Pakistan is on the American side because it has been bought with a $2.5 billion IMF loan pushed through by the United States and because sanctions against Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons from three years ago has been dropped and obviously other promises were also made to pay off the rulers of Pakistan.
"Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan expresses Iraq's regret over the
Pakistani stance on the aggression being launched by the United States
and its ally Britain against Afghanistan." [Iraqi News
Agency]
The U.S. undoubtedly also gave some assurances to the military dictatorship in Pakistan that it would protect it as a nuclear power and support the current government against Islamic fundamentalists. The U.S. is using it's big stick and big carrot approach to hold the alliance together.
Obviously much of what we find out about this war will trickle through, if at all, much later than when they happen. Some things will remain secret. On October 20th Twelve of our elite Delta Force "commandos" were wounded by the Taliban and some seriously. The chairman of JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) at first denied that the raids into Afghanistan were met with heavy resistance, but Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine reported that the Delta Force and the Pentagon was completely surprised by fierce firefighting and very heavy resistance from the Taliban near Kandahar.
Seymour Hersh's source, an army officer close to the operation told Hersh what really happened, that 12 U.S. commandos were wounded and three of the soldiers were seriously wounded.
There is generally NO voluntary real flow of information anymore, except for leaks like these. This isn't Vietnam. But, this is supposedly a FREE society. Don't believe it. If not for the brave officer who leaked this information to Seymore Hersh, we may never have known the truth.
Information is regularly withheld or destroyed. As Michael Parenti points out in "HISTORY AS MYSTERY" [1999], because of secrecy, and coverups, there are serious "distorting the historical record at the point of origin." He says, "Millions of U.S. government documents have remained classified for fifty years or more. The War Department records on the Abraham Lincoln assassination were kept secret for sixy years, finaly placed in the public domain in the mid-1930s."
And, some records are still classified about the Lincoln Assassination according to Theodore Roscoe who researched Army "secret" intelligence. For those who want to read more about this, see Theodore Roscoe, "THE WEB OF CONSPIRACY: The Complete Story of the Men who Murdered Abraham Lincoln (Prentice-Hall, 1959,1960).
That question is, what do they want to keep secret and why? Why after all those years? Was the assassination a government plot? What possible question of national security exists now which could justify redaction of some materials or complete maintaining the secrecy of those documents? Why are other documents classified and the truth withheld?
It was a complete shock to the America's "secret government" when the "PENTAGON PAPERS" was published. That blew the lid on the secrecy behind the coverups which cost over a million Vietamese lives and 58,000 American lives. The stench from Washington is still with them and many of us who remember it well were so changed by Danial Ellsberg's disclosures and his risking his life to blow the lid on the lies behind that war, yet there are still those who refuse to believe the facts. I don't want to get into discussing the Vietnam war here, but if anyone cares to, see the Vietnam Message Board at: http://pnews.org/boards/vietnam/ or contact Professor Grover Furr, who is a regular participant here in PNEWS-L and has done extensive research on the Vietnam (undeclared) War.
There are many questions of our legitimacy in that war just as there is in the Afghanistan war where we were the primary movers and shakers behind the defeat of the Soviets with our support of these fundamentalist Muslims.
We supplied and taught Osama bin Laden's "holy warriors" how to do tricks with secret ghost companies and hide money and how to code messages to communicate with his agents, which were in turn our agents by proxy. They learned this terrorism trade from the CIA. I'd like to see the secret classified docs for that operation, which was the largest covert action program since WWII (Washington Post, 7/19/92). Our "Freedom Fighters" have now become our "terrorists." Or are they? Why did (if true) the CIA recently meet with Osama bin Laden at the American Hospital in Dubai as reported in Le Figero (a newspaper which is also owned by the Carlyle Group, which the bin Laden family was invested and so is king George's father, George Bush, Sr.)
Michael Parenti says about all this secrecy: "Suppressing documents is a major industry of the national security state. In 1995, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Justice and State Departments performed some 3.6 million classification acts. In 1996, the number climbed to more than 5.8 million, or about 21,500 classifications every workday of the year." [See Information Security Oversight Office, Report to the President, - 95 and 96) per Executive Order 12829, "National Industrial Security Program) [IBID]
If a society is free and open there is no need to keep so much from public view unless there is also a secret government which needs to keep those things secret in order to do secret things which the public would not approve of it doing. Parenti says this is "thwarting democratic accountability."
And, even under the Freedom of Information Act, when we are able to get documents declassified and released for public view so much of them are redacted that many do not make any sense. There is much they do not want us to know, like how we support genocide and Parenti mentions the case of the Mayans "during the thirty-six-year war against the poor in Guatemala. The declassified documents revealed how the United States government gave money and training to the Guatamalan military, and along with U.S. private companies `exercised pressure to maintain the country's archaic and unjust socio-economic structure.'"
"The Freedom of Information Act [FOI] `allows the [CIA] to be exceedingly stingy in responding to request from historians, journalists and citizens for documents.' [David Corn, "SECRETS FROM THE CIA ARCHIVES," The Nation - November 29, 1993] Confronted with an FOIA lawsuit regarding its role in the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the CIA released barely 1,400 of 180,000 relevant pages, nearly half a century of events. The agency reportedly destroyed most of its files on other covert action int he 1950s and the 1960s, including all records related to its role in the overthrow of reformist prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Irawn in 1953. [Stephen Schlesinger, "THE CIA CENSORS HISTORY, The Nation, July 14, 1997; and Eric Alterman, "THE CIA'S FIFTY CANDLES, The Nation, Oct 6, 1997]
Michael Parenti writes in "HISTORY AS MYSTERY", "Throughout its history, the agency [CIA] has resorted to every conceivable crime and machination to make the world safe for the Fortune 500, using false propaganda, economic warfare, bribery, rigged elections, sabotage, demolition, theft, collusion with organized crime, narcotics trafficking, death squads, terror bombings, torture, massacres, and wars of attrition."
And, George Bush Senior, before he was the president was the head of the CIA.
The official line about the Delta Force raid on Afghanistan from Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as told to reporters only hours after the Special Operations forces left Afghanistan in October was that the raid was a success. There was no mention of the 12 who were wounded, including the four who were seriously wounded. However Myers did say:
"There were casualties on the other side," said Myers, who added
that there was only "light resistance" from Afghanistan's ruling
Taliban military to the raids. [Reuters]
TheGolem http://pnews.org/
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