Let's Bomb Washington!

Oh wow. It's embarrassing to be a Canadian when news like this hits the stands:

Canada to stage mock Afghan attack in Washington

The Taliban will attack an Afghan village set up in the heart of Washington courtesy of the Canadian Forces, who will send in a medic in a dramatic effort to save a civilian crippled by the explosion.

At least four times over two days this month, simulated IED blasts will bring the Afghan war – and Canada's combat role in Kandahar – home to Americans if an elaborate scheme based on modern training realism attracts widespread attention, as is hoped.

“If this works the way I want it to, more Americans will know what Canada is doing in Afghanistan,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Martin, a military attaché at the Canadian embassy.

Yeeha! Eh?

Between scheduled IED attacks at noon and 2 p.m. on Sept. 23, the first day of the conference, there will be an Afghan luncheon hosted by Kabul's envoy to Washington, Ambassador Said Jawad.

A division of Lockheed Martin [double check that bill when they're done. -catnip] that specializes in combat-training simulations will construct the mock village of three buildings and a mini-souk and provide the role-players – Afghan actors who will play the defenceless civilians [because they're running out of real defenceless civilians -catnip]. Strategic Operations Inc., a California company that claims to bring the “magic of Hollywood” to hyper-realistic training, will provide the pyrotechnics for the IED explosions.

Not to be outdone, the US military announced that it will host the following activities:

1. Hide and Seek: Find our secret torture prisons!
2. Whack-an-Afghani civilian: man your own drone and be home in time for supper.
3. Dress Hamid Karzai.
4. Pin the tail on the mass grave sites.

And for those nostalgia buffs who want to harken back to the Pentagon's glory days, there will be an extra-special demonstration:

5. How we napalmed Vietnam!
(Hazmat gear provided. Child volunteers needed.)



Yes. A good time will no doubt be had by all.

Hooah!

(h/t pogge)
 

Selling a Bloodied Afghanistan

Last week, the Stars and Stripes revealed that the Pentagon was using the Rendon Group (a very well-paid company of pro-military propagandists) to "profile reporters" writing about the Afghanistan war.

The new revelations of the Pentagon’s attempts to shape war coverage come as senior Defense Department officials are acknowledging increasing concern over recent opinion polls showing declining popular American support for the Afghan war.
[...]
Stars and Stripes reported on Monday that the Pentagon was screening reporters embedding with U.S. forces to determine whether their past coverage had portrayed the military in a positive light. The story included denials by U.S. military officials that they were using the reporters’ profiles to determine whether to approve embed requests.

In the wake of that story, officials of both the Defense Department and Rendon went further, denying that the rating system exists.

“They are not doing that [rating reporters], that’s not been a practice for some time — actually since the creation of U.S. Forces–Afghanistan” in October 2008, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters Monday. “I can tell you that the way in which the Department of Defense evaluates an article is its accuracy. It’s a good article if it’s accurate. It’s a bad article if it’s inaccurate. That’s the only measurement that we use here at the Defense Department.”

Why anyone believes anything that comes out of the Pentagon is beyond me especially since the only way it ever admits the truth if it ends up being publicly humiliated into doing so.

La voila, today the US military has terminated Rendon's contract.

“The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the Media Analyst contract,” belonging to The Rendon Group, said Col. Wayne Shanks, chief of public affairs for International Security Assistance Forces–Afghanistan.
[...]
“The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and mine alone. As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, in an e-mail sent Sunday to Stars and Stripes.

Did I say the Pentagon admits "the truth"? Whoops. Sorry. It was all just a "distraction" (cough cough).

“I have been here since early June and at no time has anyone who worked for me ever conducted themselves in a manner as your newspaper alleged. I cannot and will not speculate on the past, although I have found no systemic issues with fairness or equity in the way U.S. forces have run their media embed program.”

Compiling reporters’ past bodies of work is common practice to help the military’s public affairs officers prepare for incoming journalists, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said last week.

On Thursday, Whitman said Rendon would continue to produce the profiles and they would include “characterizations” as positive-to-negative, but he scoffed at their value and said the Pentagon used no such outside analysis.

“This was a decision made by US forces Afghanistan. I would refer you to them for their reasons,” Whitman wrote in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes on Sunday.

Then why fire Rendon?

