We fight so that little girls can go to school

[Dash-Ate]

Why would we care about a bunch of arabs on the other side of the world?

We did we invade their country?


Here's a history lesson. How can one group of people be so barbaric and hate freedom so much. And kill so many people.
And then lie and tell us they spread freedom.

Until this evil is gone we have no hope as a human race.

If you support these people, you support terror and are a terrorist.

-------------------------------------------

What I Learned in Afghanistan - About the United States

By Dana Visalli

May 07,2010 "Lew Rockwell" -- I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that I learned so much…about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan "to help Afghan women," and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report titled "Silence is Violence," that the situation for women there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the "30-year war" there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell us "a thousand stories like this." There has been a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death – in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.

Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality and lawlessness, are on the rise in Afghanistan. In this respect, the country mirrors experience elsewhere which indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened conflict, insecurity, and violence against women.

Once one understands that the US military presence in Afghanistan is not actually helping the Afghan people, the question of the effectiveness or goodwill of other major US military interventions in recent history arises. In Vietnam, for example, the country had been a colony of France for the 80 years prior to WW II, at which point the Japanese invaded and took over. When the Japanese surrendered, the Vietnamese declared their independence, on September 2, 1945. In their preamble they directly quoted the US Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….").

The United States responded first by supporting the French in their efforts to recapture their lost colony, and when that failed, the US dropped 10 million tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than were dropped in all of World War II – sprayed 29 million gallons of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange on the country, and dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, killing a total 3.4 million people. This is an appreciable level of savagery, and it would be reasonable to ask why the United States responded in this way to the Vietnamese simply declaring their inalienable rights.

There was a sideshow to the Vietnam war, and that is that the United States conducted massive bombing campaigns against Vietnam’s two western neighbors, Laos and Cambodia. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos in a operation consisting of 580,000 bombing missions – equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. This unprecedented, secret bombing campaign was conducted without authorization from the US Congress and without the knowledge of the American people.

The ten-year bombing exercise killed an estimated 1 million Laotians. Despite questions surrounding the legality of the bombings and the large toll of innocent lives that were taken, the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at the time, Alexis Johnson, stated, "The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

One Laotian female refugee recalled the years of bombing in this way: "Our lives became like those of animals desperately trying to escape their hunters . . . Human beings, whose parents brought them into the world and carefully raised them with overflowing love despite so many difficulties, these human beings would die from a single blast as explosions burst, lying still without moving again at all. And who then thinks of the blood, flesh, sweat and strength of their parents, and who will have charity and pity for them? In reality, whatever happens, it is only the innocent who suffer."

In Cambodia, the United States was concerned that the North Vietnamese might have established a military base in the country. In response, The US dropped three million tons of ordnance in 230,000 sorties on 113,000 sites between 1964 and 1975. 10% of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8000 sites having no target listed at all. About a million Cambodians were killed (there was no one counting), and the destruction to society wrought by the indiscriminate, long-term destruction is widely thought to have given rise to the Khmer Rouge, who proceeded, in their hatred for all things Western, to kill another 2 million people.

Four days after Vietnam declared its independence on September 2, 1945, "Southern Korea" also declared independence (on September 6), with a primary goal of reuniting the country – which had been split into north and south by the United States only seven months before. Two days later, on September 8, 1945, the US military arrived with the first of 72,000 troops, dissolved the newly formed South Korean government, and flew in their own chosen leader, Syngman Rhee, who had spent the previous 40 years in Washington D.C. There was considerable opposition to the US control of the country, so much that 250,000 and 500,000 people were killed between 1945 and 1950 resisting the American occupation, before the actual Korean War even started.

The Korean War, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was an asymmetrical war, in which the highly industrialized and mechanized US pulverized the comparatively primitive North Korean nation. One third of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, a total of three million people (along with one million Chinese and 58,000 Americans). Every city, every sizable town, every factory, every bridge, every road in North Korea was destroyed. General Curtis LeMay remarked at one point that the US had "turned every city into rubble," and now was returning to "turn the rubble into dust." A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as "a low, wide mound of violet ashes." General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just "rubble or snowy open spaces."

More napalm was dropped on Korea than on Vietnam, 600,000 tons compared to 400,000 tons in Vietnam. One report notes that, "By late August, 1950, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of it was pure napalm. Vietnam veteran Brian Wilson asks in this regard, "What it is like to pulverize ancient cultures into small pebbles, and not feel anything?"

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein came to power through a U.S.-CIA engineered coup in 1966 that overthrew the socialist government and installed Saddam’s Baath Party. Later conflict with Saddam let to the first and second Gulf Wars, and to thirteen years of severe U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq between the two wars, which taken together completely obliterated the Iraqi economy. An estimated one million people were killed in the two Gulf wars, and the United Nations estimates that the economic sanctions, in combination with the destruction of the social and economic infrastructure in the First Gulf War, killed another million Iraqis. Today both the economy and the political structure of Iraq are in ruins.

