January 26, 2022

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Roaming Charges: Mutiny of the Bounties!

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By Jeffrey St. Clair – Jul 3, 2020

+ If I recall, there were serious discussions inside the White House about turning the Afghan War into a bounty hunting operation led by mercenaries on contract with Erik Prince. I’m pretty sure many elements of that scheme have been in place since 1979 at the beginning Carter’s secret war and have continued in one way or another over the last 40 years.

+ Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.

+ The CIA has often paid its “bounties” in Afghanistan in a universal currency called opium…

+ More people are dying of COVID in the US every two hours than US troops have died in Afghanistan in the last two YEARS. More US citizens have been killed by police since George Floyd was murdered than US troops have died in combat in Afghanistan in the last five YEARS.

+ If the bounty story is true (and there are many, many reasons to suspect it’s not), then the Russian didn’t get a great ROI. Only 9 US troops have died in Afghanistan in 2020, 2 by roadside IED, 2 more in a plane crash.

+ According to a report in the NYT, “even in those face-to-face meetings, [Trump] is particularly difficult to brief on national security matters. He often relies instead on conservative media and friends for information, current and former intelligence officials have said.”

+ They made cartoons to brief Reagan and Nancy consulted her astrologer before any major decision. Bill Clinton was so disinterested he turned foreign policy over to Al Gore, who made a snap decision to enter the Balkans war after his daughter Karenna badgered her father over why the US wasn’t intervening, after she saw a photo of an atrocity in Srebrenica that had appeared on the front-page of the Washington Post.

+ Trump wasn’t the only president to skim his PDBs…

+ The Forever War Party: House Democrats, working with Liz Cheney, are moving to restrict Trump’s planned withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Germany.

+ It’s always the bi-partisan policies that need to come with a warning label…

+ Obama’s former director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the perjurer, says that Russians are “genetically to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever.” Maybe Clapper and Charles Murray can start a new eugenics think tank…

+ I guess if you can rehabilitate W. and John Bolton, you can lionize Liz Cheney as the new (gorgon) face of the Resistance© …

+ Hundreds of former George W. Bush officials and staffers have joined together to form a pro-Biden PAC, called 43 Alumni for Biden. Mission Accomplished!

+ If this statement by Adam Schiff is a thought experiment, it failed…

+ Hannah Arendt: “Evil comes from a failure to think.”

+ What springs from a planned failure to think?

+ Chuck Schumer: “We need in this coming defense bill… tough sanctions against Russia.” Will someone tell the Senator from Citibank that what the people need is health care, a monthly check, debt relief and rent abatement. We don’t need a war with Russia. Put a mask on and a cork in it.

+ Pelosi: “With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.” It’s pretty clear to me that Trump is a human cul-de-sac, where all roads lead to and from Trump.

+ RussiaGate is the Democrats’ version of Trump’s “caravan”, aways coming never arriving…

+ Move over Condi Rice & John Bolton, there’s a new contender for Biden’s cabinet…

+ Apparently, many liberals can’t wait to go back to sleep so that their own president can gut welfare, reignite the drug war, force everyone to buy crappy insurance instead of giving them universal health care, drone (pick a country) & turn the economy over to Wall St without troubling their conscience…

+ Clint Lorance had been in command of 1st Platoon for only three days in Afghanistan, but in that brief time he committed a war crime a day. On his last day in Afghanistan, Lorance ordered his troops to open fire on three Afghan men standing near a motorcycle on the side of the road. A military court convicted Lorance of second degree murder. Then, to the dismay of those in his platoon, Trump declared Lorance a national hero and pardoned him…

+ Trump may idolize the Confederate Generals, but in his war against COVID he’s performing more like General McClellan: indecisive, passive, racking up huge losses day after day, as his opponent runs rampant across terrain he once considered secure.

+ According to Gen. Dave Goldfein, chief of the Air Force, it’s either conventional weapons or new nuclear weapons. There’s not enough cash ($718 B) “in the current budget to allow you to do both.”

