The sacking of General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, received an immense amount of media coverage last week. The narrative basically focused on the disrespectful ways McChrystal talked about the Obama Administration.
Unfortunately, the news media never got around to asking what the Afghanistan people thought of McChrystal being sacked. It turns out that their take on the event wasn't just different, it didn't even resemble the story that the American media was selling us.
Head of Press TV's office in Kabul, Mohammad Ruhi, says US commander General Stanley McChrystal was sacked for acknowledging NATO's connection with the executed leader of the Pakistan-based Jundallah terrorist group, Abdolmalek Rigi.
Whoa! That certainly changes things.
Abdolmalek Rigi was executed by Iran a little over a week ago. He was arrested back in February under very interesting circumstances.
Moslehi said Rigi had been in a US military base 24 hours before his arrest and was carrying an Afghan passport supplied by the US.
After that, Rigi confessed to one of the most open secrets in southern Asia.
In the tape, Mr Rigi alleged that the US had promised to provide his group with military equipment and a base in Afghanistan, near the Iranian border.
He says he was on his way to a meeting with a "high-ranking person" at the Manas US military base in Kyrgyzstan when he was captured.
The Jundallah isn't just your standard, every day terrorist group. These guys are ruthless and fanatical.
In 2007, Dan Rather went to southern Pakistan for a first-ever interview with Abdolmalek Rigi. During the episode, a video of Rigi personally cutting off the head of a prisoner was shown. The same year they proudly claimed to have bombed a girl's school.
The terrorist group is most known for the 2009 suicide bombings of the Zahedan Mosque that killed 20 civilians and the Pishin bombing that killed another 43 people.
Rigi and many of his followers in the Jundallah grew up in the same madrasahs that the Taliban went to. Iran has accused them of using the opium trade to fund their weapons purchases.
Reports of U.S. support for Jundallah have been circulating since 2007. McChrystal's crime was that he confirmed it.
Make no mistake about it, Jundallah is an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group that is on friendly terms with the Taliban.
...and then you wonder why McChrystal might have some choice words for politicians in Washington.
Of course, supporting "good" terrorists has become official policy in Washington.
A bipartisan group of House members last week unveiled a resolution in support of the Iranian "resistance," a code word for an opposition group known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) that has been on the State Department's list of international terrorist organizations since its inception in the late 1980s.
During the period leading up to the 1979 revolution, the group proudly murdered U.S. military officers and civilians working in Iran. And while the group's current leadership and its apologists claim that those attacks were carried out by a splinter group no longer associated with the MEK, eyewitnesses tell me that the MEK continued to celebrate the anniversary of those murders in ceremonies and song in their training camps inside Iraq all through the 1980s.
More recently, MEK operatives inside Iran have carried out hit-and-run terrorist attacks on regime officials and have planted bombs in urban areas that have randomly killed civilians.
Exactly who are we fighting and why? I can no longer tell, which probably gives veterans of the Vietnam War deja vu.
The most despicable of crimes
One of the most tragic, immoral and disgusting symbols of Africa's pain is the child soldier. 12 and 14 year old boys, brainwashed and probably on drugs, armed with machine guns and terrorizing civilians.
It's a symbol of hopelessness and corruption, and now its also a symbol of America's foreign policy.
The United Nations lists the Somali government as one of the "most persistent violators" in the world of using child soldiers, and this week The New York Times documented several child soldiers, some as young as 12, toting assault rifles and working for the Somali transitional government in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital.
While the American government has expressed concern about the matter, it has given the Somali military millions of dollars in arms and paid soldiers' salaries.
Think about that for a moment. Your tax dollars are going to pay for an African government to employ 12 year old boys to shoot people.
At what point do we finally admit that our bankrupt and immoral foreign policy towards Somalia has failed?
On Wednesday, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said that assistance might violate the Child Soldier Prevention provision of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008; the Durbin-Coburn Child Soldiers Accountability Act; and the Durbin-Coburn Human Rights Enforcement Act.
Carolyn Vadino, a State Department spokeswoman, said, "We continually press the Transitional Federal Government to make certain that they do not use child soldiers." She also said the American government took "appropriate steps" to verify that the Somali soldiers it was helping pay were 18 or older.
It looks like the Obama Administration has picked up from where the Bush Administration left off -- when confronted with an obvious violation of the law (see torture) simply deny that it is happening and don't enforce the law. The law in question is Child Soldier Prevention Act.
So what do you get when you combine a messed up 12 year old with a machine gun? This event two weeks ago is a good example.
Fighting between Somali government troops and police has killed at least 13 people in Mogadishu...
"The clashes came after some of the government troops started to rob a civilian car and the police were trying to stop it," Abdullahi Mo`alim Kerow, a police officer, told Reuters.
"This kind of clash among government troops is unfortunate and has been repeated so many times, claiming the lives of nearly 100 troops since January."
Child soldiers shooting each other is on the increase.
A year ago the Obama Administration shipped 40 tonnes of weapons to the Somalia Transitional Government. It wasn't long before there were reports that government officials were selling those weapons to insurgents.
This is a sad and ironic twist considering that America halted food and medical aid to Somalia because we were afraid that some rice would wind up in the hands of insurgents. This is during the worst famine in Somalia since 1991.
The message being that we don't mind if the Somalians are heavily armed and killing each other while they starve.
It isn't just our weapons that are going to the insurgents. It's the soldiers too.
"The uncontrolled, predatory behaviour of the TFG's police force against the civilian population has driven some Somalis to support Al-Shabaab out of fear and anger," Prof Menkhaus said.
Most of the thousands of TFG troops trained and armed through US assistance have deserted or defected to Al-Shabaab, he added.
Somalia is home of the largest refugee crisis in the world. Few in America know this because, well, judging by what we send Somalia, few in America care.
Why should we care? After all, we didn't cause it.
Oh wait. As a matter of fact, we DID cause it. The unprovoked military invasion from christian Ethiopia that rolled into Islamic Somalia thus causing the latest crisis was financed and directed by America.
The only thing that Americans know and care about Somalia seems to be the piracy problem. The fact that the islamic rebels are actively fighting the pirates, even while we try to kill the rebels, doesn't seem to affect our sense of logic and morality.
Love that narco-terrorist money
A year ago the Pentagon released a report concluding that "Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state" and beginning to resemble a narco-terrorist state.
It turns out that the reason for Mexico's tragic condition was because American banks were financing the drug trade.
Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers -- including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.
Laundering drug money is a very lucrative business to be in. This also isn't the first time that the banks have been caught with blood-and-cocaine-covered hands.
Every time it happens the banks cut a deal and pay a fine. No jail time. The authorities are after the drug runners, not the banksters.
No big U.S. bank -- Wells Fargo included -- has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.
That may sound insane to you and me, but the banks are merely following the example set by the largest banking regulator in America - the Federal Reserve.
(Bloomberg) -- Last week the New York Federal Reserve made what may go down as the most misguided move in the history of the Federal Reserve system. They laundered money for North Korea.
As far as I can tell, no one suffered any punishment for laundering North Korea's money, so why should anyone at a private bank do jail time?
Supporting international terrorists. Funding child soldiers. Laundering drug money. It doesn't matter if you don't get caught, and even if you do get caught, that doesn't seem to make a difference either.
Why embrace conspiracy theories when the crimes are in the open?
What must the rest of the world think of us?