Search and Destroy

Pre-Orders Mailed

2009-11-03T14:43:00.001-05:00

If you've pre-ordered a copy of "The Year of Loving Dangerously," it went out today. If you'd like to order one, click the copy of the book cover to the right of this post. Thanks to all who pre-ordered, and please let me know if you like the book.

Books are also going to ship to stores this week and next.

Save the Date

2009-11-03T11:03:00.000-05:00

I'll be speaking about and signing copies of "The Year of Loving Dangerously" at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York on Thursday, December 3rd.

Cartoon for November 2, 2009

2009-11-02T00:01:00.001-05:00

It really does make a difference that Obama is president.

Cartoon for October 31, 2009

2009-10-31T00:01:00.001-04:00

Now it's obvious, even to Obama's Kool-Aid drinkers: he has no intention--probably never did--of attempting to deliver on any of his significant--forget major--campaign pledges. Utterly, totally worthless.

Can we recall him?

Cartoon for October 29, 2009

2009-10-29T00:01:00.001-04:00

It occurred to me that the "opt out" option could leave us with a strange patchwork of healthcare zones.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama's Real Death Panels

2009-10-27T15:22:00.001-04:00

President Maintains "Right" to Kill American Citizens

Shortly after 9/11, George W. Bush secretly signed two executive orders. Both violated basic constitutional protections as well as U.S. obligations under international treaties, yet both carried the force of law.

They still do.

The first order grants the president (and other officials, including the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security and presumably certain postal clerks) the right to declare anyone—including an American citizen—an "unlawful enemy combatant." A person so declared has no redress, no way to appeal, no ability to challenge that designation. Once a person has been named an enemy combatant, according to the Bush Administration—and now to the Obama Administration—he has no rights. He can be held without charges forever, tortured, you name it—well, actually, the president or the secretary of defense names it.

In the second covert executive order, Bush authorized the CIA to target and assassinate said "enemy combatants"—again, including American citizens.

These two documents first came into play on November 3, 2002, when a CIA-operated Predator drone plane violating Yemeni airspace fired a Hellfire missile at a car containing Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, supposedly Al Qaeda's #1 man in Yemen at the time.

U.S. officials didn't know that an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, was riding along. (You know what they say about hitchhiking.) "The Bush administration said the killing of an American in this fashion was legal…this is legal because the president and his lawyers say so—it's not much more complicated than that," CBS News reported at the time. "I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here," said Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, after the CIA assassinations. "He's well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority."

It's right there in the Constitution between the right to tax and the repeal of Prohibition.

Anyway, Congress tried to clarify matters in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, part of which—the section that eliminated the writ of habeas corpus—got struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. But the rest of the MCA remains in force, including a passage that defines an enemy combatant as anyone who provides "material support" to the "enemy." And who is the enemy? The enemy is anyone the president says it/he/she/they is.

Again, there is no distinction between foreigners and U.S. citizens.

Jose Padilla, the so-called would-be "dirty bomber" held in a Navy brig since 2002, was tried and convicted of such "material support" charges in 2007. (The government couldn't prosecute Padilla for their original dirty bomb charges because they had tortured him so severely that he had been reduced to mental mush.)

Now that times have supposedly changed, it's time to ask: why hasn't President Obama abrogated Bush's controversial executive orders? If Obama truly seeks a break with the lawlessness of the prior administration, what better way to enact it?

Simply put, no one man—not even a nice, articulate, charismatic one—ought to claim the right to suspend a person's constitutional rights. Not in America. Certainly no one man—not even a young, handsome, likeable one—should be able to have anyone he wants whacked. Even in dictatorships, the right of life and death is reserved for judges and juries operating under a system purportedly designed to support impartiality and a search for the truth.

But that's not the case here in the United States. In 2002 Scott Silliman, director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University asked: "Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in Washington, D.C., under [the Bush] theory? The answer is yes, you could."

Nothing much has changed since then. Obama has eliminated the use of the phrase "enemy combatant," but The New York Times reported that the change is merely meant to "symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies." The words may have changed, but Obama attorney general Eric Holder's definition of who can and cannot be held, said the Times, is "not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration."

These days, Obama has ramped up the assassination of political opponents of the U.S. and the U.S.-aligned authoritarian regime in Pakistan, deploying more Predator drone plane attacks than Bush. But that's just for now. Obama could still personally order a government agency to murder you.

Which is weird. But not nearly as weird as the fact that you probably don't care enough to do something about it.