This trail of blood, tears and death smeared across the pages of recent history is the reason that Martin Luther King said in his famous Vietnam Speech that the United States is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Vietnam veteran Mike Hastie expanded the observation when he said in April of this year (2010) that, "The United States Government is a nonstop killing machine. The worst experience I had in Vietnam was experiencing the absolute truth of Martin Luther King's statement. America is in absolute psychiatric denial of its genocidal maniacal nature."

A further issue is that "war destroys the earth." Not only does, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1960, "Every rocket fired signify a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed," but every rocket that is fired reduces the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere. In an ultimate sense it could be argued that those who wage war and those who pay for and support war, in reality bear some hidden hatred for life and some hidden desire to put and end to it.

What are our options? The short answer is, grow up. Grow up into the inherent depth of your own existence. After all, you are a "child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars, you have a right be here." There is no viable, universally inscribed law that compels you to do as you are told to do by the multitude of dysfunctional and destructive authority figures that would demand your compliance, if you acquiesce.

"If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature," wrote French author La Boétie in his book The Politics of Obedience," we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody." La Boétie wrote this in the year 1552, but people today remain slaves to external authority. "Our problem," said historian Howard Zinn, "is not civil disobedience; our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty."

Do you want to spend your life paying for the death of people (executed by the US military) that you would probably have loved if you have met them? Do you want to spend your life paying for the arsenal of hydrogen bombs that could very well destroy most of the life on the planet? If not, if you want another kind of life, then as author James Howard Kunstler often suggests, ‘You will have to make other arrangements." You will have to arrange to live according to your own deepest ethical standards, rather than living in fear of the nefarious authority figures that currently demand your obedience and threaten to punish you if you do not obey their demands on your one precious chance at life.

"We must know how the first ruler came by his authority." ~ John Locke

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." ~ Henry David Thoreau

Dana Visalli [dana@methownet.com] is an ecologist, botanist and organic farmer living in Twisp, Washington.

Copyright © 2010 Dana Visalli

[JakeYYZ]

Wow, you win a lifetime achievement trolling award for that post alone! Amazing work.

[Hedley]

yawn

[dashx]

It is sad that some people can brush aside the agony and killing of so many innocent people with a glib comment and a simple yawn.

[Nark]

So do something other than post about it on here...

[niss]

It is sad that some people can brush aside the agony and killing of so many innocent people with a glib comment and a simple yawn.

Exactly,

That's why I am taking the high road and posting a tl;dr.

[iflyforpie]

tl;dr

You beat me to it niss.

[dashx]

Do I need to post my CV here for all to see?

I have done my small (it was a job after all) share of working for the UN in a non military aviation position.

I have my experience and you have yours.

If bombing the jungle with napalm turns you on so be it.

What are the effects of napalm on those in the US that did the bombing and the manufacturing? All swept under rug?

Ah the price some people paid for that 2 1/2 car garage and white picket fence.

Johnny high on Afghani poppies eh?

All that money spent? Spend 1% and buy all their poppy crop and watch the problems disappear.

Isn't that the American way? Buy their freedom and loyalty?

[The Old Fogducker]

Yup ... you can sign me up as a sponsor of terrorism all right.

What's more ... I'd be delighted to wear my support on my sleeve so to speak .... do you have any sites that sell lapel pins, silk-screened hats, or maybe custom embroidered emblems for my blue blazer that I'd wear to formal meetings of the local chapter of the "Sponsor A Terrorist Association?"

After all, if I've got those sort of items for my lifetime membership in the Royal Canadian Regiment Association, why shouldn't I go all the way in my visible support for terrorism too?

After consideration, I don't think I should be satisfied with mere personal sponsorship of terrorism. I'll write my MP and get the govt to increase the level of funding for operations in Afghanistan, and any other haven for Al Qaeda and Taliban so I can make into the big-time ... State Sponsored Terrorism.

That's where the real fun is at.

Warm regards to all other sponsors of anti-Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorism that may read this post from,
The Old (lay the crosshairs on 'em) Fogducker

[Siddley Hawker]

Dana Visalli [dana@methownet.com] is an ecologist, botanist and organic farmer living in Twisp, Washington.

Who would have thought it?

[Hedley]

working for the UN

How much money did you manage to personally pocket in the Iraq "food for oil" multi-billion dollar UN corruption scandal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_for_oil#Abuse

[dashx]

Well there is no point arguing with H and OFD.

[Nark]

What about me?

For a guy who has had the pleasure of escorting a few flexi-cuffed "innocent poppy farmers" I think my experience speaks volumes on the subject.

