I hope the tax money is well worth it:
"Afghans amass, sell US gear as scrap metal; Devices stripped of deadly parts" by Kevin Sieff | Washington Post, October 27, 2013
BAGRAM, Afghanistan — The armored trucks, televisions, ice cream scoops, and nearly everything else shipped here for America’s war against the Taliban are now part of the world’s biggest garage sale. Every week, as the US troop drawdown accelerates, the United States is selling 12 million to 14 million pounds of its equipment on the Afghan market.
Returning that gear to the United States from a landlocked country halfway around the world would be prohibitively expensive, according to US officials. Instead, they’re leaving behind $7 billion worth of supplies, a would-be boon to the fragile Afghan economy.
Don't worry; the Pentagon and "defense" contractors will get plenty of money to replace everything.
But there’s one catch: The equipment is being turned into scrap metal before it’s offered to the Afghan people — to ensure that treadmills, air conditioning units, and other rudimentary appliances aren’t used to make roadside bombs.
“Many nonmilitary items have timing equipment or other components in them that can pose a threat. For example, timers can be attached to explosives. Treadmills, stationary bikes, many household appliances and devices, et cetera, have timers,” said Michelle McCaskill, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency.
Yeah, but if we are not going to be there why wreck the merchandi.... oh, right, we are going to be there even after we "leave."
That policy has produced more scrap metal than Afghanistan has ever seen. It has also led to frustration among Afghans, who feel as if they’re being robbed of items like flat-panel televisions and armored vehicles that they could use or sell — no small thing in a country where the average annual income hovers at just more than $500.
In a nation nicknamed the ‘‘graveyard of empires,’’ foreign forces are remembered for what they leave behind. In the 1840s, the British left forts that stand today. In the 1980s, the Russians left tanks, trucks, and aircraft strewn about the country. The United States is leaving heaps of mattresses, barbed wire, and shipping containers in scrap yards near its shrinking bases.
“This is America’s dustbin,” said Sufi Khan, a trader standing in the middle of an immense scrap yard outside Bagram Airfield, the US military’s sprawling headquarters for eastern Afghanistan.
That is where all your tax money was thrown, Americans. And for what? The mass-murder of people who had nothing to do with the false flag inside job of 9/11 to the benefit of war profiteers, drug dealers, and money-laundering banks.
The scrap yard looks like a postindustrial landfill in the middle of the Afghan desert, a surreal outcropping of mangled metal and plastic.
Look, we call it liberation, 'kay?
********************
Feda Mohammad Ulfat had gotten rich on dozens of other contracts with the US military, and he assumed this would be no different.
Hey, you know what? I'm glad someone made a buck off all the lies.
When he first signed the contract, the scrap metal was only trickling in. But over the past six months, America’s drawdown has reached a fever pitch in eastern Afghanistan, with dozens of bases being closed.
Being kept awfully quiet in my news pages. I guess they don't want the "enemy" to read what's in the Boston Globe, as if some Afghan would even bother.
Suddenly, a torrent of scrap metal was delivered to Ulfat’s farm. He had to buy more land. Scrap was piled atop scrap.
He now spends up to a half-million dollars a month on gear that has been shredded or flattened.
When US officials first began planning for their exit, the idea was to ship home the majority of their equipment, especially expensive military gear like mine-resistant vehicles. That calculus has changed.
The Pentagon has budgeted $5 billion to $7 billion to ship gear back to the United States. But that sum isn’t enough to take everything in Afghanistan.
Wanting at least a small return on their investment, the US military decided to sell the leftovers for pennies on the pound. That’s where Ulfat came in....
Their inve$tment, taxpayers?
Pennies on the pound in this time of austerity at home?
--more--"
Related and right above the above the previous article:
"Guantanamo fate tied to Afghanistan exit; Officials believe detainees could start new appeals" by Karen DeYoung | Washington Post, October 27, 2013
WASHINGTON — The approaching end of the US war in Afghanistan could help President Obama move toward what he has said he wanted to do since his first day in office: close the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
If he had really wanted to close it he could have issued his executive orders as commander-in-chief to do such a thing; however, he didn't want to fight the political fallout from such a move.
Besides, isn't Bagram being kept in AmeriKan hands?
