I know we don’t post often on NT anymore….we are trying to get back to the good ol’ days when we had new content daily…..

Anyways…if you haven’t noticed, the corporate media has been beating the war drums lately when it comes to Iran. I know President Obama isn’t a dumb guy…..but after awhile, even the smartest folks could end up believing that if Iran gets a nuke, then the world as we know it will change forever! We have heard this before……and we’ll hear this again. Just remember, when you hear this mass display of yelling about the end of the world……they did this with Iraq, we heard it with North Korea…we heard it with Afghanistan…..just remember that the same people who own 95% of our media outlets also have a big financial stakes in the defense industry. War is very profitable for some folks….and those same folks couldn’t give a fuck about the people who are directly affected….these include the victims in the war zone, and the soldiers who have to leave their families in order to fight.

side note: This was something I was worried about when President Dubya announced that we had to bail out the banks, we had to flood our financial institutions with money or the sky was going to fall. Then Henry Paulson goes to Congress with a one page proposal for $700 million dollars, and then Bloomberg news announced they have uncovered that the Federal Reserve used their emergency powers to loan $2 trillion, yes trillion dollars, to unknown entities…on top of the $700 million they were asking for. What raises red flags in my head is that during the entire Bush years…..they used fear tactics to push their agenda through Congress….the American people…whomever they needed to convince. And here they were, once again…following the same script. We know that the neo-cons want to privatize everything….they want to “shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub”. Now…a few years later, we see that no President is going to be able to push their domestic agenda through…b/c there’s no money available, from the below NYTimes article: “there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors.” Do I know for sure that the bailout was bullshit? Nope…not an economics guy myself….but how can these guys do everything wrong, or right if you’re part of the elite in this country…and then suddenly get something correct……just doesn’t add up.

By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded. (more…)

side note: Here we go again….just another lie put into motion by the criminals who ran our government the last time around! Isn’t it unbelievable that they put a lie in motion, and then justify their actions around that lie. Saddam has WMD’s…..we must go into Iraq. They leak that story to the press, and then go on national tv and say “look, even the press knows about it! Didn’t you read the NYTimes today?!?!” Al-Qaeda has ties with Iraq….we must go to Iraq. The story about the aluminum tubes that that discredited journalist wrote about for the NYTimes…..yep, another reason we had to go into Iraq. Or hey…we know that our country has had the torture debate in the past…we even helped prosecute other people based on that policy. But we want to do it now…so lets have a bunch of lawyers come up with some legal mumbo-jumbo and we’ll be able to do it to! Or the Downing Street Memos that were discovered…….or they pay off journalists to promote their agenda, remember that? And now this…..the guy that “proved” that waterboarding worked….well, he wasn’t even there! This piece of shit should be charged with a crime…..for allowing other criminals to cover up their crimes. He’s a traitor in my eyes……nothing like being angry at 9am!

BY JEFF STEIN
Foreign Policy
A study in “enhanced reporting techniques.”

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA’s application of the medieval confession technique.

The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou’s claim.

“It works, is the bottom line,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou’s ABC interview. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling — to this day — the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times. (more…)

side note: An awesome article from Vanity Fair, check out their site b/c they have quite a few links backing up some of the facts in this story. I’m a bit torn on this….on one side, I agree with Prince that if he was truly a CIA asset, then he should have the same legal protections as Valerie Plame did….granted her cover was blown based upon politics and he never mentioned this in the article. On the other side of the coin, I’m a true believer in our laws…and that we are governed by those laws and even in times of crisis, we shouldn’t abandon them. Erik Prince is/was a mercenary that broke countless US and international laws. If he does it with the consent of the sitting government……does he get a pass? I don’t believe so…..but that’s just my opinion. What frightens me the most about Blackwater is they were not just working for the US government….they can be contracted by any foreign government as well. To me, that’s a conflict of interest. In addition….he’s someone who clearly sits with the right-wing croud, and I truly believe they have let the American people down by trampling our Constitution that believes in the seperation of powers…..and a host of other illegal acts they have committed to further their agenda.

BY ADAM CIRALSKY
Vanity Fair
JANUARY 2010
Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.) (more…)

side note: The problem with most Americans is that they have no friggin memory! This is why politicians can get away with the same bullshit over and over and over again. How many times did we hear from a high ranking general that “next year we should be able to start pulling troops out of Iraq”? You wanna know how many? Count up the number of years we were in Iraq under Bush….there’s your answer! This is one reason I left the Democratic party…..they would say similar things to the public and then they’d wait for our dumbass populace to forget, and then repeat. I do think President Obama has done some good in cleaning up DC, he isn’t God, so to change the culture in a town like that is one tough task…..he is getting rid of lobbyists that help create policy that benefits their corporations….but he promised us he’d do more during his campaign, and you know what, I expect it!
BTW..this article at Salon’s site has tons of external links siting sources, check em’ out.

