In fact, from the early days of the Iraq war to the present battles in Afghanistan, war reports have whitewashed and manipulated the truth in order to better serve official US propaganda. Looking farther back, to the Vietnam war, we see reports, similar to these, that emphasized casualty figures--an emphasis that was intentional, high-level, and led to mass murder in Vietnam.

From the Wall Street Journal article by Noah Schactman:

Echo company got into a gunfight last Aug. 25 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. You'll learn that by reading the report found in WikiLeaks's database of Afghan war documents released on Sunday night. You'll learn that, after a chase, the Marines killed one insurgent. You'll learn that the insurgents supposedly fled and that the troops decided to stay the night in the area in case the militants returned.

What you won't learn is that a Marine sniper team sparked the shoot-out with a surprise assault on the insurgents; that every member of that team was nearly killed in the battle; or that the incident would kick off a three-day siege in which the Taliban nearly surrounded the Echo company squad. - Noah Schactman

Schactman is sharp enough to realize that what the reports leave out is critical for anyone assessing the war to know.

In a counterinsurgency, such metrics often matter least. A counterinsurgency is a contest for the loyalties of the people. Munitions expenditures and body counts are, at most, tangentially relevant. More important is insurgent motivation, the mood of the local shopkeeper, and the local farmer's ability to bring his crops to market.

Surprisingly, Schactman fails to note the established importance of numbers to wartime administrations. Examples include the following.

Like units throughout Vietnam, Charlie Company was encouraged to achieve a high "body count," the Pentagon-sanctioned measure of progress in the war. Officers up to the high echelons of the American Division were more interested in sending on favorable reports about their operations than in asking awkward questions about civilian deaths. - from The Vietnam War in American Memory by Patrick Hagopian (2009)

[C]over-up of the My Lai massacre began almost as soon as the killing ended. Official army reports of the operation proclaimed a great victory: 128 enemy dead, only one American casualty (one soldier intentionally shot himself in the foot). The army knew better. Hugh Thompson had filed a complaint, alleging numerous war crimes involving murders of civilians. - Doug Linder

Not until 2008 would many details finally emerge in "A My Lai a Month (November 13, 2008), by journalist Nick Turse.

The investigation paints a disturbing picture of civilian slaughter on a scale that indeed dwarfs My Lai, and of a cover-up at the Army's highest levels. The killings were no accident or aberration. They were instead the result of command policies that turned wide swaths of the Mekong Delta into "free-fire zones" in a relentless effort to achieve a high body count. While the carnage in the Delta did not begin or end with Speedy Express, the operation provides a harsh new snapshot of the abject slaughter that typified US actions during the Vietnam War.

Newsweek latched onto the story In 1971, through the efforts of its Saigon bureau chief, Kevin Buckley, and its stringer, Alex Shrimkin.

In the end, Buckley and Shimkin's nearly 5,000-word investigation, including a compelling sidebar of eyewitness testimony from Vietnamese survivors, was nixed by Newsweek's top editors, who expressed concern that such a piece would constitute a "gratuitous" attack on the Nixon administration...A truncated, 1,800-word piece finally ran in June 1972, but many key facts, eyewitness interviews, even mention of Julian Ewell's name, were left on the cutting-room floor. In its eviscerated form, the article resulted in only a ripple of interest

A fuller picture would not emerge until decades later, thanks to a whistleblower's letter and the tenacious research of Nick Turse. By then, the US was involved in a new war with startling similarities to the old war.

So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

-Seymour Hersh

Will Amreicans again have to wait decades for the real facts to emerge? Or will Congress heed the red flags and order an immediate investigation before authorizing continuation of this war?

Well, we didn't have to wait long for an answer.

