Spun Too Much: Karzai’s Had Enough
Los Angeles
Hamid Karzai is sick of the shit in Afghanistan. “It is by all means the end of the rope here….” Kind of like how the Iraqi PM refused to give US soldiers immunity from lawsuits and prosecution, which prompted the military to pull out of the country after nine years of invasion. Countries can only take so much abuse and civilian death.
Karzai’s had it with the civilian casualties, and the subsequent cover-ups and spin by the US government to hide the severity of their crimes:
In an emotional meeting with relatives of the shooting victims, Karzai said the villagers’ accounts of the massacre were widely different from the scenario depicted by U.S. military officials. The relatives and villagers insisted that it was impossible for one gunmen to kill nine children, four men and three women in three houses of two villages near a U.S. combat outpost in southern Afghanistan.Karzai pointed to one of the villagers from Panjwai district of Kandahar province and said:“In his family, in four rooms people were killed – children and women were killed – and then they were all brought together in one room and then set on fire. That, one man cannot do.” (source)
I’m also sick of the spin from the US government. In recent years, the wild stories combined with downplayed tragedies keep the public in a whirlwind of disinformation. The lies are spread intentionally. It’s not misinformation, where there’s at least the intention to tell the truth.
I’m talking about Pat Tillman, gunned down as he heroically rushed an enemy bunker, but in reality the truth finally leaked out that he was killed by his own soldiers, execution style, after he’d written letters home decrying an illegitimate war in Afghanistan.
And Jessica Lynch, firing at insurgents like a madwoman until she ran out of ammo and was then taken by savage Iraqis and raped and beaten by their doctors. When the truth came out, that image of a heroic woman soldier was complete fiction. Lynch refused to go along with the story. She said the Pentagon lied. The Iraqi doctors only showed her kindness after her Humvee crashed.
NY University media analyst, Mark Crispin Miller, said the White House believes they can spin their way out of anything. And it’s true. Bush. Obama. Doesn’t matter.
Osama bin Laden’s death was the same. Pres Obama popped on television and the web for a late-night emergency announcement. Bin Laden had been killed, finally, and he held a woman in front of his body to shield himself from the elite soldiers shooting at him. There were firefights. The terrorists are cowards. They kill women and children.
And then the story unraveled. Was there a firefight? Did bin Laden use a woman as a body shield? Or did one soldier turn into a small room, see bin Laden, and cap him in the forehead? Glenn Greenwald sharply criticized the bullshit coming out of the White House:
But what has surprised me somewhat is how little interest there seems to be in finding out what actually happened here. We know very little about the circumstances of bin Laden’s killing, because the U.S. government has issued so many contradictory claims, which in turn contradict the reported claims of those at the scene. When I wrote about this on Monday, I said that the use of force would be justified if, as the U.S. Government claimed, he was violently resisting his capture. But that turned out to be totally false. It’s now beyond dispute that bin Laden was unarmed when killed and there was virtually no violent resistence in the house. Still, the range of possibilities for what actually happened is vast — everything from he was lunging for his AK-47 to he was already captured when shot (in front of his family) to the order from the start was to kill, not capture, him — and I personally don’t see how it’s possible to assess the justifiability (or legality) of what took place without knowing which of those are true.
The accounts of disinformation go on and on. Democratic or Republican. It doesn’t matter. We’re being lied to. Our money and national vitality are being unlawfully used up not for the protection of US citizens, but for the profits of a few of society’s elite.
We are living out their nightmares. We are buying into their spin. The only reason anybody in this world wants to attack America is because of incidents like the one on Sunday, when 16 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children, were murdered in their homes by a roving gang of US soldiers.
The only reason America will get terrorized by the Middle East is because of the meddling we do in their countries. We build bases on their holy lands. We destroy their mosques. We occupy their countries and drop bombs on their villages and marketplaces. Enough is enough.
We’re already paying for these sins, and still we aren’t any safer, no matter how many invasions and occupations our military is ordered to carry out. Our nation is bankrupt, our people have lost their jobs and homes and prosperity. The few on top with all their investments in war and death and rebuilding nations are safe from all of that. They have their sprawling mansions and gated properties. It is the rest of us groveling at the trough of government assistance, desperate for any kind of help.
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