The Arghandab River Valley

US Army Captain Paul W. Pena died in the Arghandab River Valley January 19, 2010. He was 27 years old.

As a skinny teenager in the Junior ROTC program at San Marcos Baptist Academy in San Marcos, Texas, he worked quietly behind the scenes, ensuring that the unit's annual inspection and other events went smoothly.

He rose to the rank of cadet major and graduated from the academy fifth in his class in 2000, said school spokeswoman Shelley Henry. Then he attended the military academy at West Point, graduating in 2004.

A teacher at the San Marcos academy, Max Smith, recalled Pena as a diligent, well-behaved boy. "He always came back here and let you know he was OK and that he appreciated all you'd done for him."

Every week I read through the WashPo's brief obituaries of US soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and try to understand something about the particular neighborhood of that God-forsaken country where each of them perished. But there isn't much information online about the Arghandab River Valley.

The entry in Wikipedia repeats an article from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica verbatim.

There is a good deal of cultivation along the river, but few villages. The high road from Kabul to Kandahar passes this way (another reason for supposing the Tarnak to be Arachotus), and the people live off the road to avoid the onerous duties of hospitality.

People lived off the road to avoid the onerous duties of hospitality in 1911. And now they host the US Army!

Captain Pena represents the nobility of military service. The idiocy of it is represented by U.S. Lt.-Col. John Newman, who arrived in Arghandab River Valley in August 2009

U.S. Lt.-Col. John Newman was assigned to directly command the Arghandab troops. He began speaking slowly, carefully, his translator jumping in with words in Dari. There was consternation and shuffling among the elders. Then a whispered conference with Newman.

The translation should have been in Pashto, the local language, not Dari, also known as Eastern Persian, which is commonly spoken in central and northern Afghanistan.

It was just a mistake, you might say, but it was also a mistake that Lt.-Col. John Newman and his "translator" could not have made if they had ever spoken to anybody who lives in the Arghandab River Valley, before Lt.-Col. John Newman began yammering at the local elders.

"My way!" says Barack Obama.

"No, my way!" says Kim Jong-il.

But just before the US bombs North Korea, and North Korea obliterates Seoul...

"Don't get your panties in a knot, you bad, bad boys!" says UN Secretary-General Elton John, and peace is restored.

It could happen!

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling "My Way" in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the "My Way Killings."

What to do?

A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.'s -- short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes -- often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women's attention -- or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank -- they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons.

So instead of repealing "Don't ask, don't tell" to integrate more gays into the military (as if what the world really needs is a lot more soldiers), maybe it's time to form a peace brigade of flaming gays to "forestall macho face-offs" among the testosterone-intoxicated loonies who rule the world.

Fabulous are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God!

From the Guardian...

The American-born son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor has been ordered to pay more than £14m in compensation to five people tortured during the West African country's civil war.

A judge in the US made the order a year after the same Miami court sentenced Charles McArthur Emmanuel Taylor, known as Chuckie, to 97 years in prison for his role in one of Africa's bloodiest chapters; he was the first person to be convicted by a federal court of committing offences outside the US.

The 32-year-old led the notorious Anti-Terrorist Unit, a band of pro-government paramilitaries nicknamed the Demon Forces who carried out murder and torture during his father's presidency from 1997 to 2003.

Witnesses at his criminal trial in 2008 spoke of hearing him laugh as prisoners were abused and how the Anti-Terrorist Unit "did things like beating people to death, burying them alive, rape - the most horrible kind of war crimes".

A spokesman for United States immigration and customs enforcement said that it was a "clear message the US would not be a safe haven for human rights violators."

The US isn't a safe haven for war-criminals?

Bullshit!

Remember these fine words from Barack Obama?

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.

And Eric Holder...

It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.

The torture memos from Bybee and Yoo cover everybody else, and Bybee and Yoo aren't guilty either! It was just "bad judgement!"

Abracadabra!

Everybody walks! Nobody goes to jail!

So forget about the "clear message the US would not be a safe haven for human rights violators."

The real message for the torturers of tomorrow is...

Get some whore of a lawyer (like John Yoo) in your local DOJ to opine that whatever you do is legal, and then you can chop up your victims with no more fear of prosecution than if you were chopping onions.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has posted a very illustrative discussion of the current recession on their website, and for readers confused by the simultaneous decline in jobs and the official measure of unemployment, 20,000 fewer jobs while "unemployment" declined from 10% to 9.7%, one picture may be more informative than so many curiously defined statistics.

The shaded area in the graph shows the upper and lower bounds of all recessions after World War II. The purple line is the current recession.

And meanwhile in Sacramento, Reno, and Seattle...

From Paul Krugman's blog...

Health care reform -- which is crucial for millions of Americans -- hangs in the balance. Progressives are desperately in need of leadership; more specifically, House Democrats need to be told to pass the Senate bill, which isn't what they wanted but is vastly better than nothing. And what we get from the great progressive hope, the man who was offering hope and change, is this:

"I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don't, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill. Now I think there's some things in there that people don't like and legitimately don't like."

In short, "Run away, run away"!

And more from Krugman...

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That's the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It's appalling on every level.

It's bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment.

It's bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it's a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view -- and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, "I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy."

"Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view."

And that's the whole story of Obama's miserable Presidency.

From the Boston Herald...

GOP rock star Scott Brown's victory train rolled into Southie last night where the senator-elect hoisted a frosty beer with a local radio host to live up to one his first campaign promises.

"We made a bet and they said if they endorsed me and I won then we'd have to get together for a few beers," Brown, a Wrentham Republican, said at The Stadium in South Boston last night. "After it was over, they called and reminded me."

Brown, who drove himself to the pub in his now-legendary green GMC Canyon truck, turned the beer summit with WAAF [website]-FM (107.3) morning man Greg Hill into a charity event, raising $6,000 for Homes for Our Troops, a Taunton-based charity that builds handicapped-accessible houses for soldiers injured in combat.

Now "GOP rock star Scott Brown's victory train" is about to roll into Washington.

In a letter written by his legal counsel, Daniel B. Winslow, Brown said he wanted the results certified no later than 11 a.m. Thursday so that he can deliver a copy to the Secretary of the United States Senate in time to be administered the oath of office by Thursday afternoon.

Brown had initially planned to be sworn into office Feb. 11 but, Winslow wrote, "he has been advised that there are a number of votes scheduled prior to that date. For that reason, he wants certification to occur immediately."

Patrick is planning to certify the results tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., which would then allow Brown to travel to Washington for the swearing-in.

And unlike Barack Obama, a "lawyer" who never tried a case in court, filed a brief, or published any legal research except for one lonely little note, Scott Brown actually has a résumé...

Presently serving as the Army Guard's head defense attorney in New England, Brown defends Guard members who have disciplinary difficulties such as positive drug tests,[2] and provides estate planning and real estate advice to those who are about to deploy to war zones.[10]

If Republicans run "GOP Rock Star Scott Brown" for President in 2012...

Shut up!

Don't even think about it!

My rent-a-car quit on the road, and a tow-truck dropped me off in this oasis of motels and gas-pumps nowhere with nothing but a smart-phone and hope for a better tomorrow.

3:21 AM.

On TV the channel-guide cycles slowly through 100 channels.

Paid Programming Paid Programming Paid Programming
Paid Programming Paid Programming Paid Programming
Paid Programming Paid Programming Paid Programming

The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is choice, the free market, America.

Paid Programming Paid Programming Paid Programming
Paid Programming Paid Programming Paid Programming
Paid Programming Paid Programming Paid Programming

A block of named programs appears:

The Healing Power of Juicing. Your Baby Can Read. Collect Gold Coins. Celeb Hair. Cash in the Attic. Super-Size Beauty.

The Fox Movie Channel offers "Bad Boy," a musical comedy made in 1935, starring James Dunn.

Then the crawl suddenly stops, for "scheduled hardware maintenance." This thing runs on dedicated hardware! Live and learn!

3:51 AM.

Outside the motel, it's very cold. Across the service road a quadrant of the truck-stop parking lot is empty.

The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is choice, the free market, America.

From IPS...

In a surprisingly swift move on Thursday night that could have wide-ranging implications, the U.S. Senate passed a bill containing broad unilateral sanctions to punish foreign companies that export gasoline to Iran or help expand its domestic refinery capabilities.

"This means that no president can lift the embargo without certifying to Congress that Iran has met a laundry list of demands that no president in his right mind will certify," (Patrick Disney, the assistant policy director of the National Iranian American Council) told IPS.

Furthermore, "crippling sanctions," as broad-based gas sanctions are often called, is a potential checklist item on a path to military confrontation with Iran. But some think imposing and enforcing the sanctions themselves could be tantamount to war.

"Even half of the people that proposed (gas sanctions) say the only way to really impose that is a naval blockade," said (Richard Sawaya, the president of USA*Engage, a group that opposes unilateral sanctions).

"Well, that's an act of war!"

When this article appeared Friday, January 29, I thought it was premature to start talking about a naval blockade, but within 24 hours the other shoe dropped.

Tension between the US and Iran heightened dramatically today with the disclosure that Barack Obama is deploying a missile shield to protect American allies in the Gulf from attack by Tehran.

The administration is deploying two Patriot batteries, capable of shooting down incoming missiles, in each of the four Gulf countries.

General David) Petraeus said the US is keeping cruisers equipped with advanced anti-missile systems in the Gulf at all times to act as a buffer between Iran and the Gulf states.

Of course US officials are spinning the deployment of Patriot and Aegis missile systems around Iran as purely defensive, and US media have swallowed this story without a burp.

But a purely defensive interpretation of so many Patriot batteries and Aegis missile cruisers may not impose itself quite so easily upon the semi-autonomous Revolutionary Guards, who supposedly control the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. From their point of view, something very close to war with the United States has already begun.

Several top commanders in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have been killed in a suicide bombing in the volatile south-east of the country. Iranian state television said 31 people died in the attack, in the Pishin region of Sistan-Baluchistan, and more than 25 were injured.

"We consider the recent terrorist attack to be the result of US action. This is a sign of America's animosity against our country," (Parliament Speaker Ali) Larijani said, quoted by AFP.

US policy-makers apparently assume that Iran will passively await more and more stringent sanctions and eventually surrender to Western demands for de facto control of Iranian nuclear development, because dead-end resistance against the combined air power of Israel and the United States is contrary to Iran's self-interest, to say the least.

But are the Iranians really as calculating and self-interested as the very calculating and self-interested people who surround Obama assume? Or are they making the same mistake which Jacob Burckhardt once ascribed to imperial Venice?

Like many other over-clever people, the Venetians assumed that their opponents were incapable of self-destructive and irrational action.

Update: From UPI...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said celebrations of the Islamic Revolution will include nuclear development news and a "telling blow" to world powers. Iran will mark the 31st anniversary of the revolution Feb. 11 with large public demonstrations. Ahmadinejad said the government will use the occasion to give an update of Tehran's nuclear program.

"Iran will deliver a telling blow to global powers on Feb. 11," Ahmadinejad said Sunday at a Cabinet meeting.

From Asia Times Online...

Of the 24 former detainees interviewed for this story, 17 claim to have been abused at or en route to these (Field Detention Sites). Doctors, government officials, and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, a body tasked with investigating abuse claims, corroborate 12 of these claims.

One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the eastern part of the country. According to Sher Khan, US forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field Detention Site at a nearby US base. "They interrogated me the whole night," he recalls, "but I had nothing to tell them." Sher Khan worked for a police commander whom US forces had detained on suspicion of having ties to the insurgency. He had occasionally acted as a driver for this commander, which made him suspicious in American eyes.

The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point, they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. "They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed." They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow 12 bottles worth of water. "Two people held my mouth open and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious. It was as if someone had inflated me," he says. After he was roused from his torpor, he vomited the water uncontrollably.

This continued for a number of days; sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, at other times blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually, he was sent to Bagram where the torture ceased. Four months later, he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from US authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.

"What frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We cannot wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about their opponent - a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators. Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game."

Does Obama really believe it's "Washington" that shuts down Congress every time "Washington" has 41 votes in the Senate?

Has Obama been unconscious since 2006, while 41 Republican votes in the Senate turned into a de facto veto of any and all legislation? While appeasing two or three Republican swing votes eviscerated healthcare reform and Obama's feeble "stimulus?"

Was Obama out to lunch while Democrats rubber-stamped Bush/Cheney's insane foreign policy, reactionary domestic agenda, and ultra-right-wing appointments to the Supreme Court?

Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can.

Neither party? Have Democrats delayed or obstructed every bill just because they can?

But Obama wasn't really talking about Democrats and Republicans, or "Washington," or jobs and unemployment, or healthcare, or war and peace or global warming or immigration or financial reform.

Obama was talking about Obama.

It's impossible to discuss anything reasonably without accepting a few facts or axioms which no reasonable person would deny. You can't conduct a seminar about differential equations if some idiot at the end of the table keeps shouting "2+2=3."

But of course it's possible that extra-terrestrial overlords have hypnotized every human being into believing that "2+2=4" in a universe where every combination increases or diminishes the sum of its parts, and it's also possible on the same order of unlikelihood that CO2 doesn't really cause global warming, on a fantasy planet where extra-terrestrial overlords (again!) faked the Holocaust and hid Saddam's weapons of mass destruction on Neptune.

And it's also possible that endless war in Afghanistan is a very good idea.

You might think that after ten years of abysmal failure, no reasonable person would prescribe American armies as a cure for what's wrong with Afghanistan. It's now the most miserable country in the world, after ten long years of American occupation!