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
The “new” approach to Afghanistan touted by White House officials seems quite old

In order to prepare Americans for Obama’s Afghanistan escalation speech tonight at West Point (at least he’s not wearing a fighter pilot costume), White House officials have been dispatched to speak to the media (anonymously, of course) to preview all of the new and exciting aspects of the President’s plan. As a result, media accounts are filled with claims that there are major changes ordered by Obama that will transform our approach there.

But to anyone with a memory that extends back for more than a few weeks, all of this seems anything but new. In December, 2007, George Bush delivered a speech to the nation announcing his escalation in Iraq — that one only 20,000 troops, compared to the 30,000-40,000 Obama has ordered for Afghanistan. It’s worthwhile to compare what Obama officials are excitedly featuring as new and innovative ideas with what Bush said; I’m not comparing the Iraq and Afghan escalations: only the rhetoric used to justify them.

ABC News: “While tomorrow night’s speech will have many audiences … a senior administration official tells ABC News one key message will resonate with all of them: ‘The era of the blank check for President Karzai is over. . . The president will talk about, this not being ‘an open ended commitment’…” Bush:

I have made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people — and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act.
(more…)

side note: This is scary……and this is how Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and a host of other war criminals got around Congressional oversight. Hire a private company to do your dirty work! You watch, this is going to come back and haunt the United States when this truly becomes public….maybe in one year, maybe in 20………and unfortunately, President Obama is continuing these war crimes. You’re supposed to be a Constitutional scholar…WTF?!?!

by JEREMY SCAHILL
The Nation

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.
The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. “We don’t have any contracts to do that work for us. We don’t contract that kind of work out, period,” the official said. “There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services.” The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. “This is a parallel operation to the CIA,” said the source. “They are two separate beasts.” The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war–knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country. Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. “Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government,” Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has “no other operations of any kind in Pakistan.”
A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity. (more…)

side note: I think the decision has already been made. I’m from the camp that believes that our politicians make their decisions, then leak it to the press, to prepare the public for the announcement of that leaked info. I’m really disappointed in President Obama….not one country, ever, in the history of man-kind has had luck in Afghanistan. What worries me about this country is that we like to think we’re “special” and “unique”. These beliefs stem from the fact that Americans don’t travel outside our country…..which in turn de-humanizes other people in other countries……we then think we’re better. Get out and travel people!! You’ll see that at the end of the day…..people all over the world are doing the same thing: trying to survive the daily BS, trying to put food on the table for their family, and trying to give their kids a better life. We’re all on this world together……
UPDATE: Maybe and Hopefully I’m wrong….

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan, but President Obama remains unsatisfied with answers he has gotten about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy, administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama is to consider four final options in a meeting with his national security team on Wednesday, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters. The options outline different troop levels, other officials said, but they also assume different goals — including how much of Afghanistan the troops would seek to control — and different time frames and expectations for the training of Afghan security forces.

Three of the options call for specific levels of additional troops. The low-end option would add 20,000 to 25,000 troops, a middle option calls for about 30,000, and another embraces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly 40,000 more troops. Administration officials said that a fourth option was added only in the past few days. They declined to identify any troop level attached to it.

Mr. Gates, a Republican who served as President George W. Bush’s last defense secretary, and who commands considerable respect from the president, is expected to be pivotal in Mr. Obama’s decision. But administration officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not yet made up his mind, and that other top advisers, among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, remained skeptical of the value of a buildup. (more…)

side note: It’s always nice to read someone who doesn’t have an agenda……I mean, it’s very rare these days to come across an article that spews commonsense like this. I know it’s Friday and we usually like to have a post a more “fun” stories…but this is a MUST READ!

Andrew J. Bacevich
Commonweal
Afghanistan & the Limits of American Power

History deals rudely with the pretensions of those who presume to determine its course. In an American context, this describes the fate of those falling prey to the Wilsonian Conceit. Yet the damage done by that conceit outlives its perpetrators.

From time to time, in some moment of peril or anxiety, a statesman appears on the scene promising to eliminate tyranny, ensure the triumph of liberty, and achieve permanent peace. For a moment, the statesman achieves the status of prophet, one who in his own person seemingly embodies the essence of the American purpose. Then reality intrudes, exposing the promises as costly fantasies. The prophet’s followers abandon him. Mocked and reviled, he is eventually banished—perhaps to some gated community in Dallas.

