“A democratically elected congressman of the United States of America should not be talking of an ethnic divide in Afghanistan, should not be interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, should not be asking the Afghan people to have a federal structure as against what the Afghan constitution has asked for, should not be speaking disrespectfully about the Afghan people or the various ethnic groups in Afghanistan.” He went on to say that the US would never allow anyone critical of its constitution to visit either.

Rohrabacher responded by saying that he would never apologize to Karzai or his “corrupt clique of irresponsible leaders.” He added that it was ridiculous to say a foreigner shouldn’t have a say in the Afghan constitution since a foreigner, former US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, wrote it in the first place.

…The president opposed his own policy of sending in more troops to stabilize Afghanistan from the moment he approved it after months and months of messy internal wrangling. So why did he do it? The answer is that that Obama was leaving Iraq and could not afford to look weak in Afghanistan at the same time or he would come under political attack from the right. Getting out faster might also alienate the military to the point that public discord would damage the president. Although White House-military relations were strained from the beginning of his administration, Obama’s team worked hard to keep a lid on tensions. So they swallowed their doubts about the military judgments they were getting about a conflict they were increasingly sure was unwinnable.

Some will see this as an attempt to absolve Obama from full responsibility for his 2009 decision to surge in Afghanistan. I see it as all the more damning, aside from being probably accurate. In fact, I wrote more than a year ago that Obama’s war in Afghanistan was about saving political face. Throughout history there have been a lot of reasons for going to war, but few are as cynical as one’s political reputation. Hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted, thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed so that Obama could avoid being called a wimp by Republicans. How offensive.

In an article I published yesterday on TruthOut, a picture of only one of the two police informants, “Mo,” was published in the press for the first time.

Now, the other informant, “Gloves,” has in some ways been outed, with two pictures of her up online for the world to see for the first time thanks to Occupy Chicago activists. The pictures can be seen below:

“We do have pictures of ‘Gloves,’ but they’re not clear enough to make a positive identification,” NLG legal worker Kris Hermes told me in an interview in the TruthOut article. “We understand they’re both in their 30s, but we’re not sure of their age.”

“Mo” and “Gloves” have been described as the informant “threads” that bind the five NATO Summit activists charged with “terrorism.”

“The thread between all five was the informants that we believe were provoking criminal activity,” said to me in the Truthout article. “We believe it was the same two informants, which has been ascertained from the arrestees.”

Stay tuned for more coverage from the front lines. Much more to come.

Update: In a press release obtained by Antiwar.com, Occupy Chicago stated,

Occupy Chicago has obtained photographs of suspected police informants, who according to witnesses and arrestees were part of a law enforcement operation, which has resulted in the prosecution of 5 NATO protesters on terrorism-related charges. The city has yet to admit to using infiltrators in the Wednesday night raid on a Bridgeport home of activists, but both suspected police informants who go by the names of “Mo” and “Gloves” (aka “Nadiya”) were arrested with 9 others but then mysteriously disappeared. Mo and Gloves have not been seen since.

According to Occupy Chicago activists, Mo and Gloves took part in various organizing efforts over the past few weeks. Mo was arrested during an action on April 17th at 63rd & Woodlawn to protest the closure of a mental health clinic. The so-called NATO 3 (Jared Chase, Brent Betterly, and Brian Jacob Church), who came to Chicago from Florida, were befriended by Mo and Gloves and were likely sought out by the informants because of the out-of-town activists’ unfamiliarity with local Occupy Chicago organizers.

Although the State’s Attorney has not made any connections between the NATO 3 and two additional protesters with terrorism-related charges, the common thread between all of the cases is the involvement of Mo and Gloves.

For years, Pentagon officials have insisted that the open-air burn pits incinerating tons of garbage and other waste on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan could not be causing long-term health problems for our troops. But an unclassified memo (.pdf) dated more than a year ago and recently leaked to Spencer Ackerman over at Wired’s Danger Room indicates that the Army knew very well that the air quality, at least at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, could have dire health consequences for anyone living and working there between 2002 and 2010.

And the “primary contributor” to the dangerous levels of particulate matter (PM 10  and PM 2.5, which refers to the size of the contaminants) found in the air? Burn pits.

“The long term health risk associated with air conditions at BAF from PM 2.5 and PM 10 indicates there is a potential that long-term exposure at these levels may increase the risk for developing chronic health conditions such as reduced lung function or exacerbated chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, aetherosclerosis, or other cardiopulmonary diseases,” according to the memo.

