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EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!

The US is completely finished in Afghanistan. The troops are going loopy. A supposedly lone US troop in Kandahar got drunk and went over the wire at 3am in the morning. He walked to a local hamlet about a 1/4 mile from the base and, after checking the entire town, went into two different homes and slaughtered 16 people -- 9 of them woman and children. He then tried to set them on fire. That is the story being circulated by US officials. Early reports this morning on the BBC say something different. Villagers report two assaults with 16 people killed, same proportion of women and children. The attacks came in two separate villages near Kandahar. One was 1/4 mile away from the forward operating base and one was about a mile away. More than one military person was involved, though the US says there were no "operations" underway in the local area. Just what kind of operations have the US paramilitary operators been engaged in in the past? Well, if they were like this then they wouldn't be different from plain, old-fashioned terrorism to try and scare the locals into pacification. Unfortunately, for all concerned, this tactic never works for a period of time longer than a week and always backfires. This paints the US as totally black. Coming on the heals of the burning of the korans it also puts the military's tail totally between their legs. They might as well declare victory and get the hell out because this is not going to endear them to anybody, least of all those leaning leaning away from the Taliban. I have total sympathy and support to all those brave troops in the NATO coalition and their contractors and mercenaries working on the front line. War is a very, very tough situation. The natural release is getting drunk and beating on one another. I understand this. I also understand PTSD. What I don't understand is how somebody can go over the wire cocked out of their mind in a forward operating base without the consent of the guards and low-ranking non-coms and shoot up two villages and murder woman & children. This is unbelievable and inexcusable. You would think we would have learned something from the Melai (sp.?) Massacre in the the Vietnam conflict. Ohhh welll, those who don't learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. You would also think we would have gotten this ruling the empire thing down by now.

And more. The US and the British and the rest of the NATO coalition have a noble task in Afghanistan. They are trying to save that country from becoming another Iran, a Muslim theocracy totally under the control of Pakistan. Unfortunately, most of the US forces seem to be on a mission from God to kill as many Muslims as possible, whether they are actively engaged in the conflict or not. This is ridiculous. If that wasn't the case then these kinds of incidents would be widespread among the many different countries in forward operating bases. They are not. It is almost 100% exclusively coming from the US side. Recently in my local area a young US Marine came out of basic training and from his comments on Facebook it was clear he was ready to tear every Afghan a new one when he got over there. The return comments from veterans were very telling -- he was seen a "a freakin' greenie who was going to get his ass fragged". This whole conflict has slid over the edge into oblivion. I agree that the US is serving no purpose at all now and it is the time to get out. It is unfortunate in the extreme because it undercuts the ultimate sacrifice that more than 1000 US troops have made in the past ten years in Afhanistan. So much for keeping discipline in a cohesive fighting force. I am reminded of the scene in the movie Under Siege when the terrorist locked most of the crew of a US aircraft carrier in the ballast hold and started flooding the compartment. One of the terrorist looks at the closed circuit television of the crew there and says offhandedly "Discipline has totally gone out the window here". it certainly has.

i can't understand how our country went to war with the best intentions and ended up getting it's ass kicked by it's own foot. have we lost the moral high ground here?

Totally. The GOD Business (Guns, Oil & Drugs) is a tough one. While the planet supports our bloated lifestyle the US has to keep it's population in a total state of fear to continue profiting and propping up that lifestyle. We have to be scared into willingly allocating our tax dollars to the US multinational military-industrial complex. Part of that is the war on terror. The Russians are pretty much finished so we have to create new enemies. This time it's iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and any other Muslim country that dares to oppose our Imperial rule. Where there are people who would plot to cause us harm we have an interest in stopping those people. Unfortunately, we have to vilify an entire religion. And that has led us to the current predicament. We can't seem to distinguish between the bad guys and those people who simply want to live in peace and practice their own religion. So we slaughter them. Slaughtering innocent people is not a human value. Human beings are basically good and when you train them to kill on command their brain's short circuit. And so it goes. You wonder why the US military is trending toward robots and pilot-less drones? Part of it is saving lives but part of it also is that machines will do whatever you tell them to and will not freak out or have moral compunctions or ask questions. We have lost the war on terror. We have become terrorists in the name of stopping terrorism. The entire population is so conditioned with fear that people are becoming irrational. Internal dissent is becoming stifled. it is no longer OK to question authority, which is one of the cornerstones of a free society. Get used to it. This is a major trend with no end in sight. How did our once great country come to this??? Lack of citizen participation and organizing principles (corporations) based on greed. if you plant the seeds you reap the harvest -- plain and simple.

