09 December 19
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Founder, Reader Supported News
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09 December 19
Craig Whitlock | The Afghanistan Papers: At War With the Truth
Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post
Whitlock writes: "A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable."
Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post
Whitlock writes: "A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable."
EXCERPTS:
The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.
The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.
In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.
With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,”Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”
Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.
“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”
House Judiciary Committee. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Partisan Fireworks as House Panel Readies Trump Impeachment
Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The House Judiciary Committee received a detailed summing up of the impeachment case against President Donald Trump Monday as Democrats prepare formal charges against him. Trump and his allies lobbed fresh assaults on the proceedings they dismiss as a hoax and a sham."
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Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The House Judiciary Committee received a detailed summing up of the impeachment case against President Donald Trump Monday as Democrats prepare formal charges against him. Trump and his allies lobbed fresh assaults on the proceedings they dismiss as a hoax and a sham."
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Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren speaks during an interview with The Associated Press on Sunday in Charleston, South Carolina. (photo: Sarah Blake Morgan/AP)
Warren Says All-Women Democratic Presidential Ticket Can Beat Trump, Points to Harris
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes: "Elizabeth Warren believes an all-women Democratic presidential ticket can beat Donald Trump next year."
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Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes: "Elizabeth Warren believes an all-women Democratic presidential ticket can beat Donald Trump next year."
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Abortion rights rally. (photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
SCOTUS Leaves Kentucky's Anti-Abortion Ultrasound Law in Place
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes: "In early pregnancies, they will be forced to insert a transvaginal probe. The Supreme Court's refusal to consider the legality of H.B. 2 indicates the liberal justices do not trust that the conservative majority will affirm the constitutional rights to abortion providers and patients."
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Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes: "In early pregnancies, they will be forced to insert a transvaginal probe. The Supreme Court's refusal to consider the legality of H.B. 2 indicates the liberal justices do not trust that the conservative majority will affirm the constitutional rights to abortion providers and patients."
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Buckingham Correctional Center. (photo: VICE)
Prison Officials Made an 8-Year-Old Girl Get Strip-Searched Before Visiting Her Dad
Emma Ockerman, VICE
Ockerman writes: "Prison staffers in Virginia made an 8-year-old girl strip naked to search her before she could visit her father ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. And they didn't find any contraband on her."
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Emma Ockerman, VICE
Ockerman writes: "Prison staffers in Virginia made an 8-year-old girl strip naked to search her before she could visit her father ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. And they didn't find any contraband on her."
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WADA Director, Intelligence and Investigations, Gunter Younger, President-Elect, Witold Banka, WADA resident, Sir Craig Reedie, Director General, Olivier Niggli and Chair of the CRC, Jonathan Taylor QC attend a news conference after World Anti-Doping Agency's extraordinary Executive Committee meeting that has banned Russian athletes from all major sporting events in the next four years, in Lausanne, Switzerland, December 9, 2019. (photo: Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
Russia Banned From Next Two Olympics, Soccer World Cup for Cheating Over Dope Tests
Brian Homewood and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, Reuters
Excerpt: "Russia was banned from the world's top sporting events for four years on Monday, including the next summer and winter Olympics and the 2022 soccer World Cup, for tampering with doping tests."
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Brian Homewood and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, Reuters
Excerpt: "Russia was banned from the world's top sporting events for four years on Monday, including the next summer and winter Olympics and the 2022 soccer World Cup, for tampering with doping tests."
READ MORE
Sections of steel pipe lie in a staging area before being inserted underground as part of Energy Transfer's Mariner East 2 pipeline in Exton, Penn., on June 5, 2019. (photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
Pipeline Giant Energy Transfer and Its Private Security Contractors Face Bribery Charges in Pennsylvania
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "Security personnel working for Energy Transfer, one of the largest and most controversial oil and gas pipeline companies in the U.S., have been charged with bribery and criminal conspiracy for allegedly recruiting, hiring, and hiding payments to Pennsylvania state constables."
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "Security personnel working for Energy Transfer, one of the largest and most controversial oil and gas pipeline companies in the U.S., have been charged with bribery and criminal conspiracy for allegedly recruiting, hiring, and hiding payments to Pennsylvania state constables."
EXCERPT:
According to a complaint filed December 3 by Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan, Energy Transfer illegally hired 19 constables to guard the Mariner East 2 natural gas pipeline, which has faced opposition from residents over the project’s ecological impact, explosion risks, and violations of their property rights. The constables were encouraged to wear their uniforms and badges and carry their guns, in what Hogan described as an intimidation tactic.
While it is not uncommon for companies to hire uniformed off-duty police officers to provide security services, in Pennsylvania, constables are elected officials barred from private security work. Furthermore, they are required to report outside income of more than $1,300. None of the seven who met that threshold did, according to the complaint. And in what appeared to be an attempt to hide the illegal activity, Energy Transfer paid the constables via a series of subcontractors, in many instances using handwritten checks that were not claimed for tax purposes.
Hogan charged an Energy Transfer security manager, two contractors for the security firm TigerSwan, and two former state troopers for involvement in what his office called a “buy-a-badge scheme.”
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