David Walsh
WSWS

"The well-heeled liberal element [...] makes a profession of spreading illusions in the Democrats."

The outcome of the 2010 midterm elections is an indictment of the apologists for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

As a result of the November 2 elections, in which the Republican Party regained control of the House of Representatives and picked up seats in the Senate, the entire political system in the US has shifted farther to the right. The consequences for millions of working people will be severe, as the attack on social conditions and democratic rights is intensified and military violence is employed even more aggressively around the world.

Two years ago, a variety of “left” and liberal forces strove to convince those sections of the population over whom they had influence that the Obama campaign represented a watershed in American politics and that under his administration the policies of war, attacks on jobs and social programs, and the shredding of Constitutional rights would come to an end.

The Nation magazine and others painted Obama, a thoroughly conventional bourgeois politician with a track record of subservience to the Democratic Party machine in Illinois and to big business, as a “progressive” who would turn America around. This effort, which combined self-deception and deliberate falsification, helped generate illusions in Obama and lull the population to sleep.

What are the results? Obama, given a free hand by his left-liberal apologists, steered a right-wing, pro-big business course from his first day in office (and even before). In the face of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, the administration bailed out Wall Street while doing nothing for the millions of unemployed and impoverished workers and the legions of families facing the loss of their homes.

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David Walsh
WSWS

[...] the facts as reported by the Daily Mail in Britain become even more peculiar when it comes to how the two women, involved independently with Assange, according to their lawyer, got together to press charges. According to the newspaper, “The drama took a bizarre and ultimately sensational turn after she [the second woman] called the office of Woman A, whom she had briefly met at the seminar. The two women talked and realised to their horror and anger that they had both been victims of his charm.” Pardon us, if we don’t believe a word of this.

The WSWS calls for a campaign in defense of Assange and WikiLeaks, and the dropping of all charges against Private Bradley Manning, accused of leaking the documents to WikiLeaks. Top officials in Washington will stop at nothing to prevent the truth from emerging about their crimes in Afghanistan.

The decision by a senior Swedish prosecutor to reopen the rape charges against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange is a transparently political decision. There is every reason to believe this is part of a “dirty tricks” operation, originating in Washington, aimed at discrediting or destroying Assange and WikiLeaks. The World Socialist Web Site denounces the smear campaign and demands that it be halted.

On July 25 WikiLeaks posted some 92,000 US military documents covering the period January 2004 to December 2009, helping to expose the criminal and brutal nature of the conflict. The release infuriated the White House and the Pentagon, who have threatened the organization with criminal charges. The ultra-right in the US has called for Assange’s assassination.

WikiLeaks claims it has another 15,000 secret documents, which it intends to release in the near future. It is likely the campaign against Assange is directed toward pressuring WikiLeaks into turning over the files or undermining their ultimate release. Everything about the affair in Sweden stinks to high heaven.

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Pratap Chatterjee
TomDispatch.com

Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373

"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.

Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaks in July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.

When Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the U.S. provincial reconstruction team in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologizing to do. Philips had to explain why a covert U.S. military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander given the code-name “Carbon,” had called in an AC-130 Spectre gunship and inadvertently killed seven Afghan police officers in the middle of the night.

The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- counterinsurgency (“protecting the people”) and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan.

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David Walsh

The visit by MSNBC news program host Rachel Maddow to Afghanistan in early July was as revealing as it was repugnant. Maddow is a principal voice of the liberal-left in the American media mainstream. When her program first aired in September 2008, the press made much of the fact that the she was the first “openly gay anchor” to host a prime-time news program in the US.

Maddow spent several days in Afghanistan this month, interviewing American officers and soldiers, touring Kandahar and Kabul, discussing counter-insurgency strategy and the overall state of the US military occupation. Whatever misgivings she might have about the ultimate fate of the American and allied effort in Afghanistan, Maddow solidarized herself fully with the occupation and the US military, endorsing the bloody suppression of the insurgency.

In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, there were those in the US and elsewhere who were deceived into thinking that the American invasion of Afghanistan had something to do with bringing terrorists and their Taliban sponsors to justice. Nine years of the conflict—with the location and fate of Osama bin Laden largely dropped and the number of Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan calculated, by US officials, to be between 50 and 100—have clarified the issues.

The US ruling elite seized on the 9/11 attacks and, in the name of the “war on terror,” stepped up its drive for global domination. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan never had anything to do with democracy, freeing the Afghan people from oppression, or safeguarding the US population from future terrorist attacks.

The massive military operation has everything to do with the vast energy reserves in the Caspian Sea region, oil pipeline routes, and the general determination of the US ruling elite to implant itself in the strategically critical Central Asian region, both in its own interests and to thwart those of its rivals in Europe, Russia, China and elsewhere.

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David Walsh

The New York Times reported May 15 that the US military was continuing “to rely on a secret network” of spies and paramilitary assassins in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two months after the newspaper first brought the unit to public attention.

At the time, in March 2010, the network, under the supervision of Michael Furlong, a longtime Pentagon dirty tricks operator, was routinely described by the media and military US officials as “off-the-books” or “unauthorized.” Much ado was made about a Defense Department criminal investigation into Furlong’s activities and the millions of dollars spent on the program he allegedly directed.

The Washington Post asserted March 19 that the operation was shut down “late last year” and an investigation begun, and cited the comments of a US military official who primly claimed that Furlong “had stepped outside the boundaries of his contract and ‘didn’t want to operate within the constraints of how we do business.’”

This was simply so much dust thrown in the public’s eyes. In the first place, every indication suggests that Furlong’s intelligence and murder outfit was authorized at the highest levels of the Defense Department.

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David Walsh

“I hate a cinema that’s been taken over by special effects. I’ve given up going to almost all of the contemporary action movies. I still enjoy action movies, I like exciting films, but I don’t find the contemporary ones exciting. They’re just boring.” —Film critic Robin Wood (died December 18, 2009), in an interview with the WSWS, September 2000

In March 1998, filmmaker James Cameron received the Academy Award for “Achievement in directing” thanks to his work on the immensely successful Titanic, released the previous year. Over the better part of the next decade, Cameron directed several documentaries, a television special, and an episode of a television series, prior to working directly on Avatar, his newest film, which took some four years to put together.

In other words, after accepting the film industry’s highest official honor for feature film directing, Cameron turned his back on the activity, primarily devoting himself instead to the development of various film technologies. This seems entirely fitting.

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