+ At least eight nuclear nations have detonated 2,056 nuclear test explosions since 1945, half of those were conducted by the United States.

+ Bernie Sanders made a big show this week of calling for a 10 percent reduction in the Pentagon’s budget. But since there’s no chance of cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10 percent, why not demand what we really need? A cut of 65%? The Clinton post-Cold War military budget for FY 96 was $263 billion which most progressives considered much too high. Last year’s budget exceeded $738 billion.

RELATED CONTENT Bountygate: Scapegoating Systemic Military Failure in Afghanistan

+ As it turned out, only 7 senators voted against cloture for the FY 2021 NDAA (Pentagon budget): Harris, Markey, Merkley, Murphy, Sanders, Warren and Wyden. It’s up to Trump now…

+ If Trump follows through with his veto threat on the Pentagon spending bill over an amendment to strip the names of Confederate generals from US military bases, it’ll be the Confederates’ most decisive win over the Army of the Potomac since the Battle of Chancellorsville…

+ Van Jones seems like a shoe-in for winning the Donna Brazile Award at next year’s Emmys…

+ This is somehow more sinister than Kanye’s visit to the White House, where it was clear that he was having some kind of, shall we say, “episode”…

+ I’m old enough to remember when remember when Van Jones said that Trump was finally beginning to “act Presidential,” after his first speech to Congress on March 1, 2017, after the president gave made-for-prime-time tribute to a soldier killed in a botched raid in Niger that he had ordered…

+ Joe Biden on desegregation in 1977: “Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.”

+ Researchers posing as black prospective tenants in Boston were shown fewer apartments than whites, and found that real estate agents cut off contact when the renters gave Black-sounding names like “Lakisha,” “Tyrone,” or “Kareem.”

+ 70: the number of people who have died in police custody after saying “I can’t breathe,” most of whom were stopped for minor infractions or on mental health checks.

+ Here’s Florida’s Matt Gaetz, committing yet another TUI (Tweeting Under the Influence)…

+ 2020 is turning out to be a very big year for Karl Marx…

+ The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon will be on the NYT bestseller list next week, if they keep up this kind of promotion…

+ According to a review of police records conducted by the Chicago Reader, between May 29 and 31, the Chicago Police Department made 2,172 arrests, over 70 percent, were of Black, 16 percent of those detained were categorized as Hispanic and 18 percent as Asian or Pacific Islander. Only 10 percent arrested by CPD over that period were white. Yet, Chicago is not majority Black city, with just 32 percent of its population identifying as Black and 45 percent as white.

+ We’ve heard the argument that police are necessary to prevent violence from taking place. Yet over the last month, we’ve witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of violence committed by individual cops while other police watched and refused to intervene.

+ As AOC has pointed out, nearly half of the $1 billion in “cuts” to the NYPD budget amount to merely a shift of officers to other agencies, and another 30% are “projected cuts” in overtime pay.

+ In 2015, Colorado Gov. John Frackenlooper, who just won the Democratic nomination for the US senate, flew on the Atlanta Brave’s private jet to an antelope killing contest in Wyoming, where he was photographed in “redface” and fake Native America clothing.

+ Right direction / wrong track numbers (often the most telling assessment of coming elections) from the Morning Consult poll should be devastating for both parties:

MARCH 2020
39% right direction
54% wrong track

JULY 2020
18% right direction
74% wrong track

+ Texas was one of the first states in the nation to ease physical distancing mandates. In Houston, the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has quadrupled since Memorial Day.

+ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who seems to be auditioning for the role of the next Bond villain, told reporters on Tuesday that the state will not reinstate restrictions or close businesses to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has now surpassed 10,000 new cases a day.

+ Sen. Rick Scott (Moron-FL): “No one in America should buy products made in Communist China.” Can we have an inventory of the items in Scott’s office, house, closet and yacht?

+ The editors of the OED have called an emergency session to prepare an entry redefining “Communism”…

+ Florida is a state run by morons and people who pretend to be morons in order to appeal to other morons.

