Fool’s Errand

Every American should read this book. It documents (and I mean documents – there are probably close to a thousand links to original source documents) the incredible disaster that the US war in Afghanistan is.

Just a handful of damning facts:

• The US had Bin Laden pinned down at Tora Bora in late 2002 and easily could have killed him, but they deliberately let him go so they would have a reason to stay on.
• Even on Sept. 12, 2001, Rumsfield said “this is not about Bin Laden”, and rolled out the famous plan to destroy seven countries in the Mid East.
• Bin Laden was delighted when the US invaded Afghanistan. His entire plan was to pull the US into an overreaction and bog us down. The idea was that our presence there would be enormously expensive, would generate huge amounts of resentment in the MidEast (leading to more terrorism), and would destroy American civil society. I think we can pretty well say that Bin Laden won.

The author’s encyclopedic knowledge on the subject is nothing short of impressive. It seems that every relevant piece of information in the public domain is gathered in this book.

One of my favorite parts were the quotes sprinkled about throughout the book. The best one: “It turns out that I’m pretty good at killing people.” – Barack Obama

I can’t even describe how cynical, cruel, and pathetic the US effort in Afghanistan has been. The amount of human suffering is extraordinary, the cost staggering, and the results?  Pretty much nothing at all, except enormous profits for the military industrial complex and lots of careers for mindless government apparatchiks. So I guess we can’t call it a total loss, what a great scheme to transfer vast amounts of wealth from taxpayers to non-productive members of society. Just like any other government program.

 

Stonewalled

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson really blows the lid off the media in this one. She details several stories that she got involved in (Fast and Furious, the green energy subsidies, etc). For me, however, the most powerful parts of the book were the first and last chapters.

In the first chapter, she shows how biased the mainstream media is. Stories that were critical of the Obama administration were systematically downplayed, or taken off air. Government officials routinely withheld public documents, often in defiance of Freedom of Information Act requests. Top level CBS officials repeatedly intervened to squash stories that shed bad light on their personal (left-wing) causes. For example, when the Obama administration handed out money for green energy companies, something like $2 billion went “missing”. When Attkisson tried to pursue this story of a massive waste of taxpayer money, she was asked “but don’t you believe in green energy?”

The last chapter of her book describes how the government illegally hacked her laptop and bugged her home, her cell phone, and her personal internet. They went so far as to plant classified documents on her computer just in case they had to take her out. To call it Orwellian is an insult to George Orwell.

Something that struck me about a lot of the cases was that the government didn’t really do anything horribly bad – nothing like Iran-Contra or destroying Iraq or the CIA running crack cocaine in LA to raise money for illegal operations. In general, they were just incompetent (like in Benghazi) and then viciously tried to cover it up through repeated lies, intimidation, obstruction, and undue influence in the media.

Mark Twain was known for saying “never believe anything until it is vigorously denied by a government official.”  I used to think that was a joke.