March 28th, 2008 by CD
A lengthy investigation published Thursday reveals that the Pentagon gave an inexperienced 22-year-old a $300 million contract to provide ammunition to Afghanistan. The shady deal resulted in decades old, substandard munitions being delivered to US and Afghan troops fighting on the front lines of the war on terror.
The results of that investigation, which sent seven reporters across three continents, were published Thursday.
“But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur. With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces. Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed. In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.”
The company’s president was 22-year-old Efraim E. Diveroli
March 11th, 2008 by CD
The United Nations has delivered a grim assessment of the conflict in Afghanistan, reporting that violence increased sharply last year and resulted in the deaths of more than 8,000 people, at least 1,500 of them civilians.
In a report to the security council, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the number of violent incidents rose from an average of 425 a month in 2006 to 566 each month last year.
The number of suicide attacks rose to 160 in 2007 from 123 in 2006 — with 68 attempts thwarted in 2007 compared with 17 in 2006, he said.
Ban claimed that while the insurgency drew strength from local people, much of the violence was led from abroad. “The support of foreign-based networks in providing leadership, planning, training, funding and equipment clearly remains crucial to its viability,” he said.
Current violence in Afghanistan is at its highest level since a US-led invasion in 2001 to oust Taliban rulers.
Read more
March 3rd, 2008 by CD
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hailed a new chapter in ties with Iraq and took a jab at the United States over its policies in the Middle East during a landmark visit to Baghdad on Sunday.
Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian president to go to Iraq since Saddam Hussein launched an eight-year war on Iran in 1980, in which 1 million people died. He is also the first leader from the region to visit since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
His two-day trip to a country where its long-time enemy the United States has more than 150,000 troops is as much about symbolism as about cementing economic and cultural ties between the neighbours, both run by Shi’ite majorities.
He rejected long-standing U.S. accusations, repeated by President George W. Bush on Saturday, that Iran is arming Shi’ite militias in Iraq who kill American soldiers.
“We tell Mr. Bush that accusing others will increase the problems of America in the region and will not solve them,” Ahmadinejad said in translated remarks at a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
“The Americans have to understand the facts of the region. Iraqi people do not like America.”
Read more of this report here
February 17th, 2008 by CD
War Made Easy exposes a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8383084962209910782&hl=en[/googlevideo]
(Media Education Foundation)
February 13th, 2008 by CD
Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair is the third feature-length documentary produced by the Empowerment Project. The shadow government of assassins, arms dealers, drug smugglers, former CIA operatives and top US military personnel who were running foreign policy unaccountable to the public, revealing the Reagan/Bush administration’s plan to use FEMA to institute martial law and ultimately suspend the Constitution. Strikingly relevant to current events.
Full Video 72 Minutes
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8476042566108039966&hl=en[/googlevideo]
February 6th, 2008 by CD
Watch the below clip from an interview with Israeli channel 2. (2/5/08)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCBJm1X48XQ[/youtube]
February 3rd, 2008 by CD
The film focuses around the controversial death in custody of an Afghan Jitney taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extra judicial detention at the Bagram Air Base.
Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America’s policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defence of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularisation of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24.
The film is said to be the first film to contain images taken within Bagram Air Base.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in5OhVNCokc[/youtube]
January 14th, 2008 by CD
Another good reason why you should not turn your television sets on to CNN, CBS and all the rest. Democracy Now provides real journalism and investigates what really happened. Listen to the audio (real audio) of Gareth Porter explaining the situation.
Gareth Porter: this alleged crisis or confrontation on the high seas is really much less than what met the eyes of the American public as it was reported by news media. And the story really began from leaks from the Pentagon. I mean, there were Pentagon officials apparently calling reporters and telling them that something had happened in the Strait of Hormuz, which represented a threat to American ships and that there was a near battle on the high seas. The way it was described to reporters, it was made to appear to be a major threat to the ships and a major threat of war. And that’s the way it was covered by CNN, by CBS and other networks, as well as by print media.
Then I think the next major thing that happened was a briefing by the commander of the 5th fleet in Bahrain, the Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, which is very interesting. If you look carefully at the transcript, which was not reported accurately by the media, or not reported at all practically, the commander—or rather, Vice Admiral Cosgriff actually makes it clear that the ships were never in danger, that they never believed they were in danger, and that they were never close to firing on the Iranian boats. And this is the heart of what actually happened, which was never reported by the US media.
So I think that the major thing to really keep in mind about this is that it was blown up into a semi-crisis by the Pentagon and that the media followed along very supinely. And I must say this is perhaps the worst—the most egregious case of sensationalist journalism in the service of the interests of the Pentagon, the Bush administration, that I have seen so far.
Gareth Porter, Investigative historian specializing in U.S. national security policy. He writes regularly on Iran for the Inter Press Service. His latest book is called “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.”
