The National Security Archive has just released a Load of Files Electronic Briefing Book No. 253 Posted - August 20, 2008 under the title: 1998 Missile Strikes on Bin Laden May Have Backfired with a subtitle: Extensive 1999 Report on Al-Qaeda Threat Released by U.S. Dept of Energy, Taliban Told U.S. They Wanted to Bomb Washington

With backlinks to the PDF's and more links in the sidebar on the left.

On Friday August 15 the Bush administration sent Condoleezza Rice to meet with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili as a "show of U.S. support." Yikes. They sent Condi? Talk about giving somebody the goodbye look. If this were a Marty Scorsese movie, Saakashvili would have been sleeping with the fishes come Saturday morning. You'd think Keystone Kondi would have lent sufficient slapstick to the Georgian situation, but no. Adding to the antics, John McCain announced on Friday August 15 that he would send along as his personal representatives Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, the Bea Arthur and Betty White of neoconservatism. Then, to cap things off, McCain himself dropped the atomic punchline: "In the twenty-first century, nations don't invade other nations."

You could hear irony clawing at its coffin lid.

The bananastans are going bananas, Iran's down the can, al Qaeda is a more dangerous enemy than ever and our "victory" in Iraq has gone off in our faces like a joke shop cigar. Less than a decade into the New American Century, young Mr. Bush and the neoconservatives who promised us an empire have squandered everything our forefathers achieved in the America's first two and a quarter centuries as a nation. Yet, incredibly, bewilderingly, stupefyingly, a septuagenarian Senator who steals Christian prisoner stories from Alexander Solzhenitsyn and promises to protract the Bush foreign policy fumble-rama is a viable contender for the presidency of the United States.

We live in hysteric times.

promoted - cho

War correspondents have been all the rage in America for generations. News organizations love war coverage, even if what’s reported isn’t actually entirely true. “You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war," William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, telegraphed one of his soon-to-be famous correspondents in Cuba in 1898. We are again in a gilded age for war reports, with Russia invading the republic of Georgia—or was it Georgia attacked first?—just as the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were going stale as old news.

Ilona Meagher has just posted on her blog site, PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within, an outstanding collection of links and a few video's on what the subject title describes "Art For, By And About Veterans Begins Sunday" and the link just above will take you to it.

She starts it out with this:

The official hidden history of our disastrous war in Vietnam was leaked to the news media in a purloined document called the Pentagon Papers. The damning truth about America’s disastrous war on terrorism was quietly made public in a press release.

“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism," The RAND Corporation, a top Pentagon contractor on national defense research, concluded in a comprehensive study of military campaigns against insurgency groups around the world. Specifically, US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are not working, the study concluded.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to spend $20 billion to double the size of Afghanistan's army as part of a program designed to bring the country that was once the "crown jewel" of our woebegone war on terror under control. We might be better served by simply bribing the Taliban and al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan to take a little breather. That's how General David Petraeus got the Sunni militias in Iraq to play ball with him, and that only cost us about $216 million. As peace making measures go, it's cheaper to buy guerillas than it is to make soldiers, so why not take the path of least resistance?

Of course, the cost of victory through bribery in the bananastans could get twice as expensive now that "top Bush administration officials" are looking to step up ground force forays into Pakistan. I guess the top officials finally realized that bombing Pakistani weddings with nuclear submarines isn't getting the job done.

Not to worry, though. General David Petraeus, young Mr. Bush's "main man," is about to take charge of the bananastans, and if he can't win there, nobody can.

On the 29th of July an extremely important think tank report, paid for by the government, came forth from the Rand Corporation, a favorite of the Pentagon on National Security matters.

I heard the report early that morning on a news blip on NPR and went over to the Rand Site and found the report. I then posted about it on a number of sites as well as sent it out, all with back links.

originally posted 2008-07-29 12:34:13 -- bumped, cho

TWO JOURNEYS, TWO GENERATIONS, BRINGING EACH OTHER HOME

"Leave No Soldier"

A feature length documentary directed, produced and co-written by Donna Bassin,
an official selection of the 2008 Rhode Island International Film Festival.

"LEAVE NO SOLDIER,” Tells the story of two impassioned journeys by two communities of American War Veterans who have carried a Military Oath from the Battlefield
to the home front. The two groups are divided by their politics, but united in their devotion to dead comrades and their compassionate commitment to "Leave No Fallen Soldier Behind".

Below you will find mostly what is printed in the Documentaries Press Release, which if interested can be Downloaded Here in PDF with photo's and more information.

The title above comes from a new Rand Corporation Report