Afghan's look out for no-one but themselves. Despite our massive billion dollar aid, at the end of the day they thumb their nose at us. It's not because we are infidels, it's because we don't lob off their heads when they coerce with the Taliban, which the Taliban does to them when they speak to us (NATO).

[. ._]

Well there is no point arguing with H and OFD.

Yes, you forgot Nark too.

But there's also no arguing with anyone if their beliefs are strong and/or make sense to them.

So, just like the real world, this board represents society with all of the different opinions and beliefs we hold.

Amazingly, we still kind of get along.

Kumbaya, folks!

-istp

[Hedley]

there is no point arguing

I was just wondering, while you were in the employ of the UN - note the careful wording here, because I am not sure that anyone really works at the UN ...

Did you happen to oversee the Rwanda genocide while you were at the UN? Great work, there.

[The Old Fogducker]

........ I'm a communist peacenik,
-istp

Jeepers ISTP, that incongruity must cause you a great deal of mental anguish.....considering the number of people killed by every single Communist government that has taken power in the last 90 years.

When debating proponents of Communism, I can never get a convincing answer to the question of why millions flee the workers paradise, risking being shot or having their throats ripped out by guard dogs to come to the evil west, all so they could have their minds and bodies exploited by the imperialist, capitalist pigs that employ them.

The few I'm aware of that went the other way, were Burgess and McLean, then Kim Philby from the group of uproarious guys at Cambridge University.... Philby, Blunt, McLean, Burgess, and Cairncross. Even disgruntled exMarine Lee Harvey Oswald came back to the west after heading for the wonderful Soviet Union for awhile.

Must be a case of brainwashing by the devilish forces of the military industrialist complex.

Oh, I know .... nobody has really done Communism right have they?

Maybe Obama will get the chance to reform America in the vision of his protester buddies from the Democratic Party National Convention of 1968 who are now in control of the party and its direction.

Sometime, I'll write about my encounter with a group of protesters at my local MP's office. They were carrying the typical protest signs, and a displaying a large banner indicating they were from The Communist Party of Canada ... .. I really enjoyed myself that afternoon, and the experience is worthy of its own thread.

The Old Fogducker
(Proud to be called a "Running dog lackey of the US military industrialist complex" by Radio Peking.)

[. ._]

Oh, I know .... nobody has really done Communism right have they?

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

We'll figure it out one day.

In solidarity,
istp

[dashx]

I'll try to remember all the your comments as I type on my Chinese made laptop. And think about my Cuban getaway.

As far as your comments regarding Rwanda and food for oil programs I am sorry I was not involved with either one of those UNfortunate scandals. But i think its been discussed ad nauseum so why continue to dig?

I was employed by a Canadian charter company providing air services to the UN. My pay was double that of what I would have made at home but certainly not near what the UN employees were getting. And when I say double it was because the Canadian dollar was low and we got pay in US funds.

You might even say I was being exploited by my employer but (oops communist talk.....) I did nothing to be ashamed of.

There is no Swiss bank account with my name on it. But I have always wondered how much money it would taken to buy my soul (now that is religious claptrap).

[Hedley]

I was told the Berlin wall was constructed to stop all the west germans from trying to get into east germany and avail themselves of the benefits of a socialist paradise

The right wing / left wing thing sure is funny. China, which is supposedly a communist nation, is probably the most capitalistic nation in the world right now - albeit a totalitarian one. Curious.

Meanwhile, the USA, which used to be the champion of capitalism, is moving towards socialism as fast as they can, by nationalizing the banks, the auto companies and health care, and creating a huge, powerful centralized government with extremely high taxes.

You just can't make this stuff up!

[Dash-Ate]

For those who think we have "freedom" maybe you cannot see that every area of our lives is controlled by the government and corporations. So go ahead and write a letter to the editor. The 5 or so news organizations who own all the media are not gonna print it.



By the way EVERY army uses torture, always has always will.
Deal with it!


War is a death cult and there's no good guys.

http://www.newint.org/issue327/up.htm

How's your stomach? Strong? Do you feel that you are like a god and have the right to impose your will upon "the other" ? Well good. You will fit in perfectly.

http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/resources/torture/

Enjoy your stay in hell.

[Dash-Ate]

Here you can see the MADNESS of war. These same quote can be used in the middle east today...same old same old.

The greatest liberating force ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

This view was re-inforced if the NLF left the village to escape advancing US or South Vietnamese troops. In an effort to discover information about the NLF, the peasants were sometimes tortured. If evidence was found of the NLF being in the village, the people were punished. As William Ehrhart, a US marine explained:"... they'd be beaten pretty badly, maybe tortured. Or they might be hauled off to jail, and God knows what happened to them. At the end of the day, the villagers would be turned loose. Their homes had been wrecked, their chickens killed, their rice confiscated - and if they weren't pro-Vietcong before we got there, they sure as hell were by the time we left."

