Dear Supporter,

One man is at the center of a story you can’t avoid in the media, since last Friday. General David Petraeus, architect of the U.S. “surge” in Iraq, pulled in to “save” Afghanistan, then bumped over to the CIA last year, was forced to resign because the FBI, we are told, found out about an affair he was having with a fawning biographer.

The other story is one you could barely find until days ago, despite the subject being a soldier who allegedly killed 16, including nine Afghan children, on March 11 last year near Kandahar. Robert Bales, an Army Staff Sargent, is said by the Army to have gone on a rampage in two villages, and is facing a court martial involving the death penalty.

Those in charge of U.S. national security are reeling, though you can hardly find a word of criticism for General Petraeus, save his admitted “indiscretion.” He’s said to be a national hero, and somehow even more of one, since he “sacrificed” his career and resigned.

This is completely outrageous. Michael Hastings, whose article in Rolling Stone led to the firing of General McChrystal in Afghanistan has also been following Petraeus for years. He writes that in Afghanistan:

The reputations of the men who were intimately involved in these years of foreign misadventure, where we tortured and supported torture, armed death squads, conducted nightly assassinations, killed innocents, and enabled corruption on an unbelievable scale, lie in tatters. McChrystal, Caldwell, and now Petraeus — the era of the celebrity general is over. Everyone is paying for their sins. (And before we should shed too many tears for the plight of King David and his men, remember, they’ll be taken care of with speaking fees and corporate board memberships, rewarded as instant millionaires by the same defense establishment they served so well.)

David Petraeus ran two illegitimate, unjust occupations, the whole Central Command, and now the CIA. Adultery is surely the least of his crimes.

Bales, who did four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, arguably was driven nuts, as his lawyers assert. His crime is a horror, as we saw from testimony linked into Fort Lewis over the last few days from victims in Afghanistan.  The AP reports:

The stories recounted by the villagers have been harrowing. They described torched bodies, a son finding his wounded father, and boys cowering behind a curtain while others screamed, “We are children! We are children!”

The actions of both of these men represent the real face of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and they need to be thoroughly investigated, with the aim of keeping criminals like this away from people they could kill.

Dead Enough: The Reality of the "Lesser Evil"

by Chris Floyd
To all those now hailing the re-election of Barack Obama as a triumph of decent, humane, liberal values over the oozing-postule perfidy of the Republicans, a simple question:

Is this child dead enough for you?

This little boy was named Naeemullah. He was in his house -- maybe playing, maybe sleeping, maybe having a meal -- when an American drone missile was fired into the residential area where he lived and blew up the house next door.
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What the 2012 Election Was ... and Wasn't

by Dennis Loo
...The GOP is going to have an internal battle over what direction it’s going to take, with the realists among them (i.e., the ones who can count) saying that the party has to change its anti-immigrant, pro-rape stance if it wants to avoid becoming a fringe party unable to take the White House. I can hardly wait for the bloodletting to occur.

But what the election wasn’t is much more important than delighting in the internecine battles within the Party of Utmost Privilege.

The election isn’t going to lead to Obama halting his plan to privatize and reduce core elements of the New Deal, particularly Medicare and Social Security. It’s not going to lead to any less bellicose a foreign policy or a more civil-liberties-and-due-process friendly president: within hours of being re-elected, Obama celebrated with another drone attack on Yemen.
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Cindy Sheehan, Glen Ford, and Debra Sweet Discuss the Election

Two days after the 2012 election, Glen Ford (BlackAgendaReport.com) and Debra Sweet (Director of World Can't Wait) joined Cindy Sheehan for a discussion of the presidential election and "where do we, as people of Peace and Justice go from there?" Originally broadcast on Community Progressive Radio and Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox.

Listen to the discussion.

Courtroom Meets the New Freedom Fighters, Finally

Tuesday the prosecution rested in the second trial of New Freedom Fighters.  The defense team argued that the judge put aside the two counts of Obstruction of Government Administration, and one of Disorderly Conduct.

The judge, not surprisingly to us, said no.  It's up to the jury to decide if the defendants, Carl Dix, Jamel Mims, Morgan Rhodewalt and Robert Parsons, are guilty of creating a situation where, theoretically, persons who were not present could have been deterred from entering the 103rd Precinct last November 19 because of a mass protest at the door.  they have to decide whether, as the prosecutors argue, delay of a roll call that day  -- which happens regularly, according to precinct records, constitutes "obstruction" of business at the precinct....

The prosecutors tried to get these brothers to admit that they intended to shut down the 103rd Precinct, and cause annoyance and alarm to the public.  The Judge asked Jamel if he had thought about the consequences for the public in his action of standing in front of the precinct doors.  "Yes," Jamel said, looking right at the judge, "We considered the effect this outrageous and egregious policy has on the people, and we took action to stop it, for them."
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Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait