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It's the fraud stupid

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I'm just about finished with The Monster by Michael W. Hudson and hope to have the review up on Monday or Tuesday.  The thing we learn from that book is that virtually all of the subprime mortgages that were bundled into securities are fraudulent and that the banks knew that.  In addition we know that the paper work for those mortgages was throughly screwed up by the banks during the securitization process.

Joe Nocera of the New York Times reports this morning that these same banks think they are above 100s of years of property laws.

That’s why most people, myself included, have no sympathy for Bank of America’s legal predicament — and no patience for its “we’re not the bad guys here” arguments. It is absolutely true that the homeowners that Bank of America wants to foreclose on are in default on loans they should never have gotten in the first place. (Gee, whose fault was that?) But it simply does not follow that the bank therefore has an absolute right to take back the home. Under the law, it has to prove it has that right — by filing documents that show that the owner of the mortgage has conveyed that right to it. That’s why this affidavit scandal isn’t some legal nicety. It’s about the single most important value of American jurisprudence: due process.

“Just because the homeowner hasn’t paid his mortgage doesn’t mean anybody in the world can kick him out,” said Katherine Porter, a visiting law professor at Harvard. “The bank has to have the standing to do that.” She added that the bank’s argument was a little like saying that someone who committed a crime shouldn’t receive a trial because he’s so obviously guilty. America just isn’t supposed to work that way.

The banks real problem is that investors are also going after them.

As for the potential lawsuit with BlackRock and the New York Fed, the week before the investors sent the letter to Bank of America, three Countrywide executives, including former C.E.O. Angelo Mozilo, settled charges brought by the S.E.C. that they had engaged in fraudulent conduct. Internal Countrywide e-mail clearly show that they knew how dangerous their lending had become. Once the loans were sold to Wall Street — which, I should note, aggressively pushed the subprime companies to lower their standards — they went through a due diligence process that investors never knew about. Banks took advantage of investors every bit as much as they took advantage of home buyers.

And it would be nice, if just once, they would admit it. Instead, we get Mr. Noski, the chief financial officer, promising that the bank will fight these cases to the death because they’re looking out for shareholders. It’s appalling, really.

Nocera says:

I admit it: I want to see the banks feel some pain. Most people do, I think. Banks did terrible things during the subprime bubble, and they still haven’t paid any real price. I find myself rooting for judges to rule against banks in foreclosure cases. I would love to see these big investors put the serious hurt on Bank of America, which will encourage other investors to pile on. I know this colors my thinking. I can’t help it.

Yet I also know the flip side. If the foreclosure lawyers start winning a lot of cases, if judges halt foreclosures on a widespread basis, if investors start to extract billions upon billions of dollars from the banks — and if banks become seriously weakened as a result — we’ll be right back where we were two years ago. The banks will need to be saved for the good of the economy. The taxpayers will have to come to the rescue. That’s an appalling prospect too.

Banks: We can’t live with them, and we can’t live without them. It stinks, doesn’t it?

Barry Ritholz gets it right:

I disagree. We still have the option of doing what should have been done on the first place: The next time they come to the taxpayers begging for a bailout we go Swedish on them: Pre-packaged bankruptcy, fire management, wipe out shareholders, haircut bondholders, erase all of the outstanding debts and toxic paper.

He ends the article with this bon mot:

Banks: We can’t live with them, and we can’t live without them. It stinks, doesn’t it?

I would rewrite that:

Banks: We don’t have to live with them in their corrupt, incompetent form, but we can’t live without them. So we best clean uo the mess before these bastards cost taxpayers yet another trilliomn dollars . . .

I agree with Barry.

And this:

Prompt Corrective Action

First, it is time to stop the foreclosures until the banks and servicers adopt corrective steps, certified as adequate by FDIC, that will prevent all future foreclosure fraud. They must also adopt plans to remedy the injuries their foreclosure frauds have already caused, and assist the FBI, Department of Justice, and legal ethics officials investigations of their officers' and attorneys' frauds and ethical violations.

Second, it is time to place the financial institutions that committed widespread fraud in receivership. We should remove the senior leadership of the banks and replace them with experienced bankers with a reputation for integrity and competence, i.e., the honest officers that quit or were fired because they refused to engage in fraud. We should prioritize the receiverships to deal with the worst known "control frauds" among the "systemically dangerous institutions" (SDIs). The SDIs' frauds and fraudulent leaders endanger the global economy.

