04/15/10 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show Kelly Vlahos.
She is a Washington, D.C.
-based freelance writer, long-time political reporter for FoxNews.com, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today Magazine, and writes for us, of course, at original.antiwar.com slash Vlahos, V-L-A-H-O-S.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Oh, good.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate you joining me on the show today.
And I hate this article, and I don't think I want to spend too much time on it.
But then again, I kind of am obligated to give you a chance to discuss this on the show here, because where else is anybody going to hear this except this show at Antiwar.com?
So tell us the bad news.
Well, and I totally share your feelings on this, because I felt really creeped out and sad and despondent just writing about it.
So I totally share your feelings.
I've been hearing about this for some time now, and I'll bring everybody up to speed.
I start off the article talking about a front line, a PBS front line documentary that's going to be airing on April 20th, about an undercover investigation into the practice of bacha-bazi, which is basically the practice of training and grooming young boys to dance for men in Afghanistan.
And we're talking elite men, wealthy men, powerful men.
And this is a practice going back years, probably centuries.
And typically you'll see it anywhere from a wedding party or a tea room or any other gathering of the men there.
And like I said, it's typically the elite, powerful men of whatever tribe, region, village you want to call it.
And this practice apparently has proliferated since the fall of the Taliban, since we helped oust the Taliban in 2002.
The Taliban had outlawed, banned bacha-bazi and predatory male sex with boys, homosexuality, during their reign.
They would speak out against it as an abomination, a violation of the tenets of the Quran.
So since then, since the warlords have come back into power, it has become a regular practice.
And I say regular, meaning that even though it is against the law, it is still condoned by the indifference of government powers, the police.
They will tell you on the record that they are actively going after the practitioners of bacha-bazi, but everything that I've read in accounts and anecdotal evidence from people who have been victims of this, or families who've lost boys to this, is that they're not openly prosecuting this.
In the frontline episode of the documentary that's to air, they even have footage.
They capture police officers who are supposed to be part of some, what we would call a vice squad, there in that particular village, town, city, actually participating or actually being seen in the audience.
So you get the sense that this is a cruel, brutal world, and that it is not being taken seriously by the powers of the authorities there.
Alright, well call me Bill Clinton, but I say reinstall the Taliban.
Maybe Karzai's got it right.
But the scary thing is, Scott, is that this is part of more of an endemic cultural problem within Afghanistan, because as I go into it with the rest of my story, that this isn't just about bacha-bazi and the dancing boys, who in many cases are orphans that have been snatched out of the streets.
Just to be clear here, for people who, you know, radio's a weird thing, people tuning in every few seconds, it's Kelly Vlahos, and what we're talking about is how after America invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and over through the Taliban, and since then, we liberated the people of that country to fly kites and send their kids to school, and we've re-legalized slavery there, and the mass rape of innocent young children.
Yeah, well you got right to it, which I couldn't do.
But no, yeah, you're right, and these are boys that have been snatched out of the streets.
They're boys whose families have sold them into this practice, either out of desperation, or, you know, the boys, we've talked about this before in Iraq, boys and girls are sexually abused or molested.
These families turn them out.
Well, they turn them out, and they're left on the streets.
They're left as, they're basically prey to these creepy warlord, powerful businessmen types who inculcate them into this bacha-bazi lifestyle and world.
They become the property of these guys.
Now, this isn't just, when I first heard about it, I thought, you know, and I prayed, this is just a tiny little slice of this weird culture that we don't know about.
But when you start Googling it, and you start doing some research, you realize that this is rampant.
We've got to invade that country and save those people.
Oh, wait a minute.
Wait.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
And I make the point in the piece that because these are the people that are most benefiting from our occupation there.
They're benefiting from the aid that's been pouring into that country, because these are the people that are intricately involved in the corruption of the government, who are siphoning off our aid money, who've been siphoning off and shaking down people.
So, again, indirectly, we are complicit in this, not only by the support that we give these warlords, our supposed allies who are doing this.
And I'm not saying, and I don't want to sit here and say that every warlord, every businessman, but it's rampant enough that stories have been written, studies have been done, our own State Department has done, has released it, and I don't even know what it's worth.
They do this human rights study every year, and they come out and they list all the countries and all the violations.
But guess what?
The scariest things are happening in places that are supposedly our allies, and or we have troops there, like Afghanistan and Iraq.