Wow. For anyone following this story for the last several years as TAC has (we devoted a feature to it in our Oct. 1, 2009 issue of the magazine, and I have continued with several follow-up blog posts and a series of reports for Antiwar.com, as well) knows this is big news.

It’s big because it proves the Pentagon has had more concrete proof about the dangerous air quality around the pits and what it has done to tens of thousands of troops in the field than it’s ever let on. In fact, as recently as July 2011, the DoD’s American Forces Press Service claimed, “there is no evidence to suggest that service members deployed to U.S. Central Command are being disproportionately affected by environmental factors.” That was months after the April 2011 memo published by Ackerman today.

In June 2010, even after admitting that chronic health problems were plaguing servicemembers stationed at Joint Base Balad, at a 30 percent higher rate than other bases, Craig Postlewaite, a Pentagon spokesman, told Kelly Kennedy of the Army Times, “We clearly understand it can cause problems in some people. … What we’re not sure is if there are long-term effects or latent effects.”

Meanwhile, veterans have been complaining about strange and debilitating health problems for years now. Like former Staff Sgt. Daniel Meyer, who is now completely dependent on an oxygen tank to get through his day. I interviewed him in February. He has a rare, irreversible lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans,which can be brought on by inhaling toxic fumes. He’s only 27. He believes that he was exposed to burn pits while stationed at Iraq and Afghanistan with the Air Force. “I have gone from an extremely fit military man to a very limited man who is completely dependent on my wife for help with everything,” he told me.

A study in 2010 by Dr. Anthony Szema at Stony Brook University in New York found that 7 percent of troops who served at Balad Air Base early in the Iraq War have come home with a “serious lung injury,” including elevated levels of acute respiratory illnesses, asthma, and lung damage. Szema is now conducting a major study of veterans exposed to the burn pits. He will be assisted by BurnPits360, which has become a clearinghouse for veterans suffering from conditions they believe are connected to their time in-theater. The site is also maintaining a registry of those veterans and their stories.

Thirty-eight of 49 veterans biopsied at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were found to have constrictive bronchiolitis, an illness that causes permanent shortness of breath during exercise, according to a 2011 study by Dr. Robert Miller, associate professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“These are inhalation injuries, suffered in the line of duty,” said Miller who believes the burn pits are but one source of the air pollution plaguing sick vets. A number of the vets he biopsied had also been exposed to the 2003 sulfur plant fire in Mosul.

According to a report by USA Today last May, the military has seen a 251 percent increase in the rate of neurological disorders, a 47 percent increase in the rate of respiratory issues, and 34 percent increase in the rate of cardiovascular disease.

And what are these “burn pits?” A convenient way to get rid of waste on the bases, they acted as open-air trash heaps that burned hazardous waste (including, by some accounts, amputated limbs and used hypodermic needles), hardware, Styrofoam, lithium batteries, rubber, dining-hall refuse, petroleum products, pressure-treated wood, plastics, animal carcasses, latrine waste, aluminum cans, and unexploded ordnance, among other things. Regulation incinerators were brought in only late in the war and under pressure.

Thanks to congressional action brought on by veterans’ advocacy groups like the DAV and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association (IAVA), most of the pits have been shut down over the last three years and replaced by incinerators. Of course, people like Meyer and others who will never be the same healthwise say it was a day too late.

Above photo credit: U.S Air Force/Senior Airman Julianne Showalter

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, concerned by his portrayal in U.S. media as an autocratic leader intent on consolidating power, has invited several influential Washington scholars to Baghdad to meet his team next week.

The rare invitation was extended to Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institution and Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, Reuters has learned.

Pollack, by the way, is a former CIA military analyst who served in President Bill Clinton’s White House and Pletka was an advisor to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1992 until 2002. That’s the kind of revolving door these major think tanks operate in. So while Obama is largely mum about both Maliki’s emerging dictatorship and Washington’s support for that regime’s brutality, Maliki is using leading voices from leading think tanks to counter all the bad news being written up about him. Maliki apparently trusts them to improve his image.

Just to remind people, after about a year of mass protests urging the U.S.-supported dictator of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign, Yemenis voted in February in a referendum on a U.S.-backed transition deal to formally depose Saleh and elect his deputy Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, who was the only name on the ballot.