We propose Bank of America for the first receivership. In the last few weeks, the SEC has obtained a large (albeit grossly inadequate) settlement of its civil fraud charges against the former senior leaders of Countrywide. (Bank of America acquired Countrywide and is responsible for its frauds.) Fannie and Freddie's investigations -- with their findings reviewed by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) -- have identified many billions of dollars of fraudulent loans originated by Countrywide that were sold fraudulently to Fannie and Freddie through false representations and warranties. The Fed, BlackRock, and Pimco's investigations have identified many billions of dollars of fraudulent loans provided by Countrywide under false reps and warranties. Ambac's investigation found that 97% of the Countrywide loans reviewed by Ambac were had false reps and warranties. Countrywide also engaged in widespread foreclosure fraud. This is not surprising, for every aspect of Countrywide's nonprime mortgage operations that has been examined by a truly independent body has found widespread fraud -- in loan origination, loan sales, appraisals, and foreclosures. Fraud begets fraud. Lenders that are control frauds create criminogenic environments that produce "echo" epidemics of control fraud in other professions and industries.

It's The Crimes Against Humanity, Stupid!

By Steve Hynd

Despite protestations from the Pentagon, British MoD and some pundits, the simple truth is that the long term negative conseqences for the US of the acts revealed in the new Wikileaks Iraq war document dump far outweigh the negative consequences of the leaks themselves.

The big takeaway from the Wikileaks dump is that the US military not only looked the other way while Iraqis tortured detainees, there was an order to look the other way.

logs record not merely assaults but systematic torture. A man who was detained by Iraqi soldiers in an underground bunker reported that he had been subjected to the notoriously painful strappado position: with his hands tied behind his back, he was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists. The soldiers had then whipped him with plastic piping and used electric drills on him. The log records that the man was treated by US medics; the paperwork was sent through the necessary channels; but yet again, no investigation was required.

This is the impact of Frago 242. A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".

...Hundreds of the leaked war logs reflect the fertile imagination of the torturer faced with the entirely helpless victim – bound, gagged, blindfolded and isolated – who is whipped by men in uniforms using wire cables, metal rods, rubber hoses, wooden stakes, TV antennae, plastic water pipes, engine fan belts or chains. At the torturer's whim, the logs reveal, the victim can be hung by his wrists or by his ankles; knotted up in stress positions; sexually molested or raped; tormented with hot peppers, cigarettes, acid, pliers or boiling water – and always with little fear of retribution since, far more often than not, if the Iraqi official is assaulting an Iraqi civilian, no further investigation will be required.

Most of the victims are young men, but there are also logs which record serious and sexual assaults on women; on young people, including a boy of 16 who was hung from the ceiling and beaten; the old and vulnerable, including a disabled man whose damaged leg was deliberately attacked. The logs identify perpetrators from every corner of the Iraqi security apparatus – soldiers, police officers, prison guards, border enforcement patrols.

There is no question of the coalition forces not knowing that their Iraqi comrades are doing this: the leaked war logs are the internal records of those forces.

There is no question of the allegations all being false. Some clearly are, but most are supported by medical evidence and some involve incidents that were witnessed directly by coalition forces.

The coalition's answer, laid out in Frago 242, is to find justice from the senior officers of the Iraqi security forces. It is to them that the coalition send their reports. But those reports suggest that senior officers frequently are part of the problem.

As the UN's special envoy on torture points out, willfully looking the other way is a crime under international laws to which the US is a signatory - and thus, US federal law.

Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur, said under the conventions on human rights there is an obligation for states to criminalise every form of torture, whether directly or indirectly, and to investigate any allegations of abuse.

Speaking on the BBC's Today programme, Nowak, who has spent years investigating allegations of US participation in extraordinary rendition and the abuse of detainees held by coalition forces, said: "President Obama came to power with a moral agenda, saying: 'We don't want to be seen to be a nation responsible for major human rights violations'."

A failure to investigate credible claims of US forces' complicity in torture, Nowak suggested, would be a failure of the Obama government to recognise US obligations under international law. He said that the principle of "non-refoulement" prohibited states from transferring detainees to other countries that could pose a risk to their personal safety.

The documents, which cover the period in Iraq from 2004 onwards, have prompted claims that this principle has not been observed, according to those who have studied them.