I mean, that's my thing about this.
The reason my voice keeps going in and out is because I can't keep from shaking my head.
Yeah.
You know, this world is a cold, cruel place, and it has been with the Hobbesian thing about cold, cruel, and short, or whatever.
That's how life is.
It's horrible.
The situation in the mountain ranges over on the other side of the planet, I don't know what's ever going to change them.
But the problem here is that it's my responsibility now, Kelly, this madness, because this is where the Empire is, and the neighbor guy's kid is over there enforcing this.
And so it becomes our problem.
It becomes our problem.
And as I state and explore in the rest of the story, is this is part, you know, take the botch-a-bozzy out of it for a second.
There is a problem with child rape in that country, by men on men, men on boy child rape.
And it's been witnessed and documented by the Canadian military.
I don't, I have not seen much on what our troops are witnessing, and that could be a whole other story as to why we're not getting the same eyewitness accounts and complaints there.
But in the Canadian military, there are ongoing investigations into allegations on their forward operating bases of Afghan soldiers that they are working side by side with, raping young boys on base, bringing them on base, procuring them.
I mean, it makes you just want to just puke.
Well, the thing is, too, that if it wasn't for the Empire intervening over there all the time, I would like to do nothing better than sit and criticize specifically, you know, that degree of insanity over there in the Muslim world, but the whole Muslim world for the way that they treat women and the way that they separate young people from each other.
And it's conservatism gone mad.
You know, I read this thing about Afghanistan where they were talking about the Pashtun Wali Code and how, you know, all the thing about, you know, honoring and protecting guests and this and that.
But they also talked about how important the bloodline and the black turban of your descendant of Muhammad is.
And the way that they enforce that bloodline is they keep their sister locked inside all day long so that there will never be a question of the legitimacy of the male heir of the family and on down the line.
So they can keep it that way.
But there they take it so seriously that, you know, you have what an entire society of people who are completely sexually unfulfilled and then turn to being predators.
Right.
Exactly.
And it's crazy.
I wish the empire would get out of there so I could just call them backwards 13th century madmen all day.
But instead, if I do that, then I'm just piling on with the people drawing the cartoons of Muhammad just to piss them off, you know?
Right.
You could look at it so many different ways.
But we talked and I talked about this in a story that the Canadian soldiers are now, you know, basically complaining of symptoms of PTSD because they're looking at this stuff happening.
And it's just it's just they're hardwired as a Western male to be repulsed and to get angry and to penalize what they're seeing.
And they're and they're complaining that they're telling the chain of command that this is happening and that their complaints are going nowhere because there's all sorts of cultural and political considerations as to why this thing can't blow up, you know, and be exposed and prosecuted, persecuted.
There's all sorts of little minefields of, well, do we have the right to to discipline these Afghans on our base?
And it just goes down the line.
And you're thinking, how much is this going on on our base?
You know, there's got to be more than just the fact that these guys can't shoot straight, that our troops really can't stand the Afghans.
I'm reading story after story after story about this real dismissive, almost angry attitude about with the troops against their Afghan cohorts in the field.
I mean, there's not a lot of love there.
And I didn't get that with the Iraq thing.
So I'm thinking that there's a lot more to this story that perhaps the U.S. military is a little bit got the boot on the necks of the soldiers out there about what they can say, you know, in terms of this cultural issue we're talking about.
I don't know, Scott.
All I know is that it seems to be once you start getting into the nitty gritty and Googling around and looking at the bulletin boards and especially the mill blogs, the soldiers, you know, they're making a lot of allusions to this, a lot of allusions to the homosexual activity on base between Afghan soldiers.
And then all these other stories come out about what happened during the Soviet times.
And you're thinking, what the hell is going on over there?
You know, and like you said, fine, let's criticize it at a distance.
But we're putting 100,000 troops in there, you know, for what?
Yeah, because that's the whole thing.
There are no there are no good guys whose side we should take.
I mean, when they talk about, of course, there's this whole controversy, which I'm sure, you know, I'd like to give you a chance actually to to kind of get into some of the politics in Afghanistan right now.
But, you know, you kind of have as best I can tell.
And as best as I think I understand, Gareth Porter, you kind of have a two track thing where cars.
I wants to work things out with the Taliban and and, you know, come to some kind of peace agreement in the short term.
And the Americans want to wage the war until July 2011 and then deal with the Taliban or what have you.