• Wikileaks,
• Afghanistan,
• war,
• whistleblower,
• Vietnam,
• body
• count,
• Noah
• Schactman,

And now for a musical interlude from The Zombies, "Is this the dream?" ("You really shouldn't try, and I told you"):

• David-Brooks
• wankery
• tax-cuts
• Cat-Food-Commission
• The-Zombies

So I took notice when I came across this SIGACT among the nearly 92,000 Afghan war documents published yesterday. It’s a report of September 2007 from the remote province of Nuristan, along the Pakistan border. This region was the setting for Kipling’s “The man who would be king”. Here’s the part of the report that caught my attention:

There is a feud/civil conflict developing between 3 villages (Nanglam, Mashpah, and Malel) over pine nut foraging rights. 1 Afghan national has been killed, and 2 injured. Waliswol Muhammad Ali is attempting to mediate.

So how does anybody imagine that coalition forces can ever impose their will upon a population that is willing to fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

A simple question encompassing a world of problems for the US-led occupation. Afghans are desperately poor, their economy rudimentary, and their society rough hewn. They fight to defend their honor and minor slights can lead to feuds lasting generations. Even where ethnic and sectarian rivalries are absent, such as in Nuristan, social fractures between families and villages are the very stuff of the social fabric. I cannot conceive why any outsiders would suppose they could ever bend such people to their will.

Indeed Nuristan now is firmly back under Taliban rule. Americans increasingly came under brutal attack in the province, as a 2008 document singled out the by NY Times shows. Less than a year after this report, the US military suffered its worst casualties of the war in an attack at the village of Wanat. A little more than a year later, the US withdrew all its forces from the province after one base was nearly overrun.

For all the confusion of bad intelligence and chaos on the ground in Afghanistan, the evidence of these Wikileaks documents could hardly be clearer about one thing: Coalition forces are way out of their depth in trying to get a purchase on rural Afghan society.

• Afghanistan
• Nuristan
• Taliban
• New-Pentagon-Papers
• war-logs
• Sparta
• Arcadia
• Herodotus
• pine-nuts

But what it shares in common with the Pentagon Papers is this: It provides a devastating portrait of

• a disastrous guerilla war that the public had already turned decisively against
• military operations that both tactically and strategically are a mess beyond any reasonable hope of repair
• intelligence operations that are acquiring almost no accurate, much less actionable, information about anything
• American officials who appear to have no answers to the daily intractable problems they face in an increasingly unpopular occupation
• an Afghan population that has huge and legitimate grievances against heavy-handed US attacks
• an Afghan government that is corrupt, incompetent, and mistrusted in more ways than most of us could have imagined
• grossly untrustworthy Afghan army and police forces
• obscenely fraught relations with our untrustworthy “allies” in the region
• an enemy that is better armed and more adaptable and successful than the public has been told
• the history of a war that went to pieces far earlier than the US government had told the public
• specific details about military operations that contradict what the US public had been told in the past

In short, just as with the Pentagon Papers, it is nearly impossible to read through the current dossier and conclude that this occupation is winnable; that the US military ever has had a coherent plan; that the government that American lives are being sacrificed for is solid, trustworthy, or has integrity; that our forces really know what is going on in the country they’re bogged down in; or that the US government has been honest about what we face there.

So the publication of these documents could prove to be a turning point in US involvement in Afghanistan. The Pentagon Papers proved to Americans, even to people who hadn’t been paying close attention to policy debates about the Vietnam War, that they’d been deceived for years by their own government’s grossly misleading public assessments of the situation there. The publication of these New Pentagon Papers ought to produce the same result.

The difference between 2010 and 1971, however, is that in an earlier day Americans in large numbers were prepared to sit down and read and discuss the secret documents. Today, I’m not so sure they’ll even bother. After all, virtually none of these documents fall below the 140-character threshold that appears to constitute the limit to attention spans in the US these days.

In addition, almost the entire Republican caucus in Washington is devoted to the idea that the single policy of Barack Obama’s that they can support is his decision (twice) to escalate the war in Afghanistan. It’s hard to imagine the opposition party allowing these unwelcome new facts to influence in any way their proud advocacy for an open-ended war on the Asian continent. I rather doubt that many in Congress from the President’s own party will want to embarrass him about the depressing picture these documents portray.

Obama himself, the last time he doubled the troops in Afghanistan (in December 2009), emphatically denied that Afghanistan was like Vietnam.