Nowak said the US had an obligation "whenever they expel, extradite or hand over any detainees to the authorities of another state to assess whether or not these individuals are under specific risk of torture. If this assessment is not done, or authorities hand over detainees knowing there is a serious risk of them being subjected to torture, they violate article 3 of the UN convention that precludes torture."

Still, given that the US was doing its own torture during this period - at Gitmo and in secret prisons across the globe - and that Obama has refused to hold the architects and perpetrators of those crimes against humanity accountable, it's no real suprise that the US was also committing crimes by aiding and abetting Iraqi torturers...or that the Obama administration will continue to break the law by looking the other way on all of this.

Frago 242 would have been ordered by General George W. Casey - currently Chief Of Staff of the US Army - as one of his first acts on assuming command of US forces in Iraq, but was continued in force by General David Petraeus when he took over in 2007. Maybe someone could ask Petraeus if there's something similiar to Frago 242 in effect in Afghanistan right now.

That didn't take long

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Just for the hell of it I watched Juan Willaims hosting the Bill O'Reily show tonight.  In one short day he's gone full wingnut - the straight neocon/Republican talking points - and all it cost Murdoch was 2 million dollars.  NPR may have done it badly but they did the right thing.

Update:

This from The Gawker came a little late.

Because, Juan, we now fear—and we wish we didn't, but we do—that you have swallowed the Fox News company line. Which is that you are a hero. A heroic martyr, sacrificed upon the altar of NPR's left-wing liberal correctness. Of course you are smarter than that, Juan, but it's surely difficult to think very clearly when your brand new friends on the right are rushing to your defense and attacking the mean people who just fired you and dumping $2 million in your lap.

Note:

I think Williams knew exactly what he was doing and wanted NPR to fire him.  He's not getting any younger and hasn't done anything of any real merit for 10 or 15 years.  He was surrounded by wealthy pundits on FOX and at this stage of his life wanted some of the action.  The best way to get it was for NPR to fire him and stir up the hornet's nest of the right.  It worked!

Wikileaks Drops 400k Iraq War Documents Into Media's Laps

By Steve Hynd

Thanks to Kat for the heads-up, but you'll be hearing all about all this over the weekend from various pundits and media outlets. The NY Times, Guardian, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel and Le Monde have all been given over 400,000 previously classified US documents from the Iraq war, dwarfing the previous 90,000 document leak on the Afghan war which had been the biggest Pentagon leak ever. The documents cover the period 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009).

Just like with the Afghan document drop, the UK's Guardian has the best coverage. Start here.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

The NYT's coverage starts here. Der Spiegel's is here. Wikileaks here.

On a quick read-through, this new document dump is similiar to the Afghanistan one in that there doesn't seem to be a lot really new in it for those who were paying attention all these years. Iraqis abusing detainees being ignored by the US military, hardly-accidental "collateral" damage killing civilians, Iran supporting those Iraqis it was already paying with weapons and training - none of this is new news except for some detail.

Glenn Greenwald's right that new details offered by some of the documents are "news" in a real sense and i wouldn't want to say that because there's nothing big picture new we should all just ignore these documents and "move along". However, the main effect of dropping all these documents at once and the media coverage that they will engender will still be measured by renewed general political attention and pressure on Iraq, where things still aren't going as rosily as most Americans seem to believe.

Talking About Taliban Talks - Just Psyops?

By Steve Hynd

We've heard an awful lot about talks with Taliban leaders recently. There have been reports, deliberately leaked by the Pentagon, of senior leaders being smuggled into Kabul for talks by the US military. There have been rumors that Pakistan has released Mullah Baradar. There's been a lot of smoke - but now experts and an-named officials are suggesting there's not a lot of fire.

Global Post's Jean MacKenzie writes:

Alex Strick van Linschoten, an expert on the Taliban and co-editor of a recent autobiography of a top Taliban official, Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, is skeptical about all the hype. He calls it a “blunt force PR campaign” released by the U.S. military and certain government officials, hoping to prop up flagging enthusiasm at home for what more and more Americans see as a losing battle.

“Certainly, what's going on is nowhere near as exciting or progress-filled as the media are making it out to be,” he said. “If you dig down deep into the sourcing on a lot of these stories, it's all still rumors and shadow-play.”

Nevertheless, the media blitz has been almost unprecedented: Everyone from The New York Times to U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus has been making mysterious references to promising signs that are evident only to those in the know.

