November 17, 2009 archive

Is Blackwater behind the terror attacks in Pakistan?

You’d think a terrorist organization would welcome being responsible for terrorist attacks, wouldn’t you?

In fact, don’t terrorist organizations often claim responsibility for incidents that they had nothing to do with?  Isn’t that how they gain cred?   Isn’t their whole purpose of being to create “terror”?

Then why would the Taliban disvow responsibility for the recent attacks in Pakistan?

Taliban: Blackwater to blame for Pakistan attacks


The Pakistani arm of the Taliban has denied responsibility for a recent series of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, instead pointing the finger at Xe Services, the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, as well as the country’s own security services.

“The Tehreek-e-Taliban are not responsible for the bombings, but Blackwater and Pakistan’s spy agency are behind them,” said Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq, according to a translation from Al-Jazeera English.

”The dirty Pakistani intelligence agencies, for the sake of creating mistrust and hatred among people against the Taliban, are carrying out blasts at places like the Islamic university, Islamabad, and the Khyber bazaar, Peshawar,” the Associated Press quoted Tariq as saying.

Just to refresh people’s memories, or maybe to inform them for the first time, there has been a long, incestuous relationship between Pakistan’s secret police, the ISI, and the Taliban.   In fact, the Taliban would not have survived, or possibly even existed, without the support of the ISI over the years.  

Also, there is a great deal of evidence that the ISI is, and has been, responsible for a great deal of “Islamic terrorism” over the years, and were even directly involved in 9/11:

The Pakistan connection — There is evidence of foreign intelligence backing for the 9/11 hijackers. Why is the US government so keen to cover it up?


Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, is waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for a murder he almost certainly didn’t commit – of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Both the US government and Pearl’s wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not responsible. Yet the Pakistani government is refusing to try other suspects newly implicated in Pearl’s kidnap and murder for fear the evidence they produce in court might acquit Sheikh and reveal too much.

Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?

Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to “retire” by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn’t the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?

You can easily look up the history of the ISI as it relates to the very existence of the Taliban and “Al Queda”.

Well,  interestingly enough, just yesterday the LA Times published an article about how our very own CIA has funded the ISI over the years.   And I mean funded it.

CIA says it gets its money’s worth from Pakistani spy agency


It has given hundreds of millions to the ISI, for operations as well as rewards for the capture or death of terrorist suspects. Despite fears of corruption, it is money well-spent, ex-officials say.


The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan’s intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency’s annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.

The payments have triggered intense debate within the U.S. government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.

But U.S. officials have continued the funding because the ISI’s assistance is considered crucial: Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan’s tribal belt, where ISI informant networks are a primary source of intelligence.

The White House National Security Council has “this debate every year,” said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official involved in the discussions. Like others, the official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Despite deep misgivings about the ISI, the official said, “there was no other game in town.”

The payments to Pakistan are authorized under a covert program initially approved by then-President Bush and continued under President Obama. The CIA declined to comment on the agency’s financial ties to the ISI.

U.S. officials often tout U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation. But the extent of the financial underpinnings of that relationship have never been publicly disclosed. The CIA payments are a hidden stream in a much broader financial flow; the U.S. has given Pakistan more than $15 billion over the last eight years in military and civilian aid.

Congress recently approved an extra $1 billion a year to help Pakistan stabilize its tribal belt at a time when Obama is considering whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

The ISI has used the covert CIA money for a variety of purposes, including the construction of a new headquarters in Islamabad, the capital. That project pleased CIA officials because it replaced a structure considered vulnerable to attack; it also eased fears that the U.S. money would end up in the private bank accounts of ISI officials.

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

Now with World and U.S. News.  58 Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Somalia, Afghanistan shamed in graft league table

AFP

36 mins ago

BERLIN (AFP) – Lawless Somalia and war-torn Afghanistan topped a blacklist on Tuesday of the world’s most corrupt countries drawn up by the anti-graft watchdog Transparency International.

TI’s annual corruption index showed how countries devastated by conflict have become overrun by graft with Iraq, Sudan and Myanmar accounting for the three other states in the bottom five of the chart.

The Berlin-based organisation said that countries whose infrastructure had been “torn apart” by conflict needed help from outside to prevent a culture of corruption taking root.

Tax The Rich

From TPM

The Internal Revenue Service says more than 14,700 U.S. taxpayers with offshore accounts in 70 foreign countries have come forward to settle their tax debts.

Shulman says those taxpayers represent billions of dollars in taxes returning to the U.S.