But when when I'm reading these stories about cars, I it's all about how he's made Dostum, the secretary of defense over there or whatever you call it, the war minister.
And and then he's trying to cut a deal with Hekmatyar, the CIA's old friend who took a pile of money and then brags about how he helped Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.
And on down the line, there's nothing but sick, evil throat slitting madmen to prop up in power over there.
Right.
How could any of that be to America's credit?
I don't know.
I mean, it's almost like you're slapping your forehead and you're saying, how is this possibly going to help us?
This is going to bite us right in the butt.
And no, I mean, it's short order, I would imagine, because things seem things seem to be out of control, out of our control over there now.
You know, when when Karzai stole this election and the administration stood by and basically did nothing, you know, it sort of made little noises about this is awful.
And then they pressured to have the recount or the re you know, the runoff.
And I was thinking to myself, there's got to be more to it.
I mean, this is the this is the United States is the president of the United States just elected.
He's got to have a plan.
There's got to be some sort of, you know, back channel thing going on.
I don't I'm really questioning whether there is a plan for Afghanistan or everything that we see is by the seat of their pants.
Yeah.
Well, I'm here to tell you, I am, I guess, at this point, 90 percent something subscriber to Gareth Porter's view of how American policy works.
And that is simply that they shoot at whoever's shooting back at them and then they just keep going like that.
They don't know what else to do.
They don't have a plan.
It's not about preventing China from building a pipeline or making sure that there's one to the port of Karachi.
It's not about anything other than keeping doing what they're already doing.
And that's just and it's the Pentagon who leads the way once they have a base.
That's it.
Same as, you know, Mises book bureaucracy about any government program.
All bureaucrats want only to expand their department and get more money.
And they always end up just making the problem worse.
And then that's the excuse for them to keep expanding and on and on it goes.
And that there's really actually no smarts behind it at all.
No wisdom at all.
No debates like the one that you and I are having about what exactly the hell are we doing here at all?
That's not how it goes, really.
It goes, you know, go out on a mission and kill some people.
That's about as wise as the debate is.
Well, you know, that's what he says.
The last refuge of the interventionist is always that we are going into these countries or these conflicts on a in some sort of humanitarian capacity.
They did it in Iraq and they're doing it.
They've done it in Afghanistan.
The problem is, is that they, you know, they did quite the opposite.
So when the religious radicals in Iraq, for example, were starting to take over after the invasion and the subsequent insurgency, we did nothing.
They were stoning women, they were hanging women, women were getting acid thrown in their faces.
You know, everything that we supposedly were there for, to protect the people, never happened.
I don't care what anybody says.
So what did they have left there?
They have a Shia Islamist government that's likely going to stay in power if Sauder does, in fact, crack a deal with Maliki.
We have exactly the opposite of what we were supposed to accomplish there.
Yeah.
Right.
So and now we have Afghanistan where we're allowing.
Well, let me just add on Iraq really quick.
Abusive children.
Kelly, let me just add on Iraq real quick.
I just want to say Darja Mail was on the show just a couple of weeks back to talk about how.
Oh, boy, is it still the case that the Shiite religious police in Iraq are on the move out there, that they regard a woman's smile as a crime?
Because I guess, you know, it's attractive and that they are, you know, the worst kind of religious police, like in the very worst police state times in Iran and so forth.
I'm sorry.
Now, please go ahead.
So is Darja saying that that indeed is still going on?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's it.
It's the Sauderists and the and the Bata Brigade types and the Ayatollahs who rule at least the south, if not Anbar and so forth.
Yeah.
And we never hear about that.
Isn't that amazing?
You know, that that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.
You know, this this has been going on throughout the entire Iraq war and it's gotten worse.
And this is exactly opposite of what we were fighting for or we were told we were fighting for.
So there's nothing left.
And where does that leave, you know, regular American taxpayers who felt, you know, like that somehow that we, you know, there would have to be some reason or rhyme to what was going on and all the blood that's been spilled and all these guys coming back with PTSD and committing suicide for what?
We couldn't even get the humanitarian part straight.
Yeah.
And not only that, is that that what would, you know, so well is going to later translate into future insurgencies.
And guess what?
They all start.
They blame us.
The people there don't go, oh, Americans, you are our saviors.
Yeah, they blame us.
