Bill Van Auken

"[Obama] repeated virtually word-for-word the lying justifications given by his predecessor for the US war. [He] stressed that the US occupation in Afghanistan will continue indefinitely."

Sneaking in and out of Kabul under the cover of darkness Sunday, President Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan only underscored the crisis confronting the US in the midst of the war’s current escalation.

Like similar trips to US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan staged by former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Obama’s flight to Kabul was organized under conditions of extraordinary secrecy, with even Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, ostensibly the country’s sovereign ruler, kept in the dark about the visit until the last possible moment.

Reporters brought aboard the plane were not told where they were going until it had taken off and had their cell phones confiscated. Before taking off, Air Force One was boarded inside a closed hangar to prevent unauthorized US military personnel from learning of the President’s departure.

Once in Afghanistan, Obama’s six-hour visit—less than half the time it took him to fly there—was restricted to the heavily fortified US Bagram Air Base and the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul, where he was flown by helicopter.

Underlying these precautions is the reality that after eight and a half years of war, neither the Karzai regime nor the 120,000 US-led occupation troops can guarantee security anywhere in the country, including its capital.

Dahr Jamail

Last August, Travis Bishop refused to serve in Afghanistan. Having filed for Conscientious Objector (CO) status, Bishop, based at Fort Hood, Texas, in the US Army’s 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion, was court-martialed and sentenced to 12 months in a military brig. He was released from the brig today.

Bishop served his time in Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Lewis, Washington. This military brig is notorious for being a particularly difficult jail to serve time.

While in the brig, Bishop was recognized by Amnesty International and received support from hundreds of people from around the world who wrote letters of encouragement to him and wrote letters to Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the commanding general of Fort Hood, asking for Travis to be released from prison.

During his court-martial at Fort Hood last August, Bishop was tried by the military for his stand against an occupation he believes is “illegal.” He insisted that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposed on both moral and legal grounds, thus his decision to file for CO status. A CO is someone who refuses to participate in combat based on religious or ethical grounds, and can be given an honorable discharge by the military.

Rethink Afghanistan

Q: Why would U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan go out of their way to smear a journalist?

A: Because he told the truth about a night raid that killed Afghan civilians, including pregnant women.

Justin Raimondo

"His strongest virtue is that he’s a thug" says neocon (and ex-CIA analyst) Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Obama’s CIA apparently agrees.

The perpetual reinvention of reality proceeds apace, as neocons who once gave expression to the Bush administration’s most extreme rhetoric now pose as "moderates," – and these same neocons insist the Iraq war was a great success after all. They point to the recent Iraqi elections as proof of their redemption – even as their former pet, Ahmed Chalabi, rises from the political graveyard to become Iran’s chief spokesman and agent. It’s one of the richest, and perhaps most revealing, of the many ironies generated by the invasion of Iraq that the Che Guevara of the neocons has morphed into the handmaiden of the mullahs.

As tempting as it might be to elaborate on this theme, it would be a diversion from what is really the main news coming out of the election, and that is the political reincarnation of Iyad "the Executioner" Allawi. A former top Ba’athist official who fled in the early seventies, he didn’t resign from the party until 1975. He claims to have quit due to the increasing dominance of Saddam Hussein, but Hussein didn’t take complete power until President Al-Bakr resigned in 1979.