POTUS 45 takes turn Selling “Brooklyn Bridge”: Trump’s CIA man at State Bombs Un-friends Bombs “Befriends” Jihadists

Stunt on Road to the White House  

U.S. Presidents announce Ending Wars They Never End

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rump Presidency (Iraq and Afghanistan)

Associated Press reporting U.S. former CIA Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 2020:

“We’re proud of our gains, but our generals have determined that this war is unlikely to be won militarily without tremendous additional resources. All sides are tired of fighting.”

Said a man who did nothing to end U.S. slaughter of Afghans in his best condescending humanitarian dissembling: “We are now on the cusp of having an opportunity which may not succeed, but an opportunity, for the first time, to let the Afghan peoples’ voices be heard.”

In matching condescension and humanitarian dissembling (with a touch of “great white hope” self-congratulation), U.S. President Donald Trump declared

“These commitments [with the Taliban] represent an important step to a lasting peace in a new Afghanistan, free from al-Qaida, ISIS and any other terrorist group that would seek to bring us harm.”

Business Insider-UK reporting the U.S. President’s shameless fabrication and boasting (2020):

• “We’ve destroyed in Syria and Iraq 100% of the ISIS caliphate, 100% ….
• We have thousands of prisoners. 
• We’ve killed ISIS fighters by the thousands and likewise in Afghanistan. 
• But, now it’s time for somebody else to do that work. And that’ll be the Taliban.”

“They will be killing terrorists. They will be killing some very bad people. They will keep that fight going …. I will be meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not too distant future.”

2020 January U.S. News & World Report headlining presidential war orders 

“Trump to Send 3,000 More Troops to Middle East …”

“…Days before ordering the airstrike (murder of Iran’s beloved Major General Qasem) Soleimani [March 11, 1957-January 3, 2020] … President Trump had ordered … 1,000 Army airborne troops and Marines into Iraq in response to violent protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad …. The protesters, members and supporters of Iranian-backed militias, were outraged by a series of U.S. airstrikes targeting pro-Iranian militia group Kataib Hezbollah, killing more than a dozen of its fighters. …

 USA Today and the Guardian reporting January 10, 2020

An estimated “5,500 U.S. troops” occupy Iraq and U.S. officials are said to want more from non-NATO nations but Iraqi protesters and the head of state want the U.S. out of their country. And the ex-CIA man’s State Department replies with shameless temerity

“The U.S. presence in Iraq is a ‘force for good’ and U.S. officials would not discuss a military withdrawal.”

The Guardian

“United States is not willing to withdraw troops from Iraq, says Pompeo: Secretary of State says US is only willing to discuss future structure of forces in country.”

The U.S. military budget tops the world and the U.S. economy and private investment thrive on foreign wars, manufacture and sales of weapons of war: 

Estimated U.S. 2020 War Budget ranked 1st: 

$748 billion

   

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bama Presidency (Iraq)

New York Times reporting 2011 (October)

U.S. President Barack Obama:

“Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”

“Our troops will definitely be home for the holidays.”

CNN reporting 2014 (November)

“President Barack Obama is sending up to 1,500 more soldiers to Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces to fight ISIS, in a deployment that would almost double the total number of American troops there to 2,900.

“The White House said in a statement that it will also ask Congress for another $5.6 billion to fund the fight against ISIS. … The White House has insisted that the US operation against ISIS will not include ‘boots on the ground.’ But the new announcement by an administration that made ending foreign wars a core of its foreign policy is likely to fuel new concerns of ‘mission creep’ among the president’s critics.

The Hill 2016 (April)

“The Pentagon on Monday announced that it will send more than 200 troops to Iraq to support Baghdad’s offensive to re-capture the city of Mosul from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).”

U.S. Presidents’ Jihadists

Brooklyn Bridge for Sale Again

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o more than did the 44th’s theatrical “reset” etc., departure-from-Iraq stunt materialize will the 45th’s ending U.S. aggression against Afghanistan, which has spanned not just eighteen years of violence — but forty years of wild and reckless violence, capriciously and callously siding with and /or against one or another internal faction (or terrorists or jihadists, by whatever the name), spreading unending chaos against the sovereign state and leaving millions displaced, dead and wounded 

(physically and mentally), their institutions, livelihoods, and chance for a healthy future destroyed.