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we're better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history.

His administration certainly won’t be eager now to discuss whether Afghanistan is a quagmire. Even less will it want to allow public debate to be dominated by the apparent parallelism in the leaking of embarrassing documents that undercut the rationale for war. Not surprisingly, as soon as the world press reported on this dossier the White House released a statement denouncing the act of journalism as such rather than addressing the many concerns that readers of these documents would legitimately have.

I note in passing that on the main page of the White House website, under the heading ‘Issues’ you will find neither ‘Afghanistan’ nor ‘War’ (though ‘Rural’ and ‘Family’ both are somehow considered significant ‘Issues’).

So I guess we shall see whether the publication of the New Pentagon Papers has the effect that by rights it should have upon the course of this failed occupation.

In closing, I’d note the thing that struck me (as an historian) most forcefully about this trove of documents. I’ve already alluded to it. Nearly all the human intelligence gathered in the region by the US and evidently a good deal of the signal intelligence is highly fictionalized and therefore worthless - except as a reflection upon how grave our forces’ problems are there. Informants have many reasons to make things up, they’ve figured out what they can sell to us (some of this preposterous information is actually paid for), and US forces don’t have much reliable information to apply in testing the credibility of its sources. The task for Americans in Afghanistan is very much like trying to track a criminal suspect through a carnival hall of mirrors; something is going on, but who can say for sure what, where, when. This report from the Guardian is the best I’ve seen at highlighting that aspect of the documentary record:

Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred.

A retired senior American officer said ground-level reports were considered to be a mixture of "rumours, bullshit and second-hand information" and were weeded out as they passed up the chain of command. "As someone who had to sift through thousands of these reports, I can say that the chances of finding any real information are pretty slim," said the officer, who has years of experience in the region.

If anything, the jumble of allegations highlights the perils of collecting accurate intelligence in a complex arena where all sides have an interest in distorting the truth.

"The fog of war is particularly dense in Afghanistan," said Michael Semple, a former deputy head of the EU mission there. "A barrage of false information is being passed off as intelligence and anyone who wants to operate there needs to be able to sift through it. The opportunities to be misled are innumerable."

[…]

Afghanistan has a long history of intelligence intrigues that stretches back to the early 19th century. Afghans have learned to use intelligence as a tool to influence the foreign powers occupying their land. In the past quarter century it has become a lucrative source of income in a country with few employment opportunities.

As many on-the-ground truths as can be found by digging through the New Pentagon Papers, there are at least an equal number of on-the-ground fabrications, falsifications, and frauds. Lies can be as revealing as truths, but only if you’re willing to look the lies square in the face.

• Afghanistan
• Pentagon-Papers
• Vietnam
• Barack-Obama
• War-Logs
• Lady-from-Shanghai

Almost incredibly, it appears that the Obama White House and much of the conventional media figured this obvious truth out only within the last day or so, after falling for yet another transparent fraud committed by the notorious huckster Andrew Breitbart. I would have thought that the last 19 years furnished ample evidence that right-wing media has little more than contempt for mamsy-pamsy standards of truthfulness and integrity – ever since it produced and flogged around a grossly misleading public opinion poll in order to boost the nomination of Clarence Thomas after he’d been accused of sexual harassment.

A case study

There shouldn’t be any doubt that right-wing media ‘scandals’ should be greeted with extreme skepticism, and yet the naïve continue to stumble along without ever taking a good hard look at how these frauds are perpetrated. So here is an example, chosen almost at random from the many daily ‘scandals’ flogged by right-wing blogs. Like so many other ‘scandals’ promoted by conservatives since 2008, this piece is transparently race-baiting. It has also been reproduced and quoted widely and uncritically. But above all, it’s marked by preposterously misleading assertions. The post is predicated entirely on the assumption that readers will not check the source material and discover its deceptions.

The author, William Tate, argues that the “Obama administration…faces a new [racial] bias claim” from the TARP Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky. Tate would have us believe that Barofsky charges Obama with ensuring that GM and Chrysler dealerships were slated for closure based upon the race/gender of their owners.