(Ted Rall is the author of "To Afghanistan and Back," the first book about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Among its chapters is one titled "How We Lost the Afghan War.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

New Animated Cartoon Up Now

2009-10-27T14:27:00.002-04:00

If you ever doubted that Americans were a twee and craven people who can't even be bothered to hold their worst monsters accountable for their crimes, or that Barack Obama is a worthless excuse of a president, or that the left is non-existent, consider the fact that George W. Bush is now enjoying his ninth month of retirement. Here's a guy who killed more than two million people, bankrupted the country, and I don't even feel like listing all his crimes because we've been through this so often before--and there isn't even the slightest interest in holding him accountable, much less throwing him in prison. Check out my new animation, movement courtesy of David Essman, above.

New Animated Cartoon Coming Soon

2009-10-26T13:01:00.001-04:00

Just a heads up that my next animation is currently in the editing process thanks to the masterful David Essman. The topic: Back to Bush!

Book Tour Shoutout

2009-10-26T10:00:00.002-04:00

Early reaction to "The Year of Loving Dangerously" has been so enthusiastic that I am considering doing a national tour. So--if you run a bookstore or a group that sponsors speakers, please get in touch. My email is chet@rall.com. If I get enough responses from venues, I'll definitely do this.

What I look for in a venue:

1. First and foremost, good promotion. Bookstores that have loyal customers and send out a monthly newsletter to them. Groups that advertise in the local alternative weekly.

2. Second, money. A group that can pay for me to come will get priority. Most such groups can make a profit, even after paying my honorarium, by charging at the door.

3. Finally, local presence. If my cartoons or columns appear in the local paper, it means more people will know who I am. That makes it more worthwhile for me to drive (I'll be doing this by car) there.

Hope to see you soon!

Cartoon for October 26, 2009

2009-10-26T00:01:00.001-04:00

This cartoon was inspired by seeing one of these signs in San Francisco--at the site of a standard roadside maintenance/pothole patching project.

Terror Widows, Stand Aside

2009-10-24T21:16:00.000-04:00

Here's the new standard for tasteless mourning!

Cartoon for October 24, 2009

2009-10-24T00:01:00.000-04:00

Women haven't come a long way. Men have fallen a long way, baby.

Cartoon for October 22, 2009

2009-10-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

Karzai is stubborn, but even he can made to see reason in accepting a run-off election against Abdullah Abdullah Boutros Boutros Ghali.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Drop the Drones

2009-10-21T10:55:00.001-04:00

Remote Attacks Inflame Afghan Anti-Americanism

The killing of Afghan civilians, usually caused by inadvertent American and NATO airstrikes, has become the most sensitive issue between the Afghans and their Western guests." So reports The New York Times Magazine in the latest installment of its ongoing "There's a new general in charge and he's cool and maybe he can win the war" series. This decade's war: Afghanistan. week's star: General Stanley McChrystal. Alas, poor Petraeus, we hardly knew ye.

As a World War II buff, I mourn the fact that the Magazine wasn't around in 1943. Imagine the over-the-top insensitivity: "The killing of Jews, usually caused by inadvertent German and Axis deportations, has become the most sensitive issue between the French and their Teutonic guests."

"Inadvertant" airstikes?

"Guests"?

Many of the botched airstrikes have been carried out by Predator drone planes remote-controlled by CIA and USAF personnel watching computer screens thousands of miles away. One click of a mouse and a Hellfire missile bearing a 20-pound blast fragmentation warhead zooms towards its target. Despite numerous killings of civilians, drones are popular with the military because they keep soldiers out of harm's way.

Like a lot ideas, it only seems like a good one before you think about it. America's obsession with protecting its own people is at the heart of Afghans' contempt for the U.S. occupation. And Afghan resentment is the biggest reason the war effort has been doomed from the start.

To Afghans on the ground, drones symbolize American callousness and project a smug sense of superiority. Because they protect us at the Afghans' expense. New York Times reporter David Rhode, the journalist kidnapped by neo-Taliban militants and held in Afghanistan and Pakistan for nine months, describes their "terrifying presence":

"Remotely piloted, propeller-driven airplanes, they could easily be heard as they circled overhead for hours. To the naked eye, they were small dots in the sky. But their missiles had a range of several miles. We knew we could be immolated without warning."

To the dead, death is death—how you die doesn't matter in the end. To the living, it's all that matters.

Would you rather lose the love of your life to a drunk driver? Or because she rushed into a burning building to save a child? Afghanistan is a martial society. As an Afghan, how would you rather lose your son—in the heat of battle or to some alien contraption buzzing around in response to the movement of a joystick in Virginia?

