Month: July 2012

Via As’ad AbuKhalil, this picture evidently represents the views of many Egyptians:

 

 

 

 

 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just returned from a visit to Egypt to meet with the new Islamist President Mohamed Mursi. Her armored motorcade was pelted with tomatoes and shoes by protesters as she drove through Alexandria. From the very beginning, the upheavals in Egypt have scorned US support for the former dictator Hosni Mubarak and Washington’s current efforts to exploit the power transfers now going on. Many Egyptians, according to AbuKhalil, are also criticizing Mursi for even meeting with Clinton, even comparing him to Mubarak.

See Jacob Hornberg’s piece on Clinton’s visit.

“Two Named in Iran Uranium Export Scheme”

That was the headline at the Washington Times, leading the person who didn’t read any further to believe Iran was involved in an export scheme for uranium. Others termed it a “nuclear smuggling case,” or a “nuclear export plot.”

Scared yet? That’s the idea.

A cursory look at the actual articles reveals that two guys, one Chinese and one Iranian, managed to “illegally” export lathes to Iran, and failed at a second attempt to acquire some steel.

The steel in question was “maraging steel,” which can be used for nuclear centrifuges. Sure, it can be used for countless other things from engine equipment to surgical components. But that wouldn’t make nearly as good a headline.

A little honesty about what we know, what we have credible reason to suspect, and what is just random hype could spare us a lot of war hysteria.

In this case, we know lathes are for metalworking and whatnot. We know maraging steel can be used for gears and dies. Sounds like a manufacturing was the order of the day.

Instead, we see the almost mystical reasoning by which steel becomes uranium and then becomes nuclear weapons in just a few easy steps and are left shaking our heads at yet another headline that doesn’t match the story.

Following up on yesterday’s news that prisoners were injected with “mind altering drugs” before interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, the US is denying the report, kind of.

See, it wasn’t drugs, it was “medication.” All the rest of the stuff appears to have been true.

Here’s a nice thesaurus for them to fall back on if they need another word that means exactly the same thing but doesn’t sound quite so bad.

In an interview with a top Taliban commander, the safe haven myth is dealt another blow (via: ThinkProgress).

New York Times:

“At least 70 percent of the Taliban are angry at Al Qaeda,” Maulvi said. “Originally, the Taliban were naïve and ignorant of politics and welcomed Al Qaeda into their homes.

“Part of the problem with Al Qaeda was that the Afghans around Jalalabad are in the habit of welcoming everyone who comes. They do an attan [Pashtun dance] for them. To tell the truth, I was relieved at the death of Osama. Through his policies, he destroyed Afghanistan. If he really believed in jihad he should have gone to Saudi Arabia and done jihad there, rather than wrecking our country.”

The same Taliban commander also called al-Qaeda a “plague” in the interview. As Ali Gharib notes, “In 2010, Ahmed Rashid reported that Taliban leader Mullah Omar pledged that a Taliban return to power in Afghanistan ‘would pose no threat to neighboring countries — implying that al-Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan.'”

This was knowable before Obama decided to surge troops in Afghanistan and waste additional hundreds of billions of dollars there. Indeed, the administration was fully aware of what a crapshoot the mission was, but did it always. As David Rothkopf, editor of Foreign Policy, wrote back in May:

The president opposed his own policy of sending in more troops to stabilize Afghanistan from the moment he approved it after months and months of messy internal wrangling. So why did he do it? The answer is that that Obama was leaving Iraq and could not afford to look weak in Afghanistan at the same time or he would come under political attack from the right. Getting out faster might also alienate the military to the point that public discord would damage the president.

At the time, I called this what it was: war for political repute. Hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted, thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed so that Obama could avoid being called a wimp by Republicans.