by Stephen Lendman

Ahead of his address to the nation on December 1, The New York Times broke the news in an Eric Schmitt article titled, "Obama Issues Order for More Troops in Afghanistan," saying:

During a late November 29 Oval Office meeting with top Pentagon brass, "Obama issued orders to send about 30,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan (over the next six months in) what may be one of the most defining decisions of his presidency." Compounding months of public betrayal, it's perhaps another outrage that will make him a one-term president, the way Vietnam ended Lyndon Johnson's hope for a second term.

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Re-reporting, excerpting, editing with comment by Carolyn Bennett

Brain drain, blood drain - we've got both Choose to believe what is believable on the evidence

In Reinventing Collapse, Dmitry Orlov says the old Soviet Union - you will remember the Soviets took their turn in Afghanistan before the Americans - "operated a huge military and political empire but, paradoxically, failed to derive any economic benefit from it, running the entire enterprise at a net loss."

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By Kevin Zeese

If I ever get cancer, I want Barack Obama to tell me I’m dying. He could probably convince someone like me who does not believe in the supernatural that death is life.

He certainly did his best on Tuesday night to convince the American public that war means peace, and escalation means withdrawal.

President Obama is not President Bush. He is a much more effective and eloquent advocate for American militarism who makes his case in ways that will challenge people who oppose war. He does not seek to merely energize his base, as President Bush did, but more to nullify and confuse it, something he is not only doing on war but on health care, banking, climate change . . . seemingly every issue he touches.

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BY GILAD ATZMON

German State Prosecutors Hans-Joachim Lutz announced yesterday that Mr John Demjanjuk, 89, is accused of being an ‘accessory’ of the death of 27,900 Jews.

Many of us may not understand what the legal notion of ‘accessory’ stands for. An ‘accessory’ is a person who assists in the commission of a crime, but who does not actually participate in the commission of the crime as a joint principal.

Bearing that in mind. I wonder what Demjanjuk’s court case is there to serve?

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Salim Nazzal

By terminology I mean roughly the semantic or the concepts which are mental representation or abstract ideas produced to explain things. My point is to unearth some of the Zionist terminology used in the Zionist propaganda which has sadly dominated the western media for decades and brainwashed millions in Europe and the USA.

The function of these terminologies is to legitimize the Zionist policy of occupation and to conceal the truth especially for the western opinion.

In Arabic language there is a semantic link between darkness and tyranny and absenting the truth. The word ”Dhallam” stands for darkness, the term “Dhulm” means oppression, if Darkness can be explained in the absence of light, and consequently the absence of truth, oppression is a form of concealing the truth. The problem of the Zionist thinking as in all racist ideologies is that it claims to own the absolute truth. Claiming to own the absolute truth is as the Syrian poet Adonis says is the source of all oppression in history.

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BY GILAD ATZMON

Hasbara author (1) David Aaronovitch is pretty much unstoppable. The man who together with the Jewish Chronicle writer Nick Cohen encouraged the war in Iraq, is now warning us about the evolving Iranian bomb. “Wake up”, he urges us in The Times, “this threat is too big to ignore”. As if more than one million Iraqis killed in a war he advocated were not enough, the enthusiastic Hasbara author has a new conflict to propel.

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By Gaither Stewart

Two cars are ahead of me heading toward the row of a dozen or so trash bins serving my residential area. The bins are strangely empty today. The entire trash zone just opposite the fashionable tennis club that usually looks like Naples seems suspiciously clean. Almost inviting. The huge black Suv ahead of me turns the corner, slows, the darkened passenger window descends and out shoots a plastic bag of garbage which smacks down on the pavement and splits open at the feet of a bin labeled BOTTLES AND METAL OBJECTS. The Toyota accelerates and vanishes.

The car just ahead of me then stops in the middle of street, the driver gets out leaving the car door wide open, totally blocking my passage. so that I and now two cars behind me have to wait “Get the fuck out of the way,” someone yells from the window of the car behind me.

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Asif Haroon Raja

India-US-UK-Israel nexus is hand-in-glove and conspiring to harm Pakistan. Pakistan has been profusely bled by the nexus based in Kabul for the last eight years but they call themselves as friends of Pakistan. Our leaders reciprocate their sentiments and go out of the way to please them. There has been no change in this policy of appeasement despite having collected irrefutable proof of involvement of RAW in all our troubled spots. Once the Army unearthed huge caches of Indian origin weaponry and literature from Swat and South Waziristan Agency (SWA) during Rah-e-Rast and Rah-e-Nijat Operations, our rulers after naming RAW reluctantly became tight lipped. Despite causing immeasurable harm to Pakistan, the Indo-western media continue to churn out vicious stories blaming Pakistan for the sins committed by the said nexus. The US media in particular spread gloom and doom and apart from overplaying the existential threat posed by religious extremists, it comes out with never ending sensational tales ranging from Taliban stealing our nukes to their taking over power. The two premier institutions of Pakistan, the army and ISI, responsible for safeguarding security interests of the country are demonized and maligned. After the US weird allegation that Mullah Omar led Shura was based in Quetta and then shifting it to Karachi, Gordon Brown, the poodle of USA has reconfirmed Hillary Clinton’s bizarre claim that Osama bin Laden is in FATA. Such harebrained chronicles are dished out off and on to keep Pakistan on the leash.

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Mary Shaw

It sounds as though President Obama plans to keep us in Afghanistan through most, if not all, of his first term. Is he gambling with his own political future even as he is gambling with our tax dollars and -- more importantly -- our soldiers' lives?

In his December 1st address to the nation from the West Point Military Academy, Obama shared his plans to send additional troops to Afghanistan for at least a year and a half, and then maybe start bringing some of them home.

All this so we can continue to prop up and defend the corrupt Karzai government, and train the Afghan security forces to do their job, even though those same Afghan security forces have refused to step up to the job over the past eight years. Duh.

And what will this cost us? Our military presence in Afghanistan has cost us almost $233 billion and the lives of almost 1,000 U.S. troops so far.

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Russia ’s terrorist train chugs on

Eric Walberg

The worst terrorist attack to hit Russia in five years, the bombing of the Nevsky Express train last week, was almost certainly by Islamist extremists, and security forces are just not prepared for these less spectacular acts of terrorism, Russian security experts say.

The cause of the crash was identified as a homemade bomb that exploded on the tracks between Moscow and St Petersburg, killing 26, wounding scores and raising fears of a new era of terrorism in Russia. At the attack site, 320km northwest of Moscow, investigators found remnants of the bomb, equivalent to 15 pounds of TNT, that left a crater 1.5m deep. The bomb was apparently planted on the tracks and detonated while the second half of the train was passing. A second, less powerful explosive went off later at the site of the crash.

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