In at least two of the profiles, copies of which were obtained by Stars and Stripes, Rendon clearly stated the purpose of the analysis was to help military public affairs officers determine what kind of coverage to expect from the journalist, whether to grant their embed request, and if that journalist could be steered toward “positive” coverage for the military.

On Friday, a public affairs officer with the 101st Airborne Division said that when his unit was in Afghanistan and in charge of the Rendon contract, he had used the conclusions contained in Rendon profiles in part to reject at least two journalists’ applications for embeds.

It's not just a US military effort that's been required to keep selling this unpopular war. As I blogged back in 2007, our government had also been very busy at the time (and no doubt since then) trying to convince Canadians that our military presence there was all about the Orwellian-sounding "democracy promotion".

On a side note, I find it interesting that the US and Canadian governments were outraged (outraged!) by claims of election corruption/rigging in Iran but seem to be absolutely mute about the the same accusations coming out of Afghanistan following that country's recent election. Will the end result there be any more legitimate than what happened in Iran? No. Will our governments really care? No.

Today, controversial military honcho General Stanley McChrystal told BBC News the same old song and dance: time is needed to come up with a new strategy that will allow the Afghan people to control their own country.

The general says the aim should be for Afghan forces to take the lead - but their army will not be ready to do that for three years and it will take much longer for the police.

It's been 7 years already. Just how long does it take to train these people?

The bottom line is that there is no end game here. This will be Obama's Vietnam. And you can try dressing it up in purple-stained icing and multi-coloured sprinkles but you can't hide the fact that what lies beneath is a new, monthly, record-setting death toll for US troops along with a seemingly never-ending rise in "collateral damage" - all juxtaposed against a corrupt government that will take much more than a new leader to fix.

Meanwhile, an Afghan man said Monday that Taliban militants cut off his nose and both ears as he tried to vote in the Aug. 20 presidential election.

"I was on my way to a polling station when Taliban stopped me and searched me. They found my voter registration card," Lal Mohammad said from his hospital bed in Kabul. He said they cut off his nose and ears before beating him unconscious with a weapon.

"I regret that I went to vote," Mohammad said, crying and trying to hide his disfigured face. "What is the benefit of voting to me?"

(More about Mr Mohammad here).

Somebody needs to answer his question. Honestly.

Perhaps he should have a chat with Robert Fisk.
 

Secret prisons by any other name...

The NYT reports that the ICRC will now be given the names of so-called terrorist suspects in Obama's secret prisons "temporary screening sites" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But, wait a minute, you're thinking - didn't Obama close the secret prisons?

Well, no.

The executive order he signed last January only included secret CIA prisons. (And we'll never really know if that has actually happened, will we?) Meanwhile, the US military is still more than free to have its own little private gulags.

The New York Times reported in 2006 that some soldiers at the temporary detention site in Iraq, then located at Baghdad International Airport and called Camp Nama, beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces, and used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball.

Military officials say conditions at the camps have improved significantly since then, but virtually all details of the sites remain shrouded in secrecy.

There's more of that promised transparency Obama campaigned on.

How often do we need to be reminded that people taken prisoner during these wars have been continuously denied their basic human rights while our governments pretend otherwise?
 

Michael Moore Blasts Blitzer and CNN

If you didn't get the chance to see Monday's Situation Room, you missed Michael Moore blasting Wolf Blitzer and CNN.

Crooks & Liars has the video and here's the transcript.

Before Moore appeared, CNN ran a video segment by Dr Sanjay Gupta disputing some of the facts in Moore's film "Sicko":

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN SR. MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): "Sicko" throws hard punches at the United States healthcare system, and it seems just about everyone has something to say.

(SOUNDS)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Moore was spot on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The facts, I think, support what I believe.

GUPTA: And Moore presents a lot of facts throughout the movie. But do they all check out? Keeping them honest, we did some digging and we started with the biggie. The United States slipped to number 37 in the world's healthcare systems.

It's true, 37 is the ranking, according to the World Health Organization's latest data on 191 countries. It's based on general health level, patient satisfaction, access and how it's paid for. France tops the list. Italy and Spain make it into the top 10. The United Kingdom is 18.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hello!

GUPTA: Moore brings a group of patients, including 9/11 workers to Cuba, and marvels at their free treatment and quality of care. But hold on. That WHO list puts Cuba's healthcare system even lower than the United States, coming in at number 39. Moore asserts that the American healthcare system spends $7,000 per person on health, whereas Cuba spends $25 per person.