But as soon as we postulate another gang of fantasy overlords in the form of Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Khalid Sheik Mohamed, we immediately return to that alternative reality where 2+2=3, global warming is a myth, and a couple of tents in the God-forsaken wasteland of Afghanistan mysteriously threaten not only the United States but also every other civilized nation!

Never mind that Spanish terrorists somehow coordinated multiple massive attacks in Madrid without so much as the shadow of a connection to Afghanistan or anything like "al Qaeda" outside Spain.

Never mind that Timothy McVeigh blew up Oklahoma City with crap you can buy at Wal-Mart!

It's all about a couple of tents in the wilderness, and the super-human overlords who formerly inhabited them!

So our new "Terror President" bombs bombs bombs some of the most desolate wastelands in the world in North and South Waziristan, and it makes even less sense than bombing Antarctica on the chance that Usama bin Laden is hiding in an igloo at the South Pole, because if we were bombing Antarctica, we wouldn't be destabilizing nuclear Pakistan.

Read more »

From Politico...

Defense Secretary Robert Gates hosted a meeting with the nation's top defense company executives Wednesday, stressing the need for a closer partnership with them and pledging to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time, according to his spokesman.

Gates's meeting was part of a day-long session between Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter and the Aerospace Industries Association, the top trade group for American aerospace firms. The heads of the nation's top two defense firms - Lockheed Martin and Boeing - attended, said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

And meanwhile there's no end in sight in Afghanistan...

Violence in Afghanistan typically increases over the summer months and General Petraeus forecast that this year would again be bloody. He also said that it was premature to make predictions about whether the situation would improve by 2011.

And if it's "premature to make predictions about whether the situation will improve by 2011," then it's also a fortiori premature to make predictions about whether the situation will improve by 2012, or 2013, or 2014, and it's probably premature to predict much of anything so far in advance, except...

Steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets.

This heavily redacted paragraph and notes appear on page 264 of a report from the Inspector General of the Department of Justice about "the FBI's Use of Exigent Letters and Other Informal Requests for Telephone Records."

The report concludes on page 272 that "the ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) was violated when the FBI obtained ECPA-protected records without first issuing appropriate legal process."

But that conclusion was radically undermined by the OLC, in an opinion endowed with the status of "authoritative legal advice to the President and all the Executive Branch agencies."

I didn't believe Brown would beat Coakley for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts until two days before the election, when this story popped out of the internet noise.

Twitter Followers: Brown (9,679), Coakley (3,385)

YouTube Video Views: Brown (578,271), Coakley (51,173)

Facebook Fans: Brown (70,800), Coakley (13,529)

Gaaaa gaaaa Oh la laaa-aaa!!!

Read those numbers and weep, Democrats! Republicans are winning in the Age of Minimal Information, politics played with micro-tweets...

Hope and Change!

Gaaaa gaaaa Oh la laaa-aaa!!!

But now it's...

"Independent Voice!"

"Brown will be an Independent Voice in Washington!"

Gaaaa gaaaa Oh la laaa-aaa!!!

I watched dozens of voters mouth this brain-dead noise on Boston TV, and this is only the beginning!

In the House, GOP lawmakers send out 529% more tweets than Democrats.

Gaaaa gaaaa Oh la laaa-aaa!!!

From the New York Times...

Every day, a United States Air Force cargo plane specially equipped with radio transmitters flies for five hours over the devastated country, broadcasting news and a recorded message from Raymond Joseph, Haiti's ambassador in Washington.

"Listen, don't rush on boats to leave the country," Mr. Joseph says in Creole, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. "If you do that, we'll all have even worse problems. Because, I'll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that's not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from."

And of course what Haiti really needs, more than food, water, or even medecine, is...

More American soldiers!

The US has about 1,000 troops in Haiti and another 2,000 are on their way. There are also 9,000 UN peacekeepers and international police officers in the country.

There has been criticism from some aid agencies of the Americans for giving priority to military flights at the airport while planes carrying relief supplies are unable to land. MSF (Doctors without Borders) has had five planes turned back from the airport in recent days, three carrying essential medical supplies and two with expert surgical personnel.

"We lost 48 hours because of these access problems," said Leduc. "Of course it is a small airport, but this is clearly a matter of defining priorities."

Asked how many avoidable deaths had been caused by the delays, he said that hundreds of critical lifesaving operations had been delayed by two days.

"We are talking about septicaemia. The morgues in the hospitals are full," he said.

And that's the way it is, Tuesday, January 19, 2010, in Haiti and the USA.