By Joe Conason Truthdig

The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots. They claim to be the deepest believers in our system, the strongest defenders of our Constitution, the most upbeat, bold and courageous Americans anywhere. But now that the government is finally prepared to put the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on trial, these same patriots are the first to spread doubt, instigate anxiety and abandon constitutional principles.

When did fear-mongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?

All credit and copyright for the story goes to Carissa Picard and VCS, so any use or reprint must be approved by the originators.

ROBERT L. HANAFIN
Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired
GS-14, U.S. Civil Service-Retired
Veterans Advocacy Editor
Veterans Today News Network &
Our Troops News Ladder

By Lewis M. Simons USA Today

As President Obama flies from one Asian capital to another, scrambling for economic and diplomatic support, dogged all the while by the nightmare of Afghanistan, he is likely to overlook the solution to America's open-ended war with radical Islamists that is staring him in the face.

That solution lies in Southeast Asia, home of a quarter-billion Muslims. Unlike the retrogressive Afghan tribesmen, the embittered Pakistanis and the furious Arabs of the Middle East — all of whom want Americans out — the Muslims of Southeast Asia are striving to get the United States to reengage after a 34-year-lapse that began when we lost the war in Vietnam.

Gideon Levy, one of the most prominent Israeli journalists working with Ha'aretz speaks to The Real News' Lia Tarachansky about Israel's addiction to the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. He says there are two ways to deal with a drug addict, you can either help them get more drugs, and this may be perceived as care, but it is not friendship. A real friend helps the drug addict get over their addiction. Levy says the Jewish lobby has decided to take the former route, but he is hoping that the United States and the Obama Administration will take the latter. (Click on the Image to View the Video)

By Frank Rich The New York Times

The dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right.

Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone. His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning signs raised by Hasan’s behavior and activities because they are blinded by political correctness toward Muslims, too eager to portray criminals as sympathetic victims of social injustice, and too cowardly to call out evil when it strikes 42 innocents in cold blood.

By Alfred McCoy TomDispatch

In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.

by Jeff Gates, Staff Writer 

When waging war “by way of deception,” the motto of the Israeli Mossad, well-timed crises play a critical agenda-setting role by displacing facts with what a target population can be deceived to believe. Thus the force-multiplier effect when staged crises are reinforced with pre-staged intelligence. In combination, the two often prove persuasive.

That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a “consensus” belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those “facts” proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.

By Judith Miller and David Samuels Los Angeles Times

The U.S. response should be zero tolerance for political cultists who try to achieve their goals through violence.

Both left- and right-wing accounts of the mass murder at Ft. Hood are haunted by the specter of "political correctness."

Faced with a man reportedly yelling "Allahu Akbar!" and mowing down dozens of soldiers on a U.S. military base in Texas, journalists at mainstream news organizations and left-wing bloggers were nearly unanimous in promoting explanations that allowed them to ignore the suspect's religious and political beliefs.

National Security Adviser James Jones says, "Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false." That’s maybe good news. It maybe means Obama is coming to his senses and is ready to pull the plug on this Af-Pak madness.

Various reports indicated that Obama was ready to go along with a re-re-re-escalation of up to 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, but Jones says that’s bun-ola. "[President Obama] has not received final options for his consideration, he has not reviewed those options with his national security team, and he has not made any decisions about resources," says Jones. "Any reports to the contrary are completely untrue and come from uninformed sources." I guess that’s that. Jones isn’t a joke smith, one hears.

As the US and NATO leadership struggle to find a way out of the Afghan quicksand, amid a growing concern caused by the mounting casualties and enhancing strength of Afghan resistance, the US rhetoric seems to be getting focused on the city of Quetta.  

According to US assessment, the city houses the top echelon of the Taliban leadership, the “Quetta Shura” who are not only providing the ideological orientation to the insurgency in Southern Afghanistan but also arranging for the logistical support for the fighters owing allegiance to Mullah Omar. Quetta Shura finds a mention on the assessment forwarded by General Stanley McChrystal to the US Government, duly ‘leaked’ to the Washington Post and now available to all and sundry on the internet.

By Richard Cohen The Washington Post

Between World War I and World War II, Britain fought all across the Islamic world, battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name just two, and usually losing. This caused a fair amount of worry, introspection, angst and the usual commissions to determine why history was being so unkind. What the British discovered was what Pogo could have told them: They had met the enemy and it was them.

By Neil Genzlinger The New York Times

It’s too bad Bob Hope isn’t part of the “Fox NFL Sunday” crew. He might have been able to do something with the odd incongruity of Sunday’s program, broadcast from Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan: a show glorifying fake warriors and their game, playing to a crowd of real warriors locked in an eight-year-old conflict.

You can imagine Hope — always so good at telegraphing that he knew the absurd discordance of bringing Hollywood glamour into a war zone — having a fine time.