H/T to Jed Lewison

 

 The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a federal report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

   In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million youngsters the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

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Open Heart

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Public Call To Leak Photographic Evidence of Torture

The U.S. has blocked the release of photos showing clear evidence that the United States is responsible for torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. We think someone with access to the photos should simply leak them on the web, saving tax payers a load of cash and letting people know just what it is our twin occupations are really about. We are calling on anyone who has access to the images to leak them and anyone else to copy this message and post it in order to increase the chance of it reaching anyone who might have access.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates won’t allow new photographs showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by Americans military personnel. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has taken the issue to court, and is suing for the release of 21 color photos under the Freedom of Information Act. Ultimately, this lawsuit will win, but why waste the taxpayer dollars to hide from tax payers what they’re funding in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Federal courts already rejected the White House arguments that the photos must be kept from public view. In respponse to this, Congress – which is largely populated by people who supported both invasions, knowingly swallowing vast doses of false information as if it were fact – gave Gates new power to keep them private.

We know the U.S. military and its many contractors are involved in torture and humiliation of detainees, actions in violation of both U.S. and international law. Evidence has been published in the past and it was shrugged off under the “few bad apples” plea. We know this isn’t the case and these new photos are yet still more tangible proof of that.

If you have access to these photos, release them. If you don’t have access to these photos, please cut and paste this call anywhere you can and let’s create a viral plea to someone with the power to be a whistle blower. Don’t wait for the courts.

The American Dream and the Prosperity Gospel

I am not usually a reader of magazines except when waiting in places like doctor’s offices or for routine car repair, but a particular column in The Atlantic fairly jumped out at me yesterday while running errands.  Provocatively entitled “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?“, immediately I wondered what Christianity the author was referring to when making such a sweeping pronouncement.  As it turns out, it’s a particularly curious hybrid strain that synthesizes radical optimism and personal gain at the expense of hard truths or self-awareness.  In that regard, it could not be more indicative of the modern age, in all of its faults and promises of salvation through riches.  Moreover, in this epoch where instant gratification reigns, perhaps it was inevitable that this petard preaching material gain was hoist.  

Though centrally based around an emerging Catholic congregation catering specifically to recent Latino immigrants, in her compelling article author Hanna Rosin draws in disparate strains of different denominations to make an interesting and ultimately damning point.

America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity.

In Garay’s church, God is the “Owner of All the Silver and Gold,” and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. “Instead of saying ‘I’m poor,’ say ‘I’m rich,'” Garay’s wife, Hazael, told me one day. “The word of God will manifest itself in reality.”

I find this belief system, if one could truly call it that, particularly troubling and problematic, considering that there are any number of verses of Scripture and words of Jesus I could invoke to directly contradict it.  The most obvious citation and one that likely jumps out to those with a strong Christ-centered background is, of course, from the Gospel of Matthew.

“No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

I am surprised certainly at how unapologetic is this emphasis on personal finance and wealth, since the model used by many churches is a much more insidious one.  The most flagrant perversion is found within conventional Protestant Christianity and is known as the Edifice Complex.  In it, individual salvation is closely linked with coughing up enough money into the collection plates to buy the brand new multimillion dollar building being pushed by the minister and certain well-connected committee members.  A singular focus upon a new house of worship takes precedent, is set into motion, and is awaited with a kind of rapturous Messianic zeal.  Plans are drawn up, each stage is announced with much fanfare, updates are frequently provided on how much money has been donated to cover the expense, and it is implied strongly and frequently that all problems will be easily solved by more square footage.  The tactic is almost always justified by stating that unchurched people will be drawn into the fold and as a result souls will be saved.  Of course, paying for it all over time, in addition to such matters as an notable increase in monies devoted to utilities, mortgage payments, and routine upkeep would certainly require greater participation and increased numbers in the pews, but these are often vulgar, cynical conclusions few dare to draw openly or, for that matter, vocally.

It is not all that surprising that the prosperity gospel persists despite its obvious failure to pay off. Much of popular religion these days is characterized by a vast gap between aspirations and reality. Few of Sarah Palin’s religious compatriots were shocked by her messy family life, because they’ve grown used to the paradoxes; some of the most socially conservative evangelical churches also have extremely high rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce. As Garay likes to say, “What you have is nothing compared to what you will have.” The unpleasant reality-an inadequate paycheck, a pregnant daughter, a recession-is invisible. It’s your ability to see beyond such things, your willing blindness to even the most hopeless-seeming circumstances, that makes you a certain kind of modern Christian, and a 21st-century American.  

