{"id":150482,"date":"2019-12-30T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=150482"},"modified":"2019-12-24T10:45:03","modified_gmt":"2019-12-24T10:45:03","slug":"afghanistan-war-the-crime-of-the-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/12\/afghanistan-war-the-crime-of-the-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan War \u2013 The Crime of the Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

16 Dec 2019 – <\/em>\u201cWe were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn\u2019t know what we were doing.\u201d So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> last week, that General Lute\u2019s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war.<\/p>\n

What we learned in what is rightly being called the \u201cPentagon Papers\u201d of our time, is that hundreds of US Administration officials \u2013 including three US Presidents \u2013 knowingly lied to the American people about the Afghanistan war for years. This wasn\u2019t just a matter of omitting some unflattering facts. This was about bald-faced lying about a war they knew was a disaster from almost day one.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember President Bush\u2019s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? Remember how supremely confident he was at those press conferences, acting like the master of the universe? Here\u2019s what he told the Pentagon\u2019s special inspector general who compiled these thousands of interviews on Afghanistan: \u201cI have no visibility into who the bad guys are.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is not only members of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations who are guilty of this massive fraud. Falsely selling the Afghanistan war as a great success was a bipartisan activity on Capitol Hill. In the dozens of hearings I attended in the House International Relations Committee, I do not recall a single \u201cexpert\u201d witness called who told us the truth. Instead, both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses called a steady stream of neocon war cheerleaders to lie to us about how wonderfully the war was going. Victory was just around the corner, they all promised. Just a few more massive appropriations and we\u2019d be celebrating the end of the war.<\/p>\n

Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the American people as \u201cexpert\u201d witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think tankers.<\/p>\n

What is even more shocking than the release of this \u201csmoking gun\u201d evidence that the US government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve wasted at least half a year on the Donald Trump impeachment charade \u2013 a conviction desperately in search of a crime. Meanwhile one of the greatest crimes in US history will go unpunished. Not one of the liars in the \u201cAfghanistan Papers\u201d will ever be brought to justice for their crimes. None of the three presidents involved will be brought to trial for these actual high crimes. Rumsfeld and Lute and the others will never have to fear justice. Because both parties are in on it. There is no justice.<\/p>\n

Just days after the \u201cAfghanistan Papers\u201d were published, only 48 Members of Congress voted against the massive military spending of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. They continue as if nothing happened. They will continue lying to us and ripping us off if we let them.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ronald Ernest Paul (born 20 Aug 1935) is an American author, physician, and retired politician. On three occasions, he sought the presidency of the United States: in 1988, 2008 and 2012. Paul is a critic of the existence of the Federal Reserve, the military\u2013industrial complex, and the War on Drugs. He has also been a vocal critic of mass surveillance policies such as the USA Patriot Act and the NSA surveillance programs.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2019 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 ronpaulinstitute.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Dec 2019 – \u201cWe were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn\u2019t know what we were doing.\u201d So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post last week, that General Lute\u2019s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":117967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[93,94,133,1106,267,1126,487,1050,504,291,91,86,112,880,70,126,492],"class_list":["post-150482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-afghanistan","tag-central-asia","tag-cia","tag-drones","tag-geopolitics","tag-hegemony","tag-human-rights","tag-imperialism","tag-international-relations","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-occupation","tag-pentagon","tag-state-terrorism","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150482\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}