Wonder of wonders, Tate is being deceptive. What follows are three obvious ways in which Tate has tried to mislead.

(i) Tate’s main evidence is a quotation that he rips out of context from the TARP SIG report (PDF). Here is how the quotation is rendered by Tate:

[D]ealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships. [Emphasis added.]

He reproduces this one sentence without providing anything like adequate context. Quite the contrary, by careful choice of his words, Tate implies (a) that this was the method by which all closure decisions were made for both GM and Chrysler, and (b) that the Obama administration “forced” this method on them. Neither thing is true.

In fact, the quotation relates only to GM, which devised its own method without much oversight from the Obama administration (Barofsky’s report suggests there should have been more governmental involvement, not less). Furthermore, the quotation relates to a secondary, not the primary (much less the sole) method for selecting GM dealerships for closure. The primary method was based purely on two objective criteria for how well dealerships were performing. Those that met both criteria were slated for closure. Then some 1252 marginal dealerships, those that met one but not both criteria for closure, were reviewed in more detail and 364 of them were given reprieves on several bases. The main basis for these reprieves, the report says explicitly, was to save rural dealerships. The quotation reproduced by Tate refers only to the remaining marginal reprieves, where a GM dealership was retained even though it wasn’t rural.

In other words, Tate selectively quotes a single sentence from a complex discussion in order to whip up racial resentments by falsely suggesting that racial preferences factored in all the decisions to close GM and Chrysler dealerships, putting thousands of workers out of jobs.

The truth is far less explosive: At most, a small number of marginal GM dealerships were given reprieves because of racial/gender preferences.

Here is the full paragraph that Tate carefully edited:

GM officials attributed these inconsistencies [in granting reprieves to some but not all of the marginal dealerships] primarily to a desire to maintain coverage in certain rural areas where they have a competitive advantage over import auto companies that are not typically located in rural areas, although ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas. Other dealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships.

For what it’s worth, later in the TARP SIG report there may be hints that those relatively few gender/racial preferences were based on corporate legal advice, perhaps due (?) to past accusations of GM-wide bias. In any event, it’s clear that Tate’s goal is to stoke racial animosities by misrepresenting what the Inspector General says. Here is Tate’s take-away from his selective quotation:

Thus, to meet numbers forced on them by the Obama administration, General Motors and Chrysler were forced to shutter other, potentially more viable, dealerships. The livelihood of potentially tens of thousands of families was thus eliminated simply because their dealerships were not minority- or woman-owned.

A series of bald assertions that simply are not true. Tate must know that they’re false, for why else would he omit the word “Other…” at the start of his quotation? He’s counting heavily on his readers’ gullibility.

(ii) Tate then proceeds to argue that “a reading of the IG's study makes plain that some dealership closings forced by the administration were based largely on politics”. He means that Obama wanted payback against Republican (rural) areas of the country he didn’t win in 2008.

Tate’s evidence? The fact that Barofsky states “ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas.”

That is where raw, hard, sewage-filled Chicago politics came into play.

That’s it, Tate has nothing beyond a factoid about rural GM closures. Tate does not of course quote the full sentence nor supply the context, as I do above. Had he done so, it would have become immediately apparent to his readers that GM sought to lessen rural closures; that all closed dealerships were selected by an objective standard for poor performance; and that the standard was created by GM, not the White House.

The Barofsky report states explicitly that “SIGTARP found that [Obama’s] Auto Team was not involved in determining which dealerships to terminate.”

So not only is there not a shred of evidence that the Obama administration manipulated the closure process based on politics, the report indicates as clearly as possible that Tate’s central point is false.

(iii) Toward the end of his post, Tate puts in blockquotes three passages that he introduces as “details contained in the Barofsky report” and “essential underlying facts” in the report that the Treasury Dept. has not disputed. The first passage is the selective quotation discussed in part (i). Thus Tate implies that all these passages come from the Barofsky report. In the post as a whole, otherwise, Tate uses blockquotes only for quotations from the SIGTARP report.