Well, and that's in fact, the one thing that I think we have going for us is that is the degree to which the people of the Muslim world, the billion plus of them consider us separate from our government, which, by the way, for any foreigners listening, we in fact are all the lies about we the people and popular sovereignty.
Notwithstanding, this is not our policy.
It's our government's policy that does this.
And I'm actually the only thing that makes me really hopeful is that all the people with satellites out there watching American television and saying to each other, oh, no wonder the American people back this up, if this is what they see and this is what they believe.
Right.
You know, I mean, that's the only thing we have going for us is is really we're ignorant as hell over here.
We got no idea.
We're stuck way over here on an island in the new world and got no idea what it's like over there or, you know, what it's like to have a hellfire missile kill your family or none of these things.
Right.
And, you know, and you bring that up and I, you know, and I feel like when I was writing this story about the Afghan boys, I feel this conflict in myself that I don't want to disparage as a person who is obviously not an anthropologist or, you know, one of these social scientists that they send over there with the army.
You know, I don't it's not my role to disparage an entire culture history, but I mean, we know what's right and what's wrong.
And if the reports are so frequent and so rampant and as just as a lay person, I can do this by doing, you know, simple Google searches.
There is there is an endemic problem there.
And it's not obviously not all of the people of Afghanistan because there are so many victims.
You know, one woman was quoted on this front line special documentary saying, you know, when are they going to stop this?
When are they you know, why aren't the police doing anything?
Because power with power is power.
You know, they're suffering, too.
They're suffering from the corruption of their government.
They're suffering at the hands of the police.
They're suffering at the hands of the Taliban.
They're suffering, you know, so they're they're victims just just like we're victims of a terrible policy.
And we feel we feel helpless to do anything.
We have no power.
We elect a president in hopes that he'll dial back these foreign policy blunders and he doesn't.
You know, we did our best.
You know, we thought we were electing somebody who was going to change things.
And he didn't.
Not Scott.
I don't go for that at all, man.
You know, he's just another Bill Clinton.
That's all he is.
Anybody ever thought any difference?
Just kidding himself.
We saw the Democratic primaries.
They went on for a year and there were two peaceniks and everybody called them kook and loser and they lost.
And then there were the Clintonites, including Clinton, the wife and Barack Obama, who pledged to bomb the world forever.
And when and when Obama was asked in the fall of 2007, can you promise by the end of your first term in January 2013, all of our guys will be out of Iraq?
He said no.
Yeah.
And anybody who thought for a minute, no offense, but come on, there's no point in fooling yourself.
It's better to face up to the fact that we have no power, that there's a one party state.
It's an evil, murderous empire.
And the whole democracy thing and all that is nothing but a big sham.
There's no rule of law.
They have a torture regime.
They're they're recording this conversation as well as keeping track of every Google search you ever make.
Kelly.
Yeah.
You know, we're living in a lawless imperial police state here.
They're all that statues and parchment is nothing but window dressing and public relations now.
Yeah.
And the pathetic thing is that the only rebellious movement we have now, i.e. the Tea Party movement, has no interest in talking about foreign policy at all.
So you have one group that's actually out there rampaging, you know, protesting, dumping tea, whatever.
And they could care less about whether we, you know, bomb Iran tomorrow or continue our, you know, march of empire.
So, I mean, that's the pathetic thing.
I mean, I know there's a lot of earnest people who have been protesting this war.
But, you know, it's just it's just ironic that the first people movement that we've had in a long time doesn't care.
And they're just a bunch of bushies for all I for all I care.
Yeah.
I mean, in terms of their foreign policy position.
It sure is that way.
You know, it always happens with the left, right thing.
You know, I look on Twitter.
I'm sorry.
I just love picking on these guys.
And maybe you'll get a hoot out of it.
It's BuzzFlash, who are the you know, they're very progressive.
They're not, I thought, just Democrats.
I thought that they were kind of, you know, even a little bit commie or whatever in a good way.
Like as in not so loyal to the Democratic Party that they end up changing their principles.
I would have thought.
But every tweet, every tweet that they send out on Twitter is the most nationalistic, anti sedition, anti right out of power type rhetoric.
It's amazing.
They want to criminalize anybody who doesn't like Obama.
And they just go on and on about disloyalty and patriotism.
And it's like the free republic over there now.
Well, you know, you remember the Clinton days.
Oh, yeah.
It was bad.
Happened then.
It was like all the Clinton gets in power and all the hippies are in power.
