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Archive for Afghanistan

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Monday 12th December 2011

Karzai Solves Mystery of Afghan Corruption

8:48 pm | Afghanistan | Barron's | Uncategorized | Comments: 2

Afghan frontman Hamid Karzai announced this past weekend that foreigners are to blame for the rampant corruption his country. It is true that foreign aid has helped bring out the worst in many Afghan wheeler-dealers. But Karzai and his cronies would likely be looting regardless of whether Uncle Sam air-dropped billions onto [...]

Wednesday 30th November 2011

Dying to Corrupt Afghanistan

2:21 pm | Afghanistan | Terrorism | wool | Comments: 8

from the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Daily (posted online today)
Dying to Corrupt Afghanistan
by James Bovard
American soldiers are dying so that Afghan politicians can continue looting U.S. tax dollars. Foreign aid has long been notorious for creating kleptocracies — governments of thieves. The $50+ billion foreign aid that the United States has dumped on [...]

Thursday 9th June 2011

MP3 of Today’s Interview with Ron Smith on WBAL

11:48 am | Afghanistan | Obama | wool | Comments: 0

It’s always fun to raise hell with Ron Smith in Baltimore. Ron had me on his WBAL show today and we had a good time flogging foreign aid and the Afghan debacle. Ron is one of the best informed talk show hosts out there, and it was neat to see what his [...]

Monday 6th June 2011

Barron’s: The Anti-Corruption Charade (full text)

Barron’s
Editorial Commentary
The Anti-Corruption Charade
by James Bovard
In much of the world, governing is a synonym for looting. Unfortunately, American and European foreign aid has a long history of accelerating the looting. Foreign aid created a generation of kleptocracies—governments of thieves—in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Mercedes-Benz automobiles became so popular among African government officials that [...]

Thursday 14th April 2011

Your Tax Dollars at Work and Play

Washington Times, April 15, 2011
Uncle Sam’s big plans for your hard-earned tax dollars
by James Bovard
Congratulations - your tax payment is probably your biggest purchase of the year. The federal tax burden now amounts to more than $20,000 per household, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Your contribution to the Treasury coffers will permit Uncle [...]

Friday 8th April 2011

Obama’s Torture Regime?

Spencer Ackerman of Wired has an excellent piece today on the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command’s secret jails in Afghanistan. Ackerman notes:
Human rights groups have been sounding the alarm about these detention centers since 2009. Detainees who claim to have gone through the sites have told them about abuses inside the so-called “Black Jails” ranging [...]

Wednesday 22nd December 2010

Obama’s Dead Excuses for Afghan Carnage

11:38 am | Afghanistan | Obama | Comments: 5

from the Ottawa Citizen

Wednesday 29th September 2010

Dicking Afghanistan: Where Obama Went Wrong

3:15 pm | Afghanistan | Obama | Comments: 2

Washington Post ace Al Kamen has an outtake from Woodward’s new book that shows how Obama was on the wrong foot on Afghanistan from his first days in office:
“It wasn’t until well into the Obama presidency,” Woodward writes, that vet

Sunday 19th September 2010

Winning Hearts and Minds and Fingers in Aghanistan

The latest PR challenge in Afghanistan…

Monday 6th September 2010

Helping Afghans Drown

1:35 pm | Afghanistan | Democracy | Comments: 5

If only Toles had written the word DEMOCRACY onto the anvil, the cartoon would be perfect.
(from today’s Washington Post)

Thursday 12th August 2010

How We Brought Freedom & Prosperity to Afghanistan

posted online today by the Future of Freedom Foundation, from the May issue of Freedom Daily -
BRINGING FREEDOM & PROSPERITY TO AFGHANISTAN
by James Bovard
The Obama administration is seeking to rechristen the Afghan debacle it inherited from the Bush administration. Obama

Wednesday 11th August 2010

Government Lies Make Leaks Explosive

The Pentagon is caterwauling that the next round of WikiLeaks’ disclosures of US government documents will be even more damaging than the last round.
It is always touching to see the world’s most powerful military machine portray itself as a “pitiful, helpless giant” (the phrase Nixon used in his speech announcing his illegal invasion [...]

Wednesday 4th August 2010

My 2 Cents on WikiLeaks, the FBI, and Assorted Hokum - Antiwar.com Transcript

The good folks at Antiwar.com Radio added a transcript to the MP3 of last week’s interview. My comments on the Obama administration’s ploy to increase FBI surveillance power are excerpted here at the top. (The full text is below. My Kelly Girl past is now no longer secret).
Bovard:
National Security letters have [...]

Tuesday 3rd August 2010

New U.S. Government Motto: Controlling Us to Secure Us

“If you don’t have control of the population, you can’t secure the population,” according to Brig. Gen. Frederick Hodges, director of operations for the NATO regional command in southern Afghanistan.
The front-page Washington Post piece with the above quote deals with Kandahar.
But it is also the motto for the U.S. government’s approach to [...]

Saturday 31st July 2010

MP3 of My Interview with Scott Horton on the FBI, WikiLeaks, Etc.

Scott Horton of Antiwar.com Radio and I had fun tarring-and-feathering the usual federal outrages on Thursday. The MP3 is here.
Scott balked at the chance to reveal his deepest thoughts on Chelsea’s wedding. It could have been a great “Bill Hicks moment.”
Here’s Scott’s thumbnail of the interview:
James Bovard, author of Attention Deficit Democracy, [...]

Thursday 29th July 2010

Excellent Interview with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange by Antiwar’s Scott Horton

Antiwar’s Scott Horton did a superb radio interview with WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange yesterday. Transcript and the MP3 are here.
I have been amused to see the tut-tutting of some of the Washington press corps because the Afghan document disclosure was not as earth-shaking as the Pentagon Papers.
Folks, this game is only beginning. Assange confirmed [...]

Monday 26th July 2010

Three More Cheers for WikiLeaks!

The latest deluge of truth from WikiLeaks is a welcome novelty in American politics.
The New York Times, UK Guardian, and Germany’s Der Spiegel are simultaneously releasing articles today on more than 90,000 Pentagon documents that WikiLeaks posted on the web regarding the Afghan war.
These documents reveal the lies that have permeated U.S. Afghan [...]

Thursday 22nd July 2010

The Pentagon No Longer Awards This Medal

10:17 pm | Afghanistan | Attention Deficit Democracy | Comments: 2

Amazing how much has been forgotten since this 1988 New Yorker cartoon…

Friday 9th July 2010

“Freedom & the War on Terrorism” - my Pennslyvania speech…

Now online here: the video of my “Freedom and the War on Terrorism” speech last month in Bernville, Pennsylvania. I want to thank Bob Bowers, who organized this libertarian supper club, for inviting Jacob Hornberger and I to talk there. The audience was excellent - lots of hardliners full of fire-and-brimstone. [...]

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