Roundup & Recap
Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films is calling on Gen. Stanley McChrystal to resign and the producer-activist has launched a petition drive, saying that his comments reported in Rolling Stone have “undermined the Office of the President of the United States.”
General McChrystal is Summoned to Washington
It’s now Tuesday, so the weirdness that was Monday has passed. Or so we thought!
I awoke this morning to the same headlines as everyone else: The Runaway General. That’s the name of the incredible new piece in Rolling Stone with the subtitle, “Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.” Yikes!
So, obviously, no shortage of things to talk about today!
We’ll begin the show with Christina Bellantoni, senior reporter for Talking Points Memo, who’s written at least four stories about that story today.
And we’ll wrap things up with an in-depth look at McChrystal– going back to his plan for covering up the real cause of Pat Tillman’s death, the leaking of his plan during last year’s policy review, and more – with Derrick Crowe of Brave New Films and Rethink Afghanistan. Brave New Films has launched a petition on facebook calling on McChrystal to resign. Sign on and pass it along!
The people at BP must be thanking God for Stanley McChrystal today. But while we’re preoccupied with insubordination, the oil keeps spewing from the ocean floor into the Gulf of Mexico. I came across an interesting piece today on BuzzFlash, written by Nikolas Kozloff (author of No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet) entitled “BP Oil Catastrophe Unleashes a Hidden Toxic Killer of Life and Climate: Methane.” He’ll also join in for a quick explanation of this “800 pound gorilla” in the gulf.
Kucinich: ‘We may be funding our own killers in Afghanistan’
By Sahil Kapur at The Raw Story
On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies “are using American money to bribe the Taliban” to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a “series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents,” the Times said.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading opponent of the war, wondered, “Is the U.S. paying for attacks on U.S. troops?”
“Our troops are dying in Afghanistan, and now it turns out we may be funding their killers,” Kucinich said in a statement e-mailed to Raw Story, renewing his longstanding call for a pullout. “Our continued presence in Afghanistan is detrimental to our security.”
“The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops,” he said.
Kucinich’s motion in March to implement a swift withdrawal of US troops from the region failed by a margin of 365-65 in the House.
“In the coming weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to give another $33 billion for war efforts… I will be bringing this report to the personal attention of individual Members of Congress prior to the vote on any additional war funding,” the Ohio congressman said.
The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who “believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.”
A White House spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Robert Greenwald, an ardent war critic and director of the 2009 documentary “Rethink Afghanistan,” viewed the Times story as vindication for his message.
“Supporting a corrupt elite in a civil war does nothing to make us safer, costs the United States billions of dollars, and it’s not working,” Greenwald told Raw Story.
It “confirms what we have heard numerous times from our friends, co workers and producers in Afghanistan. The United States is effectively funding both sides of the war all too often,” he said.
The administration and large bipartisan majorities in Congress continue to support and fund 8-year-long military operations in Afghanistan, warning that a pullout could lead to a Taliban takeover and greater threats to American interests.
Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters Monday that the US, Japan, Britain and other countries have “committed” roughly “200 million dollars” to fund peace efforts in Afghanistan, Agence-France Presse reports. The Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program aims to reintegrate Taliban fighters who have renounced violence into Afghan society.
Brave New Films Takes On Fiorina
Brave New Films, the documentary film company behind a series of damaging anti-McCain viral videos in the 2008 presidential campaign, has put its sights on Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for Senate in California.
In the latest of three videos attacking Ms. Fiorina that the company has released since July, several former Hewlett-Packard employees who say they were laid off during Ms. Fiorina’s tenure as chief executive of the company describe her as ruthless and extravagant.
The video, which asserts that the workers are among 30,000 whose jobs were shipped overseas when she ran the company, comes as dozens of candidates in both parties run campaign advertisements criticizing their opponents for supporting policies that encourage outsourcing American jobs.
A spokeswoman from Ms. Fiorina’s campaign said the company had a history of distorting the facts. ”This group has consistently made misleading videos,” Andrea Saul, the spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
Indeed, the group’s first film linking Ms. Fiorina to the The Tea Party splices footage of Ms. Fiorina addressing a Tea Party crowd with shots of angry Tea Partiers calling President Obama a communist at a rally that her spokeswoman said Ms. Fiorina did not even attend.
Afghanistan Reaches New Milestone: Now The Longest Military Action In US History
By Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars
Three months after 9/11, every major Taliban city in Afghanistan had fallen — first Mazar-i-Sharif, then Kabul, finally Kandahar. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were on the run. It looked as if the war was over, and the Americans and their Afghan allies had won.
Butch Ivie, then a school administrator in Winfield, Ala., remembers, “We thought we’d soon have it tied up in a neat little bag.”
But bin Laden and Omar eluded capture. The Taliban regrouped. Today, Kandahar again is up for grabs. And soon, Afghanistan will pass Vietnam as America’s longest war.
The Vietnam War’s length can be measured in many ways. The formal beginning of U.S. involvement often is dated to Aug. 7, 1964, when Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving the president a virtual carte blanche to wage war. By the time the last U.S. ground combat troops were withdrawn in March 1973, the war had lasted 103 months.
U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001. On June 7, the war will complete its 104th month. President Obama on Thursday reaffirmed his commitment to the war, saying “it is absolutely critical that we dismantle that network of extremists that are willing to attack us.”
This longest war is far from America’s bloodiest. It has drifted in and out of focus and, for much of its life, been obscured by another war, in Iraq.
I guess we should be grateful for small favors in that relative to other battles, there’s been less loss of life, although I’d say it’s still 1,800 lives too many.
Former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke on This Week last week to say that even with the troop increase in Afghanistan, “victory” (however you define that) ultimately was in the hands of the Afghans.
If that’s the case, one has to ask why the hell we need to be there for anyway.
BraveNewFilm’s ReThink Afghanistan is fundraising to purchase an ad in the Politico (because you know they all read it) asking Congress and the President to pull the troops by December 2011. If you’re able, please consider donating to inject some sense into this debate.
Robert Greenwald Challenges JFK Actors Kinnear, Holmes to Vet Script
Left-wing documentary firebrand Robert Greenwald Thursday challenged actors Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes — who were cast this week to play John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie in a History Channel miniseries about the Kennedys — to “insist on a historically accurate and politically unbiased script.”
In February, Greenwald corralled a group of prominent historians including former Kennedy advisor Ted Sorenson who in a video took objection to the script, calling it a politically motivated “character assassination.”
The eight-hour miniseries is being produced by Joel Surnow, the executive producer of the hit action-torture series “24″ and an outspoken political conservative.
The miniseries is scheduled to air in 2011 and marks the channel’s first foray into scripted drama. It is also in keeping with the network’s move to broaden its audience and attract younger viewers — a decision that seemed to pay off earlier this week when the channel recorded its biggest ever ratings for Sunday’s premiere of “America: The Story of Us.”
At the time of the February broadside, the channel defended the project, saying the historians had seen an early draft and that History’s standards for historical accuracy “are more rigorous than the broadcast networks.”
With the high-profile casting of Kinnear and Holmes this week to play the lead characters, Greenwald again went on the offensive.