Mike Pence (R-Nutjob-Ind.), co-author of a ** bipartisan bill to protect reporters and their confidential sources,** said all parties responsible for gathering, distributing and publishing documents released by Wikileaks.org about the Afghanistan war ought to be “thoroughly investigated.”… “Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from,” said Pence, the third-ranking House Republican. ***[So do we. Langley, Virginia via Pakistani ISI]]

An archive of classified U.S. military logs spanning six years, more than 91,000 documents, and 200,000 pages, was today made available by WikiLeaks. The papers show a picture of the war in Afghanistan that is far more grim, and far less hopeful, than previously portrayed. The White House has issued a response. The statement from national security adviser Gen. James Jones emphasizes two points: first, the administration asserts that this leak of classified information endangers the lives of Americans and America’s war allies. Includes an excellent opinion and editorial by Kevin, Webmaster at Cryptogon.com.

Tony Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry that toppling Saddam Hussein helped make Britain safe from terrorists was dramatically undermined by the former head of MI5 yesterday. She told the inquiry: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam.”

Soldiers killed themselves at the rate of one per day in June making it the worst month on record for Army suicides, the service said Thursday. Seven soldiers killed themselves while in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan in June, according to the statistics. Of the total suicides, 22 soldiers had been in combat, including 10 who had deployed two to four times.

With the first tar balls from the Gulf oil spill now washing ashore in Galveston, Texas, Rep. Ron Paul, whose district includes the affected area, said Monday the federal government is not doing enough in the recovery effort. “If all our states had their Guard units back here maybe they would have the manpower to do more to help clean up the beaches and prevent the oil from coming in, but, no, our Guard units are all over the world fighting wars we don’t need,” said Paul, a critic of the U.S. deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. *** Embedded Video of Interview

“Last month,” he said, “some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, ‘Why do you hate us?’ I replied, ‘Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.’”

Note that this is the Taliban we’re speaking about; made up of farmers, locals, pissed off countrymen, a few radicals and every other Afghan that is tired of the US occupation. This is a form of what the CIA called “blowback.” Al-Qaeda (all-CIA-duh) is simply a fictional, intelligence-community-organized rag tag, motley crew of extremists loyal to Western money and intelligence handlers.

The Central Intelligence Agency has hired Xe Services, the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, to guard its facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to an industry source. The previously undisclosed CIA contract is worth about $100 million, said the industry source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the deal, which is classified.

McChrystal is in trouble for making disparaging remarks about fellow officers and civilian officials — a military tradition that surely goes back to the armies of Hammurabi (and long before). Yet he faced no reprimand or remonstrance whatsoever for his admission, just a few months ago, that brazen war crimes were being carried out under his command. “Another bureaucrat of death” has taken his place, though. Obama has appointed the top imperial proconsul of the age, bipartisan fave David Petraeus, to take direct control of the wars — overt and covert — in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Petraeus, as head of “Central Command” — the core provinces of the eternal War of Terror — is already in overall charge of the Af-Pak morass, having previously been in charge of the Iraq bloodbath.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates rejected suggestions Sunday that US forces will move out of Afghanistan in large numbers in July of next year under a deadline set by President Barack Obama.

News that the U.S. has suddenly discovered $1 trillion-worth of mineral deposits in Afghanistan, and descriptions of the bounty as a “game changer” by the corporate media, represent nothing more than crude war propaganda designed to reinvigorate public support for a failing and ever more pointless occupation. A man intrinsically tied to the 1980′s Soviet operation in Afghanistan, by radicalizing muslim resistance in the country, was über elitist Zbigniew Brzezinski. In his book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”, Brzezinski refers to the strategic and economic prizes to be gained via control of the Eurasian Balkans.