Bush’s orders to send special forces after Taliban militants have roots in previous presidencies.
Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, Sept 15, 2008
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Reporter Howard LaFranchi talks about the US military’s raids inside Pakistan, looking for terrorists.
WASHINGTON – Orders President Bush signed in July authorizing raids by special operations forces in the areas of Pakistan controlled by the Taliban and Al Qaeda and undertaking those raids without official Pakistani consent, have roots stretching back to the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In an address to a joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush said, “From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
But even before that declaration, two key steps had been taken: One, Congress had authorized the use of US military force against terrorist organizations and the countries that harbor or support them. Two, Bush administration officials had warned Pakistan’s leaders of the dire consequences their country would face if they did not unequivocally enlist in the fight against radical Islamist terrorism.
What Mr. Bush’s July orders signify is that, after seven years of encouraging Pakistan to take on extremists harbored in remote areas along its border with Afghanistan and subsidizing the Pakistani military handsomely to do it, the US has become convinced that Pakistan is neither able nor willing to fight the entrenched Taliban and Al Qaeda elements. Indeed, recent events appear to have convinced at least some in the administration that parts of Pakistan’s military and powerful intelligence service are actually aiding the extremists.
“We’ve moved beyond the message stage here. I think the US has had it with messages that don’t get any action, and that is why the president authorized this,” says Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis for Stratfor, an intelligence consulting firm in Washington. “This says loud and clear, ‘We’re fed up.’ ”
Even before the July order, the US had undertaken covert operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Moreover, the CIA over the past year has stepped up missile attacks by the unmanned Predator drones it operates to hit targets in the region. That increase has coincided with a deterioration of the war in Afghanistan, where the Afghan Army and NATO forces have come under increasing attack from militants crossing over the rugged and lawless border from Pakistan.
But Bush’s orders, first reported in The New York Times Thursday, mean that operations against insurgent sanctuaries will become overt and probably more frequent. A Sept. 3 ground assault involving US commandos dropped from helicopters targeted a suspected terrorist compound. Missile attacks by the CIA’s unmanned drones, including one Friday reported by Pakistani officials to have killed at last 12 people, are also on the rise.
Precedence for the orders authorizing the attacks on terrorist havens can be found in President Bill Clinton’s authorization of retaliatory attacks in 1993 (against Iraqi intelligence facilities) and in 1998 (against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan), and in President Ronald Reagan’s bombing of Libya, legal scholars say.
The administration has debated the use of commando raids in Pakistan for years, but the tipping point came in July, as relations with Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders deteriorated, intelligence sources say. The “kicker,” according to one source who requested anonymity over the sensitivity of the issue, was two July events: the bombing of India’s embassy in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, an act that US intelligence officials concluded was aided by Pakistani intelligence operatives; and a July 13 attack on a US military outpost in eastern Afghanistan that killed nine US soldiers. The outpost attack was carried out by Taliban militants who had crossed over the nearby border from Pakistan.
Peace and Justice Post 
Will McCain-Palin Lies Hurt Them?
September 15, 2008By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted September 15, 2008.
Despite all the chatter about how “historic” Campaign 2008 has been, it is the McCain-Palin ticket that it is truly testing the limits, not of race or gender politics, but whether the United States is ready to enter into a new dimension of political lying.
Until two weeks ago, it would have been hard to believe that any political figure would have had the audacity to step into the national spotlight by telling the bald-faced lies that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has. Yet, many Americans have embraced her enthusiastically and don’t want to hear anything negative about her.
Palin’s most obvious lie is one that she has repeated over and over: “I told Congress, ‘thanks but no thanks’ about that Bridge to Nowhere.” Now, however, anyone who has bothered to fact-check this claim knows that Palin supported the bridge until Congress removed the earmark and then she kept the money to use on other state projects.
Palin also presents herself as a “reformer” who can’t stand earmarks or the lobbyists who arrange such wasteful pork-barrel spending — except that she hired Alaska’s top Washington lobbyists to secure millions of dollars in earmarks for her town, Wasilla, and for her state, including sending off a wish list of nearly $200 million just this year.
With the help of the lobbying firm and her annual treks to Washington, Palin secured a stunning $27 million in earmarked funds for Wasilla, a town then with about 6,000 residents. Some of Palin’s projects were considered such prime examples of Washington pork that they were cited in anti-earmark reports compiled by none other than Sen. John McCain earlier this decade.
When ABC’s news anchor Charles Gibson asked Palin about her past support of earmarks and her backing for the Bridge to Nowhere, Palin simply refused to acknowledge that she had made misleading or false claims about herself.
“It has always been an embarrassment that abuses of the ear form — earmark process has been accepted in Congress,” Palin said. “And that’s what John McCain has fought. And that’s what I joined him in fighting.”
But Palin is not alone in simply denying reality. Her partner, John McCain, has shown his own ability to not blush while lying.
On the ABC-TV show “The View,” McCain was confronted with Palin’s contradictory record of arranging earmarks while selling herself as a reformer. McCain simply ignored the facts and declared, “not as governor she didn’t.”
McCain’s Lies
But McCain now has his own long trail of stunning lies, both about his opponent Barack Obama and McCain’s dubious reputation for clean politics. After presiding over a convention notable for its partisan rancor — including endless mocking of Obama as a “community organizer” — McCain said his presidency would be about eliminating “partisan rancor.”
Earlier in the campaign, McCain approved ads accusing Obama of everything from causing $4 a gallon gasoline (a silly charge) to stiffing wounded U.S. troops in Germany by canceling a visit because he couldn’t bring along cameras (a false accusation).
More recently, McCain and his team have blamed Obama for passing a law that would require sex education for kindergarteners and for calling Palin a “pig” when the Democratic nominee criticized McCain’s economic package by saying it was like “putting lipstick on a pig.”
Though McCain himself had applied the common expression to Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, Obama’s use of the image was ripped from its context and twisted into a “sexist” attack on Palin.
As for the kindergarten sex-education ad, the McCain campaign had contorted Obama’s support for a program that would teach young school children how to avoid sexual predators into providing them “comprehensive sex education.”
When confronted on “The View” about these two dishonest ads, McCain insisted that “actually they are not lies.” He then went on to argue that his own use of the “lipstick on a pig” remark was different because he was talking about Clinton’s health-care plan.
Barbara Walters, one of the program’s co-hosts, challenged this excuse, noting that Obama was speaking about change, not Palin.
McCain’s response was that Obama “chooses his words very carefully,” suggesting apparently that when McCain has used the phrase he doesn’t. McCain added as his defense that harsh things have been said about him, too, and that “this is a tough campaign.”
At the end of McCain campaign ads — including others that have compared Obama to Paris Hilton and distorted his positions on taxes, health care and energy — the voters hear McCain intoning, “I approved this message.”
Continued . . .
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Tags:blaming Obama, Bob Herbert, business lobbyists, Charles Gibson, Congress, John McCain, lies and deception, Sarah Palin, US election campaign, Wasilla
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