Unlike his predecessors McChrystal knows that every "inadvertent airstrike" prompts a certain number of Afghans to join or support Afghan resistance forces. "Gentlemen," he tells a morning briefing of NATO generals, "we need to understand the implications of what we are doing. Airpower contains the seeds of our own destruction. A guy with a long-barrel rifle runs into a compound, and we drop a 500-pound bomb on it? If we lose airpower irresponsibly, we can lose this fight." Later that day, the Times reporter who recorded that statement wrote, McChrystal said he planned on "banning bombs and missiles in populated areas unless his men were in danger of being overrun."

An improvement, no doubt. But in Afghanistan and everywhere else, all use of airpower is irresponsible. Whether piloting a B-52 at 35,000 feet or wiggling a joystick 8,000 miles away, fighting a war at a distance means chucking ordnance willy-nilly into people and situations you can't see or know anything about.

And those people will hate you for it.

In the short term, remote drone warfare offers the tantalizing prospect of killing your enemies without risking your own forces. "In Pakistan, a CIA-led program using Predator drones to hunt down and kill leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has proven remarkably successful, even if controversial within Pakistan itself," reports the Times. "To date, American officials say, they have killed 11 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, without having to launch large-scale military operations across the border."

In the long term, however, the geopolitical risks eclipse any short-term gains. Note the "even if." Drone plane attacks brought Pakistani anti-Americanism to a boil and led to the collapse of the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally. Meanwhile, like most cell-based guerrilla organizations, Al Qaeda's structure ensures that no man is indispensable. It simply appointed new members to the positions vacated by the Hellfire victims.

If the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is destined to fail, it would be nice to see it end with more dignity. In an ideal world, President Obama would sign legislation outlawing the manufacture, deployment or use of Predator and similar drone bomber technology, and urge other nations to do the same. In a somewhat decent world, he would withdraw rather than send more troops to Afghanistan. And in the crappy world we call home, the least we can do is kill Afghans with flesh-and-blood soldiers rather than drone planes.

(Ted Rall is the author of "To Afghanistan and Back," the first book about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Among its chapters is one titled "How We Lost the Afghan War.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for October 19, 2009

2009-10-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

Cartoon for October 17, 2009

2009-10-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

Eight years into the war, we're determining the mission?

Ted Rall in San Francisco

2009-10-16T10:39:00.001-04:00

I'll be signing books and selling copies of the not-yet-in-stores "The Year of Loving Dangerously" Saturday and Sunday at the Alternative Press Expo. If you're in the SF Bay Area, I'd love to meet you! I'll be at the NBM table.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Too Illegit to Quit

2009-10-15T10:41:00.001-04:00

We Can't Make Afghans Accept Karzai Now

Eight years. We've been in Afghanistan longer than any other war in American history. The party of the president who invaded Afghanistan has been repudiated at the polls. Yet we still haven't altered the flawed strategy that allowed uneducated tribesmen with outdated weapons to defeat us year after year.

We haven't learned a thing.

You can see the myopia in our leaders' talking points. "Our goal [in Afghanistan] is to disrupt, dismantle, defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies," secretary of state Hillary Clinton told ABC News' "Nightline." "But not every Taliban is Al Qaeda. There are people who are Taliban, who are fighting because they get paid to fight. They have no other way of making a living."

So few words. So much stupidity. Where to start? Here: Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan in 2001 was negligible. Al Qaeda was a Pakistani phenomenon. Still is.

You're welcome, have another: Not only is every Taliban not Al Qaeda, there's no such thing as a Taliban, as in: "That guy is a Taliban." Members of the Taliban are called Talibs. You invade a country, send in 100,000 troops, presume to decide what form of government it should have and who should rule it—yet you still don't know something as basic as what the members of the nation's majority political movement are called? Still wondering why "they" hate us?

Last and not least, actually, while it's true that the neo-Taliban (as South Asian experts call them) sometimes pay stipends to their fighters, it's one hell of a stretch—not to mention reflective of an utter misunderstanding of the situation—to depict them as a bunch of greedy and/or desperate entrepreneurs trying to scrape together a few afghanis to make ends meet. (Afghanis are the national currency. Afghans are the people of Afghanistan. Neither the president nor news reporters know this.)

The neo-Taliban are merely the most recent reflection of a historical truth: Afghans set their political differences aside when it's time to kill invaders. Nothing the U.S. can or will do can or will change what we are: a hostile occupation force. Nothing the U.S. can say will change why the Afghans think we're there: to kill them and steal their land.

Eight years. Look, we were never going to win. No one does empire like the British, but the Afghans beat them like a drum. Next-door neighbor Russia knew all about the Afghans and their culture; they lost too. There was no way we were going to outperform the English and the Russians. Still, even if America's political class doesn't read history, you'd think they might catch a clue about crushing the hopes and aspirations of ornery brown people over the course of eight years of occupation. At least by osmosis.