As the 44th made matters worse in Iraq (and in Pakistan and Afghanistan and from the Horn of Africa westward and eastward), the 45th has worsened his immediate predecessor’s (and his predecessor’s predecessors’) worse — by stepping up brutal slaughter with “smart” bombs and distant technological bloodletting “games” and economic strangulation mainly (but not only) against peoples of the MENA, the Persian Gulf, and the Horn of Africa (north, east, and westward); unconsciously driving people into the sea, into the arms of rapists and human traffickers; and then denying victims of U.S. aggression entry into U.S. territory.

Perhaps Americans can forget or blissfully persist in their ignorance of this interminable and unconscionable aggression against these countries and peoples; but you can be sure the people (including Jihadists) of Africa and Asia will not trust the word of a known and pathological liar. They will neither forgive nor forget the war crimes and crimes against their humanity.

The current two or a few years of pageantry and pretense and on-camera talk and posturing — bolstered by rotten politics, incessant propaganda, unending political campaigns, a corrupt U.S. electoral system and a distracted body politic—may well get an unethical, lawless, incompetent, and unfit for purpose person elected to U.S. public office. But these conditions will not wash clean the U.S.-led “West’s” seas of blood, callous injury, contempt for life and “difference”; and interminable, overpowering, unchecked aggression.

Tribes quite naturally, and by nature independent spirits will neither trust nor heel to the congenital character of malevolence—no matter who holds forth from the U.S. White House Oval Office.

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orty years and Counting (a review)

USA Mujahideen - Taliban

•  1970s: Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet branch: the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) requested that the Soviet Union bring forces into Afghanistan to aid the government.

• 1979–1989: The United States, Pakistan, the Saudi Kingdom and others aided the Mujahideen against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviets.

• The Mujahideen was a political alliance or bloc of “seven main Mujahideen parties known as the Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahedeen.”

• Mujahideen were not a government but a movement (a tribe) and after years of fighting— including infighting — a religious leader among them, backed by Pakistan, formed another movement. 
• This new movement was known as the Taliban — in Pasto “students”, reflecting the members’ formative years spent in Pakistani refugee camps (on the southern border of Afghanistan) and in Saudi-financed educational institutions (madrassas, Islamic religious schools) focusing on “Wahhabism,” a “fundamentalist” or “particularly austere and rigid form of Islam rooted in Saudi Arabia.”

Known for its strict (Saudi) interpretation of Islamic law, the Taliban, held power over roughly three quarters of Afghanistan (1996-2001); and at its zenith, received diplomatic recognition from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. 

After 2001 the tribe “regrouped as an insurgency movement to fight the American-backed Hamid Karzai administration and the USA/NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the War in Afghanistan.”

Convenient Puppet

Hamid Karzai (a U.S. / UK puppet) in the 1980s was a fundraiser for the U.S.-Pakistan-Saudi-backed anti-communist Mujahideen.

Years later Karzai tried to warn U.S. officials (who failed to listen or heed the warning) about the coming September 11, 2001, attack in New York. 

Three months after the attack, Karzai was wounded, receiving injuries to his facial nerves, by U.S. missile fire in southern Afghanistan. Karzai’s leadership of Afghanistan was later decided not by the Afghan people but by the Western Alliance (until they tired of him). 

Name your flavor

Jihadism	Jihad	Mujahideen
Shahid	Martyrdom video	Islamic terrorism
Black Standard	Islamic fundamentalism	Islamism
Wahhabism	Salafism	Qutbism
Al-Shabaab	Taliban	Al-Qaeda
	Ansar al-Islam	Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

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amid Karzai, the son of Afghan politicians and tribal leaders, was an Afghan politician, Interim leader of Afghanistan then President of Afghanistan [December 22, 2001 (December 7, 2004) -September 29, 2014]. He was no idiot. And in 2017 he again issued a sort of warning to the people of the United States.

The United States uses the Islamic State insurgency as a tool in Afghanistan, aimed at destabilizing the whole region.

Karzai urged the international community “‘to convince the U.S. that it needs to actually fight terrorism.”

U.S. officials not only have a disgraceful contempt for other nations and peoples, they also have a deluded sense of themselves. Repeatedly they have underestimated others and overestimated themselves. They seem to celebrate their ignorance and they keep the populace ignorant with misplaced priorities, inferior educational institutions, and propaganda in all-round sound. 

