"Talk about a double whammy. It was not enough for Standard & Poor's to downgrade the United States' credit rating; with impeccable timing, and apparently a single shot, the Taliban in Afghanistan simultaneously downgraded the empire's colossal war machine.
As much as the US power elite refuse to accept that the US financial crisis was caused by years of George W Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and mega-corporations; massive bailouts of banks and insurance companies; and astronomic military spending on the Pentagon's declinations of The Long War, the power elite will also refuse to acknowledge that the "new" war strategy in Afghanistan is also a failure.
The sound of that Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter shot down by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, on Friday, killing 38 people - including 19 US Navy SEALs and seven Afghan commandos - was the full digital sound of the empire being shocked and awed into disbelief, no matter Pentagon efforts to practically order the media "not to read too much" into the crash.
The SEALs are part of a humongous, 10,000-strong Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) task force, based in Afghanistan, which has been involved in as many as 70 raids a day in AfPak, capturing - according to Pentagon spin - 2,900 "insurgents" and killing more than 800 from April to July. JSOC's global reach has been deconstructed in a piece by Nick Turse (see A secret war in 120 countries Asia Times Online, August 5)"...........READ MORE
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