A confidential trove of Government documents obtained by the Washington Post reveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18 year campaign, making rosy announcements they knew to be false and hiding the unmistakable evidence that the war had been unwinable.
(Behaving like a US colony ,Australia joined the disastrous Afghanistan War like so many other US led wars of intervention that ended in defeat ,untold human suffering and brought terrorism to our shores. John Menadue)
See the Washington Post documents .
John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.
Comments
6 responses to “CRAIG WHITLOCK.-At War with the Truth(Washington Post 9.12.2019)”
Wars used to be fought for the aggrandisement of feudal leaders. Then it was the aggrandisement of corporations like the British East India Company. Their engine was the greed of their shareholders. Today the corporations and their shareholders that profit directly from US aggression form the US deep state. Funding for the deep state comes from all the other greedy, frightened people that need the state to protect and aggrandise their property. Like most crooks, they end up being defrauded.
Because greed is in our genes, it can never be eliminated. But it can be mitigated (by socialism in its various aspects, including science and Christianity) rather than encouraged (by neoliberalism, including intellectual property rights). A culture that encourages greed promotes war and lies. It promotes its own death by drowning in an ocean of lies.
Until the money trail of those who profit in the US from these wars is traced in almost its entirety and prominently broadcast throughout the world these wars will continue. Trillions of dollars have been expended with nary a cent being spent on the country itself with its myriad problems of un and under-employment, homelessness, spiraling debt and out of control medical costs. And people wonder why Trump was elected.
The Democrats are in the pay of those profiteers as are most if not all of the Republicans. If the US had a free media with multiple levels of information gathering and multiple levels of conversation then such an event as I desired above would ultimately occur. However, with only 3 world wide press agencies all subservient to the US Deep State and 5 corporations in the States owning all the main stream media, themselves being tools of the Deep State, then I don’t hold out much hope of such disclosure. However, as Dylan sang, ‘the times they are changing’ and one can only hope for their and our sakes that he is correct.
It gets worse.
Caitlin Johnstone does a sterling job of explaining the total capitulation of the mainstream media to any pretense at being anything but whores for power, Washington Post included.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/12/28/medias-deafening-silence-on-latest-wikileaks-drops-is-its-own-scandal/
Read and weep. Without an informed public, democracy cannot exist.
I will take some pleasure at confronting my ex ADF Liberal federal MP with the question of why we keep creating injured veterans for military campaigns based on nothing but lies. Taking proper care of them would be a lot easier if we did not create them so carelessly.
Regarding your last paragraph Simon, the question you intend to ask of your MP is critically important. I suspect we both know that when you have asked that question, it won’t be long before ‘national security’ gets a mention, either before or after ‘the American alliance’.
In the event you decide to pursue the matter and ask your MP why it is that Australia is not able to operate independently as other countries have done / are doing, once again the response will be the same. If your MP is honest, then the unspoken sentiment would be: “How the hell could Australia ever be truly independent?”
As an ex-Service member, I wish to thank you for the issue raised in your last sentence. It is specially relevant to serving members of the ADF and their families, but also to past members, and in particular those left behind following veteran suicides.
To add to John Menadue’s comment, until Australia gets some decent political members and they develop some courage, then determining an independent foreign policy that is not a dictate from the USA and stops mouthing all the propaganda from the likes of Pompeo and his tribe of Deep Staters, which has been delivered in the past through the lips of a US stooge, now the new Chancellor of the ANU, Julie Bishop, this week replacing a person who was worthy of the position, Gareth Evans.
What a contrast. What an error in judgement, ANU.
Until then, we will remain as we are now, a country to be shunned eventually by our biggest trading partner, China to our serious detriment and also totally unrespected throughout the world as nothing more than a US lapdog since WWII. We have added a level of credibility to the USA with its hegemonic power plays, now nothing more than a power hungry terrorist answering daily to its Zionist puppet-masters.
We can do it but we have to want to see our country become something worthwhile. But in the hands of a non-entity like our current PM, there’s little chance of that.
Thank you Washington Post for obtaining and disclosing these documents.
When will they/we ever learn?
As if the tragedy of Vietnam was not enough. It had to be followed by the longest US war ever, again in someone else’s country.. For what? More and more destruction and inhumanity.