By Caroline Alexander The New York Times

Washed onto the shores of his island home, after 10 years’ absence in a foreign war and 10 years of hard travel in foreign lands, Odysseus, literature’s most famous veteran, stares around him: “But now brilliant Odysseus awoke from sleep in his own fatherland, and he did not know it,/having been long away.” Additionally, the goddess Athena has cast an obscuring mist over all the familiar landmarks, making “everything look otherwise/than it was.” “Ah me,” groans Odysseus, “what are the people whose land I have come to this time?”

That sense of dislocation has been shared by veterans returning from the field of war since Homer conjured Odysseus’ inauspicious return some 2,800 years ago. Its vexing power was underscored on Thursday, when a military psychiatrist who had been treating the mental scars of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan went on a shooting rampage at an Army base in Texas.

By Sherwood Ross /Staff Writer

Seven million Americans have been arrested since 1995 on marijuana charges and 41,000 of them are rotting in federal and State prisons---but the public is starting to rebel against “the preposterous war on pot,” two political scientists say. Thousands of other pot users and sellers are confined in local jails as well.

“People convicted of possessing even one ounce of marijuana can face a mandatory minimum sentence of a year in jail, and having even one plant in your yard is a federal felony,” progressive organizer Jim Hightower and co-author Phillip Frazer point out in the November issue of “The Hightower Lowdown.”

• 'Twas Brillig in Bananastan
• Dear Sarah: Keep up the great writing!
• Tomgram: Afghanistan as a Bailout State
• Keeping Afghanistan Safe from Democracy
• Italian court convicts 23 Americans of kidnapping in CIA rendition case

By Barbara Ehrenreich TomDispatch

Optimism as a Public Health Problem

If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for a lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being blamed on "undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration and Big Pharma.

Optimism is supposed to be good for our health. According to the academic "positive psychologists," as well as legions of unlicensed life coaches and inspirational speakers, optimism wards off common illnesses, contributes to recovery from cancer, and extends longevity. To its promoters, optimism is practically a miracle vaccine, so essential that we need to start inoculating Americans with it in the public schools -- in the form of "optimism training."

By Sherwood Ross /Staff Writer

Political activist Noam Chomsky says that although President Obama views the Iraq invasion merely as “a mistake” or “strategic blunder,” it is, in fact, a “major crime” designed to enable America to control the Middle East oil reserves.

“It’s (“strategic blunder”) probably what the German general staff was telling Hitler after Stalingrad,” Chomsky quipped, referring to the big Nazi defeat by the Soviet army in 1943.

By Russ Baker Truthout

The first anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?

By Marty Kaplan The Huffington Post

If you're depressed by the way the national debate about health care has been playing out, just wait until the rubber hits the road on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Israel. If you're enraged by the way Wall Street's rescue has made us hostages to their recklessness, get ready for how the oil and coal industries are going to game the energy and climate change decisions ahead. If you're scared by the way the media can trivialize and polarize and make entertainment out of any topic in its crosshairs, imagine its toxic impact when we get around to dealing with education, immigration and trade.

• Alas Afghanistan
• Cockamamie COIN
• More Schools, Not Troops
• Corey: What Afghanistan (Should) Mean to Us
• What Constitutes Justice For Guantanamo Detainees?

(Editor's note: This op-ed from the NYT is an intriguing look at our situation in Afghanistan. Before we leap into deeper water it might be a good idea to also get the opinions of Alexander and Genghis Khan. Bob Higgins)

Victor Sebestyen The New York Times

THE highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.

By Jeff Huber at-Largely

“I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan.” Matthew Hoh

Foreign Service Officer Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter is a stunning refutation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s proposal to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Hoh, a former Marine officer who fought in Iraq, was a senior civilian official in Zabul Afghanistan.

By Leo Michel and Robert Hunter Los Angeles Times

'There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies," observed Winston Churchill in 1945, "and that is fighting without them." It's a truth worth recalling as the Obama administration nears crucial decisions on Afghanistan.

American commentators often shortchange allied efforts in Afghanistan, ignoring the facts and insulting our friends. The European allies and Canada provide about half of the 73,000 troops in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, and they account for nearly 40% of Western combat deaths since 2001. Estonia, Denmark, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and Latvia have lost more soldiers per capita than has the United States.

Think of us as just having passed through the failed era of "must" in Washington. For almost eight years, George W. Bush made speeches and appearances in which he hectored this or that country, or enemy, or people about what they "must" do. Never, I suspect, has an American president lectured more people out there on their responsibilities to us. Looking back, what's surprising is how few paid much attention. The Iraqis didn't listen, nor did the Afghans, nor the Iranians, nor, it seems, the Pakistanis, nor the Russians, nor the Chinese... and so on. It's been a remarkably ignominious lesson in bluster and bust -- and a reasonable measure of the actual power of a country that, not so many years ago, Washington pundits were happily (and favorably) comparing to the Roman and British empires in its reach and ambition.