked around and saw pieces of bodies everywhere. I couldn’t make out which part was which.”
And yet all Barack Obama and his minions in Congress can talk about regarding the Afghan war is the extraordinary service of American soldiers, lies about Afghan security, and arbitrary dates which we are misleadingly told will see an American withdrawal. The useless, aimless, lie of a war continues unabated, without any attention paid to children like Grana.
Antiwar.com’s Week in Review | October 16, 2011
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Today’s APNews Break featured the welcome news that US drops keeping troops in Iraq.
Reporters Lara Jakes and Rebecca Santana however managed to suck the joy from the long awaited announcement by possibly the most tasteless paragraph to come over the wire since Clinton era intern shenanigans.
The decision ends months of hand-wringing by U.S. officials over whether to stick to a Dec. 31 withdrawal deadline that was set in 2008 or negotiate a new security agreement to ensure that gains made and more than 4,400 American military lives lost since March 2003 do not go to waste. [Emphasis mine.]
Yes, that’s right. The American youth sacrificed for the inhumane, illegal and unconstitutional occupation of Iraq are mere veggie fried rice left overs that shan’t go to waste in the mighty victory over the Iraqi people.
Jakes and Santana note that, “Iraqis are still angry over incidents such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or Haditha, when U.S. troops killed Iraqi civilians in Anbar province, and want American troops subject to Iraqi law.”
One couldn’t imagine why.
From Boiling Frogs:
Leading scholars and human rights groups from a range of fields — including psychology, medicine, law, military, and intelligence — have joined together in spearheading a broad-based effort to annul and delegitimize the American Psychological Association’s deeply flawed 2005 Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (the PENS Report). In a joint declaration the coalition states:
Despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations, the PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists play a critical role in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective.” With this stance, the APA, the largest association of psychologists worldwide, became the sole major professional healthcare organization to support practices contrary to the international human rights standards that ought to be the benchmark against which professional codes of ethics are judged- the “do no Harm” standard.
Further, the coalition points out the inherent bias in the Presidential Task Force membership, where six of the nine voting members were on the payroll of the U.S. military and/or intelligence agencies, and five having served in chains of command accused of prisoner abuses. The group cites other significant conflicts of interest by the Task Force’s unacknowledged participants, such as the spouse of a Guantánamo intelligence psychologist and several high-level lobbyists for the Department of Defense, and direct funding for psychologists by the CIA.
The Coalition has launched a petition calling for the annulment of the APA’s PENS Report as part of their joint effort to remove psychologists from torture and abusive interrogations.
If you thought the DC “assassination plot” sounded improbable before, wait until you hear how the whole ridiculous story ties into Iran’s Quds Force.
Detailing the connection of a “notorious Iranian militant,” the Washington Post is only too willing to take the allegations at face value, spelling out with a straight face one of the most preposterous narratives imaginable.
It goes like this: Quds Force Commander Abdul Shahlai, who is a real whiz with assassinations, decided to use Mexican drug cartels (for some inscrutable reason) to either kidnap or knock off the Saudi Ambassador.
But Shahlai didn’t know any drug cartels. So he called up his cousin, a whiskey-swilling failed used car salesman from Texas. Why, you ask? A direct quote from Wapo says:
U.S. officials say that Shahlai hoped that Arbabsiar, by virtue of his time in Texas, might be able to get in touch with Mexican drug traffickers
That’s right ladies and gentlemen: the case for Iran’s Quds Force being behind this “plot” rests on the assumption that a highly organized military force that is supposedly at the forefront of the assassination game called somebody’s bumbling cousin who lived in Texas, to see if he happened to know any Mexican drug cartels, because Texas is close to Mexico.
