The #AfghanistanPapers

3,000 Billion Dollars into the Bottomless Well of Afghanistan
By Manlio Dinucci
In the London Declaration, the 29 member countries of NATO reaffirmed “the engagement for the security and long-term stability of Afghanistan”. One week later, on the basis of the Freedom of Information Act, (used to empty a number of aging skeletons out of the closets, according to political necessity), the Washington Post managed to force the declassification of 2,000 pages of documents which reveal that “US civil servants fooled the public about the war in Afghanistan”. Basically, they hid its disastrous effects, including the economic effects, of a war which has been dragging on for 18 years. Read more...

Afghan Papers Inadvertently Document WaPo’s Role in Spreading Official Lies
By Joshua Cho
If the Post is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,” shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same “talking points” to spin the coverage in the desired fashion? Read more...

The Afghanistan Fiasco and the Decline and Fall of the American Military
By Philip Giraldi
A devastating investigative report was published in the Washington Post on December 9th. Dubbed

“War is Good for Business”

“War is Good for Business”: 

Big Oil, Wall Street and the 

Pentagon’s “New Cold War” Against Russia

By Bill Dores

The Soviet Union no longer exists. The Russian Federation is not a socialist state. But the U.S. military and political establishment still seek to destroy Russia. That’s the object of the crisis the Pentagon, State Department and CIA are orchestrating in Ukraine.

What drives this seemingly irrational course of action?

The same thing that drove the George W. Bush regime to invade Iraq in 2003. The same thing that’s driving the violent anti-China rhetoric from the Pentagon and the White House: financial need and cold economic ­calculation.

Not the financial need of the hungry and homeless, of the millions who need jobs at living wages, of those who can’t pay their rent or mortgages or who must choose between heating and eating.

It’s the need of Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs to pump up their profits, stock prices and rates of return on their invested capital amid a global economic slowdown caused by capitalist ­overproduction.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the United States will replace Russia this year as the world’s top hydrocarbon energy producer. It says the U.S. will replace Saudi Arabia as the world’s No. 1 oil producer by 2015.