Not true, but not too far off. The United States spends $6,096 a year per person versus $229 a year in Cuba. And astronomically more money doesn't mean far better outcomes. In fact, Americans live just a little bit longer than Cubans on average. So Americans do pay more, but the United States also ranks highest in patient satisfaction.

And Americans have shorter wait times than everyone but Germans when seeking non-emergency elective procedures like hip replacement, cataract surgery or knee repair. That's not something you'll see in "Sicko" as Americans tell their tales of lack of coverage and suffocating red tape.

It's true that the United States is the only country in the Western world without free universal access to health care. But you won't find medical utopia elsewhere. The film is filled with content Canadians and Brits sitting in waiting rooms, confident care will come.

In Canada, you can be waiting for a long time. A survey of six industrialized nations found that only Canada was worse than the United States when it came to waiting for a doctor's appointment for a medical problem.

PAUL KECKLEY, DELOITTE HEALTH CARE ANALYST: That's the reality of those systems. There are quotas. There are planned wait times. The concept that care is free in France and Canada and Cuba, and it's not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes. And as a proportion of their household income, it's a significant number.

GUPTA: It's true that the French pay higher taxes and so does nearly every country ahead of the United States on that list. But even higher taxes don't give all the coverage everyone wants.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fifteen-to-20 percent of the population will purchase services outside the system of care run by the government.

GUPTA: So, there's no perfect system anywhere. But no matter how much Moore fudged the facts -- and he did fudge some facts -- there's one everyone agrees on. The system here should be far better. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

And here's part of Moore's response:

BLITZER: Michael Moore is joining us now live from Detroit. Michael, thanks very much for coming in. You want to respond to anything ...

MOORE: First of all, Wolf, yeah, well -- yeah, I'd like about 10 minutes to respond to what was said.

BLITZER: Give us a couple of headlines, what you'd like to say.

MOORE: I don't talk in sound bites. So -- that report was so biased. I can't imagine what pharmaceutical company ad's coming up right after our break here.

But why don't you tell the truth to the American people? I mean, I wish that CNN and the other mainstream media would just for once tell the truth about what's going on in this country, whether it's with healthcare -- I don't care what it is. I mean, you guys have such a poor track record.

And for me to come on here and have to listen to that kind of crap. I mean, seriously, I haven't been on your show now for three years. The last time I was on, you ran a similar piece about "Fahrenheit 9/11" saying this can't be true what he's saying about the war, how it's going to be a quagmire, the weapons of mass destruction.

You know, and -- why don't you start off actually with my first appearance back here on your show in three years and maybe apologize to me for saying that three years ago, because it turned out everything I said in "Fahrenheit" was true. Everything has come to happen.

Everything I said. I mean, I was -- I took you in that film to Walter Reed Hospital and it took three years before you or any of the rest of the mainstream media would go to Walter Reed Hospital and see what was happening to our troops. So for me to have to sit here and listen again to more crap about socialized medicine or how the Canadians have it worse than us and all this, all the statistics show that we have far worse healthcare than these other industrialized countries.

We're the only ones that don't have it free and universal. And, you know, there's a -- there's a -- you said that Germany was the only one that was better than us in terms of wait times. The Commonwealth Fund last year showed of the top six countries, we were second to last, next to Canada. It showed that Britain, for instance, 71 percent of the British public, when they call to see a doctor, get to see the doctor that day or the next day. It's 69 percent in Germany. It's 66% in Australia. And you're the ones who are fudging the facts. You fudged the facts to the American people now for I don't know how long about this issue, about the war.

And I'm just curious when are you going to just stand there and apologize to the American people for not bringing the truth to them that isn't sponsored by some major corporation? I mean, I'll sit here for as long as it takes, if you can do that for me.

And that was just the beginning. Make sure you read and/or view the rest. Moore was on fire and Blitzer didn't know what hit him.

Related: Michael Moore's site
 

"Liberal Media", my ass

If the New York Times is supposed to be a part of the "liberal media" conspiracy that so many right-wingers are so bloody scared of, then why would they post this sanitized Pentagon propaganda editorial about just how wonderful things supposedly are at Gitmo?

Maybe next week we'll be reading that there are actually amusement park rides at Gitmo too - aka "Gitmo Disney"™ - which the Pentagon has been keeping under wraps to avoid having a huge flurry of crazed tourists flocking to the heaven-like facility torturing gulag for their winter vacations.