+ Mike Pence is simply too ludicrous to have been a convincing character in 1984, but he might have had a cameo in Animal Farm…

+ As vice president, Mike Pence has done a lot to increase the reputation of fellow Hoosier Dan Quayle as a deep thinker…

+ One flew into the cuckoo’s nest: Pence, who refers to his wife as Mother, has now taken to calling Trump his “father.”

+ When the Founders contemplated “choice” in health care, it was between bloodletting with a lancet or a leech…

+ Why is the COVID-19 death count so much lower than some researchers expected? Short answer: they haven’t been counting all the COVID-19 deaths. According to a new study of excess mortality from Yale, the actual number is probably 28% higher than the official tally, which would put the real death toll in the US close to 165,000.

+ More than 80% of all COVID-19 deaths in Canada are from long-term care facilities and retirement homes, according to a new analysis from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

+ Trump on resurgence of virus as cases are spiking in several states: “We are putting out that life because it’s a bad life that we’re talking about.” I thought the rightwing mantra was All Lives Matter? Did President Snuff Film not get the memo from Pence?

+ 4.3 million people missed their mortgage payment in May.

+ Based on responses collected June 18 through June 23, the Household Pulse Survey estimates that 24.5% of adults either missed last month’s rent or mortgage payment, or had slight or no confidence that their household could make the next payment on time. According to the same survey, 10.9% non-Hispanic white adults had slight/no confidence household could make next mortgage/rent payment on time compared with 29.1% of non-Hispanic African American adult. Meanwhile, moratoriums on evictions are being lifted. Why aren’t the Democrats talking about this every hour of every day? Oh, right, Russia…

+ Cuomonomics at work: New York is expecting more than 50,000 eviction cases in front of courts as soon as next week.

+ According to new research from MIT, more than 78% of pending evictions in Boston are in Black and immigrant communities

+ The sound of one tiny hand wanking…

+ Here’s the positivity rate for states that went all-in on Trump’s charge to re-open the economy.

AZ 23.9%

FL 15.5%

NV 15.2%

SC 15.1%

TX 14.9%

AL 13.0%

MS 12.7%

GA 11.9%

UT 11.3%

+ According to the WHO a rate of positive tests above 10% indicates there are significant unknown cases.

+ LA County officials now estimate that 1-in-140 people are unknowingly infected with COVID-19, a big spike from last week’s projection of 1 in 400.

+ Nationally, Morgan Stanley’s new Covid model has the epidemic doubling time at 41 days, down from 46 days last week.

+ In 2019, more than half of the Pentagon’s budget was spent on expensive, and largely unaccountable, contractors.

+ The Biden Doctrine for Latin America, a lot like the Monroe Doctrine, but with nuclear weapons…

+ Since 1996, drug companies have increased the price of a vial of insulin by 1200%. More than 25 percent of patients now ration insulin to survive. Big Pharma, of course, is suing to block Minnesota’s new insulin access law, which attempts to rectify some of these gross inequities.

+ The US trade deficit US trade hit $54.6 billion in May, an increase of nearly 10%.

+ More than 2,700 people currently detained by ICE have tested positive for COVID-19 and the rate is surging.

+ Former presidential candidate Herman Cain has been hospitalized with COVID-19. He attended Trump’s Tulsa rally on June 20th.

+ For the first time since 1965, more Americans say immigration should be increased rather than decreased.

RELATED CONTENT Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

+ Left-wing “radicalism”, if such a thing exists, has been fueled by 40 years of neoliberal “normalcy”, enforced relentlessly by presidents and congresses of both parties.

+ Republican “strategist” Alex Castellanos on mask-wearing during COVID-19 pandemic: “Mask-wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol. “Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”

+ Trump and the Case of the Disappearing Virus…

2/10: “It will go away in April.”
2/26: “Close to zero in a couple days.”
3/31: “It will go away, hopefully at the end of the month.”
4/29: “It’s gonna leave.”
5/8: “This is gonna go away without a vaccine.”
6/16: “Even without [a vaccine], it goes away…”
7/1: “I think we’re gonna be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point that it’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.”

