US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Horace Murray

Now Dah is a very small village north-west of Bagram AFB in Afghanistan, and it’s virtually invisible on the internet except for photographs by American soldiers, distributing humanitarian assistance or “engaging key leaders,” as above, April 20, 2010.

During the same engagement, an Afghan boy “playfully” aimed his slingshot at the photographer, Staff Sergeant Horace Murray, 982nd Signal Company (COMCAM), US Army Reserve, from Wilson, North Carolina.

If you look for the meat in what amounts to a vast bullshit-sandwich of Republican blather about immigration, you eventually come down to mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants.

And likewise if you swallow all the piss-and-moan Democratic hysteria about Arizona’s worse-than-the-fucking-Nazis plan “to stop people on the suspicion that they may be undocumented workers,” at the bottom of that steaming urinal you arrive at open borders.

But of course it’s always nothing definite with the major American political parties, and we citizens just have to guess at their hidden agendas on the basis of whatever stinking con-game has been calculated to deliver the most votes right now.

So which is it, Republicans and Democrats?

Mass deportation of millions of our hard-working friends and neighbors, or open borders, and de facto American citizenship for everybody in the Western Hemisphere, and beyond?

What a beautiful choice!

Or is it more like an inevitable dilemma, that all of us chose and keep choosing every time we elect yet another NAFTA-lovin’ con-man like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama?

Obama’s critics constantly portray him as a “weak-livered pole-cat!”

But after the passage of Obama’s landmark healthcare reform, the child-like faith of Obamabots all over America was apparently justified! Although…

Hard-boiled editor Perry White wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as Lois Lane, because…

Obamacare depends on $455 billion in spending cuts from Medicare!

Two American soldiers (not yet identified by the Pentagon) died in Logar Province on Thursday, April 22, 2010, during an exchange of gunfire in an isolated family compound, on the road between Pul-e-Alam and the town of Baraki Barak.

Baraki Barak is the original homeplace of the Burki/Baraki/Ormuri, (historically also known as Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar), a Pushtun tribe now concentrated in Kaniguram. in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

Like other Pushtun tribes, the Burki (Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar) seek self-segregation from the outside world: thus the importance of Kaniguram as the historical focal point of the tribe and the continued effort to retain their native tongue (Urmar), which predates Pushtu.

The Barakis’ most celebrated chieftain was the warrior-poet Pir Roshan, who invented the Pushtu alphabet, advocated universal education and equal rights for women, and led a rebellion against the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1582.

This rebellion continued for about 100 years, until the grandsons and great-grandsons of Pir Roshan finally made peace with the grandsons and great-grandsons of Emperor Akbar.

………………………………………….

Three days after a couple of American soldiers were killed along with three Afghan civilians/insurgents/whatevers during one of General Stanley McChrystal’s signature midnight commando raids in Logar Province, “protestors” blocked the main road through the district capital of Pul-e-Alam, and burned 16 NATO fuel tankers.

The local commander of the Afghan National Army, Brig. Gen. Ghulam Mustafa Mohseni, complained that NATO had declined to consult with local authorities before the midnight raid, and relied instead on the same kind of intel which has failed and failed and failed to track down Osama bin Laden in nearby Waziristan for nine long years.

Two American soldiers (not yet identified by the Pentagon) died in Logar Province on Thursday, April 22, 2010, during an exchange of gunfire in an isolated family compound, on the road between Pul-e-Alam and the town of Baraki Barak.

Baraki Barak is the original homeplace of the Burki/Baraki/Ormuri, (historically also known as Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar), a Pushtun tribe now concentrated in Kaniguram. in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

Like other Pushtun tribes, the Burki (Barak, Baraki, Birki (of Baburnama), Barki, Braakee or Urmar) seek self-segregation from the outside world: thus the importance of Kaniguram as the historical focal point of the tribe and the continued effort to retain their native tongue (Urmar), which predates Pushtu.

The Barakis’ most celebrated chieftain was the warrior-poet Pir Roshan, who invented the Pushtu alphabet, advocated universal education and equal rights for women, and led a rebellion against the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1582.

This rebellion continued for about 100 years, until the grandsons and great-grandsons of Pir Roshan finally made peace with the grandsons and great-grandsons of Emperor Akbar.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig burning in the Gulf of Mexico

Lightening in the cloud of volcanic ash above the Eyjafjallajokull volcano

A plume of gas and dust extending approximately 17,000,000,000,000 miles (3 light-years) out of the Carina Nebula

All three photos were originally published by the Daily Telegraph.

The dim-witted but Presidential-looking tool of corrupt political bosses Warren G. Harding was sold to the American public after WWI by promising a “return to normalcy,” and for anyone except idiotic bullshitters about the “War on Terror,” Harding’s humdrum slogan represents a very appealing alternative to the chaos which American invaders inherited and intensified in Afghanistan.

Intelligent readers will probably be amazed to learn that what you might call “normalcy” has already returned to a couple of provinces in Afghanistan, meaning that tribal elders have expelled foreign militants, pacified the Taliban, accepted a pile of money from our grateful coalition, and re-instated the glacial tranquility of their primordial way of being, enlivened only by ancient festivals and a few low-key shoot-outs between Hatfields and McCoys.

This relatively happy state of affairs in Nangarhar Province, for example, was immediately (or sooner) misinterpreted by Western media and the Pentagon in three different ways:

1. It can’t happen.

2. It can happen, but it’s all about money.

3. It quickly failed.

It’s probably impossible for our fundamentally immodest and benighted nation to accept this modest and self-evidently appropriate outcome of our lethal misadventures in Afghanistan, and leave behind a weak central government exercising only sporadic authority over almost entirely autonomous tribes, which is to say, Afghanistan as Afghanistan was always and ever shall be, whenever it isn’t occupied by foreign imbeciles.

