U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

ENGEL: Exactly. And the reason the streets are still unpaved is that these government officials refuse to pay any taxes to the government. They are in a fight so the government won‘t come and pave the roads or connect it to any kind of sanitation system at all because the same government ministers won‘t pay to register the neighborhood. 

MADDOW: So they won‘t throw their weight around to get their neighborhood taken care of, because they don‘t live here anyway. 

ENGEL: They don‘t live here anyway. So you have these large homes, and some of these homes - you see this building right behind you? 

MADDOW: That looks like a hotel. 

ENGEL: No. No. No. They are all private homes. 

MADDOW: This is a private home? 

ENGEL: It‘s a private home. It probably has 25 bedrooms in it and garish, colonnades and unusual architectural features. And then, they‘ll rent that out to some western client and they‘ll charge either by the bedroom or by the floor or for the whole thing. And if you were to build this one - it‘s obviously under construction - that is a $1 million plus house in Kabul with no paved streets. 

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

ENGEL: Because this was originally just empty land. You can see there is no real pavement or anything like that. When the Americans came in with the northern alliance (the northern alliance, which was the allies against the Taliban) took this land and then gave it away to all their cronies. They created a new war wealth neighborhood out of nothing. 

MADDOW: And so we‘ve still got open sewers and we‘ve still got no pavement, but we have rococo castles. Nouveau riche castles. 

ENGEL: That lease for $10,000 to $25,000 a month, because it‘s a safe area. But here‘s the irony. Most of the government officials - and these are almost all owned by government officials - don‘t live in them. They rent them out to foreign companies, contractors. And they live in Dubai or have their families in Islamabad. So they are purely investment properties. 

MADDOW: There‘s a sign right there in that one. It says, “house for rent.” 

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

The Afghan and Iraq wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy:

Wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender
equality, the rule of law, etc.

============================================

The war in Iraq was very very clearly about oil, as was the war in Afghanistan. The oil pipeline that was planned (in Afghanistan), the best security for that was an occupation." 


"If you map the proposed pipeline route across Afghanistan and you look at our bases? Matches perfectly. Our bases are there to solve a problem that the Taliban couldn't solve. Taliban couldn't provide security in that part of Afghanistan -- Well now that's where our bases are. So, does that have to do with Osama Bin Laden? It has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden. It has everything to do with the longer plan, in this case a strategy which I wouldn't necessarily call neoconservative, however it fits perfectly in with the neoconservative ideology which says, 'If you have military force and you need something from a weaker country, then you need to deploy that force and take what you need because your country's needs are paramount'. It's the whole idea of unilateralism, of using force to achieve your aims."

-Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel whose assignments included a variety of roles for the National Security Agency and who spent her last 4 1/2 years working at the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld 



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUxI3rSLDO8



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SltOy_F6ZII

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

Spend long enough at war, and you cannot fit in anywhere else. It finally kills you. It is not a new story. It starts out like love, but it is death.

War is the beautiful young nymph in the fairy tale that, when kissed, exhales the vapors of the underworld.

The ancient Greeks had a word for such a fate: ekpyrosis.

It means to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used it to describe heroes.

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

So US forces transferring individuals to NDS Kandahar in violation of a July 2011 order suspending such transfers are absolved from any responsibility?  

Or to a facility called "Mullah Omar's House," a residence taken over by Special Forces soldiers and renamed Firebase Maholic. There, the torturing by Afghan forces was in the presence of Americans.
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

To anything.  
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

What's the objective, how is the military going about achieving it, and where are our tax dollars going?

Not long ago, Rachel Maddow walked the dusty, garbage-strewn streets of Afghanistan with RIchard Engel to see what exporting US-style democracy means, and what US nation-building actually builds. Watch this to see where are our tax dollars going, and learn how we are not "nation-building", not making us safer, and not helping the Afghans or building their nation at all (or a democracy). Learn how this has all been just a huge rip-off of the American people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR5BHnN__5M

RACHEL MADDOW: There are very few countries in the world poorer than Afghanistan where abject poverty is almost everywhere. The keyword there is almost. There are super rich folks here. We visited their neighborhood in Kabul. They‘re garish, bizarre. What it looks like to be rich in poor, war-torn, land-locked Central Asian neighborhood. 

MADDOW: So we are in a neighborhood now. Kabul. Talking about the distribution of wealth, in Kabul and the effect of - 

RICHARD ENGEL: There is a distribution of wealth. This is where it is distributed. This is where it ends up. All of the money from contracts and association with the government and association with the U.S. military has ended up here. 

MADDOW: Why? 

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