Yet however brief his ascendancy, the discredited prophet leaves behind a legacy. Most obvious are the problems created and left unresolved, commitments made and left unfulfilled, debts accrued and left unpaid. Less obvious, but for that reason more important, are the changes in perception.

The prophet recasts our image of reality. Long after his departure, remnants of that image linger and retain their capacity to beguile: consider how the Wilsonian vision of the United States as crusader state called upon to redeem the world in World War I has periodically resurfaced despite Woodrow Wilson’s own manifest failure to make good on that expectation. The prophet declaims and departs. Yet traces of his testimony, however at odds with the facts, remain lodged in our consciousness.

So it is today with Afghanistan, the conflict that George W. Bush began, then ignored, and finally bequeathed to his successor. Barack Obama has embraced that conflict as “the war we must win.” Those who celebrated Bush’s militancy back in the intoxicating days when he was promising to rid the world of evil see Obama’s enthusiasm for pressing on in Afghanistan as a vindication of sorts. They are right to do so.

The misguided and mismanaged global war on terror reduced Bush’s presidency to ruin. The candidate whose run for high office derived its energy from an implicit promise to repudiate all that Bush had wrought now seems intent on salvaging something useful from that failed enterprise—even if that means putting his own presidency at risk. When it comes to Afghanistan, Obama may be singing in a different key, but to anyone with an ear for music—especially for military marches—the melody remains intact.

Candidate Obama once derided the notion that the United States is called upon to determine the fate of Iraq. President Obama expresses a willingness to expend untold billions—not to mention who knows how many lives—in order to determine the fate of Afghanistan. Liberals may have interpreted Obama’s campaign pledge to ramp up the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan as calculated to insulate himself from the charge of being a national-security wimp. Events have exposed that interpretation as incorrect. It turns out—apparently—that the president genuinely views this remote, landlocked, primitive Central Asian country as a vital U.S. national-security interest.

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Tune in to the Sunday talk shows or consult the op-ed pages and you might conclude otherwise. Those who profess to be in the know insist that the fight in Afghanistan is essential to keeping America safe. The events of September 11, 2001, ostensibly occurred because we ignored Afghanistan. Preventing the recurrence of those events, therefore, requires that we fix the place.

Yet this widely accepted line of reasoning overlooks the primary reason why the 9/11 conspiracy succeeded: federal, state, and local agencies responsible for basic security fell down on the job, failing to install even minimally adequate security measures in the nation’s airports. The national-security apparatus wasn’t paying attention—indeed, it ignored or downplayed all sorts of warning signs, not least of all Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States. Consumed with its ABC agenda—“anything but Clinton” was the Bush administration’s watchword in those days—the people at the top didn’t have their eye on the ball. So we let ourselves get sucker-punched. Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semipermanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan. Rather, it requires that the United States erect and maintain robust defenses. (more…)

side note: This is why we need to continue to have conversations with everyone we can. At my last job, I was fairly outspoken about where I stood on many subjects. During the run-up to the 2008 election, I took my role of educating people who clearly didn’t pay attention seriously. One of my co-workers, who I had spoken to previously sent me one of those chain emails going around. Remember when Obama didn’t put his hand over his heart for the National Anthem? Well…this email said that it wasn’t the Anthem, it was the Pledge of Allegiance. And this woman sent a nasty email to me showing me how little “Obama cared about this country”. Of course, I emailed her the YouTube video showing her that it was the Anthem and not the Pledge, and then emailed her 10 videos of Americans at sporting events, singing the Anthem without covering their heart. One of the owners of my past company came out of her office and told me that this wasn’t the place or the time, and that I shoudn’t bring that stuff to work. And I flatly disagreed with her….WE NEED TO BE TALKING TO THESE PEOPLE EVERY CHANCE WE GET….THEY ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION, AND IF THEY ARE, THEY’RE TURNING ON FOX NEWS FOR 5 MINUTES A DAY! She didn’t like my answer….but sometime you need to stand up for what you believe in, especially if you think you’re making a difference. With that being said, it helped that I was in the owner’s good graces, b/c someone else may have fired me…..but that’s a chance i was willing to take. BTW…that woman, who sent me that email, who was calling Obama…Osama during the summer of ‘08….ya, she voted for Barack in November!! Touchdown Superbowl!!