An opinion survey of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed that 94 percent of respondents support negotiating with the Taliban over military confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 percent regard the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers”.

The survey, conducted by a private U.S. contractor last December, covered Kandahar City and other districts in the province into which Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is planning to introduce more troops in the biggest operation of the entire war.

“Our Afghan brothers!”

This is the end of the line for the United States in Afghanistan, and if anyone was waiting for handwriting on the wall to announce it, there it is.

From Glenn Greenwald…

During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Thomas Drake.

Think about to whose interests the Obama DOJ is devoted given that — while they protect the most profound Bush crimes based on the Presidential decree of “Look Forward, Not Backward” — they chose this whistle-blower to prosecute (and Drake, incidentally, is apparently impoverished, as he’s been assigned a Public Defender to represent him).

In the process, of course, the Obama DOJ also intimidates and deters future whistle-blowers from exposing what they know, thus further suffocating one of the very few remaining mechanisms Americans have to learn about what takes place behind the virtually impenetrable Wall of Secrecy surrounding the Surveillance State — a Wall of Secrecy which the Obama administration, through its promiscuous use of “state secrets” and immunity claims, has relentlessly fortified and expanded.

Mark Ambinder provided another salient detail in the Atlantic…

Drake faces up to 40 years in prison.

40 years in prison for exposing crimes which will never be prosecuted.

Look Forward Not Backward, America!

Look forward to foreclosures surging to another absolute record!

Look Forward Not Backward, America!

Look forward to larger defense budgets in constant dollars than the War in Vietnam, when we had 500,000 troops in the field!

Defense expenditures in constant dollars, slightly under-representing Obama’s military budget of $716 billion for 2011.

And here we are right back at the beginning of my diary, because…

If anybody on the inside is ever tempted to blow the whistle about waste and fraud in our bloated national security establishment, then he or she should carefully consider the case of Thomas Drake…

And then there’s the massive fraud and waste which Gorman also exposed as a result of Drake’s whistle-blowing. The primary focus of her stories was that the Trailblazer project turned into a massive, billion-dollar “boondoggle” which vastly exceeded its original estimates, sucked up enormous amounts of the post-9/11 intelligence budget explosion, and produced very little of value.

Soldiers from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry take defensive positions at firebase Restrepo after receiving fire from Taliban positions in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province on May 11, 2009. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)

More than 40 U.S. soldiers have been killed, and scores more wounded, in helicopter crashes, machine-gun attacks and grenade blasts in the Korengal Valley, a jagged sliver just six miles deep and a half-mile wide. The Afghan death toll has been far higher, making the Korengal some of the bloodiest ground in all of Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, the American presence here came to an abrupt end.

For U.S. commanders, the Korengal Valley offers a hard lesson in the limits of American power and goodwill in Afghanistan. U.S. troops arrived in 2005 to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. They stayed on the theory that the American presence drew insurgents away from areas where the United States had a better chance of fostering development. The troops were, in essence, bullet magnets.

“Bullet magnets!” Put that on all those recruitment posters that Army recruiters plaster all over inner-city neighborhoods!

And at the very end, we paid off the Taliban to permit us to run away in peace, for 6,000 gallons of fuel, and some rusty equipment.

If U.S. troops were allowed to leave peacefully, the Americans wouldn’t destroy the base, the crane and the fuel. (Village chieftain Shamshir) Khan assured (Local US commander Captain Mark) Moretti that the valley’s fighters would honor the deal.

So that’s the end of our stupid adventures in the Korengal Valley, but until that very moment, we were just as stupid as always.

Moretti had been boycotting weekly meetings of the elders and avoiding Zalwar Khan as a way to pressure them into greater cooperation. He also hoped that by ignoring Khan he could force him to build a relationship with Afghan government officials.

“You are the only American commander I have known who refuses to see me,” Khan said in Pashto, his face just inches from Moretti’s. “You are the only one who doesn’t sit at the weekly shura. Why?”

“The shura is a waste of time,” Moretti replied. “All we talk about is dead goats.”

“All we talk about is dead goats…”

…in a valley too poor to graze sheep on scarce bottom-land, and where nothing except goats can scratch out a living on the rocky slopes. Three or four goats is the difference between milk for children and cheese in the winter and even a little meat on very special occasions for most of the families in the Korengal Valley.

But Americans don’t want to talk about dead goats!

And now we can forget about everything else in the Korengal Valley, too, along with the names of so many brave soldiers who died there…

Staff Sgt. Thaddeus S. Montgomery, of West Yellowstone, Mont. and PFC Richard A. Dewater, 21, of Topeka, Kan., and Staff Sgt. Nathan M. Cox, 32, of Walcott, Iowa, and Pvt. Joseph F. Gonzales, 18, of Tucson, Ariz. and Staff Sgt. Kristopher D. Rodgers, 29, of Sturgis, Mich., and Sgt. Joshua C. Brennan, 22, of Ontario, Ore., and Spc. Hugo V. Mendoza, 29, of Glendale, Ariz., and Pfc. Juan S. Restrepo, 20, of Pembroke Pines, Fla., who left his name to “Firebase Restrepo” in Korengal Valley, and Pfc. Timothy R. Vimoto, 19, of Fort Campbell, Ky., Sgt. Edelman L. Hernandez, 23, of Hyattsville, Md., and Spc. Christopher M. Wilson, 24, of Bangor, Maine, and Cpl. Angelo J. Vaccaro, 23, of Deltona, Fla., and Cpl. Fernando D. Robinson, 21, of Hawthorne, Calif., and Sgt. Russell M. Durgin, 23, of Henniker, N.H., and PFC Richard A. Dewater, 21, of Topeka, Kan., along with 25 other American soldiers and many more Afghan civilians.