La la la.
And they're supposed to.
And, you know, and there and they would go on and on about the old days of Nixon and Hoover.
And, you know, the FBI.
And then all of a sudden they become more jackbooted thugs than anybody before them.
And it's like, wow.
So, I mean, we should.
Yeah.
I mean, you and I have been girded for that.
But it's just funny to see it like in action.
Yeah.
And it just flips half the population is angry.
The other half is satisfied.
And then they switch back and forth, back and forth.
And then, you know, we try to collect those who wash out in the meantime, you know.
Well, you know, I was reading Justin Raimondo's piece a few weeks ago about, you know, Rachel Maddow.
And, you know, and I and I read it and I appreciated it, but I didn't appreciate it fully until I was watching him and MSNBC the other night.
And she's she's promoting this Tim McVeigh, the Tim McVeigh tape to the McVeigh tape special.
And it might have come and gone already, but now it's coming up this Monday.
Yeah.
Her advertisement basically, unbelievably, unabashedly link, you know, McVeigh to this current sort of drumbeat about, you know, right wing anti-government threat.
Right.
Like pro-government sentiment doesn't cause more violence.
You know what I mean here?
Her dear leader is killing people in four different countries, five, maybe all day, every day.
And do in in part to her silence on the issue and cheerleading for him and pretending like everything else matters instead of the wars.
Her pro-government propaganda and sentiment is literally causing people to be killed with high explosives each and every day.
While here she tries to pretend that you and I are a would be McVeigh if we don't like the current regime.
Yeah, it was so blatant.
And, you know, I mean, and I was thinking of Justin's column there.
I mean, if anybody would even like question Justin's analysis there, it was all like crystallized in that one advertisement, because even she's making an issue before there even is an issue.
OK.
And not only that, is that there's a cynicism that her corporate paymasters will benefit by them hyping up an issue because it's all about the rating.
So you put up the McVeigh tapes, you resurrect this guy and that whole, you know, devastating time for this country just so you can get ratings.
It's beyond, you know, the political.
It's the cynical corporate, you know, establishment stuff that really gets to me because now that they're, you know, they're going to ride this thing.
They're going to ride it for every penny they can.
And in the meantime, they're just destroying this country by polarizing us even further.
Because every time she goes on the air to do that, you know, somebody like you or, you know, some, you know, somebody on the other side is going to get more angry and more suspicious of their neighbor, more paranoid.
You know, they had a movie back in the 90s, Arlington Road.
Oh, my God.
Remember that?
Oh, yeah.
So Tim Robbins was the terrorist.
Oh, it was awful.
And now, wait a minute.
Here's the exact quote of the most radical anti-government thing that he said in the movie.
The people have a right to know the truth.
That was the mark of a terrorist.
Your neighbor, that guy who says he doesn't like Bill Clinton, is probably going to bomb something and pin you for it.
Yeah, exactly.
And that brings back a flood of memories of the 90s where, yeah, they made us paranoid about our neighbors.
Granted, you know, we're all adults here.
We can see if there's, you know, if there's people that cross the line.
Yeah, if there's people who are crossing the line, if that militia out in Michigan managed...
Whoever's crossing the line, Kelly, is always infiltrated by the cops.
We know it.
Whether they're Muslim terrorists or whether they're right-wing kooks, even the Oklahoma bombing plot was thoroughly infiltrated by the FBI.
Anybody who's Googled more than an hour and a half or, well, even half of one hour knows about that.
And the same thing with the Hutteri militia and with all the neo-Nazis.
There was a neo-Nazi leader who just had to admit that he'd been, and the FBI was forced to admit in court, that he'd been on their payroll forever and ever.
And, you know, everybody ought to be able to see through that by now.
But wait a minute, I've got to change the subject to something that you brought up and I think is extremely important.
And that was when the soldiers come home and when the government is done using them.
And you mentioned the post-traumatic stress disorder and the suicides.
And it just gives me an opportunity to bring up this most important article, and I hope to get the author of it on the show sometime very soon.
I read it last night.
It's called Disposable Soldiers at the Nation, and it's by Joshua Kors.
And people might recognize that name from Charles Goyette's old interview or mine about Specialist Town and this theory that the military has that if a soldier is wounded, they just force them basically to sign a piece of paper that says that they have a personality disorder, which is a pre-existing condition and means that they are not eligible for any of their benefits whatsoever.