The US Marine was special forces and operating out of a forward operating base in Kandahar. There was more than one soldier involved in the killing and it happened in more than one village. The apprehended US soldier has no evidence of a mental breakdown. The villagers were dragged out of their home and summarily executed So much for damage control. President Hammat Karzai is calling for a public trial in Afghanistan. Somehow I don't think he is going to get it. The US is bracing for Taliban revenge attacks. This has to be the worst day of the war in ten years. if this was a coordinated special forces action it was stupid beyond belief. Unless, of course, it was designed as an exit strategy.

Anybody have any contacts for a push this election? Los Angeles Deadheads want to contribute to the fight against modern conservatism and idiocy. The counterculture is alive and well. Reach out. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eagle-Winged-Palace/19579729496

Go to the website and register. You can start calling supporters with your own phone immediately. Look to the die-hard Dems. in your local area. They will clue you in to the local office where you can sit with a bunch of old people using DNC cell phones. Or, organize a party of like-minded people and do whatever while making the calls. You need to put out a coherent message though. Stick to the script. Support Obama. The alternative is unthinkable

The massacre in Afghanistan was a good example of how a story is born and then gets distorted. How the truth is reported and then spun and then the spin becomes the truth. People do not understand this spoon-feeding process or are incredulous that it exists. They shouldn't be... Take the story of the massacre by US soldiers in Afghanistan yesterday. When it was heard on the BBC (a very venerable source of news originating from England) it was reported that Afghans observed multiple soldiers in more than one village. The first reports in the US on NPR said that it was one drunken soldier. CNN reported the BBC version at around 11am EST. By the time it was again reported on network evening news it was back to the original spin put out over NPR. We do not get the truth from our media outlets in this country on sensitive issues. If you really want to know what is going you have to check multiple news outlets around the world. CNN, Reuters and BBC. You should gather as many facts as possible and see how many times they recur in the various stories. It is highly likely that foreign news services will have the real, unvarnished truth. The common facts that among these outlets are probably the truth. The 5th Estate in this country has totally sold out to corporate interests. Reporters know how their stories get edited or buried. It is so sad.

It is quite clear that something is being covered up about the massacre in Afghanistan. Now the "soldier" (still being blamed on a lone gunman) was from Fort Lewis in Washington state, where it seems that all the "problem" soldiers are from, as in involved in other atrocities and committing suicide in droves, 26 in the last year. The lone "special forces" operative (this is now dropped from all domestic news reports) did not give himself up but was found crawling through an orchard trying to sneak back into his base. When found, he remained silent and invoked his Miranda rights. News reporters are now using the word "villages" instead of village to describe where the killings took place but they are not saying explicitly that the incident took place in at least two villages. Probably because the distance involved would mean more than a lone operator. Now it is reported that the soldier wasn't drunk, but that he might have had a bottle of alcohol in his locker... Meanwhile Leon Panetta says that "War is hell" and that these events have happened before and will probably happen again. NPR reports that there isn't much in the way of demonstrations because "The Afghan people are used to these kinds of incidents". I think it's now safe to venture an opinion that this was an unauthorized "black op" carried out by a cabal of special forces operators out of Fort Lewis that went horribly bad. The President and his cabinet and the entire Pentagon is in damage control mode trying to stave off total collapse of the mission in Afghanistan. This is pathetic. Trivializing the loss of life during time of war is despicable. As long as it happens to those people and not to our people it seems to be OK? I want to vomit! C'mon people! I'm starting to feel by the lack of comments here thagt anybody who reads what I am saying is afraid to comment... Comfortably numb are we? Hey, I'm trying really hard to be number than you are but I'm an empath -- it doesn't work with me! Say something, please?

