skip to main |
skip to sidebar
An Afghan police commander and 13 junior officers have joined the Taliban in the western Afghan province of Farah, in what correspondents say could be the biggest defection by police.
They say the commander, named as Mirwais, was in charge of a 20-man checkpoint when he defected on Sunday.
The men are said to have taken heavy weaponry, radios and police vehicles including US-made armoured Humvees.
By Glenn Thrush in
Politico 44
Mackenzie Weinger just posted a comment from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioning just how tough a call President Obama made when he gave the kill order to the SEAL team targeting Osama bin Laden.
“You mentioned there was a tough decision,” Rumsfeld said on Tuesday night on Fox News. “I don’t think it was a tough decision. We’ve seen a lot of instances where presidents over the years have had to make decisions like that.”
But six years ago, Rumsfeld himself called off a major raid in Pakistan, citing many of the same factors that Obama administration officials complicated the OBL mission.
In 2007, Mark Mazetti of the Times reported:
A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.
The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.
But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.
Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.
The decision to halt the planned “snatch and grab” operation frustrated some top intelligence officials and members of the military’s secret Special Operations units, who say the United States missed a significant opportunity to try to capture senior members of Al Qaeda.
Treasonous Congressional Republicans would rather take down Obama than do their jobs.
Recently, we learned that leaders of the Republican Party gathered together on the evening of January 20th 2009, immediately after Obama was sworn in as our nation's President, to devise their hateful strategies of obstruction, lying, manipulation, distortion, character assassination and demagoguery all in the name of "keeping millions out of work to put one man out of a job."
Given that the leadership of the Congressional Republicans publicly declared that their only goal is: "... to deny Obama a second term, no matter the cost to the country", shouldn't they be found guilty of lying under oath as well as of attempting to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States of America, and possibly Grand Theft Larceny? After all, they continue to accept their generous salaries, extravagant health care and drug coverage, hefty retirement plans, and all the other "perks" all paid for by we, the tax-paying citizens, while doing everything they can to end the "Grand Experiment that is America".
They have abdicated their oaths of office, instead paying obeisance to Grover Norquist, an unelected arch-conservative who advocates restricting voting rights to "the landed gentry", and who is successfully holding our nation's economic recovery hostage.
It is shameful and obscene that the Republican Party is so beholden to ideology that it is willing to lie and obfuscate, filibuster and demonize those trying to right our sinking Ship of State that is foundering because of the Bush-created Depression that is the Republican legacy of so-called leadership.
Americans need to awaken from the toxicity with which the Republican's constant fear-mongering and demonizing of differences has infected our citizenry. We need to awaken to the very real destructive forces within the Republican Party that threaten to destroy the American Dream by returning us to the days of Dickens.
Pay attention to what Republicans do when in office - remember: their actions are what matters - not their empty promises.
"Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me!"
An Afghan police commander and 13 junior officers have joined the Taliban in the western Afghan province of Farah, in what correspondents say could be the biggest defection by police.
By Glenn Thrush in
Politico 44
Mackenzie Weinger just posted a comment from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioning just how tough a call President Obama made when he gave the kill order to the SEAL team targeting Osama bin Laden.
“You mentioned there was a tough decision,” Rumsfeld said on Tuesday night on Fox News. “I don’t think it was a tough decision. We’ve seen a lot of instances where presidents over the years have had to make decisions like that.”
But six years ago, Rumsfeld himself called off a major raid in Pakistan, citing many of the same factors that Obama administration officials complicated the OBL mission.
In 2007, Mark Mazetti of the Times reported:
They have abdicated their oaths of office, instead paying obeisance to Grover Norquist, an unelected arch-conservative who advocates restricting voting rights to "the landed gentry", and who is successfully holding our nation's economic recovery hostage.