Of said clues, Number One If-You-Forget-Everything-Else-I-Tell-You-Remember-This-One Clue goes as follows: Hamid Karzai, appointed as a U.S. puppet in 2001, has never been considered the legitimate president of Afghanistan by the people who count—Afghans. We've done a lot to piss off the Afghans—slaughtering wedding parties, dropping depleted-uranium bombs on civilians, encouraging opium poppy cultivation—but the biggest single reason every single American soldier who died in Afghanistan has died for nothing is that they died fighting for Hamid Karzai.

Karzai's Afghanistan is a disaster. The average Afghan has received zero assistance from the U.S.-led coalition, has seen zero improvement in his or her life, and has seen no reconstruction whatsoever. Most Afghans never even see American aid workers, who never leave their compounds in Kabul. $13 billion has been allocated for aid to Afghanistan—but there is no evidence that a single cent has ever been spent. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says the overall effort in Afghanistan "has been a nightmare; vast amounts have been wasted."

"The [Afghan] judiciary is so weak," reports the Times, "that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, 'a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.'" Which is how the Taliban came to power in 1995-96. There was chaos. They brought order.

Di. Sas. Ter.

But President Obama doesn't understand a thing.

"Administration officials describe Mr. Obama as impatient with the civilian progress so far," reports The New York Times. "The president is not satisfied on any of this," a senior administration official tells the paper.

Mr. President: The Afghan war was lost the day the U.S. invaded. It was doomed to disaster the day it installed an illegitimate stooge. Not only is he a puppet, he is a puppet on a shoestring budget—so he can't try to buy the kind of public support that other Afghan politicians have earned with bravery on the battlefield.

Now the U.S. is trying to retroactively legitimatize the Afghan pseudo-president. But it's a sucker's bet. Leaving even one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan means only one thing: more death.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the upcoming graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the 2002 graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for October 15, 2009

2009-10-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

Obama wins the Nobel. Tell the Afghans about Obama's role as a peacemaker...or tell the Pakistanis...or anyone who reads a paper.

New Animation: Git-Mo Help

2009-10-13T11:36:00.001-04:00

Inspired by the Obama Administration's claim that they can't close Gitmo because they don't know what to do with the detainees, here comes yours truly to suggest a free-market solution.

Cartoon for October 12, 2009

2009-10-12T00:01:00.001-04:00

The U.S. Supreme Court may soon declare corporations to have the same rights as individuals.

The Alternative Peace Prize

2009-10-10T08:38:00.007-04:00

The Nobel Committee has been giving prizes to people who totally do not deserve it or who have not earned it, such as L. Paul Bremer #3* and Henry Kissinger, and now Barack Obama.

Is it worth it to receive an award when that puts you in such low company (and you can't get much lower than Bremer and Kissinger, both accused war criminals)?

I'd like to introduce an award that's been around for a while, but many people haven't heard of it. It's called the Right Livelihood Award, and they've been giving awards out since 1980.

Susan

*Correction: L. Paul Bremer won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not the Nobel Prize. My bad. But Bremer the Third fired the entire Baath Party and 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, thus virtually creating the Iraqi insurgency. His bad.

Cartoon for October 10, 2009

2009-10-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

It's hard to say exactly what inspired this cartoon. It's nothing in recent news, but rather my long-term observation that the U.S. government goes to extreme lengths to retrieve body parts. Examples include the 9/11 recovery effort and the decades-long campaign to get back body parts from U.S. servicemen who perished in Vietnam during the 1960s. Wouldn't it make more sense to care about Americans while they're alive?

First Review

2009-10-09T13:02:00.002-04:00

The first review of "The Year of Loving Dangerously" has appeared on the Strong Verse blog.

Barack Obama, Nobel Peace (!) Prize Winner

2009-10-09T12:36:00.003-04:00

In what one of the most appalling decisions since the Medal of Freedom went to Paul Bremer, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace (cough) Prize.

Setting aside the obvious question--what peace agreement did he negotiate> in what material way did he promote the cause of peace?--one has to slap one's collective forehead in amazement at the spectacle of a man getting ready to send 40,000 more troops to kill Afghans winning such a prize. The Iraq War continues without end. Afghanistan is ramping up. Drone planes are bombing Pakistani civilians for fun and profit. He's sabre-rattling with Guinea. He continues to torture detainees in Guantanamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia, various secret prisons, etc. He hasn't restored habeas corpus. He wants to renew the Patriot Act.

WTF?