And they use this against guys who have severe concussions and brain damage and shrapnel wounds.
And this story, Kelly, is about a guy who was in prison and given the sleep deprivation, Rumsfeld, Abu Ghraib treatment for a month, more than a month in solitary, kept awake all night long until he finally signed the piece of paper that said, oh, yeah, I was crazy before I joined up.
And so, therefore, to the U.S. government, he's worthless and not worth one dime of their obligation to him.
It makes you wonder why they have so much energy.
That's the army of one, right?
The army of one.
You're on your own, kid.
But they'll go to those lengths just not to have this guy on their roll.
Yeah.
Oh, and here's better.
Twenty two thousand six hundred cases like this.
Yeah.
And the government investigated it.
The Pentagon investigated itself and decided that everything was fine.
Oh, I'm sure.
In fact, Obama put forward a bill trying to do something about it.
And Bush did the thing to make it look like he was doing something about it and nothing ever happened.
And then nobody ever did anything about it.
You know, I did a story like this a couple of years ago.
And if you start digging into it, it's just it just makes you sick because you're right.
I mean, they have the whole issue with the personality disorders.
But then you've got these guys who are physically injured and they go and they get their their ratings for their disability.
Ratings are so low balled just so the active duty doesn't have to pay for them.
And then, you know, they'll go and they'll get their discharge and they go to the VA and they usually get a normal rating.
But they have to go through all the backlog just to get their compensation and their benefits.
But just the fact that these numbers are out there and you look side by side, guys with, you know, you know, amputated limbs and so forth.
They have multiple injuries and there's all sorts of technicalities so that the Pentagon doesn't have to pay them or their family the full life benefits.
You know, it is probably, you know, a discussion for another show.
But what it does is highlight the length that the Pentagon, the military will go to to lessen its own burden.
You know, and like you said, they are there.
They're ground up like a grinder.
And then when they come back here, they're on their own.
They got to fight tooth and nail for every dime.
And some of these guys, their lives are devastated because not only do they have mental health issues but physical issues in which they can't work anymore.
And I've met Vietnam veterans like this.
Their lives will be forever altered.
So the least thing that we can do is make the rest of their lives as comfortable as possible because that's what we promised them from the beginning.
But instead, we make them miserable by making them.
They have to go through this tedious process of paperwork and refiling and appealing just to be told, well, you're 30% disabled, not 40%.
So you only get this much.
And it's just, God, it must put them through such a mental wringer, them and their families.
But you're right.
This personality disorder thing is the ultimate.
I doubt this is a new thing, but because we have so many of these guys coming back with traumatic brain injuries that you can't necessarily see, there's all sorts of gradations, that it's easy for that military to say, eh, you're smoking a lot, you're drinking a lot, you're getting in bar brawls.
It's obvious that you have a personality disorder from the get-go.
You're out of here, pal.
Not, oh, this guy's got some serious physical brain issues and he's self-medicating and he's dealing with his own way because he's afraid to go to the doctors for them to tell him that he's a psycho.
It's a vicious circle.
Yeah.
Our belief is their betrayal, basically.
Right.
That's the deal.
Yeah, I support my president.
You shut up, traitor, and blah, blah, blah.
And rally for war is you end up stabbing a knife in the back of the kid down the street who went to fight it for you.
That's the reality of the situation.
You know what it reminds me of?
It reminds me of the now dead of Agent Blue-caused bladder cancer, Colonel David Hackworth, who is a decorated Vietnam veteran, I think the most decorated non-commissioned officer or something like that, I forget exactly.
And he dedicated his entire life to defending the enlisted man from the officers.
Right.
And it was just absolute class war.
I mean, to hear him tell it, you'd have thought he was talking about the British at war in South Africa 120 years ago or something.
And it's the officers and the Pentagon's war against the enlisted man.
And here, enlisted man, is how you can fight back.
And here is what we must do to protect the enlisted men from the predators, the officers.
That was Hackworth's whole thing.
I remember hearing him on the radio over and over again in the 1990s.
That's all he ever talked about was how they don't give a shit about you.
They'll throw you in the garbage can.
Yeah.
That's the reality of the situation.
All the hype and all the jet fighters in the air and the flags and all that amounts to simply a lie.
Yeah.
And it's too bad that our media, their first loyalty is the corporate paymasters and the government and the status quo and not to the people.
