Saudis Feed Manure To The World

In Saner Thought

And Our Dear Supreme Leader is eating it up…….

I see the Saudis have a hard time coming up with the story of the death of Jamal Khashoggi…..reminds me of the ever changing story when they killed a busload of school kids in Yemen….

Their story here is also ever changing…..most times to the point of stupid!

But never let it be said that I would not try to give all the story to date…..a recap……..

President Trump is criticizing Saudi Arabia’s version of Jamal Khashoggi’s death—that the late journalist died in a fistfight gone wrong. “Obviously there’s been deception, and there’s been lies,” he tells the Washington Post, but adds that “nobody has told me” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is responsible for the death: “We haven’t reached that point … I would love if he wasn’t responsible.” He also downplayed Jared Kushner’s relationship with Mohammed (“They’re…

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Tracking The Conflict

The war in Afghanistan has been raging for 17 years and I have been tracking the conflict for the whole time…..by tracking I mean that I have been watching how Americans react to the war and to the news about the war.

Americans, as a whole, NO longer care about this war…..the military families that it has an impact on are the only caring group anymore.  We are celebrating 17 years of a war that means nothing anymore….

The absurd hopelessness was the worst part. No, it wasn’t the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) blowing limbs off my boys, or the well-aimed gunshot wounds suffered by others; it wasn’t even the horror of ordering the deaths of other (“enemy”) human beings.

No, for a captain commanding 100 odd troopers in Southwest Kandahar province at the height of the Obama “surge” of 2011, what most struck me was the feeling of futility; the sense that the mission was fruitless operationally, and, of course, all but ignored at home. After a full year of saturating the district with American soldiers, the truth is we really controlled only the few square feet we each stood on. The Taliban controlled the night, the farmlands, the villages. And, back in 2011, well, the U.S. had about 100,000 servicemen and women in country. There are less than 15,000 on the ground now.

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2018/10/17/not-worth-another-life-an-afghan-anniversary-to-lament/

The news and our society have basically forgotten about our longest war…if that is truly the case……

You’d hardly know it from the news, but we’ve been continuously at war in Afghanistan since 2001. The war quietly turned 17 on October 7.

Unfortunately, America’s amnesia didn’t prevent Command Sergeant Major Tim Bolyard from being killed in Afghanistan in early September during his eighth combat tour and 13th deployment.

https://original.antiwar.com/Stacy_Bannerman/2018/10/11/if-you-forget-about-a-war-its-time-to-end-it/

Believe it or not……the Afghan War is over and we did not win…….

America has lost the war in Afghanistan. Washington may not want to admit it, and the U.S. military insists the conflict is a “stalemate.” But make no mistake: The original 9/11 war has been lost.

On Thursday, the Taliban attacked a meeting between Afghan officials and the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller. Americans in attendance were wounded, but Miller was unhurt. At least three Afghan officials, though, were killed, including Gen. Abdul Raziq, a key American ally and powerbroker in southern Afghanistan. The U.S. military’s initial statement on the attack was a good example of its cognitive dissonance. Instead of a full condemnation, Col. Dave Butler, the spokesman for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, claimed it was merely an “Afghan-on-Afghan incident.” This is an absurd characterization given that the Taliban quickly claimed responsibility, a crucial anti-Taliban commander was killed, and Americans were wounded, all in the presence of the U.S. general in charge of the war effort.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/thomas-joscelyn/the-afghanistan-war-is-over-we-lost

This war is over……then why have we not left and brought our war weary troops home?

During the past few months, many foreign policy analysts have overlooked a series of troubling reports from America’s war in Afghanistan. In late July, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has been pushing Afghan security forces to withdraw from “vast stretches of the country.” Moreover, in the last few weeks, the Afghan government sustained significant losses defending territory in four districts from the Taliban, and Kabul has stopped reporting the number of deaths of its soldiers because the losses in many districts have become unsustainable. Nonetheless, in what has become a familiar pattern, American troops were dispatched to help Afghan security forces eject the insurgents and re-establish control.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-wont-us-leave-afghanistan

…..an insider attack in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province killed materially all of the top-ranking officials in the provincial government. The Pentagon downplayed the matter, saying two Americans were wounded, but that the top general present was unharmed.

What they didn’t reveal until Sunday was that the “serviceman” wounded in the attack was actually Brigadier General Jeffrey Smiley, a high-ranking advisor for the NATO mission in southern Afghanistan. He was shot, and is recovering.