It has all the earmarks of a carefully orchestrated play aimed at creating the illusion of success, something that longtime Afghan watchers have been quick to point out.

“The case is being intentionally overstated,” said Martine van Blijert, a senior researcher with the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a Kabul-based independent think tank, writing in her blog. “[Officials are] suggesting more fire than the smoke warrants, and … feeding the press information about events that are likely to have taken place in the past.”

No one denies that there are meetings between Afghan government officials and the Taliban. They have been taking place for years, with very little result.

The Taliban's senior leadership have consistently denied any involvement in serious talks in their statements too. McClatchy's Jonathan Landay adds more expert opinion:

"This is a psychological operation, plain and simple," said a U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's outreach effort.

"Exaggerating the significance of it (the contacts) is an effort to sow distrust within the insurgency, to make insurgents suspicious with each other and to send them on witch hunts looking for traitors who want to negotiate with the enemy," said the U.S. official. He requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Ali Jalali, a scholar at the National Defense University and a former Afghan interior minister who maintains close contacts with the Afghan government, said he knew of no significant peace negotiations.

"There is a desire (by the Afghan government and its foreign backers) for talks with the Taliban and others, but the situation is not ready for these talks yet," he told McClatchy. "There is a lot of smoke, but no fire."

...U.S. officials and Afghanistan experts said insurgent leaders have no incentive at the moment to engage in serious talks. They pointed out that insurgents still hold sway over large swaths of Afghanistan despite sustaining significant losses in Army Gen. David Petraeus' intensified counterinsurgency drive and stepped-up night raids by U.S. Special Operations Forces.

"We have the impression that all of the commanders that have been taken out have been replaced quite quickly," said Thomas Ruttig of the Afghan Analysts Network, a respected independent policy institute. On a scale of one to 100, Ruttig put progress on peace talks "at somewhere between one and two."

"That (psychological warfare) is exactly what it is," said a former senior U.S. official in touch with the White House. "Petraeus has been upping the attack on the Taliban, and trying to intimidate, and at the same time, reaching out : 'let's talk.'" The former senior official requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing ties with the Obama administration.

If Ruttig and the rest are right - and there are some serious on-the-ground Afghanistan experts quoted above- then it's just a variant on the classic police interrogation ploy: "your pal has already told us everything and is trying to get a plea deal - make it easy on yourself and do the same".

Trouble is, it's not working and in the meantime the psyops ploy is getting in the way of actual real negotiations. Robert Dreyfuss in the Nation quotes experts who say that by excluding those who could really make a deal work - senior Taliban leaders and Pakistan - the psyops ploy is simply paving the way for a new civil war.

Marvin Weinbaum, a former US intelligence official who is now at the Middle East Institute...says that inside Afghanistan the anti-Taliban, non-Pashtun forces in the north and west of the country, including the remnants of the old Northern Alliance (NA) that fought the Taliban in the 1990s, won't easily agree to a deal with the Taliban, either, which is a huge problem for Karzai. Fearing that the Taliban might make a comeback, the Northern Alliance and its allies are rearming, securing weapons from Central Asia and other allies, Weinbaum says, in preparation for a potential civil war. And the ANA, the Afghan army that is being built brick by brick by the United States and NATO, would fragment and fall apart if there's a deal with the Taliban, with many of the ANA troops joining the NA. "If there's a chance that [the Taliban] would return, the army would break up," he says.

Caroline Wadhams, who leads the Afghanistan-Pakistan work at the Center for American Progress, agrees that the non-Pashtun forces in the north are preparing for civil war, if it comes to that. "I've heard about rearming in the north," she told me. "Part of it stems from the fear that if everything collapses, regardless of the peace talks, there'd be a return to civil war." Karzai, she says, is taking a great risk that people in Afghanistan's north and west would oppose the reconciliation with the Taliban that Karzai is trying to bring about. Both Wadhams and Weinbaum said that Karzai was at pains to name people to the High Peace Council (HPC), including former President Rabbani, who could help persuade northerners that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan isn't in the cards. Rabbani's job, says Weinbaum, is "to say to the north 'there's not going to be a deal that you can't subscribe to.' "

There's a problem with the other end of the plan too, killing Taliban commanders in the hope of breaking the insurgency into factions and forcing it into talks. Back to Jean MacKenzie's piece:

“There is not much hope for the moment that talks will yield positive results while the U.S. military is trying to bludgeon the mid-level and senior leadership of the Taliban,” said van Linschoten. “They are removing the people to talk to, fragmenting the insurgency more than it already is, and creating the space for a newer generation of people to move into leadership positions who are much less interested in political compromise.”