They display a weakness, a deep and serious character flaw that keeps them from studying others, learning, respecting and accepting their ways, and engaging in conversations with many cultures. They choose brute force, violence all the time everywhere. If anything is savage, this surely is. The “American way” or, as some have termed it, the doctrine of “Americanism,” is savagery.

Correcting

the course of cruelty requires U.S. leadership that thinks and acts with humility and integrity, open-mindedness, engagement with words through many languages (learned, spoken and in translation) and with respectfulness (not condescension) — one human being with another. 

 

This is not a quest for or reduction to weakness — but rather a rise from weakness to strength; courage that causes neither blood loss nor pain; neither regrets (awaiting mea culpa memoirs) nor grounds for retaliation. 

 As much as Americans (and other nuclear-powered and historically colonial and oppressive nations and tribalists) have been prepared to stay the course of endless destruction and cruelty — they must garner (and instill in the young) the strength of character to stay the better course of 

Negotiation

Diplomacy

Debate

Conversation

Give and take

Cooperation

Quest for understanding—in the service of health and human evolution.

Why not teach the young to live, to communicate, to negotiate, to engage without fear — instead of training them to engage defensively and act offensively, to kill and be killed, to wound and to be mentally and physically wounded in wars against man (humankind) and nature, which are ordered and protracted by liberal, conservative, left-right-center ideologues, presumed elites, and plutocrats?

Sources

Wikipedia

Mujahideen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujahideen

Hamid Karzai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamid_Karzai

Taliban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban

Associated Press “US, Taliban set peace signing for America’s longest war” Matthew Lee February 28, 2020 https://apnews.com/70626747d0b9ee4dec98042119efff98

Business Insider UK “Trump says US troops will start leaving Afghanistan immediately” Ryan Pickrell February 29, 2020 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-says-he-will-meet-taliban-leaders-in-near-future-2020-2

U.S. News & World Report “Trump to Send 3,000 More Troops to Middle East Amid Iran Escalation” Paul D. Shinkman January 3, 2020 p.m.https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-01-03/trump-to-send-3-000-more-troops-to-middle-east-amid-iran-escalation

USA Today “Pompeo rebuffs Iraqi leader’s demand for US troop withdrawal as critics warn of ISIS resurgence” Deirdre Shesgreen January 10, 2020 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/10/iraqi-pm-tells-mike-pompeo-decide-how-withdraw-troops/4429350002/

 

The Guardian reporting by Patrick Wintour, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Baghdad and Jennifer Rankin in Brussels January 10, 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/us-not-willing-to-withdraw-troops-from-iraq-mike-pompeo

New York Times “U.S. Troops to Leave Iraq by Year’s End, Obama Says” Mark Landler October 21, 2011 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/president-obama-announces-end-of-war-in-iraq.html

CNN “Obama sends 1,500 troops to Iraq” Stephen Collinson November 7, 2014 https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/07/politics/obama-sends-troops-to-iraq/index.html

TheHill.com “Obama to send more troops to Iraq” Kristina Wong April 18, 2016 https://thehill.com/policy/defense/276652-obama-to-send-more-troops-bring-them-closer-to-front-lines-in-iraq

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Desertion of Public health for Private wealth

Government officials’ Selling Public Good for Private Gain

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hilling for Big Cola

She favored a company that reportedly spreads disinformation through “scientists” the company hires “to produce results that obscure the product’s harm.”

• Before her departure, she reportedly promoted “Coca-Cola’s physical fitness programs” and considered reconnecting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [public-private profiteering partnering] with Coca-Cola, a company, which has been exposed (2015) “for funding scientists … (to claim that) America’s obesity crisis was all about exercise; not the excess empty calories from sugary drinks.”

Multinational publicly traded manufacturer, retailer, marketer of nonalcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups (Georgia headquartered) The Coca-Cola Company (2018 est.) revenue $31.85 billion; total assets $83.21 billion

• She invested in “drug, insurance, and health diagnostic firms that posed conflicts in dealing with cancer, opioids, and dissemination of health information.”

• She invested in “tobacco stocks” while in her position at the CDC; and before her appointment to the CDC, she reportedly invested in “cigarette companies whose products kill 480,000 Americans a year and 6 million worldwide.”