The deal granted Saleh total immunity for the crimes he committed while on Washington’s dole and despite the sham, single-candidate “election,” the U.S. praised it as democracy. The Obama administration then dutifully restarted military and economic aid to the Yemeni regime, dramatically escalated the drone war in Yemen, which has bombs dropped in the country virtually every day, and sent in Special Ops to fight militants without even acknowledging that this was any of Congress’s or the American people’s business.

The Yemeni people see clearly how their popular revolution was hijacked in the name of “American interests,” and are now being systematically marginalized as Hadi maintains a terrible dictatorship and U.S. bombs continue to breed al-Qaeda loyalists. To boot, Obama signed an executive order last week which threatened sanctions or worse against anybody who challenged the Hadi government, even if you’re an American citizen.

What a model of success!

Leaving aside the perverse nature of how the Executive Branch of the United States essentially decides which thugs get to repress entire countries of people in the Middle East, such a plan would be disastrous in Syria. I’ve repeatedly gone through why intervention would (and already has) worsen the conflict. But Syria is different from Yemen in important ways. Washington was able to muscle through a mock political transition/regime change because they had already been propping up the previous government and had deep ties to the state security establishment and the tribal factions through Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration, no matter how badly it wants to impose regime change in Syria, doesn’t have those points of leverage. This would mean either that Russia needs to take the lead or that the U.S. and its allies need to use considerable force, i.e. war. And frankly, that has the potential to be an even worse humanitarian catastrophe than Iraq.

The Annan plan is hanging on by a thread (and is being hindered by foreign intervention on all sides). So far, there little evidence the Obama administration plans to move from providing lethal and non-lethal aid to the opposition to actually going to war in Syria. But talk like that which Reuters reported this weekend makes clear their intentions and the status quo means Syria will become an intractable proxy war.

On Saturday, 19.5.2012, around four thirty in the afternoon, a large group of settlers descended on the eastern outskirts of the village ‘Asira al-Qibliya, from the settlement Yitzhar. B’Tselem volunteer photographers filmed the events from two angles. The video shows the settlers, some of whom were masked and armed, throwing stones at Palestinian homes, and fires beginning to burn. One of the masked settlers was armed with a “Tavor” rifle which is only used by infantry soldiers, raising the suspicion that he is a soldier on leave.

Palestinian youths from the village soon arrived and threw stones at the settlers. A few minutes later, soldiers and Border Police officers arrived at the scene. During these moments, the video records the sound of several rounds of live ammunition being fired, but does not show its source.

Around 5pm, a group of three settlers are seen standing with a soldier in front of the Palestinian youths, while all around there is mutual stone throwing. Two of the settlers seen were armed with M4 rifles, and one was armed with a pistol. One of the settlers is wearing what looks like a police cap. The video footage shows the settlers aiming their weapons at the Palestinians and firing.

The firing injured village resident, Fathi ‘Asayira, 24, in the head. He is seen being evacuated from the area by a group of youths. He is hospitalized in a stable condition in Rafidiya hospital in Nablus. About five other Palestinians were injured by stones.

The video footage raises grave suspicions that the soldiers present did not act to prevent the settlers from throwing stones and firing live ammunition at the Palestinians. The soldiers did not try to remove the settlers and in fact are seen standing by settlers while they are shooting and stone throwing.

For more on Israeli settler violence against Palestinians, see here, here, and here.

Much is made in the mainstream of Palestinian “terrorists” and supposedly rampant anti-Semitism. But as speaker of the Israeli Knesset Reuven Rivlin said last November regarding the so-called price-tag attacks by Israeli settlers, “this is Jewish terrorism that should be called nothing less.”

And on the racism charge, I’m reminded of something I read in Gershom Gorenberg’s book The Unmaking of Israel. Gorenberg, an Israeli, recounts a story from 2009 when he was driving through the West Bank and picked up two orthodox Jews hitchhiking for a ride back to their illegal outpost. They talked to Gorenberg about why they didn’t want to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. One of the young men said the army “doesn’t want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world,” something he derided. Another said of the Gaza war, Operation Cast Lead, that he was:

“outraged” by the army’s concern for noncombatants. In the command post, ‘there was an officer from our army who was in touch with the Arabs in Gaza and was concerned about their rights,” he recounted, with utter disbelief. “He’d say not to shell a neighborhood because they were evacuating the wounded. And we’d let the ambulances evacuate them – tell me, is this a war? They’re crazy!…In the last five, ten years, the army has turned into a welfare office for Palestinians.”

