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| Brown University's Costs of War Project released a new report Monday detailing post-9/11 spending by the Pentagon. The study found that of the over $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since the start of the war in Afghanistan, one-third to one-half went to private military contractors.
The report, authored by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, said $4.4 trillion of the total spending went towards weapons procurement and research and development, a category that directly benefits corporate military contractors. Private contractors are also paid through other funds, like operations and maintenance, but those numbers are harder to determine.
Out of the $4.4 trillion, the top five US weapons makers -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman -- received $2.2 trillion, almost half. To put these huge numbers into perspective, the report pointed out that in the 2020 fiscal year, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, compared to the combined $44 billion budget for the State Department and USAID that same year. |
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| Washington's reputation as an effective imperial power experienced another humiliating setback in August with the implosion of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. The sight of helicopters urgently ferrying American diplomats from the embassy to the Hamid Karzai International Airport (named after an earlier U.S. Afghan puppet) was all too reminiscent of the chaos in Saigon when Washingtons client regime collapsed in April 1975. So, too, was the emotionally wrenching scene at that airport when desperate Afghans clung to the fuselage of a departing evacuation aircraft.
The Biden administration could be heading for a similar foreign policy and public relations fiasco in Iraq. As with the Vietnam and Afghanistan missions, multiple presidential administrations not only approved a prolonged, ill-conceived military intervention with US troops, they staked the success of the Iraq mission on supporting a "democratic" government. And as in the cases of Vietnam, the client regime in Baghdad is not especially democratic, and even worse, it exhibits multiple signs of corruption and incompetence. Indeed, US leaders exhibit contempt for that government far more often than even perfunctory respect. |
| Shortly before 9/11 the National Security Agency (NSA) asked Thomas Drake to join its senior staff. As things turned out, Sept. 11 was his first day on the job. Already au courant with key NSA programs via his earlier contract work, Tom was immediately tasked to find out how much information NSA had on terrorist attacks before 9/11.
Drake found an embarrassing abundance of such information. But when he told top NSA management, his investigation was abruptly shut down. On Jan. 7, 2014 in a VIPS Memorandum prepared for President Obama, "NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong."
Drake wrote: "Make no mistake. That data [collected and analyzed by NSA] could have, should have prevented 9/11." |
| | Overnight, Israeli warplanes were reported to have attacked the Gaza Strip, intending to hit military targets belonging to Hamas. The reports out of the strip suggest no real damage or casualties on the military targets.
That doesn't mean Israel did nothing, however, as videos and photos emerged from the area around Rafah to show that Israel attacked and destroyed three poultry farms. The video showed the sites, which were being restored after the most recent war, were attacked again. |
| The August 29 U.S. drone strike in Kabul that killed ten civilians, including seven children, demonstrates the bankruptcy of the war on terror. Like many other drone strikes, the strike in Kabul targeted innocent people and achieved nothing except to blow up civilians that had the misfortune to be in the vicinity. According to two recent investigative reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the vehicle targeted in the strike carried no explosives, and the cars driver was Zemari Ahmadi, an aid worker who had spent the day delivering water to those in need. Hailed as a "righteous strike" by Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Kabul drone strike was an atrocity that should never have happened. The Biden administration has emphasized that the US possesses "over the horizon" capabilities to continue waging war in Afghanistan even after the withdrawal of US forces from the country, but the August 29 strike shows why the US should not be using them. |
| Afghanistan's acting foreign minister held his first news conference on Tuesday and reiterated a pledge from the Taliban that the new government would not allow militants inside Afghanistan to attack other countries. "We will not allow anyone or any groups to use our soil against any other countries, said Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, a member of the Taliban since the 1990s.
Since the US withdrawal, Western media has been full of stories conflating the Taliban with al-Qaeda and warning that al-Qaeda will gain a foothold in Afghanistan. But the Taliban have a clear interest in not giving the US another pretext to invade Afghanistan.
The narrative that the Taliban will provide a "safe haven" to al-Qaeda ignores the fact that the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to the Bush administration multiple times in 2001. Even before the September 11th attacks, the Taliban offered the US to put bin Laden on trial. |
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