A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Only fools believe we should stay in Afghanistan

Posted: 01 Nov 2011

After more than 10 years of Western-led war in Afghanistan, The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele says that it is a conflict that we’ll (thankfully) never win. Take note America, Britain and Australia:

Two days after 9/11, I wrote a column in The Guardiansaying that if the U.S. reaction was to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan and try to occupy that country and to bring about regime change, they would suffer exactly the same fate as the Soviet Union. And I’m afraid to say that I’ve been proved right on that, because they’re following exactly the same techniques as the Russians. It’s what I call the garrison strategy. You hold the main cities, you try and keep the roads going open between them, and you make little forays into the countryside and try and push out a bit. But it doesn’t work, because you create new resistance by being there. The resistance comes because you’re there; you’re not there because of the resistance. The occupying force itself creates the resistance.

And so, the crucial thing now is to recognize that the war is unwinnable. It is a stalemate. There is no military victory. And this is the lesson that I’m afraid President Obama hasn’t yet learned from what the Soviets did, because Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in the Kremlin in 1985, after five years of war, when 9,000 Soviets soldiers had already died. He inherited somebody else’s war from his predecessor. And he realized immediately that the war was unwinnable. He consulted his military. They also said the war is unwinnable. They didn’t say, “We want a surge.” They didn’t say, “We want new troops, new equipment, you know, more scope, more money.” They recognized that the thing is a disaster. Obama hasn’t yet recognized that. And in fact it’s worse than that, because people like General Petraeus are still convinced that there can be a military victory. He has the ear of the President. He’s the head of the CIA, sees him virtually every day. And so, it’s really important, I think, that the American public—and we know from the polls that more than half are against this war—really make their voice heard.

Finland signed up to American network of terror after September 11

Posted: 01 Nov 2011

Yet more evidence is emerging of the global scope of torture post 9/11 by the Bush administration with virtual bi-partisan support. Just the latest (via Reprieve in the UK):

As a front-page article in Finland’s leading daily Helsingin Sanomat today explains, the Finnish government have reluctantly been compelled, in response to requests by Amnesty International, to release some data about suspicious planes passing through Finnish territory between 2001 and 2006. But does the government have the will to investigate the loose ends which this data has brought to light?

The mysterious flight of N733MA in March 2006 is a case in point. According to the data released by the Finnish foreign ministry, this plane flew from Porto in Portugal to Finland, arriving in Helsinki at 20:37 on the 25th of March. After that, it disappears from the record, with no onward route given – except that we know from other sources that two hours later it had mysteriously reappeared in Lithuania. According to the parliamentary inquiry on the establishment of CIA secret prisons in Lithuania, on its arrival there this plane was not greeted by the usual border checks, because the security services had written to the border guard the day before … asking them not to check the plane.

Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah filed a case against the government of Lithuania in the European Court of Human Rights last Friday, concerning his secret detention in Lithuania in 2005-6, so the time is ripe for the Finnish government to look seriously at the implications of this, and other, new disclosures. On 23 September Reprieve and partners Access Info Europe filed a freedom of information request about more potential renditions planes passing through Finland. The response, from transport agency Trafi, is now well overdue. Will they, and the government, make the necessary effort to get to the bottom of this murky history? They are likely to be faced with increasingly difficult and embarrassing questions in the near future if not.

Condi Rice reassures world; Bush made space for Arab Spring

Posted: 01 Nov 2011

Yes, and Iraq is a liberated nation with peace and tranquility. Delusional:

“The demise of repressive governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during this year’s “Arab spring,” she says, stemmed in part from Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which promoted democracy in the Middle East. “The change in the conversation about the Middle East, where people now routinely talk about democratization is something that I’m very grateful for and I think we had a role in that. It would be a mistake to make the leap of faith that this [Arab Spring] would somehow have worked in Iraq,” she says in her first newspaper interview about her memoir, No Higher Honor. […]

“Gadhafi … wasn’t Saddam Hussein in terms of his reach and capacity,” she says. “I do think that an Arab spring in Iraq would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein.

Let’s be clear; Australia has no interest in helping Palestinians end Zionist occupation

Posted: 31 Oct 2011