President Trump's Disgraceful Peace Deal with the Taliban (TIME 2020)
Here’s the back story with all the context.
President Trump's Disgraceful Peace Deal with the Taliban
BY DAVID FRENCH
Time, MARCH 3, 2020
Excerpt…
If you read the peace agreement itself, you’ll note immediately that it gives the Taliban a series of concrete, measurable gifts. First, there’s an immediate allied withdrawal – down to 8,600 American troops (and proportionate numbers of allied troops) within 135 days. The remainder of American and allied forces will leave within 14 months.
At the same time, the United States will immediately and substantially reinforce the Taliban by seeking the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners by March 20. Even worse, the United States further agreed to a goal of “releasing all remaining prisoners over the course of the subsequent three months.” It will do this at the same time that it commits to the “goal” of removing sanctions from members of the Taliban that include travel bans, asset freezes, and an arms embargo.
The combination of the planned American retreat and the planned prisoner release would represent a substantial change in the balance of forces in Afghanistan. This would come without any agreement by the Taliban to cease hostilities against our allies.
At this point, the deal looks worse than a simple withdrawal. America can leave all on its own without also agreeing to seek the release of Taliban prisoners. It can leave all on its own without promising to ease sanctions. So why agree to the additional concessions?
America is making these concrete concessions in exchange for unenforceable promises from an untrustworthy enemy. The Taliban promise that they will not allow its members or members of al-Qaeda to use Afghan soil to threaten American national security. The promise to “send a clear message” that those who threaten the United States “have no place in Afghanistan.” Yet the agreement released to the public provides no verification or enforcement provisions for these assurances, and once America is out of Afghanistan, our ability to enforce those promises absent a new, substantial military buildup will be limited to nonexistent.
Continues…
https://time.com/5794643/trumps-disgraceful-peace-deal-taliban/
Now Trump’s deal is obvious for what it is: exactly like Trump, a disgrace.
= new reply since forum marked as read
It was all for Pootie.
The Fake News in 1990 That Propelled the US into the First Gulf War
Jack Xiong
Citizen Truth, May 7, 2018
The 2016 election was the year of fake news, but fake news is not such a new problem in our country. We take a look back at the congressional testimony of a young Kuwaiti girl in 1990, testimony which propelled the U.S. into the First Gulf War but later proved to be based on a lie.
In October 1990, a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl gave a harrowing testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, recounting inhumane atrocities committed by Iraqi soldiers in her country. It was credited for helping draw the U.S. into the Gulf War later that year. Her claims were ultimately refuted by evidence to the contrary, exposing deceptive motives and sources behind the ploy.
Known as “Nayirah”, the girl told the caucus that Iraqi soldiers had removed scores of babies from incubators and left them to die. Her story was originally corroborated by Amnesty International and other evacuees of Kuwait at the time.
“Public relations” or “fake news”?
According to the New York Times in 1992, the girl’s testimony was actually orchestrated by the big public relations firm Hill & Knowlton on behalf of a client, the Kuwaiti-sponsored Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The client’s aim was to secure military support from the U.S. through raising awareness about the dangers posed to Kuwait by Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.
The girl who gave the testimony was also revealed to be not just an ordinary civilian but the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S.
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https://citizentruth.org/fake-news-1990-that-ignited-gulf-war-sympathy/
Gold makes people do crazy stuff, including propagandists lying America into wars without end. Oil is black gold.
Besides the people who sold them?
October Surprise: Finally, Time for the Truth
By Robert Parry
Jamshid Hashemi looked wearier than he did seven years earlier, his complexion was waxier, befitting a man with a serious heart condition. The U.S.-Iranian arms merchant/businessman also was in more legal hot water from his work with an American company which collapsed in an allegedly fraudulent stock scheme.
But Jamshid Hashemi's account of the political intrigue that surrounded the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis -- plotting that allegedly undercut President Carter's negotiations to free 52 Americans and ensured Ronald Reagan's election -- has changed little over the years. In that way, Jamshid Hashemi remains potentially one of the most important witnesses to the unsavory acts that may have launched the Reagan-Bush era.
Jamshid Hashemi still claims that in the summer of 1980, he and his brother, Cyrus, participated in secret meetings involving William J. Casey and Iranian intermediaries representing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In a recent interview with The Consortium, Jamshid Hashemi repeated his account that meetings in Madrid, Spain, in late July and then in August, 1980, resulted in an agreement to release the 52 American hostages only after Reagan took office. In exchange, the radical Iranian government got commitments for secret shipments of U.S. military supplies.
"I thought it was my duty that the people in the United States should know," Hashemi told me during an afternoon-long interview at a hotel near Heathrow Airport outside of London. "They should know, they should be the judge of it."
Though Hashemi sat through the lengthy interview with the same gentlemanly style that I encountered when I first met him in 1990, he did flash with anger when he discussed the House inquiry that examined the October Surprise controversy in 1992 and issued a report in January 1993 clearing the Republicans.
"Rubbish, that's what I think," steamed Hashemi. "Just a whitewash of the whole situation. It's a cover-up."
Hashemi argued that it made no sense for him to have invented his October Surprise account which he repeated under oath to Congress in 1992. He had nothing to gain by making the public charges -- and a great deal to lose, he said. "Who has ever paid me a single dime?" he asked. "I had to pay all my lawyer's fees. What did I gain here?"
Hashemi blamed the cover-up primarily on the attack strategy of Republican lawyers on the task force, particularly Richard Leon, who was the senior GOP investigator, a role similar to Leon's post on the 1987 House Iran-Contra investigation, in which the Republicans issued a minority report clearing Reagan and his subordinates of all wrongdoing in that scandal, too. Hashemi said Leon, rather than task force chief counsel Lawrence Barcella, appeared to be running the October Surprise investigation.
CONTINUED...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile9.html
Poppy Bush? Now there was a player.
George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: [font size="5"][font color="green"]As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.[/font color][/font size]
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
SNIP...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified. The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
Bob Gates was young then.