Tag: Foreign Occupations

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan…

At a time prior to one of the so called great powers on this planet decided it wanted to control.

Photos Of Afghanistan’s Past: Modernity Lost

June 18, 2010 The Afghanistan of Mohammad Qayoumi’s memory is far from that of a “broken 13th century country,” as it was recently described by British Defense Secretary Liam Fox.

Qayoumi, now a university president in America, grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a period of calm and prosperity – and even optimism – before the Soviet invasion.

And thanks to a batch of vintage photos, Qayoumi has opened a window into that world with a photo essay recently published in Foreign Policy. The images depict a world that is slick, modern – even Western.

The photos show women in demure scarves, but also in pencil skirts and other fashions of the 1950s and ’60s. And just as striking is what some of the women are doing: buying records. Back then, Qayoumi tells NPR’s Deborah Amos, Afghans favored songs by Western pop singers like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Tom Jones.

More “Change” From President Obama

President Obama’s track record has been stunning in its all out embrace and expansion of the corrupt Foreign Policy of the past 8 dark years (and with it, the total rejection of what people voted for) —  a darkness Obama won’t let any sunlight near.

Here’s the latest from Obama:

The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.

With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA’s most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency’s chief apologist.

So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the “smartest man he had ever met.”

Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.

Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk,” in response to the president’s demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the “slam-dunk” briefing to the president in January 2003.

McLaughlin was the “villain” behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the illegal war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and then tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.

When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.

Continued…