At times I have found criticism from those who are not people of faith a little annoying and self-righteous, but still do try to give credence to their concerns, many of which are well-founded.  If, for instance, one assumes that religion, or for that matter, Christianity is little more than a panacea of positive thinking or a snake-oil curative based on this example, I can hardly fault them for it.  True believers have always had to contend with distortions of the truth formulated to suit the ends of those who manipulated followers to advance their own ends, which often involved material gain.  It is unfortunate that tunnel-vision suffices for real faith in the eyes of the deluded, though I fault those who advance it, not those who cling to it.  

Later in Matthew,

While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”  On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  Learn what this means: ‘I want mercy, not sacrifices.’  For I have come to urge sinners, not the self-righteous, back to God.

I remember that when I was in high school I had a friend who grew up in a very conservative Evangelical family.  Underneath the piety, however, was a kind of dysfunction utterly at odds with the stability which they espoused.  The mother and father had been long divorced and so my friend lived with his mother in an always cluttered house packed floor to ceiling with junk and unorganized possessions.  She used divine revelation and divine direction as justification to leave the country for long periods of time.  No matter whether or not she had the money or the need to engage in weeks-long mission trips to remote corners of the globe, her rationalization was that God meant for her to go and since she wanted to go, He would provide for the messy details like funding or making sure her son had the support he needed.  Upon reading this article, this anecdote from my own life entered my mind and I am saddened to think that what I considered delusional eccentricity might be far more commonplace then I had ever dreamed.          

The Atlantic article focuses on a member of this Charlottesville, Virginia, Latino Catholic congregation by the name of Billy Gonzales, whose requisite devotion to the Prosperity Gospel raises some major red flags in the eyes of this reader.  


By many measures, Billy Gonzales does not have it all. He lives with his wife and three children in a tiny apartment on the back side of a development at the edge of town, where people hang out on the stoop until all hours. He works 45 minutes away and his car has been broken down for three months, and he does not have any money to fix it. Every day at work he is faced with a vision of what he does not have. He works for a man who just built a $4 million house-one of four the man owns. Gonzales’s job is to make sure every wine glass, garden statue, and book is dusted and in its proper place. Yet when I talked to Gonzales he was like a child hearing the ice-cream truck, or a man newly in love. “I’m crazy! Just crazy,” he said, meaning crazy for the Lord, and giving little jumps out of his chair.

“I want to buy a house,” he confessed to me one evening this summer. It turned out his lease was almost up, and he needed to move in the fall. “Not a small one but a really huge one, a nice one. With six bedrooms and a kitchen and living room. I know, it’s crazy! But nothing is impossible! God, you saved my life,” he said, no longer speaking to me. “You saved my life, and now you will give me a gift. Now I’m crazy!” Last I heard, he and Garay were house-hunting together.

The narrative that has been advanced in our society since roughly World War II is that religion is detrimental and thus it ought to be jettisoned and disregarded.  This has found favor particularly in liberal circles and continues to be pushed hard, since it is easy to provide a new example of how religious intolerance holds back progress or controls people to maintain its own power.  When riding the bus yesterday here in DC, I came across a very visible ad for Humanism.  It fairly dripped with optimism, smiling faces, calm colors, and good cheer, stating that it is possible for a person to be good without having to have a belief in God or a higher power at all.  

In my opinion, I believe that it is entirely possible to be a model citizen without a belief in a higher power, but I suppose I simply have a hard time entertaining the notion that humans when in groups are capable of staying grounded and remaining focused in their efforts to assist everyone.  One needs only look at the artifice we have created in government to see the confusion, the inequality, and above all, the needless complications that resort when peoples’ stated agenda at the outset is egalitarianism which ends up by the end nothing remotely like it.  What often starts with the best of intentions concludes with a finished product that pleases no one.    

Going back to Gonzales, what strikes me as a supreme tragedy is this particular passage, which flies in the face of much biblical teaching and, to be fair, much teaching of other religions.

He told me he feels pity for his employer. He assumes the man must have been close to God at one point, or at least his family must have been, “because the rich are closer to God.” But now the man has lost his way. He laughs when Gonzales talks to him about Jesus, and he wastes his money, buying $500 birdhouses and hiring Gonzales to clean them.

This story begs to be contradicted and my selection of the passage below should come as no surprise.

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”  “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments.”