So what happens if the ploy doesn't work? The London Conference made it clear that Western leaders - especially those across the pond - expect reconciliation and negotiation to be the main fig leaf that allows an exit that preserves some "face". They've put some major money and a lot of political capital behind the idea - to the point where even Petraeus has said "this is how insurgencies end".

The longer this psyops goes on, promising talks and hinting of breakthroughs, the more it will undermine the alternative narrative that the Taliban have to be pounded into submission by military force first before they will come to the negotiating table. If by July 2011 no senior Taliban have "cracked", then those who have authorized and perpetrated this psyops ploy - basically lying in the hope of making the lie true - are going to be in some deep caca, career-wise. Even the Teflon General might not be able to sidestep the splatter. As for Karzai...

No Mean Feat: Justifying Israel's Nukes Without Acknowledging Them

By Russ Wellen

What's it like to be one of the principal keepers of "The Worst-Kept Secret" (as Israel bomb historian Avner Cohen calls it in his new book)? David Danieli, the deputy director general and head of the policy division of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, was recently interviewed by Yossi Melman for Haaretz. Some background: at this year's General Conference of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the Arab states, along with Iran, sought to pass a resolution calling for Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In the process, Israel would place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards and, oh yeah, finally admit to possession of nuclear weapons. The resolution failed to pass as narrowly as it succeeded in passing last year (though obviously to little effect that time). First, Washington's response. Reuters reports . . .

Washington had urged countries to vote down the symbolically important although non-binding resolution, saying it could derail broader efforts to ban nuclear warheads in the Middle East and also damage fresh Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. "The winner here is the peace process, the winner here is the opportunity to move forward with a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East," said Glyn Davies, the U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). 

With its insinuation that they're less invested in the peace process than the United States and Israel, Davies's gloating is an insult to the Arab states. Worse, its suggestion that all it takes for the Middle East to be a nuclear-weapon-free zone is for the likes of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to hold their heavy water makes him sound delusional. If Davies wants to pretend that Israel has no nuclear-weapons program, fine, but don't expect the Arab states -- or the citizens, if not the governments, of Western states -- to succumb to this mass hallucination.

Neither was Danieli the soul of graciousness when he told Melman: "This was definitely a very important achievement for Israel. . . . This is also an unprecedented decision, in light of the fact that there is an automatic majority against Israel in international organizations. Israel is not blessed with a lot of decisions in the international arena that defeat the bloc of Arab-Muslim states." In other words, it wasn't the peace process and the nuclear-free weapons zone in the Middle East to which he was referring, just sheer victory over the Arab states.

In fairness to Israel, it must be pointed out that when it comes to this, he has a case: "One of our more convincing arguments was asking why Israel should be singled out when the IAEA has never passed a resolution against any other country that is not a signatory to the treaty, such as Pakistan and India."

As for Israel joining the NPT . . .

Israel does not see fit to join the treaty as long as the current conditions in this region remain in place. . . . There are other weapons of mass destruction here -- chemical and biological [as well as] terrorist organizations that get aid from terror-supporting states like Iran and Syria [and] have tens of thousands of rockets aimed at Israel.

See what Danieli is saying here? Because of extenuating circumstances, Israel needs its nuclear weapons. But in the next breath he says: "Israel has a clear and responsible nuclear policy, and it has frequently reiterated that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East."

As you can see David Danieli has a thankless job trying to juggle Israel's nuclear lies. Unless his audience has undergone mass hypnosis, there's no way he can keep all those balls in the air.

First posted at the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.

Honorable Mention Tweet

Caught and Enshrined by John Ballard. Best commentary on the defenestration of Juan Williams by NPR.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
what oft was thought,
but never so well expressed.
---Alexander Pope

In a compelling symbolic gesture, Mr. Williams refused to accept a two million dollar contract offered him by Fox news network, stating in no uncertain terms that his journalistic integrity is not for sale.

Both Sides Of His Mouth II

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Below I suggested that Juan Williams latest remarks on FOX were just the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and that he had a habit of talking out of both sides of his mouth.  It would appear I may have been right on both counts.

