September 27, 2009 archive

Diverse sources fund Afghanistan’s insurgency

Foreign donations, opium bolstered by criminal rackets, U.S. officials say

By Craig Whitlock

KABUL, Afghanistan – The Taliban-led insurgency has built a fundraising juggernaut that generates cash from such an array of criminal rackets, donations, taxes, shakedowns and other schemes that U.S. and Afghan officials say it may be impossible to choke off the movement’s money supply.

Obama administration officials say the single largest source of cash for the Taliban, once thought to rely mostly on Afghanistan’s booming opium trade to finance its operations, is not drugs but foreign donations. The CIA recently estimated that Taliban leaders and their allies received $106 million in the past year from donors outside Afghanistan.

A Burst of Technology, Helping the Blind to See



By PAM BELLUCK

Published: September 26, 2009

Blindness first began creeping up on Barbara Campbell when she was a teenager, and by her late 30s, her eye disease had stolen what was left of her sight.

Reliant on a talking computer for reading and a cane for navigating New York City, where she lives and works, Ms. Campbell, now 56, would have been thrilled to see something. Anything.

Now, as part of a striking experiment, she can. So far, she can detect burners on her stove when making a grilled cheese, her mirror frame, and whether her computer monitor is on.

She is beginning an intensive three-year research project involving electrodes surgically implanted in her eye, a camera on the bridge of her nose and a video processor strapped to her waist.

So much effort extended here lately writing about how to free ourselves from tyranny.

That makes me happy, because a blog where that does not happen, is a blog full of frightened people who fear to bring up the subject, especially if it comes too close.

Yell louder! indeed.

Okay, now that we’ve done that, for this round; here we are. I really like it that we can just do that, and then here we are. No big repercussions.

We don’t get killed by yelling, we are still extant. We don’t go away when we yell louder.

It makes us stronger, being able to do that. It’s like engaging in calisthenics.

Well, not really. Bad simile, really. But this really is what freedom is about, being able to yell louder, without worrying that one will be taken away.

Anybody been taken away here lately?

I hope not. My plate is overfull, far as people being taken away goes.

Miep

Open Thread

Jeremy Scahill is, to my mind, the finest journalist working today.   There are very few real journalists left, I could probably count them on one hand, and Scahill is simply on fire.  

I wanted to share his latest, from his website where he simply destroys the whole notion of ACORN being any kind of a real scandal.

Here is the jist of his article:

How could any sane person put even the wildest allegations against ACORN up against the systematic misconduct and criminality of war corporations and gigantic multi-nationals?

This, considering the way the media has covered this, the way our politicians have such a terrible, palpable fear of any real Democracy that they all, including our complicit Democrats, have decided that Acorn is the real enemy and worthy of being punished, to the point where they are trying to pass legislation called “The Defund Acorn Act”.

If you just put ACORN up against Blackwater, the charges are absolutely ludicrous.   Acorn received $53 million over 15 years, most of which went to support housing for low-income people.   Blackwater has received over a BILLION in government contracts in the last few.  

And check this out:

The GOP smear machine tries to link ACORN to prostitution. Beyond the hypocrisy of Republicans denouncing prostitutes (long history of using them), do they really want talk of prostitution? One former Blackwater employee recently stated in a sworn declaration that Blackwater owner Erik Prince “failed to stop the ongoing use of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, by his men.” Another former employee described “having young girls provide oral sex to Enterprise members in the ‘Blackwater Man Camp’ (in Iraq) in exchange for one American dollar.” (PDF links to these affidavits are here) Even if ACORN did provide inappropriate tax advice to a prostitute, is that really on the same level as this conduct being conducted on a huge US government contract? If you think these are just the allegations of disgruntled employees, read the Justice Department’s perspective on Blackwater’s crimes and how its men “specifically intended to kill” Iraqi civilians as “payback for 9/11.”

As Scahill notes in his previous work on the website, Where is the “Defund Blackwater Act”?     Where, indeed?    Supposedly Democratic and supposedly liberal and supposedly “for the people” Barack Hussein Obama has decided to keep using Blackwater until, well, god only knows how long.   Yet what do we hear about in the press?   How bad and terrible and corrupt Acorn is.  

Nobody talks about defunding the real criminals, others of which are mentioned here:

Beyond the question of innocent until proven guilty, these questions must be asked of Democratic lawmakers who support this punitive legislation against ACORN: Where is your legislation to defund the companies whose men are indicted by actual, real life prosecutors for manslaughter; who are accused by the IRS of tax fraud and whose North Carolina compound has been raided by the ATF for possessing unauthorized, automatic weapons? What about the move to defund KBR, which has provided polluted drinking water to US troops and installed faulty electrical wiring that has resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers? What about the move to defund the massive US-funded mercenary force DynCorp in Iraq, Colombia and Afghanistan? A company whistleblower alleged that in Bosnia he “witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.” What about defunding Armor Group, which employed security guards at the US embassy in Kabul who were throwing fraternity-style parties, complete with disgusting hazing of new recruits in the form of alcohol shots off of butt cracks and the fondling of genitals?

You really just need to read the whole thing.   I can’t possibly do it justice in lame attempts to paraphrase.    And read the rest of his stuff, too, give his site a visit.   He’s amazing.   We need hundreds of Jeremy Scahills in the world, sadly there is just one.

Ministry of Truth has an essay up on First Amendment Rights.  

We had rights — at one time.  

We still have rights — IF you are granted them.  

In America’s imperial twilight, one technology stands above all others in its perfected power: television propaganda. Indeed, the politics of TV-drugged America have been defined largely by the progressively more audacious use of the medium to propagate increasingly pernicious untruths. Pick any outrageous claim – flat earth, creationism, alien abductions, the kindness of health insurers, or Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, and the TV spinmeisters can have 60% of America believing it in a week. This technology of disseminating falsehood dominates modern American society, and the Internet has managed to counter-act it only to a slight degree.

It is a distinctive feature of American innovation that advances in one field are rapidly applied to relevant problems in others. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the Government’s expertise in “winning” wars by declaration was extended to the current economic crisis. The spin doctors are now flooding the TV media with declarations that the recession is over and that a slow recovery is under way. This is exactly analogous to how the Iraq war was “ended.” The average citizen believes that America won the Iraq war by means of a “surge” in troops that defeated the opposition.

But the “war” in Iraq continues to smolder in that ruined nation, and unemployment in America continues to increase, with most indicators of economic welfare sharply depressed. Yet the average citizen is being persuaded that the recession is over, because that message is pumped out with Orwellian regularity through the almighty TeeVee. It is a matter of survival for the American plutocracy to keep civic unrest at a minimum. A reordering of economic power is not an option that will ever be presented to the TV audience. The great mystery of the moment is how much can TV propaganda addle the wits of the American people. Just how bad does reality have to get before it can’t be concealed by smiling TV “personalities?”

Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but he never imagined a nation that watched an average of five hours of television a day. TV is much more than an opiate; it is crack cocaine, and like the cheap and destructive crack, it is deadly. It has wrecked our politics, mired us in absurd wars, destroyed public health, and crippled the very essence of public discourse. Instead of a shared search for the truth we have duelling cacophanies of lies.

So behold our economic recovery by declaration: a miracle of propaganda levitation, defying the gravity of actual experience, and confirming that engineered falsehood can conquer simple truth through the black magic of American television.