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”  When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.  Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”  Jesus looked at them intently and said, “For humans this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

The long and short of it is that religion isn’t meant to be a consistent warm fuzzy.  That’s not the point.  Jesus called out the leaders of his day and age, which directly led to his death on a cross.  All or nothing thinking transforms religion either to a nonstop bummer trip of hypocrisy and thought control or a kind of willing Utopia adopted by believers desperate for a break from the travails and stressors of the world.  We are taught, poetically, that to everything there is a season.  Sometimes we need encouragement, sometimes we need to be aware of our own frailties, sometimes we can delight in joy, sometimes we need to be held accountable for our transgressions, but we don’t need a retelling of the bootstrap mythology based on a oversimplified interpretation of scripture.  

A notable criticism of all of the monotheistic religions is that they are Paternalistic and at times needlessly meddling.  I admit that the intention of the Gospels has been twisted to state “I know better than you do”.  Still, focusing specifically on what Jesus taught, the ultimate intention in the beginning was that of empowerment, not subordination.  No teacher desperate to be worshiped or admired would have stated that whomever exalts himself or herself will be humbled and whomever humbles himself or herself will be exalted.  It is a corruption of original intent that leads many away from faith and towards a gospel preaching riches, while in the process forsaking the Golden Rule.  The American Dream as realized begins with the Protestant work ethic, but takes a sharp detour along the way.    

To conclude, a message for false teachers and corrupt politicians.

“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat.  So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.  They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.  Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted in the marketplaces and to have men call them ‘Rabbi.’

“But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have only one Master and you are all brothers.  And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.  Don’t make others call you a leader, because you have only one leader, the Messiah.  The greatest among you will be your servant.  

     

On Determining Impact, Or, How Stimulative Is Stimulus?

We strive to be, if anything, a participatory space around here, and I’ve had a question come to my inbox that is very much deserving of our attention.

To make a long story short, our questioner wants to know why, on the one hand, despite the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, also known as the “stimulus”), unemployment in the construction industry continues to increase, and, on the other hand, why there is such a giant disparity, on a state-by-state basis, in the cost of saving a job?

They’re great questions, and, having done a bit of research, I think I have some cogent answers.

O’Reilly predicts Pelosi’s MURDER in violent tea party, even Beck balks. “It’s gonna get ugly”

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Sick Fux.

BECK: Last week, I head you say that – you were on with Dennis Miller. … You two were talking about an insurrection coming.

O’REILLY: Tax revolt.

BECK: He used the word insurrection. And not in a comedic way.

O’REILLY: Yeah, tax revolt. I think people, when they figure out how badly they’re going to get hurt in the next few years, there’s going to be a tea party on taxes and its gonna get nasty. Nancy Pelosi’s going to be bobbing up and down in the Boston Harbor.

    This statement appeared to be too much for Beck even, who replied, “Uh, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

ThinkProgress.org

    More below the fold.

Anita

She lay in her bed, with a bible clutched in the hand not encased in a cast, speaking openly about her divorce. Despite her deeply religious views, the divorce seems to not bother her at all, other than strategically.

She answers her ancient roommate, “I’ll pray for us both to get better, so we can get out of here, but if that doesn’t work, we just have to live it, one day at a time.” The old lady starts to cry, and she speaks again, “Look at it this way, at least you got 50 more years than I did before you landed here. You’ve had a pretty good life, dear. We’ll get through this.”

That stops the old lady’s crying.

The two of them talk a lot at night. Neither sleeps well, but when you are bed ridden all day, as she often points out, how tired can you possibly get?

She’s 42, and this nursing home is her final stop, and she knows it.

Docudharma Times Tuesday November 17




Monday’s Headlines:

In Beijing, Obama Pushes Need for ‘Strong Dialogue’

Online Maps: Everyman Offers New Directions

Deep divisions linger on health care

National intelligence director to evaluate CIA missions

‘Iron Lady of the North’ in late bid for EU’s top job

Kosovo’s prime minister claims election victory

Donald Macintyre: Palestinians throw down challenge to Obama and UN

UN nuclear chief in secret talks with Iran over deal to end sanctions

Indus Valley’s Bronze Age civilisation ‘had first sophisticated financial exchange system’

A Bonapartist in the Indian Ocean

Roy Bennett pleads not guilty as Mugabe murder plot trial begins

Congo gold ‘still funding’ rebels

Boys and Girls Club of America

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

This is my home, this is where I need to be, and now, they might want to ask me about starting a national program from an idea I had.

Are they fucking nuts?!

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

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