+ NYC’s Presbyterian had the highest death rate of patients in the city’s largest hospital systems, more than 24% through 4/29, largely as a result of faulty ventilators distributed by the state and the federal government.

+ On the first day of Oregon’s statewide order to wear masks in all indoor public places, a group of Oregon State troopers refused to wear face coverings inside a Corvallis coffee shop despite being asked to so. “Fuck [Gov.] Kate Brown,” one of the troopers declared. And, yes, there’s video.

+ Inmates at San Quentin went on a hunger strike this week, protesting conditions in the California prison where 1,135 prisoners—nearly a third of San Quentin’s total inmate population—have active COVID-19 infections.

+ More than 40 South San Francisco Bay Area principals are now in quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19 during an in-person meeting to plan the reopening of schools.

+ On July 1, 2020

Arizona: 7.28 million people; 4,878 new COVID cases
The EU: 446 million people; 3,543 new COVID cases

+ More than 300 children in Texas daycares have contracted COVID-19. The number is rising…

+ Like Biden, Trump’s base is on Wall Street. These people are just pawns he manipulates and abandons when it comes time to rewrite the tax code and impose austerity measures …

+ Who will tell her the water she’s drinking is fluoridated?

+ More than 45 million people have filed for unemployment since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over this same period, the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by … $584 billion.

+ Jeff Bezos’ net worth is now $171.6 billion, a new record. He’s gained $57 billion in the first six months of this year alone.

+ Political contributions from billionaires soared from $32 million in 2010 to $611 million in 2018.

+ Number of billionaires giving money to Biden: 106, and to Trump: 93.

+ IRS audit rates for the wealthiest Americans (with more than $1 million in income) have declined from 12.5% in 2011 to 2.4% last year.

+ Here’s a perfect illustration of why the Democratic Party only gets worse with each iteration. It tolerates no dissent and patronizes the only people who still want to rescue it from its militaristic neoliberalism.

+ $18.63 billion: the amount of taxpayer-funded F-35 property and parts around the world that has apparently gone missing. (Has someone checked Bernie’s garage?)

+ 9.31 billion: the number of N95 masks that could be produced for $18.63 billion.

+ According to a Harvard study, the U.S. should be testing at least 1.2 million people a day to control the outbreak and at least 4.3 million people a day in order to eradicate it. We are testing around 500,000 and this rate is expected to decline in the coming weeks from from shortages of testing supplies.

+ Banality in action…

+ A study of coronavirus infections in the quarantined northern Italian town of Vò found that 40% of cases showed no symptoms, suggesting that asymptomatic cases are playing a big role in the spread of the pandemic.

+ The Evangelical case for prayer instead of wearing a mask: if you pray and don’t get COVID, it’s because you’re one of God’s Elect. If you pray and get COVID, it’s because God is testing you. If you pray and recover from COVID, it’s because God’s healed you. If you pray and die from COVID, it’s because you’ve been Raptured

+ The price of Truvada for PrEP, an HIV prevention drug manufactured by Gilead, is $2000 in the US, yet it costs only $6 to make. Gilead Sciences is a leading corporate sponsor of Virtual Pride Week in San Francisco…

+ Solyndra on 18-Wheels: Mnuchin’s Treasury Department just loaned YRC Worldwide, a failing trucking company, $700 million. The company is only worth $70 million and was sued in 2018 for ripping off the Pentagon in a previous contract.

+ According to an internal memo excavated by Ken Klippenstein, the Trump administration re-classified ICE as a “security agency” with the intent of blocking all employee information from public disclosure under FOIA.

+ Since Susan Collins voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, the senator from Maine has raked in nearly $200,000 from donors linked to the Federalist Society, the rightwing outfit obsessing with implanting “originalist” whackos on the federal bench. Many of the donors had never given to the perpetually indecisive senator a donation before.

+ Cardinal Dolan, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “If literature that depicts prejudice is to be banned, I don’t know if even the Bible can survive.”