But the second and third passages are in fact not quotations but Tate’s own hyperbole, each with only a short phrase snipped from the report. You’d have to be reading carefully, however, to figure out that these blockquotes are not marking actual quotations. Nor is Tate’s hyperbole here an accurate summary of the contents of the Barofsky report. The third passage in particular is egregiously misleading:

A disproportionate number of Obama-forced closings were of rural dealerships, in areas unfriendly to Obama, even though such closures could "jeopardize the return to profitability" for GM and Chrysler.

The latter part (about returning to profitability) is not an undisputed viewpoint, nor should Tate imply that it is one held by the Inspector General. It’s an opinion voiced by a representative from the Center for Automotive Research who was asked to critique the thinking of the Auto Team. Indeed that person describes any such jeopardy as “the worst case” scenario. Furthermore, there’s nothing in the SIGTARP report to prove that “a disproportionate number of…closings were of rural dealerships”. We aren’t given the proportions of rural and non-rural closings. And of course the report does not talk about political considerations in rural closures because it found no political involvement in the decisions.

From beginning to end, this flimsy piece is worse than a fiasco. It's not predicated on a misreading of the report, or mere sloppiness. It is deliberately and carefully disingenuous. It selects a few stray bits of authentic material and presents them in a package of analysis of such gross dishonesty as to transform these tatters into what appears, on first glance, to be a coherent tapestry of 'scandal'. The image collapses at the lightest touch, however, leaving behind only its filthy shreds.

The same is true of nearly all right-wing media 'scandals'.

Update: Here's a classic right-wing response to Tate's dishonest piece. Unlike nearly all conservative commentators, who simply swallowed Tate's lies whole, Ed Morrissey acknowledges the plain fact that the Obama administration had nothing to do with selecting the dealerships to close. None the less, Morrissey flails around trying to save Tate's false allegation (his title: "TARP audit on dealer shutdowns: Ethnic, gender issues trumped economics") by the most convoluted and bizarre argument imaginable. Among other things, it involves citing Tate for a "fact" that his own flimsy argument hinges on - the false assertion that "Barofsky actually found that closing dealerships wouldn’t save the automakers all that much money". (Barofsky said everybody agreed dealerships needed to be closed, but there were legitimate differences of opinion about the speed/timing of closures and the main benefits from them.)

In the end, Morrissey just flat out drops the question of "ethnic, gender issues". What's more, Morrissey then doesn't even come close to providing evidence to support his too clever reframing of Tate's racial argument - "why politics trumped business concerns" in the closure decisions. Instead, Morrissey just shifts the discussion to a different issue altogether by quoting another right-wing nut. Like Tate, Morrissey anticipates that the reader will swallow the hyperbolic allegations without noticing that they're unsupported. To judge by his commenters, that's exactly the reaction he gets. His post is a subtler version of Tate's manipulation, but no less deceptive.

• American-Thinker
• William-Tate
• SIGTARP
• GM
• Chrysler
• Neil-Barofsky

With this public relations catastrophe, it’s now much less likely that Petraeus will be able to convert his apparent presidential ambitions into reality. For one thing, it raises further concerns about Petraeus’ physical fitness. Anyhow it’s simply not presidential to faint when you’re being asked difficult questions about your job performance, especially for a general. And, yes, Petraeus is painfully aware that his failure to stem the tide in Afghanistan is going to be a huge obstacle in his further ambitions.

I’ve never bought the hype about Petraeus’ supposed military genius and capabilities.

General Petraeus had built up the local police by recruiting officers who had previously worked for Saddam Hussein's security apparatus.

Although Mosul remained quiet for some months after, the US suffered one of its worse setbacks of the war in November 2004 when insurgents captured most of the city. The 7,000 police recruited by General Petraeus either changed sides or went home. Thirty police stations were captured, 11,000 assault rifles were lost and $41m (£20m) worth of military equipment disappeared. Iraqi army units abandoned their bases.

The general's next job was to oversee the training of a new Iraqi army. As head of the Multinational Security Transition Command, General Petraeus claimed that his efforts were proving successful. In an article in The Washington Post in September 2004, he wrote: "Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being re-established." This optimism turned out be misleading; three years later the Iraqi army is notoriously ineffective and corrupt.

General Petraeus was in charge of the Security Transition Command at the time that the Iraqi procurement budget of $1.2bn was stolen. "It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Iraq's Finance Minister, Ali Allawi, said. "Huge amounts of money disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."

In any case Gen. Petraeus’ regular interference in domestic politics, such as his infamous op-ed published late in the 2004 presidential campaign, and even more his intrusion into the political debates regarding proposed surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been dangerous for our democracy. The Founders of our Republic were rightly worried that military officers’ ambitions would destabilize the nation. Petraeus has not only pushed his ambitions to an extreme not seen perhaps since Douglas MacArthur, he has even gone so far as to provide misleading testimony to Congress to further those ambitions. In his September 2007 testimony on the surge in Iraq, Petraeus used falsified maps that seemed designed specifically to obscure the extent of ethno-sectarian cleansing that had gone on in Bagdad while he was in command. Petraeus has never alerted Congress to that falsification much less publicly corrected his testimony.

I don’t trust the man, and I’ll be happy to see any presidential ambitions go quietly into the night.

• David-Petraeus
• Afghanistan

Risen presents the information as if he had a major scoop.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

In fact, however, the survey was conducted between 2004 and 2007. Risen claims that it’s results were ignored until recently, when the Pentagon “came upon” the geological survey data while looking for ways to boost the country’s economy.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

Utter nonsense. In 2007 the Afghan government touted the survey to the world. In the time since then, it has been working to attract international developers for its copper and iron reserves – which appear to be the most valuable and accessible ones. Already in 2007 a Chinese company won a competition to lease the largest copper mine, agreeing to pay the Afghan government $400 million per year in taxes.

It’s hard to conceive that in the foreseeable future Afghanistan will be able to derive more than a few billion dollars per year in taxes/mineral royalties by exploiting its reserves to the fullest possible extent. For comparison, the current Afghan GDP is thought to be around $16 billion. In 2007, the UNODC estimated that opium accounted for half of the country’s ‘licit’ GDP, or about $4 billion. So mining is not going to turn Afghanistan into a rich state much less eliminate the opium trade.

Risen and his sources are trying to sell us a pipe dream.

The fact that the USGS survey is being recycled now as "news" tells you everything you need to know about how grim the actual news coming out of Afghanistan has become this year. The Pentagon “heroes” of Risen’s story are selling this “news” to (a) buy time with the US public for military policies that are failing in the field, and (b) distract attention from the fact that America is doubling down on behalf of a corrupt, ineffective, and illegitimate Karzai government. If Afghanistan has vast mineral wealth, as we’re supposed to believe, then perhaps it makes slightly more sense (in a blood-for-copper kind of way) that the US now appears to be committed to staying there forever.

The genesis of this NYT article can be attributed to the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda machinery, as Marc Ambinder at least recognizes to his credit.

The way in which the story was presented -- with on-the-record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, no less -- and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.

That could hardly be clearer. The narrative as presented by Risen is bizarrely slanted in favor of the Pentagon, and furthermore is full of glaring holes. What’s more the outdated “news” is being recycled in a way that is highly reminiscent of the DoD’s standard operating procedures under the Bush administration, whenever it needed to distract attention.

What it shows is that the US government thinks we’re suckers. The reaction of commentators to Risen’s “blockbuster” suggests that the government has pretty much got it right.

crossposted at Inconvenient News

• James-Risen
• Pentagon
• domestic-propaganda
• Afghanistan

And I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault. Instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen. I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I’ve met a lot of these miners and their families. They’re very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.

As a simple matter of fact, it always is someone’s fault when mining disasters occur. Mines are artificial. When they become deadly, it must be due to human agency. Nearly all deadly mining accidents in recent times are due ultimately to poor adherence to mining regulations, precisely because it costs money to uphold safety standards. No mining deaths are acceptable or excusable. Finding where fault lies in a mine disaster is exactly what the government should be doing, not looking the other way fatalistically.