After seeing their comrades killed by booby traps, there was a temptation for the patrol to take it out on the next village they arrived at. By doing so they increased the peasants hostility towards the Americans and made it more difficult for them to support the South Vietnamese government against the communists.

In 1965, General William Westmoreland developed the aggressive strategy of 'search and destroy'. The objective was to find and then kill members of the NLF. The US soldiers found this difficult. As one marine captain explained: "You never knew who was the enemy and who was the friend. They all looked alike. They all dressed alike." Innocent civilians were often killed by mistake. As one Marine officer admitted they "were usually counted as enemy dead, under the unwritten rule 'If he's dead and Vietnamese, he's VC'."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNnlf.htm

[Expat]

I'll try to remember all the your comments as I type on my Chinese made laptop. And think about my Cuban getaway.

As far as your comments regarding Rwanda and food for oil programs I am sorry I was not involved with either one of those UNfortunate scandals. But i think its been discussed ad nauseum so why continue to dig?

I was employed by a Canadian charter company providing air services to the UN. My pay was double that of what I would have made at home but certainly not near what the UN employees were getting. And when I say double it was because the Canadian dollar was low and we got pay in US funds.

You might even say I was being exploited by my employer but (oops communist talk.....) I did nothing to be ashamed of.

There is no Swiss bank account with my name on it. But I have always wondered how much money it would taken to buy my soul (now that is religious claptrap).

Well said,
I happen to have been here in Af for five and half years. Everyday, it becomes clearer to my mind, and to the average Af mind, that the Soviets did a lot more to help them out of their misery, than the west is doing now. Even the Bagram Air base, was built by the Soviets, along with the Salang tunnel, all grain elevators, universities, roads, dams, erosion protection, everything... We have not succeeded in bringing back to Kabul power 24 hours a day, after nine years! Opium production was almost zero during Talib time, and now it is out of control! Flown out in military planes! 3000 tons of precursor chemicals are flown in every year, so that opium is processed here.
The so called surge in Kandahar, the last fight against the Talib, is only a poorly disguised plot to force them out, to spread them out in the whole country, so that that the sh*t hits the fan big time. It is not going to happen because other provinces hold their end, and will not be dragged into the violence cycle.
I do not know much about Laos and Cambodia, but the lady has her act together on Af!
The school building program is such a joke here! I could have one built for 30,000 USD, but the government spends near one million USD doing it, and in a remote area, where no one goes, because there are no school busses here, and kids walk to school!!!

There is a lot more than meets the eye...Good night...

[Icebound]

The right wing / left wing thing sure is funny. China, which is supposedly a communist nation, is probably the most capitalistic nation in the world right now - albeit a totalitarian one. Curious.

Meanwhile, the USA, which used to be the champion of capitalism, is moving towards socialism as fast as they can, by nationalizing the banks, the auto companies and health care, and creating a huge, powerful centralized government with extremely high taxes.

Of course you are going to have "extremely high taxes", if you spend trillions on your military to destroy stuff, followed by more trillions to help people "rebuild" it.

The reason that you see these aberrations of capitalism is because, it cannot survive in its current manifestation.

Capitalism is supposed to work by me building something for you, while you built something for me, and we both benefit.

But that wasn't enough. We had to gain an "advantage". I had to work out schemes to benefit "more" that you. I had to take shortcuts, maybe leave a little toxic waste here and there for somebody to clean up later. You had to create products that weren't real products but looked like it. Oh, and then we set up ways to collect money not based on what we actually made, but on speculation on what we MIGHT make in the future, and how important it will be to society.

We would take that money, pay ourselves handsome bonuses, fritter it away on yachts, parties and mansions, and when the creditors came calling.... well, we would declare bankruptcy, give them 10 cents on the dollar, restructure, and try again.

Among the creditors were millions of workers whom we paid as little as possible and who now would not even get that.

We are very lucky to have big government to focus the people's ire. It is a nice buffer that greases the wheels to keep "capitalism" going. It buys lots of stuff. Keeps the unwashed hordes in check. Good for business.



....

[Nark]

As oppose to the BILLIONS of dollars I the tax payer is giving to these companies?

Capitalism works well, it's when the government interjects and makes a socialist state, is when it fails.

I'm curious, who makes the boat, yacht, airplane, who tends to the stable that holds the many Thoroughbred's these evil people own?

Who repairs the fat cat toys when the need fixing?

Better yet, who takes them on a fishing/hunting trip when they need a break from it all?

Yes, the people who make money is the root of our demise.

Mark my words, Novemeber 2010 the US will no longer be heading toward the socialist type state Trudeau made of Canada.

[shitdisturber]

I was told the Berlin wall was constructed to stop all the west germans from trying to get into east germany and avail themselves of the benefits of a socialist paradise

You've been reading Tom Clancy again haven't you?