We’re not supposed to hear about this side of things in the U.S. The narrative has held strong that the Israelis are victims surrounded by scary, anti-Semitic, terrorist-sympathizing Arabs.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

…The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

According to this official, “senior public affairs” officers within the Department of Defense want to “get rid” of Smith-Mundt and other restrictions because it prevents information activities designed to prop up unpopular policies—like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The legislation banning propaganda aimed at Americans has not meant the end of propaganda, with a sycophantic mass media filling in for the state all along the way. But even the government’s war propaganda has managed to persist. Recent reports published by USA Today exposed the dubious nature and exorbitant costs of the Pentagon’s “Information Operations,” (IO) which the newspaper described as “the modern equivalent of psychological warfare,” or war propaganda. In fact, soon after the reports were published, the journalists were targeted in a misinformation campaign. If it was done using federal funds, it could be a direct violation of Smith-Mundt or the FRAA.

Propaganda has always been with us. During the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a propaganda ministry meant to build public support for the war effort. The CPI distributed propaganda in news stories, street posters, advertisements, and hollywood films. It launched pro-war lecture circuits to mobilize public opinion, and publicly criticizing the president or the war effort was essentially criminalized.

“The propagandists in World War II,” writes historian Susan A. Brewer, ” following in the footsteps of the Committee on Public Information, while attempting to avoid their predecessor’s mistakes.”

The OWI’s [Office of War Information] objective, acknowledged privately, was the “coordination, synchronization, embellishment, emphasis, manipulation and distribution of facts as information rather than…gross overstatements and exaggerated misrepresentations.” To mobilize the population, the OWI drew on familiar advertising techniques such as repetition, catchy slogans, and celebrity endorsement.

…On December 16, 1941, President Roosevelt set up the Office of Censorship, headed by Associated Press executive news editor Byron Price. The Office of Censorship had authority over all civilian communication…Before news organizations released a story, Price wanted them to ask themselves, “Is this information I would like to have if I were the enemy?” In a 1942 press conference, he and [OWI Director Elmer] Davis explained the relationship of the Office of Censorship and the OWI with the news media. Price announced, “We tell what they cannot print.” Davis said, “We give them stuff we hope they will print.”

But a modern phenomenon really put a stick in the spokes of the government’s attempts to treat the public like mushrooms and the mass media’s efforts to dominate the airwaves with regurgitated state spin. By making vast amounts of historical, political, and economic literature freely and immediately accessible, the Internet has belittled the the government’s aim of keeping the public ignorant. As the saying goes, information is power – and when citizens have more of it, the government has less.

According to the report from Hastings, the amendment’s sponsors have the Internet specifically in mind:

…Thornberry warned that in the Internet age, the current law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.”

The bill’s supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home, and that new techniques are needed to help fight Al-Qaeda, a borderless enemy whose own propaganda reaches Americans online.

In other words, people are getting information online that we don’t want people to have – therefore, legalize domestic propaganda. So NDAA is the latest effort by Congress (after SOPA, CISPA and the others) to take control of the best resource the American people have. The Internet is too open, too free, too…subversive. We need information the government wants us to have, not all that other stuff.

It wasn’t as bad as one might expect –the calm measured Hillary Mann Leverett was given a reasonable about of airtime given the forum. Still, one doesn’t need to sit through a ponderous Christiane Amanpour interview to learn the facts of the matter.

Below, Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton in a this now classic clip demolishing the case for war with Iran in under seven minutes.

The 2024 date was never exactly a secret, but official statements mostly glossed over that part of the deal, instead lionizing Obama for signing the deal that would “end” the war, even if it only theoretically ends it long, long after he would leave office.

For the mainstream press, it was apparently “message received,” as the NY Times’ top story today chronicles Obama’s “shift” on Afghanistan, and closes with the claim that Obama is going to “largely” withdraw in 2014. 2024 is not mentioned.

The AP, for its part, ran a story on the NATO summit in Chicago, focusing on Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s promises not to “rush to the exits” instead of the police brutality going on outside. This article too explicitly claims that the war will end “by 2015.”

2024 has become the date that dare not speak its name, and indeed the closest thing to a major media acknowledgement of the date in several days came on NPR, which said that the President “pledged support” through 2024. That this support will come in the form of a military occupation, of course, is not mentioned, though since they do refer to the deal as a “strategic security pact” (technically it is simply a document dictating terms of engagement for ground troops), they at least get partial credit.