The Surge Worked! Just ask Obama! It was a resounding success or something like that, said then-Candidate Obama. Suicide bombings have been on the rise in Iraq, but The Surge was a success, we won and we're going home kind of but not really. It was such a success that Obama is going to have his own Afghan Surge. Winners succeed. Then we can kind of leave but not really leave Afghanistan as Winners, just like the US is starting to kind of leave but not leave Iraq as Winners. As long as we can build and maintain the Green Zone Vatican and the shiny new Base they are building in Afghanistan then it's Mission Accomplished! Hopefully before 2012 so the Democrats have an easier time peddling their antiwar snake oil.

The footage in this Part 4 video of Rethink Afghanistan is “poignant, heart-wrenching, and often a direct result of U.S. foreign policy.” (see sig)

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/?utm_source=rgemail#video

don't keep stuffing torture details in my face.

Sorry, I mean no offense, I just think you could more usefully contribute to the fact finding by helping dig up British complicity, about which too little is known right now, than by waving a reproving finger across the pond.

The Three Wanketeers strike again.

Consortiumnews.com, By David Swanson, June 30, 2009 (see sig)

We've heard of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, and maybe even Jay Bybee. Some of us recall John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey and even David Addington. Michael Haynes, Stephen Bradbury, and Douglas Feith occasionally make the news.

If I had any say about it all 40 of these facilitators of torture would be universally known -- plus the eight more that readers of this article will call to my attention and angrily accuse me of trying to cover for by only being aware of 40.

I would also make universally known the fact that two of the worst now work for President Barack Obama.

You probably know that the Justice Department under Bush-Cheney produced memos pretending to legalize torture, gruesome memos stipulating exactly how many times a particular victim could "legally" be tortured with a particular technique.

John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote the worst of these memos. But the memos take the form of responses to inquiries from a guy named John Rizzo. Yes, Mr. Rizzo, you may slam that guy against a wall. No, Mr. Rizzo, you may not drown that one unless you have a doctor present. And so on.

The memos are all headlined thus: "MEMORANDUM FOR JOHN A. RIZZO."

So, Yoo and Bybee didn't invent the torture techniques out of their own sadistic imaginations. They replied to Rizzo's requests for "legal" permission to use detailed techniques.

What if those requests from Rizzo had been turned into news headlines, rather than the Justice Department's responses? Would activists then be focused on demanding Rizzo's, rather than Yoo's, removal from one of our prestigious institutions of higher learning?

That's actually a very easy question to definitively answer, and the answer is no. Rizzo doesn't work in academia: he is still, until he retires this summer the top lawyer at the CIA.

[...]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/063009a.html

Ran across this from Human Rights Watch :http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11610/section/3

( from a link from RMP?) Old news, but worth reading, if for no other reason than gives lie to the 3-prisoners--a-little-waterboarding meme. That's just one account, at one camp in Iraq (full story at sig) . Extrapolate(possibly) through Iraq and Afghanistan , over a longer period, and the glaring question is " How many do we not konw about?"

One quote from an officer, concrned about detainee treatment : "...They burned them.The exact quote was, "They (the soldiers at Abu Ghraib) were getting in trouble for the same things we were told to do, so we destroyed the pictures."

While American interrogators have said that al Qaeda and various resistance efforts in the region used the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse images as recruiting posters for the resistance, it's always seemed a little odd to me that torture and abuse by Americans would inspire this kind of response whereas torture and abuse by -- say -- the Saudi and Jordanian authorities (among many others) doesn't seem to give rise to significant armed resistance.

That's an excellent observation. What it reveals is sometimes uncomfortable for progressives to acknowledge, which is that America really does have a reputation to uphold. There's more riding on how we conduct our affairs than we sometimes like to admit — not just American interest but to some extent the underpinnings of the modern world, and when we fall into that downward spiral we put much more at risk than does some local tyrant.

Of course American action abroad is rarely if ever just unicorns and rainbows. But what's extraordinary is that despite the very fact of American bad action in the past — wartime atrocities, economic sabotage, assassination, or what have you — there has still always been this sense that the Americans set an example.

One reason why it's hard to appreciate this fact from within the US is that most of us don't really have so much of a sense of our own power. Everyone else in the world is acutely aware of our military — one of our fleets has more sheer firepower than most of the armed force of the rest of the world combined, and we have a half a dozen of them. And yet we mostly just sail around, chasing pirates or what have you.

(A sinologist friend recently observed somewhat bitterly that if the Chinese had that kind of firepower they certainly wouldn't be wasting it on endless good deeds, at least without also shoring up their hegemony in some way — I tried to argue that that's exactly why we got the hegemony in the first place, and they didn't.)

There's also American economic power. Even in a recession, with a massive imbalance of trade, we're still feeding rice to East Asia. And we produce more oil than almost any country on earth, even if we guzzle it all ourselves. For countries like Japan or Russia or China, that's extremely intimidating — and yet, once again, what we mostly seem to want to do with all our wealth is have a good time.

Kissinger and his neoconservative heirs don't like that. They feel like we should be following the "crazy person with a big stick" model of global power. That idea seems to make people in the world uneasy, and I imagine a lot of the speed of America's decline in world estimation under Bush had a lot to do with the fact that on some level many people had probably been wondering when and if exactly such a day would ever come.

But for the most part we seem to naturally tend toward being a bemused, uninvolved, forgetful gorilla who can't be bothered to care why you all have been fighting for 1000 years, and just wishes you'd knock it off.

The benefits of this approach are subtle, and don't do much for the personal insecurities of people with tiny gonads and ugly ideas. But they do exist. The Americans showing up really did mostly used to mean that the beatings would stop, the sectarian killings would subside, the government assassinations would be discreetly postponed — at least for as long as our attention span lasted.

Or take the State Department's annual report on human rights. It would hardly be fair to say that the publication is now a laughingstock, but the project's reputation has taken a huge hit as the result of our own recent massively increased tolerance for bad behavior.

None of this is to say that the US is some kind of perfectly benevolent, perfectly deserving world policeman. Far from it. In fact, if anything it all probably just goes to show how low the bar really is to achieve goodwill. The combination of wealth, peaceful isolation, and armed strength coupled with not being a bunch of total assholes all the time apparently goes a long way.

Put it this way: people everywhere look at us and think, if the Americans have all this weight to throw around, and yet they act with some semblance of restraint and commitment to their principles, then maybe there is something to restraint and principles after all.

Yeah, I'm sure part of it in the Middle East is the old, "me against my cousin, but everyone against the foreigner" thing at work. But there really is a living ideal — or call it a myth if you prefer — that animates many people's feelings about the US.

I think People are more attached to that than even they think. Consider the extent to which most of the world was truly, deeply stunned by the World Trade Center attacks.

It was a couple of office towers and a few thousand people. The Israelis did as much damage with our own jet-fuel high explosives 20 years earlier in Lebanon. We caused more collateral destruction in a lazy week of imprecise bombing during the Gulf War.

It was, in other words, in purely technical terms a yawner of an attack. Yet something about it made hard-hearted, ostensibly America-hating adults all over the world weep with despair. Something there goes deep, something we have spent an enormous amount over a long period of time to bring into being. And I think on some level when we break it, that's what people are reacting to.

The American republic as we have known it may yet completely implode, in which case we will find out how much misery the pax Americana was actually preventing. In that case I sincerely hope to be proven wrong about all of this.