Blocked by Congress from releasing or transferring many of the remaining 164 detainees and able to try only a small number of them, administration officials are examining whether the withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2014 could open the door for some to challenge the legal authority of the United States to continue to imprison them.
Except we are not really withdrawing. Leaving "trainers" behind is not withdrawing.
Most immediately, officials believe the war’s declared end could force a reckoning over the detention of more than a dozen Afghan Taliban members captured on the battlefield, allowing them to lodge new appeals to the federal courts.
Wow, they are really setting up the upcoming narrative. Going to declare an end to the war, yaaaaay!
“In the words of the Supreme Court, the authority to detain — if you’re detaining based on someone being a belligerent — can unravel as hot wars end. And I think that’s a real question,” Brigadier General Mark Martins, chief prosecutor for military commissions at Guantanamo, said in a recent interview.
Detainees at Guantanamo have been held, some of them for more than 12 years and most without charge, since Congress authorized the use of military force against those who “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and might launch new attacks.
Related: ISRAEL DID 9/11
Why isn't the government going after them? Instead they are being featured on the propaganda pre$$'s political programs.
Ideally, Obama would like to do away with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a law passed within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, and replace it with more targeted versions to allow action against new Al Qaeda-related groups in the Middle East and Africa and other threats as they arise.
Bulls***!
His goal, the president said in a May speech, is to “refine and ultimately repeal” the authority.
There he goes opening his mouth again.
Repeal of the authorization could allow other detainees imprisoned under its terms to refile habeas corpus petitions that the government had quashed.
“If that were to go away, you really don’t have that legal hook for continued detention,” a senior administration official said of the authorization. “I think you would have some very interesting constitutional questions.”
While the end of the war may accelerate the transfer of prisoners, the administration would still need a place to hold those being tried in military commissions, including the alleged Sept. 11 plotters, as well as potentially some of the four dozen men deemed too dangerous to release but who are ineligible for trial because evidence against them is inadmissable. Congress has prohibited their transfer to US prisons.
Meaning Gitmo isn't closing even with the end of the war, and those guys are ineligible for trial because the inadmissable evidence is based on TORTURE! Talk about obfuscation in an article and suggestive deception in a headline.
No new detainees have arrived at Guantanamo since 2008, when the George W. Bush administration announced the transfer of the last of the 16 “high-value” prisoners from secret CIA and other sites overseas.
Don't even go there.
Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the authorization has provided the legal justification under US law for military action in Afghanistan and for CIA drone attacks and other actions in Pakistan.
With no legislative or legal challenge, Obama has also adopted an expanded interpretation of the law to use force against Al Qaeda “associates,” including groups that did not exist when it was first enacted.
But he wants to do away with it, yeah.
As currently interpreted, the authorization has no geographic boundaries and can justify military action anywhere in the world where the administration determines it applies.
Including HERE at HOME, dear fellow citizens of America!!
Under Obama, it has been the legal underpinning for lethal strikes against Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabab in Somalia. This month, it was the cited legal authority for US Special Forces operations that captured Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, also known as Anas al-Libi, in Tripoli, Libya, and the failed attempt to capture an al-Shabab leader in southern Somalia.
Shoving that Al-CIA-Duh alibi right up your anus with that in-your-face laugher, aren't they?
But the open-ended nature of the authorization — along with the distance in time and space between current struggles in the Middle East and Africa and the Afghan conflict that began in 2001 — has left many concerned.
“I never imagined that the AUMF would still be in effect today,” Jane Harman, former Democratic representative from California, one of 420 House members to vote in favor of the measure on Sept. 14, 2001, said at a recent conference on the subject.
“Over time, some would assert, and I agree, that it has taken on a life of its own, and the executive branch has used it in ways that no one who voted for it envisioned,” Harman said.
Who is Jane Harman?
Related: Hiding Harman's Treason
Because she got so huffy about it. Strange how that spying doesn't raise a ruckus in my jewspaper.
Others have been reluctant to do away with it or narrow its scope.
The only ironclad waiver to the current congressional restrictions on transferring detainees out of Guantanamo Bay is a court order.
--more--"
Nothing about the hunger strikes, huh?
UPDATED SCRAP:
Bomber kills 10 police officers