Because these stories that you and I are talking about never really seem to penetrate the mainstream.
Sure, the Washington Post won a Pulitzer for their investigation of Walter Reed.
And I thought that was a fantastic first step into exposing this.
But guess what?
It just went away, just like a lot of these stories.
They just go away.
Everything is about, like you said, promoting, maintaining the belief that we're doing the right thing.
And it's not a people story.
It's not Howard Zinn's people's history.
We don't have the people's news.
It's corporate.
And they've got a different agenda.
And you have to talk about these poor kids who all of a sudden find themselves out on their ass with a dishonorable discharge just because the military didn't want to pay for their benefits anymore.
Yep.
I never understood how people could figure that supporting the troops meant supporting any mission they happen to be on.
What?
Okay, wish them well if they're stuck on a mission.
Fine.
But your responsibility is never sending them on a mission unless you got to.
I even read the war nerd over at the Exiled.
He had a thing about the Marine Corps Osprey thing.
And he was saying, yeah, some of them crashed.
But you know what?
If you've got to send 50,000 Marines somewhere to kill a bunch of people and fight a war, yeah, you lose a certain percentage.
So what?
But he's talking about a real war where you're fighting at least against some other nation state that has so much as tanks or something.
Yeah.
But we don't send them on a mission to just go get killed for nothing.
You know what?
I'm sorry.
I need to chill out.
But you know what?
There's another thing.
It's in the New York Times and the Washington Post today that these guys have been occupying this valley in Afghanistan and dying for it for years, for a decade almost here.
And now they're leaving.
And now the soldiers who are leaving are telling the reporters, yeah, we wish that the officers had asked themselves years and years and years ago what the hell we were doing there.
One of them talked about, yeah, geez, when I got here, I was 18.
You know, he's probably 20 now or 21, right?
He's talking about it like it was a lifetime ago.
And all of the friends he's seen die there.
And they're leaving.
And this, you know, in the middle of a war, they're not even going to pretend to withdraw until more than a year from now, according to the last timeline they gave us.
And yet they're pulling out of this valley because they realize there is no point in being in this valley.
Yeah.
And that's what these soldiers' lives are worth to the officers and to the neocons and the goofballs with the ties up there in the Pentagon.
Yeah.
And this is one story they couldn't help but get, they couldn't keep from getting into the press.
Yeah, it was too big.
But I'm sure McChrystal and Petraeus are too happy to see that in the Washington Post.
You know, everything's about PR over there.
And this is probably the worst PR in a long time because they're basically saying that they lost.
They lost this particular valley.
One of the subtitles in that story in the print version was a waste of time.
It was a quote from one of the officers there or one of the soldiers there basically saying this was a waste of our time, that we had to cut a deal with the tribesmen there because to make sure that they let them leave safely.
I mean, what is that?
What kind of message?
I mean, even for somebody who's just maybe tangentially paying attention, you know, we have to cut a deal with these guys, these villagers, to let us leave safely.
So we basically said, you know, we'll keep everything intact for you.
You can have the base.
Just make sure we don't get hurt on the way out.
Yeah, that's how the New York Times piece ends.
It says, it's frustrating because we bled there and now we're leaving, said Captain John P. Rodriguez, who has first lieutenant served there with Company B, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines.
So you question, were those sacrifices worth it?
But just because you lost guys in a place doesn't mean you need to stay there.
Yeah, that beats any of the good press they thought they might have got from that Marjah operation, which that, to me, says it all, that they couldn't get a PR zinger out of that one.
But a story like this, that overshadows everything in my estimation.
Well, there's this sense that we are like, you know, above all, you know, we have the weapons, we have the might.
You know, we send our guys in there, they start cleaning up, you know.
I mean, if this is a quote-unquote waste of time and we can't get out of there without cracking a deal, can't get out of there safely without cracking a deal, what do we have left?
We certainly don't have a good diplomacy going on over there.
I mean, between Holbrook and Clinton, I mean, they can't even get in the door to talk to Karzai at this point.
So I don't know what is successful over there.
I don't know.
Well, that makes 300 million of us.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, Kelly.
I appreciate your time on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Great, as always.
Thanks.
Everybody, that is Kelly B. Vlejos.
You can find what she writes at original.antiwar.com slash Vlejos.
And now I need to find the right link to say her bio, which is FoxNews.com, The American Conservative Magazine, and Homeland Security Today as well.