Media Matters releases new video showing right-wing media’s leading role in driving movement

Washington, DC – Today, Media Matters for America released a new video demonstrating how the conservative echo chamber operates in the age of President Obama. Conservative activists – aided by Fox News, a political organization disguised as a news network – use distortions, lies, and smear tactics to shape public opinion and influence national policy.

Media Matters

side note: Well, this comes after a statement last week by the great investigating journalist Sy Hersh, he says that the military is waging a war against this White House. As we’ve seen in the past….these higher-ups in the military will do almost anything to try out their new toys, or just to increase the usage of the US military. I don’t necessarily blame them…we do want some crazy (war-like mentality) folks running our armed forces…especially if things really get bad….but when there is not a great need to expand the use our military….these guys become quite the hawks. I hope President Obama can stay strong and make sure those running the military know he’s in charge.

By Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Obama and advisers evaluating exercise that used different troop levels

The Pentagon’s top military officer oversaw a secret war game this month to evaluate the two primary military options that have been put forward by the Pentagon and are being weighed by the Obama administration as part of a broad-based review of the faltering Afghanistan war, senior military officials said.

The exercise, led by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, examined the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed “counterterrorism plus.”

Both options were drawn from a detailed analysis prepared by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan, and were forwarded to President Obama in recent weeks by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The Pentagon war game did not formally endorse either course; rather, it tried to gauge how Taliban fighters, the Afghan and Pakistani governments and NATO allies might react to either of the scenarios. Mullen, a key player in the game, has discussed its conclusions with senior White House officials involved in the discussions over the new strategy.

One of the exercise’s key assumptions is that an increase of 10,000 to 15,000 troops would not in the near future give U.S. commanders the forces they need to take back havens from the Taliban commanders in southern and western Afghanistan, where shadow insurgent governors collect taxes and run court systems based on Islamic sharia law. (more…)

side note: President Obama, during his campaign, did say that he thought the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting, so this news shouldn’t come as a surprise. With that being said, there is a growing rumble that this war cannot be won, and to be honest, the “term” won doesn’t have a definition and if some government hack does comment on it….it’s always changing. Tonight, Frontline on PBS, will open their season with Obama’s War. It’s a look at our current President’s choices with a country that had many failed invaders, including Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British, and Russia……..President Obama has escaped many political traps thus far, hope he can Houdini himself outta this one!

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Additional Deployments Not Announced and Rarely Noted

President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized — and the Pentagon is deploying — at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.

The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.

The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq “surge” that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said.

The deployment does not change the maximum number of service members expected to soon be in Afghanistan: 68,000, more than double the number there when Bush left office. Still, it suggests that a significant number of support troops, in addition to combat forces, would be needed to meet commanders’ demands. It also underscores the growing strain on U.S. ground troops, raising practical questions about how the Army and Marine Corps would meet a request from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

Defense experts said the military usually requires that thousands of support troops deploy for each combat brigade of about 4,000. That, in turn, exacerbates the strain on the force, in part because support troops are some of the most heavily demanded in the military and are still needed in large numbers in Iraq.

“There are admittedly some challenges over the next 10 to 12 months as we are downsizing in Iraq, and therefore any schedule for increasing in Afghanistan might have to be more gradual,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Pentagon and White House officials have not publicized significant deployments of support troops. For example, when Bush announced the Iraq surge, he spoke only of 20,000 combat troops and did not mention the approximately 8,000 support troops that would accompany them. When Gen. David H. Petraeus announced that the surge would end, he spoke only of the withdrawal of the combat units because he needed to retain many of the support troops in Iraq.

On Afghanistan, White House and Pentagon spokesmen differed over exactly what the president has approved. (more…)

side note: What a fantastic, scary article! I’m a believer that we live in a society where everything trickles down from the top……and I think oil is at the top of that pyramid. When there is a secret gathering to try and change how the biggest money maker is traded…….that’s not a good thing for attaining any type of peace in this crazy world we live in. I’ve always thought that the Iraq War was caused by oil….started by oil men and crazy profits have been made by oil companies……this is an important article for everyone to read.

UPDATE: France has flatly denied these claims…..click here to read. Should be interesting how things unfold from here.

By Robert Fisk, Independent UK
Independent UK
Alternet.org

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China’s former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. “Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable,” he told the Asia and Africa Review. “We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security.”

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region’s conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves. (more…)

side note: Another strong article from the people over at Salon.com! This falls in line with what we’ve been saying for years. The price of oil is globally set….so what that means that if there’s a shortage in the middle east, b/c of any sort of circumstances, then the price of oil with spike…not just in the middle east, but everywhere. So this article takes it a step further, explaining why we need to protect the interests of other countries…..a good read, if not a bit depressing how the people in charge explain this to the citizens of this country…..and even more depressing is that there are a huge number of us who buy into it without doing a damn bit of research.

By Michael Lind
Salon.com
Obama has the chance to end our Cold War hangover, and start an era where the U.S. is not the sole global policeman

While the economic crisis continues to overshadow other topics, world politics is undergoing rapid and dramatic changes. In areas from national security policy to trade, the Obama administration has repudiated Bush-era precedents significantly, if not rapidly enough for some critics on the left. The pressures on the administration to continue in the path followed by U.S. administrations since the fall of the Berlin Wall are intense, particularly in light of the victory of the hard-liners in Iran and new revelations about Iran’s nuclear program. Even so, President Obama in partnership with other world leaders has a genuine opportunity to bring the post-Cold War era to a definitive end and to preside over the greatest reorganization of global politics since the end of World War II.

During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt hoped that the postwar world could be policed by a great power concert or alliance, made up initially of the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, along with Nationalist China. Corresponding to FDR’s concert-of-power security system would be new global economic institutions that would go beyond setting rules to promoting Keynesian demand management on a global scale in the interest of sustained and shared global growth. (more…)

side note: Frank Rich has such a beautiful way with words…even when he’s writing about subjects such as Vietnam and our current situation in Afghanistan. We hope President Obama has the strength to resist the military complex…..they are a very strong force, and we’ve seen them in action before……and at times, they have led us down the wrong path.

By FRANK RICH
The New York Times

THE most intriguing, and possibly most fateful, news of last week could not be found in the health care horse-trading in Congress, or in the international zoo at the United Nations, or in the Iran slapdown in Pittsburgh. It was an item tucked into a blog at ABCNews.com. George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book, drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. “Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration.

Holbrooke’s verdict on “Lessons in Disaster” was not only correct but more prescient than even he could have imagined. This book’s intimate account of White House decision-making is almost literally being replayed in Washington (with Holbrooke himself as a principal actor) as the new president sets a course for the war in Afghanistan. The time for all Americans to catch up with this extraordinary cautionary tale is now.

Analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan are the rage these days. Some are wrong, inexact or speculative. We don’t know whether Afghanistan would be a quagmire, let alone that it could remotely bulk up to the war in Vietnam, which, at its peak, involved 535,000 American troops. But what happened after L.B.J. Americanized the war in 1965 is Vietnam’s apocalyptic climax. What’s most relevant to our moment is the war’s and Goldstein’s first chapter, set in 1961. That’s where we see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office. (more…)

side note: As I keep trying to hammer home…..the reason why Americans support torture is they don’t know their history. We need to redo out educational system in this county so people can learn from the mistakes made by past generations….so we just don’t repeat the same bullshit over and over. We get dumber and dumber as a nation as the years go by…..just look at what people think about those “elite intellectuals”…we used to want those guys leading this country….now we want the “regular, grits eating Texan to run this country”, with the motto of “lets kick ass!”……
(sorry to all the NT readers who eat grits!)
For anyone that hasn’t seen the Frontline program, “The Dark Side”….you should check it out, really helps explain how Cheney was able to push his agenda over the 8 years with minimal push back.

By Derrick Z. Jackson
Boston Globe

The more Dick Cheney defends torture, the more we Americans must end our tortured ambivalence. Either we are above using the same interrogation practices that police states use, or we are are not.

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8/31/09 Cheney says CIA inquiry is politically motivated
This past weekend, the former vice president said he knew about waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used by CIA personnel on terror suspects and even defended officers who went beyond authorized methods. He said they were “absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.’’

Going further, he said it “offends the hell out of me’’ that the Obama administration has decided to investigate prisoner abuse by the CIA. He called it an “outrageous political act’’ that will demoralize the intelligence community to the point where “nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions.’’

It would be easy at this juncture to demonize Cheney, who was so wrong so often in his eight years in office, most notably about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that he and President Bush used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That war has cost the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers, with another 31,400 wounded, and about 100,000 documented deaths of Iraqi civilians, according to Iraqbodycount.org.

But Cheney’s role is an old, if still developing story. After all, he warned us five days after Sept. 11 that our government would work on the “dark side.’’ He told the late Tim Russert, “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.’’ A majority of Americans thought Cheney was right. Despite the false pretenses for war and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses that were exposed in the spring of 2004, Bush and Cheney were reelected. (more…)