+ How many thousands of books, poems, films and works of art have been placed on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (not to mention scientists excommunicated, imprisoned, or, in the case of Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake)?

+ Binders full of women of color…Joe Biden on VP vetting: “There are a number of women of color. There are Latino women. There are Asian. There are across the board.”

+ It’s not the cognitive decline that you have to worry about with Biden, it’s what remains embedded in the gray matter he has left…

+ We need a Sarah Cooper to mock Biden’s streams-of-semi-consciousness…(And HRC’s)

+ Many of the children Obama and Trump caged or denied entry at the border were refugees from the Honduran coup that HRC abetted, just another bullet point on her blotter sheet of crimes against humanity…

+ The four largest meat packing companies control 85% of the market, yet, personal animus toward marijuana, the Justice Department investigating two cannabis companies that would control less than 1% of the market.

+ There are now 9 Q-Anon-supporting congressional candidates who have now made it to November by state:

CO: Lauren Boebert
CA: Mike Cargile, Erin Cruz, Alison Hayden, Buzz Patterson
OR: Jo Rae Perkins
GA: Angela Stanton-King
OH: Ron Weber
TX: Johnny Teague

+ Still, belief in Q-Anon is probably less fanciful than thinking Biden will end fracking….

+ 600,000: the number of Americans who have voted for candidates that support the Q-Anon conspiracy theory.

+ Johnny E. Williams: “‘White-splainin’ is deployed by ‘whites’ in the academy to discipline speech considered offensive r unpleasant to them. ‘White-splainin’ is a patronizing attempt by whites to explain 2 the racially oppressed what is & is not racist, while unwittingly exhibiting their own bigotry.”

+ Making the Suburbs Great for White Flight Again…

+ Biden supporters are pushing a new Monmouth poll show that half of registered voters have ruled out casting a ballot for Trump. Yet, more than half of all voters ruled out voting for Trump in 2016, kept their word at the polls, and he still became president…

+ The House will vote to remove bust of Roger B. Taney, segregationist who penned Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling. Of course, there are at least three justices to the right of Taney sitting on the court right now. Try removing some of them.

+ Boris Johnson’s big FDR-New Deal plan for reviving the post-COVID/post-Brexit UK economy will amount to slightly more than 0.6% of the spending in Roosevelt’s New Deal…”

+ Is Trump sure that the paintflingers are “Anarchists” and not Abstract Expressionists (who probably got a grant from a CIA-funded cultural foundation)?

+ More than a half-century after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, why are there now few black major league baseball players than ever? One big reason may be an institutional bias against them that starts in player development in the minor leagues, where black players are consistently given more negative scouting reports than whites and are promoted up to higher league division at a rate of 3 to 4 percent less than white players with similar or lesser skills.

+ There are now 7,669 recorded cases of COVID-19 on the Navajo Reservation and a total of 371 deaths. Cases by Service Unit, as of July 2, 2020:

Chinle:1,967
Crownpoint:663
Ft. Defiance:485
Gallup Service:1,284
Kayenta:1,089
Shiprock:1,239
Tuba City:670
Winslow:268

+ On Weds., the troubled Fermi II nuclear power plant in Michigan lost electrical power due to a swarm of … mayflies.

+ It was 70F above normal this week in some parts of the Arctic…

+ The number of fires in northern Siberia increased fivefold this week, according to the Russian forest fire aerial protection service, as temperatures in the Arctic shattered records.

+ Casper Henderson: “If 2ºC is now inevitable, that doesn’t make it comfortable. Indeed, it will be, for much of the world, a horror — and the space between those two things, inevitability and horror, is the one in which we will all be forced to learn to live. Perhaps the most important lesson of the freakish Siberian heatwave is: however terrifying you find projections of future warming, the actual experience of living on a heated planet will be considerably more unpredictable, and disorienting”

+ Meanwhile, things appear to be even worse in Antarctica, where the South Pole warmed at three times the global rate over the past 30 years.