Many commenters today have focused on Paul’s bizarre defense of BP, while nearly ignoring his even more shocking statement excusing the killing of coal miners. As environmentalists have warned for years, oil spills are a nearly inevitable part of offshore drilling (however badly BP screwed up in this case). It is not inevitable however that coal miners must die – at least not unless profits are put before safety. The notion that it’s a normal cost of business for a certain number of miners to die comes directly from the coal barons themselves. Even more than Paul has drunk deep from the oil companies’ wells, he has most shockingly imbibed the full ideology of the most ruthless coal corporations.

In his ABC comments Paul was trying to exculpate Massey Energy over the horrific disaster recently in one of its West Virginia mines, which took 29 lives. It was caused by methane gas buildup. Methane levels are strictly controlled for a reason. Had Massey wanted to spend the money, it could in fact have prevented any such buildup. The non-unionized Massey has long been notorious for its poor safety record. A single one of its mines in Pike County, Kentucky has been cited by MSHA for more than 3000 violations since 2005. This even though it appears from the immediate aftermath of the West Virginia disaster that inspections of Massey mines have been quite lax (MSHA suddenly began to find all manner of Massey violations that it had overlooked heretofore).

Rand Paul is simply indifferent or oblivious to the facts of the matter. Miners just gotta die because they do. That’s the privilege of the ideologue, to ignore the real world, actual history, and human suffering.

For Paul, an unfettered free market is a panacea for all of society’s problems…you know, the things created by government itself. Businesses can never be shown to be predatory or unscrupulous because that would tend to legitimize government regulation. Far better to let those miners perish, in the dark out of sight, than to rethink the purity of his ideology…not that it remains entirely pure whensoever the libertarian’s self-interest or personal preferences might be advanced through the agency of government. But hey consistency, hobgoblins and all that.

Speaking of consistency, political commentators in the corporate media have for more than a decade been insisting that the extremists on the right wing are mirrored by others on the left. That’s simply untrue. Specifically, there is no left-leaning equivalent of the fanatical Tea-baggers such as Rand Paul who would offer glib justifications for looking away when men are killed recklessly.

There used to be such leftists – all the way back in the 1930s, when some of Stalin’s apologists in America thought a few deaths here and there shouldn’t force them to rethink their rank ideology. But none of those clowns ever made their way into mainstream politics, most eventually smartened up and the rest long since faded into deserved obscurity.

By contrast, the unfettered-corporations-shall-be-our-saviours-but-taxes-are-the-spawn-of-satan kind of right-wingers have been very much with us without cease for more than a century. Their hold on the Republican Party is as strong as it has been for quite a while. There are plenty of these half-baked ideologues already serving in Congress, and now a truly pernicious version of this type has won the Republican Senatorial primary in Kentucky. There is no left-wing analog to the kind of craziness that has become mainstream within the Republican Party nationally, and there hasn’t been for decades.

Update: AP reporter Michele Salcedo interprets Rand Paul's comment on ABC as a reference to a smaller mine disaster at the Dotiki Mine in Kentucky, in which 2 miners died in a roof-collapse in April. Dotiki, operated by Webster Coal, has also been cited for safety violations many hundreds of times in recent months. Seventeen of those citations were for failing to secure the mine roof and walls adequately. And like Massey, the non-unionized Webster routinely contests many of the MSHA citations. The owner of Dotiki Mine, Alliance Resource Partners, has a miserable record of maintaining safety standards.

• Rand-Paul
• Massey-Energy
• coal-mining
• Tea-Party

Five acres of serene, forested land in Oklahoma have been donated for a memorial sanctuary where, at no cost to owners, every pet that has fallen ill or died due to dangerous pet food will be remembered with a personalized memorial stone. The sanctuary, named "Vindication," is located at Keystone Lake in Oklahoma and is expected to open this June. The donor hopes that Vindication will comfort grieving owners.

They all mattered to someone,
They all matter in Vindication.
Vindication will Never Forget Them; Nor why They Died.

TruthAboutPetFood.com

Plants, benches and memorial stones, will line pathways winding through wooded acres - all a gift to you from an anonymous donor, a family of modest means who lost six pets to melamine-contaminated pet food and decided that "enough is enough."

Susan Thixton, at TruthAboutPetFood.com, who also knows the pain of losing a pet to dangerous food, is leading the effort to spread word to every owner of a pet sickened by petfood. Considering that many thousands of pets may have died from the melamine incident alone, this is a daunting goal. Your help, gentle readers, will be critical to success.

What you can do

1. Go to TruthAboutPetFood.com and read more about Vindication.

2. Register the names of pets you may have owned that were sickened or killed by pet food.

3. Pass along word of Vindication to other pet owners.

Cross-post this diary (in its entirety if you wish) to other websites. You have my permission in advance. Tweet and email the news to others and post it on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Print out the flyer posted at TruthAboutPetFood and post it wherever pet owners gather in your community--animal hospitals, groomers, doggy daycares, dog parks and pet supply stores--as well as general gathering spots, like coffee shops and dry cleaners. Fax or email the Vindication press release to media outlets, particularly those in your hometown, and bloggers. (Don't forget freebies like City Paper.)

Check back at TruthAboutPetFood.com/Vindication for updates. A donation page should be available there, soon, to accept voluntary contributions toward the perpetual maintenance of Vindication.

Never forget

What happened to pets in 2007--and continues to happen--is a national disgrace. Both food manufacturers and government officials betrayed hundreds of thousands of beloved family members for company profits. Then, after witnessing a flood of illnesses and deaths, manufacturers failed to destroy the contaminated food. Instead, they sold recalled pet food to farmers to feed to livestock meant for human consumption and continued to mislead consumers about the threat from melamine. For more on that, see my series of diaries exposing the deceptions.

Sadly, those responsible for this deadly debacle received only a slap on the wrist - a modest fine and probation. But, that need not be the end of the story.

Vindication is ours. As you read this Vindication is being sculpted by the donors into flowering gardens with handmade stones lining the cascading pathways. Careful selections of flowers are being chosen; flowers will bloom both day and night. At the very front of our land will be 16 handmade stones circled into the pathway beginning. These 16 stones signify the 16 “official” pets that died at Menu Foods testing laboratory long before the deadliest recall in world history was announced.

From the Remembered 16 Circle will be pathways that cascade over our land. Each stone lining each pathway will be handmade and personalized with the name of a pet killed or sickened by pet food. Each innocent victim will be remembered. Thousands of pets – each with their own personalized pathway stone will be honored here.

TruthAboutPetFood.com

In closing

Of the many diaries I have written, none has given me more satisfaction than this one. The creation of Vindication, possibly the first memorial related to food safety, is a deeply touching and generous act; a loving hug to grieving pet owners. It is also an important message in the making that will put food manufacturers and regulators on notice that wrongdoing will not be forgotten.

Vindication logo

Photo Credits
Kitten: CarbonNYC at Flickr.com
Dog: SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent) at Flickr.com

Cross-posted from Daily Kos

• pets,
• food,
• Vindication,
• memorial,
• sanctuary,
• food
• safety,
• melamine

Curious in any case that Limbaugh promises to head to Costa Rica, which has a very successful socialized health care system. The country has benefited recently from a boom in health care tourism, especially with regard to US citizens because of the high cost of private health care in America.

With traditional tourism hit hard by the global recession, Costa Rica is seeking to draw foreign visitors by offering low-cost, high-quality health care – especially targeting people from the United States, where the same medical procedures can cost up to four times more.

Health tourism is growing around the world due to the high costs of private medical services in industrialised countries, which have prompted many to look to developing countries in search of good quality, inexpensive care.

[...]

Foreign patients generally pay 30 to 60 percent less than what they would pay back home.

• health-care-reform
• Rush-Limbaugh
• Costa-Rica
• socialized-medicine
• hypocrisy