The 18-Year Afghanistan Debacle: A West Point Combat Ranger Vet Talks With Chris Hedges About The Rule Of Our Republican & Democratic War Criminals

Torching lives, reputation, treasure, national values and reputation in an 18-year bonfire of racketeering, ignorance & lies by both Republicans & Democrats.

[Editor’s Note: This discussion is an excellent overview of the revelations from the recent Washington Post series on the Afghanistan War papers. Given the bipartisan fraud, lying and complicity in this 18-year long corrupt war crime, the story is not getting the attention it deserves in the corporate media. — Mark L. Taylor]

By Chris Hedges
On Contact / RT (12/21/19)

Chris Hedges talks to Spenser Rapone, former combat veteran and US Army Officer, about the Washington Post’s series the Afghanistan Papers. Drawing on thousands of pages of international government documents about the war in Afghanistan, the series exposes the lies, deceit, mismanagement, waste, corruption, fraud and failed schemes that both Democratic and Republican administrations pursed in Afghanistan, the longest conflict in US history (18 years and counting) that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money.

Link To 27-Minute Video

  • “Commie Cadet” Spenser Rapone On Why He Left The U.S. Military & Became A Socialist — The so-called “Commie Cadet” was anything but a communist at the start of his military career. Spenser Rapone was like a character who stepped out of a Bruce Springsteen song. He was an idealistic teenager from the rural Rust Belt town of New Castle, Pennsylvania (literally the “Fireworks Capital of America”), who embraced patriotic jingoism and enlisted in the army straight out of high school. But after being deployed to Afghanistan and seeing the violence his unit was helping to inflict, Rapone grew increasingly disillusioned with the military. He studied political theory, radicalized, and eventually turned to socialism. Inspired by former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who famously took a knee to protest police violence, Rapone wore a Che Guevara T-shirt to his West Point graduation in May 2016 and turned his cap over to reveal the hand-scrawled message, “Communism will win.” … Read The Rest

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

— Gen. Douglas Lute, Afghan War “Czar” adviser to both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
(Access NPR interview with Lute.)

(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2019. Open source and free for non derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

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Leaked Video Of SEALs Calling Trump’s Pet War Criminal Eddie Gallagher “Evil”

The Young Turks (12/27/19)

“Members of SEAL Team 7 Alpha Platoon described their platoon leader, retired Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, as “toxic” and “evil,” according to video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times. Gallagher’s war crimes case gained national attention after President Donald Trump controversially intervened on his behalf, ignoring Pentagon leaders who had told the President such a move could damage the integrity of the military judicial system.

“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller said of Gallagher during his interview with Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents, the Times reported.”

Link To 11-Minute Video

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Take No Prisoners: Inside A WWII American War Crime

Reveal / Center For Investigative Reporting (8/28/18)

In December 1944, Adolf Hitler surprised the Allies with a secret counterattack through the Ardennes forest, known today as the Battle of the Bulge. In the carnage that followed, there was one incident that top military commanders hoped would be concealed. It’s the story of an American war crime nearly forgotten to history.

After desperate house-to-house fighting between German and American forces, American soldiers wrested control of the Belgian town of Chenogne. Americans rounded up the remaining German prisoners of war, took them to a field and machine-gunned them.

Reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway found an entry in General George S. Patton’s handwritten diary referring to the incident in Chenogne. Patton called it murder. So why then was there no official investigation?

Through vivid interviews with a 93-year-old veteran who witnessed the event, conversations with historians and the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials, and analysis of formerly confidential military records, we investigate why justice never came for the American soldiers responsible for the massacre at Chenogne.

DIG DEEPER

  • Read: Did defense secretary nominee James Mattis commit war crimes in Iraq?
  • Read: The devastating story behind one image of detainee abuse

Link To Story And 51-Minute Audio