Rick Santorum looked supremely pleased last evening in his victory speech. The arch-conservative former Penn. senator looked very sure of himself as he pumped hands working the crowd amidst his Secret Service protection at the Hilton in Baton Rouge. He beat Gingrich and Romney in close races in Alabama and Mississippi. He is the Catholic candidate with very conservative social views and he has a juggernaut rolling right now. It would be a different race right now had he been declared the winner in Iowa instead of the real vote being covered up by the GOP party Chairman in that state (Santorum was declared the victor quietly a week after the vote. The GOP chairman was dismissed.). Now, Santorum has the crowds and adoration and cockiness that comes with being front and center in the limelight. While Romney looks like a bad actor with canned music, Santorum has people singing original folk songs about him! This candidacy is not good for Obama... A Santorum candidacy would pose a more credible threat to Obama than Romney, who is widely seen as an insincere, inept bumbling rich man who doesn't have the karma to be president. Please God, take your faithful servant Rick Santorum away from politics and into the priesthood so he can directly do your work and leave running the country and opposing corporate personhood to Barak Obama.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was on a "long-planned" (read - 'rushed like hell to get over there to do damage control') trip to Afghanistan today. As his plane landed an Afghan soldier went berserk and stole a truck and crashed it on the runway. This after 2 of Karzai's brothers were attacked at the village near Kandahar where the killings took place as they were addressing the villagers and paying compensation ($2k each, a rather large sum in Afghanistan, paid by the Afghan government. The US will pony up more bucks to the relatives in a bit). The Obama Whitehouse cabinet is debating the wisdom of continuing the campaign behind his back and he is taking potshots at the president tonight. Panetta says we need to continue the campaign to it's logical conclusion (withdrawal of all combat troops by 2014) to honor all those who have made "the ultimate sacrifice". And, of yeah, because we are winning. Hello Leon, I think you have your head up your ass and you sound like General Westmoreland during the Vietnam war! I think Obama has it right. NATO can't even get the Taliban to sit down and talk with them about surrender. They are laughing at NATO right now. Obama and the British PM are talking this very minute about how the hell they can get the military out of there in one piece. I am imagining scenes from the South Vietnamese capitol in 1975: The last American helicopter taking off with our loyal Vietnamese allies clinging to it and then dropping into the waiting maw of the of the Viet Cong. Those poor Afghan allies... Afghanistan is so corrupt that Karzai will continue to lead a government of loyal opium warlords until the Taliban over-run it with a coalition of their own opium warlords. When, in the last millennium, has it ever been any different over there? One thing I sympathize with Panetta about is all those who have given their life for the sake of the mission over there. Their country called them to duty and they heeded the call, their country right or wrong. Those families here in the US, those Gold Star moms, dads, sisters, brothers, children and close friends. This must be agonizing. It was coming to this anyway, but these freaking Fort Lewis cowboys have now robbed them of their psychological dignity. Heaven knows it's all obscene.

President Obama's opening salvo of the presidential campaign debuted at 8pm this evening. At 10pm it already had 175,000,000 views on youtube. Tom Hanks does the narration. An ardent supporter of Obama, it left not knowing what to think... The part about the bailout drove me nuts. If the bailouts had gone to every American taxpayer making less than 50k a year it would have done more to stimulate the economy than giving it to the investment banks and the auto industry. Democrats! Who can love them? Republicans! Who can't hate them? The rigged system we live under makes me just want to curl up under the blanket for about ten years and hibernate. Please somebody, pass the whisky round.

I'll have a slug of that whiskey with you, fluffanutter. What a bunch of crazy deals goin' down.

It would seem that if the massacre in Afghanistan by special forces from Fort Lewis WAS an officially sanctioned "black op," then, by yesterday's news reports, it seems to have served it's purpose. It was reported yesterday that in preliminary talks to the NATO summit coming up in Chicago, Obama and British PM Beckham are planning to pull the plug on the Afghan campaign one year early. I don't see this method as being an idea of Obama's. He probably gave an order saying "Find some way to get us out of that war!". The way that it ended up being carried probably curled his skin... 16 innocent civilians had to die? This is entirely conjecture on my part but I actually don't think it's very far from the truth. Look at the way the lone special forces operator is being treated. Whisked out of the country and now defended by a top-notch lawyer from Seattle, The man is still not even named. A lot of build-up that he is a wounded warrior and never should have returned for a 4th tour because of concussive brain trauma. I don't think this soldier is ever going to serve more than 3 years in a military stockade. In order to save many lives a few more civilian was a small price to pay? The obscenity of it all. The callousness of it all. The guile, barbarity and crudity. The cynical nature of power being practiced at the highest levels is just blowing me away...

Sgt. Bales is the lone accused in the massacre of Afgans near Kanadahar on March 12th. He is now in detention at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Sargent Bales Of 4 tours in our endless wars A valiant warrior. What happened to you? Did you become possessed And feel woman and children Were America's enemy? Did you snap because Of your brain injuries? Or, from your home An hour from Sea-Tac Tucked away in The hills of the Cascades Where the good fishing Starts in your backyard Did they come to you & some of your Ft. Lewis buddies Saying: We have a mission Of vital importance To your country Can we count on you? It all sounded so good Until you were Actually dragging them out By the hair And double-tapping each one With your 45 The 2 year old especially You just went through the motions Of lighting them on fire after Your mission wasn't over Had to get back to the base. But the nightmares had Already begun without sleep The helicopters hunting You down in the orchard Why? It was a sanctioned op. Not supposed to Go down this way Did the others get back OK? Send lawyers, guns and money The shit has hit the fan Send lawyers, guns and money Lord get me out of here!

The video of visit to Ireland last week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-OAWfRGwZI&feature=youtu.be

So glad you made it TL. Nice slideshow too.

I know what it's like to vote Red.I know what it is to vote Blue. And they're making me feel like not voting at all. Thank you for the lovely e-postcard TL! Looks like it was a fun time. Bulmer's! Yummy! I spent NYE in '78 quaffing an appalling amount of Bulmer's trapped in Western Massachusetts instead of at That Show At Winterland. Well, at least we had our band set up and we played lots of Dead tunes, while we still could.

Is yummy, eh Pid?

I said "Who put all those things in your head?Things that make me feel that I'm mad And you're making me feel like I've never been born." I know what it's like to be free... (Envy you the Emerald Isle this past St. Patty's Day, Lilly Tip of my shillelagh then to you.)

Ireland was indeed just wonderful, and as any person with Irish blood-I feel almost as if I made my pilgrimage to the Mecca of the old country for Paddy's Day! :D Will never forget I was there for that ONCE!. LOL on the day I went to Cork on the bus by myself, I had to be back close to Limerick in the late afternoon because my friend Justin's father wanted me to meet him in his pub hang-out, to watch the horse races with himself and his friends. So I drank hard cider with a bunch of older men, shrieked and cursed about the races with them, and felt very much like was having a genuine Irish experience that day. Also watching Ireland lose at rugby to England in the championship, in a pub on St. Patrick's Day was something I won't forget so fast! The general conclusion in the pub was that the players neednt bother to come home again, after so traitorously losing that day! :D I learned some great new curses that day too! :D Now I just have to unlearn saying "t'irty-t'ree" after was practising their adorable accent so hard all week. I also liked how the country is modern, but keeps such a respect for their culture and history, and language. And the high quality of fish, local meat and vegetables, and cheese etc. was impressive.

I DID make it there, Jonapi! Even ate a fantastic sandwich from there for my lunch! :D Fresh Irish brown bread, spiced beef, local cheese, etc. Was phenomenal, and whole market was a feast for the eyes. I got one pic of the outside of it-and it's in the video

The shooting of Trayvon Martin in Orlando is very troubling. Even more troubling are the laws in Florida that do not allow the police to arrest the neighborhood watch captain until a judge decides in a hearing that the shooting was unwarranted. No wonder the signs at the state line to Florida say: THE LAWS ARE DIFFERENT HERE. If Obama weren't president the US Justice Dept. would probably not be sticking it's nose into what is most obviously a hate crime. There is a trend developing that certain members of the public are arming themselves and doing their own citizen patrols, with or without the tacit approval of local police departments. I am seeing this trend within my own community as I live in an area with a lot of Asians and the white-bread townies in this burg of 25,000 seem to be having a homeland security nervous breakdown. These people who do this are pathetic wretches who have no life and take it upon themselves to trespass on private property in the name of, what? Finding out that Asian people eat rice? Gee, guess there are no Muslims around here so they'll bother whatever foreigners they do have with their "loserness". The case of Trayvon Martin has crystallized something that is deeply troubling. The American people have been so conditioned with fear a small, fringe group of paranoids has taken it to the next level -- arming themselves and doing citizen patrols on whatever targets of opportunity present themselves. I am not saying that citizen patrols in inner-city areas or high crime suburban neighborhoods are not needed, they are. What I am saying is that people with too much time on their hands with handguns, unrestrained by law enforcement, are going to create more innocent victims. That is why in my case, with the law in my state (NOT Florida!) on my side, I will now carry a concealed weapon in case I have to defend myself against people who feel that all foreign looking people are a threat to them. For God's sake! What the hell has happened to our country??

I read about the demonstration organized in NYC by nationofchange.com for justice in the case of Trayvon Martin. African-Americans are pissed off these days and I don't blame them. A piece of advice for you is that carrying a gun is not usually the solution. You have to make sure you don't become part of the problem. Having a gun means the chances of it being used increase by at least 50%. And if these really are the tribe of towny inbread mutant piglets (as Lour Reed called them) then the towny police will protect them the same way the Sanford cops are protecting this joker. The bottom line is that there will always be those local losers who believe they are protecting their town after beering up at the VFW hall. There really is nothing much you can do about them except call the cops and have them arrested if they commit a crime. The reall crime is that the sheriff won't even arrest them for drunk driving. At least not in my town.

Has anyone else noticed the rapid expansion of Christian-centric thinking in this country? As a product of a prototypical Catholic school upbringing, I tend to shy away from the whole "organized religion" thing, but I can't help but see how the Christian mindset has infected our society in a rather big way since George W. Bush's inauguration. Now, before I start to sound like a total atheist, I only bring this up because I find that people in general are far less open-minded than they were previously. I just miss the days of people being able to discuss their differences in an open, free, and peaceful manner. Also, does it bother anyone else that the Republican party is pretty much the anti-gay and anti-freedom party? Or is it more bothersome that so many people aren't able to see them that way? They just see them as the "Anti-Obama" party....

A well-read friend of mine said the Republican party is disintigrating into splinter groups, ever since the fall of the common enemy-the Soviet Union. I have been thinking a lot about that comment, and think he may be on a right thread. And this might be what is bothering them now, and making them so socially reactionary now.

They say that Dick Cheney received a heart in a transplant operation recently. I feel bad for the donor, but not for the usual reasons.

I wasn't aware Cheney had a heart that needed replacing!

technically, that would be called an implant, not a transplant.

Dick Cheney goin' down that yellow brick road feelin bad! Somebody else deserved that heart, Dick! Give it back!

Some things you hate to be right about... The story that they were trying to stick to didn't work and now Sgt. Bales is said to have snuck out, snuffed out some Afghans, snuck back in and then gone BACK OUT AGAIN and killed some more Afghans in a different village. My, my. Such an ambitious lad! This is getting freakin' ridiculous. Sgt. Bales doesn't remember anything about this night in his life. He is like the Manchurian Candidate (the newer one). Obviously, this was a sanctioned black op. by Ft. Lewis/McCord cowboy special forces operators, designed for maximum deniability. You have to wonder what kind of Kool-aid they gave him when he got back from the mission. The US has now reimbursed each family that lost a member $50,000. I think they paid something like $2,000 per injury. This is a sad, sad chapter in US foreign military involvement. It will only mean something if Obama & Cameron successfully lead NATO to end the Campaign one year earlier than the scheduled pullout in 2014. They are getting fierce pushback from conservative thinktanks and conservative cold warriors who somehow believe we need to stay the course in this ridiculous ruse of an engagement. Guess what? We didn't need to fight in Iraq. It is debatable if we needed to do this thing in Afghanistan. There is no debate (worth wasting your breath over) if we should be there post Bin Laden's demise. Pull up the map online of the number of dead in the Afghan Campaign. You can even break it out by state if you want. Very, very frightning... Some things you hate to be right about (sighhhh)!