+ The water temperature at Virginia Key, a small island off the coast near downtown Miami, hit 92.5°F on Thursday (July 2), the hottest ever recorded since the station was installed in 1994. The previous record was 92.3°, set in August 2017 and tied this past Wednesday.

+ The number of properties in the United States in danger of flooding this year is 70% higher than government data estimates, according to research from the First Street Foundation, with at-risk hot spots in Houston, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

+ An appeals court in Nevada just ordered scofflaw rancher Clive Bundy to post $92,00 bond payable to the Center for Biological Diversity for “vexatious and spurious litigation.” The court found that”Mr. Bundy and his attorney have initiated, pursued & maintained one of the most flagrantly ill advised pieces of litigation this Court has ever seen.” If Bundy pays his fine, the Center plans to donate the money to the Burns Paiute Tribe and the Moapa Band of Paiutes in recognition of his defilement of their lands, culture and history.

+ What Clive Bundy knows about “the negro”…

+ The shutdown of hundreds of coal-fired power plants in the United States over the past decade has saved an estimated 26,610 lives, according to a study in the journal Nature Sustainability.

+ Chesapeake Energy, the “bridge fuel” fracking company that struck a covert $25 million deal with the Sierra Club, has finally gone belly-up…

+ While we’re getting rid of Columbus, it’s time to change Columbia University to honor its greatest professor and decolonizer, Edward Said University…

+ The Columbia River should revert to its original name, Nch’i-Wana…

+ And the District of Columbia should be renamed after its most influential native son, Duke Ellington.

+ Mike Elk, of the indispensable PayDay Report, has written a must read corrective to the glowing obits for rightwing media scold Betsy Rothstein, who Elk describes as “a racist, a bigot, and a tool of the boss, but her obituaries being written by the white DC media elite are whitewashing her record & erasing the lessons of racial inequity…”

+ There was never any doubt about who Jefferson Beauregard Sessions was and remains. But the coy, parenthetical way Sessions’ racist slander of Henry Louis Gates is handled, leaves no doubt about what the NYT was and remains, either…

+ Soon Tucker C. and M. Zuckerburg will be fighting it out over the same 7 comings willing to advertise on their platforms: Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby, Cracker Barrel, Liberty University, My Pillow, SoulCycle and the NFL team that plays in Washington, DC…

+ Speaking of Zuckerburg, I was put into Facebook jail for a week after someone (or algorithm) complained that I had posted a photo that violated their community standards on nudity or sexual activity. The post was a link to a Guardian story on the terrifying spread of COVID-19 through indigenous communities in the Amazon. There is nothing “sexual” about the story. The photo is from the Guardian story and it was Facebook’s own image grabbing software that grabbed it for linking. There’s nothing that resembles “nudity” in the story. This is the second time I’ve been jailed for posting stories about the threats to indigenous people in the Amazon on the grounds that the stories, both from mainstream outlets, violate the community standards of a company which started out as a “Hot or Not” rating platform for unsuspecting co-eds. The only obscenity here is the gross negligence of the Bolsonaro regime, which is endangering lives of Brazil’s most vulnerable populations, a crime against humanity that Facebook seems eager to help cover-up…

+ Profound. The hair, I mean…

+ Biden, the nation’s most notorious trichophiliac, is probably hoping that C-SPAN will start making these floor speech available in Odorama…

+ If you’re looking for something else to watch, I recommend Samuel Fuller’s film Park Row, whose plot turns on a newspaper war in NYC over “crowdsourced” funding to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty…

+ Tony Austin, a veteran of the West Coast Get Down jazz collective: “Most of the kids that I knew would join a gang and get drawn in by violence. Jazz was an outlet for us to express our anger. Some of the other kids we knew spoke with a gun, but we used music as our language.”

+ Kamasi Washington on John Coltrane: “You could spend a lifetime in one song. It’s almost like the night sky with the stars: Each time you look, it’s different.”

 

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JSCCounterPunch .

Featured image: Mujahideen in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles provided by CIA.

 

(CounterPunch)

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