Dana Davis Rehm, NPR’s senior vice president for communications, said in an interview that Williams’ comments violated internal ethics policies that prohibit NPR journalists from going on other media and expressing “views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist.” The guidelines also prohibit NPR journalists from participating in programs “that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis.”

Rehm said Williams had been warned several times in the past about making personal comments that violated the policy.

“This wasn’t the first time where we felt Juan crossed the line in terms of what’s permitted for NPR analysts and journalists as a whole,” she said. “We felt we really didn’t have an alternative. And it was not without regret, and it was not a decision that was made lightly by any means. We do appreciate the work he has done.”

It would appear that simply going on a show like Hannity or O'Riley violated NPR guidelines and he had been warned on numerous occasions.  But don't cry for Juan, he got what he wanted:

Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary, the Tribune Washington Bureau has learned. The Fox News contributor will now appear exclusively and more frequently on the cable news network and have a regular column on FoxNews.com.

NPR had been under a lot of pressure to dump Williams from it's listeners and that's where most of their money comes from. 

The New York Times Hypes the Afghanistan War, Again

By Derrick Crowe

The New York Times just published a story under the headline, "Coalition Forces Routing Taliban in Key Afghan Region" that could not include more Pentagon talking points if it were written by General David Petraeus himself. In both the broad outline of the story and in the particulars, the Times conveys a deceptive picture of the state of the conflict and obscures the continued deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan. The available facts simply do not support the assertion that U.S. and coalition forces are "making 'deliberate progress' and have seized the initiative from the insurgents."

The gist of Carlotta Gall's article is that U.S. operations in Kandahar are shattering the Taliban as the U.S. strategy there begins to bear fruit. Though the article is heavy on talking points from NATO spokespeople and anecdotes from troops, we are given only one concrete measure of "progress" in this article:

"Lt. Col. Rodger Lemons, commanding Task Force 1-66 in Arghandab, said he had seen insurgent attacks drop from 50 a week in August to 15 a week two months later. That may be because of the onset of colder weather, when fighting tends to drop off, but Colonel Lemons said he felt the Taliban was losing heart."

But here's the problem: According to the Afghan NGO Safety Office (.pdf), armed opposition group attacks all across Afghanistan increased between August and late September.

And, in Kandahar City, the insurgent attack rate continues to follow a general upward trend:

"The daily attack rate [in Kandahar] has grown from 0.1 in Week one to 2.8 per day by Week 35 suggesting that the elements of OP HAMKARI undertaken so far are not degrading the AOG ability to conduct attacks. Field reports suggest that the Taliban retain up to 4,000 fighters inside the city and continue a wide- spread campaign of intimidation, targeted assassination and the widespread deployment of IEDs against Police and Military targets."

Further, the area continues to become more hostile for civilians. The International Committee of the Red Cross says that the number of war-related injuries being treated at local hospitals is spiking.

Someone please explain the progress to me again. I can't find it.

This gem from Gall's article is particularly rich, emphasis mine:

Unlike the Marja operation, they say, the one in Kandahar is a comprehensive civil and military effort that is changing the public mood as well as improving security.

That sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? Why, it's almost like this is exactly how U.S. officials described the Marja operation at the time. Here's one General David Petraeus, interviewed back in February:

"But Petraeus sought to put the [Marjah] offensive in a larger context, saying that it's "just the initial operation of what will be a 12- to 18-month campaign."

"We've spent the last year getting the inputs right in Afghanistan, getting the structures and organizations necessary for a comprehensive civil-military campaign," he said.

You can find this language about Marjah from Petraeus, General McChrystal, and others in countless other places, including this transcript of Petraeus' remarks from April and again in the Senate Democratic Policy Committee talking points, "Progress Toward Turning the Tide in Afghanistan." Yet, somehow, Gall and the rest of the media seem to just give the Pentagon a free pass to keep dredging up the same tired talking points without questioning their reemergence. She relays to the reader that Kandahar will be different than Marjah because it will be a "comprehensive civil and military effort," without providing the reader context that this is exactly the same language that the military was using to sell the Marjah operation.

Throughout the article, Gall practically drools over a "new" rocket system employed in Kandahar, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), and uncritically passes along General Nick Carter's praise for this weapon:

"Yet residents say that the Taliban have been stunned by fast-paced raids on their leaders and bases. In particular they talk with awe of a powerful new rocket that has been fired from the Kandahar air base into Panjwai and other areas for the last two or three weeks, hitting Taliban compounds with remarkable accuracy.

"In an interview, General Carter said the weapon the Afghans saw was most likely the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, a relatively new multiple rocket system. "They are extraordinarily precise; they are accurate to a meter," he said."

The article lacks any mention of the last time the HIMARS made the news, back in February, when U.S. forces in Marjah killed a slew of civilians with it, after which the HIMARS was briefly suspended from use in the country . From ISAF's own statement on the incident:

"Two rockets from a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launched at insurgents firing upon Afghan and ISAF forces impacted approximately 300 meters off their intended target, killing 12 civilians in Nad Ali district, Helmand Province today."

Let's just ignore the fact that these "new rockets" with "remarkable accuracy" have been in the field for years and were the munitions involved in highly publicized civilian casualty events...those rockets are just bad ass, aren't they? I mean, it "curls and turns in the air as it zooms in on its target"! AMAZING! The war is over!

This is the problem with the obsession with "precision" weapons: they are frequently imprecise, and they are only as good as the judgment of the wielder. That's why the first 50 "precision" strikes of the Iraq War all failed to hit their intended targets. So pardon the pun, but it's particularly galling that the Times would pass along this bit of merchandising for the war industry without doing so much as a Wikipedia search to just see if maybe General Carter is blowing smoke in your face.

This latest burst of war propaganda is depressingly transparent, and it insults the intelligence of the American people, most of whom see past the smoke screen and oppose the war. We know that the war in Afghanistan isn't making us safer, and it's not worth the cost. It's imperative that we end this conflict now, before it corrodes our national interest further. Doing so would be much, much easier if the media in this country would do their job and question authority, rather than uncritically passing along easily disproved spin from their handlers in Afghanistan.

If you're tired of the Pentagon spin and ready to see this brutal, futile war end, join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter.

Massaging The Messaging On Afghan "Progress"

By Steve Hynd

As a follow-up to my post earlier today about the US military's deliberate spin of a quagmire as "deliberate progress", it's worth reading this report by Ben Gilbert of Global Post:

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan – A major military operation involving hundreds of American troops, U.S. Special Forces and heavy bombers dropping 2,000-pound bombs on Taliban command and control centers wrapped up last week, concluding a critical phase in the campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province.

But no journalists were there to witness the operation.

U.S. military officials told journalists who had arrived to Kandahar Airfield for embeds in the Arghandab district between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15 that logistical problems had caused their embeds to be cancelled.

Maj. Randy Taylor, head of the Media Support Center at Kandahar Airfield, said the cancelled embeds were not an attempt by the military to limit media coverage of the war in the Arghandab district, long advertised by the U.S. military as one of three key objectives of this summer and fall's campaign in Kandahar province.

The New York Times, Agence France Presse, the military’s independent “Stars and Stripes” newspaper, Swedish Radio and several other freelance photographers and reporters were among the embeds canceled or changed just hours or moments before they were scheduled to join U.S. military units in Arghandab district.

And this from Joshua Foust writing at CJR:

Away from the military’s spin machine, reality is nothing so upbeat. Two weeks ago Michael Cohen noted in The New Republic that the military is, literally, the only group inside or outside of Afghanistan that sees hope and progress in the war. Everyone else—he spoke to NGO workers, election monitors, and longtime residents and analysts—sees nothing but “pervasive gloom” when it comes to Afghanistan’s future.

This disconnect between military spin and ground reality is not only dangerous, it is insulting: Americans can handle the truth about the war their government is fighting. Whitewashing the real challenges and problems we face can only make us worse off: it will make our eventual withdrawal more humiliating and surprising, and it will create a need in the public to know what went wrong. What went wrong, however, is years of consistent political and policy failures, on the part of four military commands, two administrations, and the entire civilian foreign policy community. A surprise “defeat,” which can result from such odious spin, will lead not to a sober reconsideration of how to avoid such a catastrophe in the future, but a witch hunt instead. The military should be more responsible in how it handles its public images. And much more importantly, the media—print and TV alike—should quit meekly reprinting whatever briefing they’re given on their embeds.

Take all reports of progress which read like ISAF press releases with a massive pinch of salt.