Already the most significant insider attack of the war, having basically taken out the provincial government, this makes it an even bigger attack, as it means a Taliban gunman also got close enough to shoot a US general after killing all these people.

(antiwar.com)

This week, the Taliban demonstrated – once again – that they can strike where and when they choose. The target was General Miller, the top US commander in Afghanistan, as well as some senior Afghan security officials. It was a close call, but General Miller was unhurt. The same can not be said for three top Afghan security leaders who were killed or the two American soldiers wounded in the crossfire. More disturbingly, the gunmen appeared to be Taliban sleepers embedded in the provincial governor’s (who was among the dead) bodyguards. Thus, this was another fatal “insider attack,” of which I’ve recently written. What, then, can we say about this near miss ambush, and how does it reflect on the war effort – America’s longest – in Afghanistan writ large?

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2018/10/21/quagmire-what-the-attack-on-general-miller-in-afghanistan-tells-us/

At what point do we stop looking for excuses to stay and bring the troops home?

If the war and our troops do not immediately come to mind then it is time to call the war and let the troops enjoy their families again.

Like I said in the beginning of this post…I have been tracking this conflict since the first shot was fired….Americans care nothing about this conflict and ignore the news as much as possible.

Time to call it off and declare a win.

Erekat: Abduction of Jerusalem governor a new step against Palestinian presence in the city

PNN/ Ramallah/

On Saturday October 20, around 7:00 pm, three vehicles carrying Israeli Occupation Forces intercepted the car of the Governor of Jerusalem, Mr. Adnan Gheith, pulling him out of the vehicle and taking him to an unknown location. Governor Gheith was in Beit Hanina, north of Jerusalem, at the time of the abduction. Now Governor Gheith has been transferred to the Ofer Detention Center, Prison, and Military Court, in the occupied West Bank village of Beitunia.

“This is a new step taken by the Israeli Occupation against the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem,” PLO Secretary General Dr. Saeb Erekat said in a statement.

“Israel is further violating its own commitments and obligations regarding Palestinian institutions in the city. Since August 2001, when Israeli Commandoes closed the Orient House in Jerusalem, dozens of Palestinian institutions have been closed in an attempt at provoking a Palestinian politicide in Jerusalem. The threats and detentions against Palestinian political and community leaders, including the abduction of Governor Gheith, should only be taken as part of Israel’s plan to eliminate any foundations for a political solution based on two-states on the 1967 border,” Erekat added.

After the Trump Administration’s illegal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the Israeli Government has escalated its aggression against the Palestinian people, including in and around the occupied Palestinian capital, Erekat said. “This includes forcible transfer of civilian population, home demolitions, colonial-settlement expansion and persecution of Palestinian civil society and political leaders.”

In conclusion, Erekat demanded the immediate release of the Governor of Jerusalem.

“We call upon the international community to take a firm stand on the case of Governor Gheith as well as on the issue of the Palestinian institutions. East Jerusalem remains occupied under international law, with Israel, the occupying power, not having any right to disrupt the Palestinian political, economic, cultural and social life in the city. We consider the abduction of Governor Gheith not only to be a further Israeli violation and aggression against the Palestinian people but a reminder to the international community of the need to take concrete measures to save East Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Palestine.”

Orwell was right: free speech is important but it is not enough | David Dwan

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Freedom of expression is a dangerous licence when severed from any commitment to truth, as cyber-thugs reveal daily

It’s been an eventful week for what we used to call truth. The Saudi government has finally admitted that Jamal Khashoggi has been killed, although its account of how this happened is as implausible as the various denials it supplants. That we rely on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the world’s most enthusiastic jailer of journalists, to help establish the facts is one of the ironies of a post-truth world.

Talk about the demise of truth is always liable to sound histrionic and naive. After all, we have long been told that the prince must be “a great feigner and dissembler” (this is Machiavelli, not the House of Saud), and “realists” ever since have stressed the usefulness of illusions and the necessity of lies. Indeed, recent research by Ezra Zuckerman Sivan indicates that a large constituency of voters expect their political heroes to lie on their behalf.

Continue reading…

Trump administration trying to define transgender out of existence – report

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  • New York Times cites government memo
  • Gender would be defined at birth as only male or female

The Trump administration is attempting to strip transgender people of official recognition by creating a narrow definition of gender as being only male or female and unchangeable once determined at birth, the New York Times reported.

Related: ‘Rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ is a poisonous lie used to discredit trans people

Continue reading…

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