> Obviously, this was a sanctioned black op. I disagree with your assessment, Anna. I think the story that's been carried by the media--alcohol was involved, Bales saw a buddy get injured the day before, and Bales himself had been wounded in combat a couple of times--is probably close to the truth. Those variables coming into play within a culture of killing that's ten years into a failed counter-terrorism project would seem to be sufficient to trigger a reaction such as Bales'. "He just snapped," seems to cover this one pretty well.

But i think it would be hard for somebody who was drunk to sneak out twice from a forward operating base. when you reach that conclusion you are calling a lot of people a bunch of clowns who were guarding that base that night... I am not one to see conspiracies around every corner. I just happened to be right on top of this story when it broke and have seen it's evolution.

Your conclusion that "obviously, this was a sanctioned black op" doesn't seem to take into account that those killed were mostly young children. Also, the serious diplomatic misstep of moving Bales to Kuwait immediately after the event would seem to indicate that the military command was caught off-guard and improvising badly. I understand that Bales' story has changed since it first came out, which doesn't surprise me since there was alcohol involved, but I don't think his testimony is necessary to determine what happened. There's abundant circumstantial evidence and eyewitness accounts, which should be enough for a military court to convict him of murder. Finally, you don't offer an alternate theory of the crime; if it was obviously a black op, what was its point?

Was to create an endgame strategy to get NATO out of the war early. If there were all these witnesses how come the story didn't come out clearly from the beginning? How come Bales remained silent and invoked his Miranda rights? That is pretty level-headed thinking for a drunk. How come he got a top-notch lawyer right away? How come the press has come up with all these favorable stories? How come we keep getting "expert analysis" that it will be hard to convict Bales because there are no forensics, no weapons to test and all that sort of thing? I think this op. went way wrong and Bales is being set up to take the fall but I feel that somebody decided they had to cover their (& his) ass, so Bales is going to serve about three years in the stockade at Leavenworth during a showcase trial in which he will be found innocent by reason of insanity, concussive head injury, PTSD and whatever else his lawyer can come up with. Speaking of eye-witnesses, how about the Afghan villagers themselves who saw multiple soldiers in different villages doing the killing? Karzai got to those villages with hush cash very quickly and the US dropped even heavier money bags on them. No, I think it very hard to conclude that this was the action of one drunk soldier, who happens to be a Special Forces Ranger, in a forward operating base on high alert in the wake of the koran burnings. I mean, I really hope I'm wrong but it sure does stink the way this episode got spun and continues to spin, like a top!

That the story of the Afghan Massacre keeps changing on a daily basis. This would suggest to any reasonable person that something is slightly more than amiss from the version of events military authorities are projecting. Whether it was a sanctioned or non-sanctioned operation or an operation at all and just the demented actions of one war-weary veteran will never be known, not even after a trial. But, watching the actions of military authorities in that theater of operations is quite revealing. They pulled Bales out to Kuwait immediately after Karzai started making serious noise about a show trial in Afghanistan. I think Anna's opinion, is a viable possibility. Especially so since the timing fit ever so perfectly -- Just when Obama and Cameron were conferring about the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago. Lets face it, if the US and Britain want something from NATO, they get it. Does anybody really think this was a "coincidence"? Please! Jonapi, when you tell somebody to fuck off it doesn't reflect well on you and usually means you have no facts to support your own conclusion. Saying that everybody in a forward operating base in a combat theater on a high alert is a clown (in that they allow a drunk to sneak out, sneak in and then sneak back out again) is a dog that just don't hunt. We are being asked to suspend our logical, rational thinking process here and I am so happy that there are people among us who are not sheep enough to swallow it hook, line and sinker. This whole thing is tragic in the extreme. I feel sorry for every person involved. Especially for Bales and every one of the Afghan dead and injured. Further, for every person involved in this insane conflict. Isn't it clear now that we should have just invaded and occupied the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan? That would have cut the heart out of this problem and brought a quick demise to Bin Laden. 10 years later, with thousands dead and trillions spent the job got done in the most grotesque way imaginable.

been swallowing, 'cuz I remember, Jonapi

Nahhh, I'm not going to touch this one.