Before her resignation, Brenda Fitzgerald had been Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (July 2017-January 2018); Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health (2011 to 2017); and a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist.

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hilling for Big Pharma

He was the major pharmaceutical drug company Eli Lilly’s “top lobbyist and spokesman as its Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Communications” (2007).

• He was Vice President of Lilly’s U.S. Managed Healthcare Services organization and its Puerto Rico affiliate” (2009), and during his tenure “the company paid $1.415 billion to settle criminal charges regarding its (1999-2005) promotion of antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (olanzapine) for off-label uses.”

• He was President of the largest division of Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly USA, LLC) and had responsibility for the company’s entire U.S. operations; the position carried with it a seat on the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a pharmaceutical lobby’s, board of directors (2012-2017).

The CDC reported that in 2015 diabetes was listed as the cause of death on a quarter million U.S. death certificates and the annual direct and indirect national cost of diabetes was a quarter of a billion dollars. 

• In the years 2010-2015, during this man’s tenure, his company, Eli Lilly, hiked the cost for its Humulin injection “up 325 percent.” A class action lawsuit against the company has charged that “the price of Lilly’s insulin drugs ‘Humalog’ and ‘Humulin’ skyrocketed by 1,157 percent, and nearly 800 percent, respectively.” 
• In 1996, a vial of Humalog “cost $21.” In 2017, that same vial cost “$274.70.”

As Eli Lilly was undergoing company reorganization in early 2017, he physically (technically, on their books) left Eli Lilly; and later that year he was picked up by U.S. President Trump. 

In early 2018, the U.S. Senate rubber stamped the appointment of Big Phrama boss Alex Michael Azar II (net worth $8.7 million) as top executive of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Multinational publicly traded pharmaceutical company (Indiana-headquartered) Eli Lilly and Company (2018 est.) revenue $24.556 billion; total assets $43.908 billion

In early 2020, in the midst of an infectious disease scare, when asked about affordability of a now nonexistent vaccine for the country (and the world), Mr. oblivious-to-anything-but-self-multi-millionaire Azar The 2nd showed his colors —

“We can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” he said. “… Price controls won’t get us there.”

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he government of the United States in the person of corrupt and corruptible politicians of all stripes bent on selfish means and selfish ends have sold government service to private interests, resulting sickness — a nation exposed, individuals’ only recourse being (if they can afford the fare) lawsuits. But lawsuits do not solve societal problems, domestic or global.

What did the preamble to the U.S. Constitution say?

“…In order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense (for example, research, discovery, innovation and prevention against epidemic disease—not going around the world killing people and claiming “defense” of the homeland or “humanitarianism” for convenient “others”), promote and general welfare (the founders were not talking “communism,” “socialism,” “capitalism,” or even “Americanism”), and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves (not to one or some of us but to all of us) and our posterity….”

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mericans for a long time have suffered successive executive administrations’ and congresses’ and high courts’ weakening of the body (the body politic, the people as a whole). Toward their own ends, they have distracted and driven gulfs, winding and multiplying like snakes or snaking mazes, among us. 

Masters of mayhem, propagandists and false informers (public-private) partnered in an intricate web of shadowy and overt entities— these are the traitors engaged in unending treachery (abroad in unending military-industrial hostilities) on the domestic front against the public good.

Sources

The Coca-Cola Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coca-Cola_Company

Brenda Fitzgerald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Fitzgerald

Union of Concerned Scientists “Conflicts of Interest in the Trump Administration: The Cases of

Alex Azar and Brenda Fitzgerald” Derrick Z. Jackson, February 5, 2018 https://blog.ucsusa.org/derrick-jackson/conflicts-of-interest-in-the-trump-administration-the-cases-of-alex-azar-and-brenda-fitzgerald

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a national nonprofit organization founded more than 50 years ago by scientists and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alex Azar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Azar

Elli Lilly and Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Lilly_and_Company

Forbes “Health Secretary Alex Azar Refuses to Guarantee Coronavirus Vaccine Would Be Affordable for All” Isabel Togoh February 27, 2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/02/27/health-secretary-alex-azar-refuses-to-guarantee-coronavirus-vaccine-would-be-affordable-for-all/#9abd99b490c3

The Verge “Health secretary Alex Azar won’t promise that a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable” by Nicole Wetsman February 27, 2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155879/alex-azar-coronavirus-vaccine-affordable-insurance

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