Not according to all American intelligence reports and our allies, which confirmed some payments, not just the promise. The only bull is the ridiculous claim that Trump is tough on Russia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/29/timeline-russia-bounties-us-troops-afghanistan-trump-response/

@newtboy
you were not the only one who put me on the defensive for supporting chis hedges.
so if you feel singled out,i apologize.

the point of this post is put into light an adored spokesperson for the left,and a commentator who is also left leaning (and many of his upvoted videos can be found on the sift) to make a point.

and by your comment,you are struggling to reconcile the two.
but you DID reconcile,and you did so by giving maddow a tacit pass and condemning kyle for being a "complete bombastic liar".

when the truth is:
they both are...kinda..sorta..

they both are approaching,and making their points by using biased and slanted data to influence you,and i for that matter,into adopting their viewpoint.

these are not outright and pernicious lies.they are lies that serve a purpose and i find maddows far more egregious,because it is far more subtle..and you appear to have bought it.

she did so by using the innocuous word "might",yet her inferrence cannot be mistaken.they call it the "dog whistle".this is a wink and a nod that those dirty ruskies own our new president.

wink wink...nudge nudge..know what i mean?

now kyle is not exactly lying either.
he is using russias reaction to the new deployment from putin himself.who has stated that there was an agreement that there would be no new encroachment after the GDR,but that simply reveals the cleverness and political saavy of putin.

the real truth is this:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/

or is it?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html
from 2009?

maybe this is the truth?
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russia-us-nato-deal--20160530-snap-story.html
from 2016.

well,personally i am going with the LAtimes and der spiegel.
brookings is a right wing think tank with deep tentacles in the pentagon and DoD.

but CNN reports that poland LOVES the new troops:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/europe/poland-us-troops-nato-welcome/

look,
while i will agree that putin is a vicious thug,who murders political opponents and tortures dissidents.that he is ruthless and relentless political player.

i do not see any evidence of russian hacking influencing our elections,nor do i see a new russian empire pushing for those cold war expansionism days.

the only entity/country i see pushing for expansion and a renewal of the cold war..is us..the pentagon and the department of defense,and those juicy juicy defense contracts!

i feel my time on the sift is coming to a close.
having to defend my admiration for a pulitzer prize winning,war correspondent and author is just...weird.

at least i know i am biased,but i do my best to self-correct.

"We need to find out how many vets are willing to do war crimes. Jesus."

You don't really follow current events, do you?

Since the Vietnam war, American soldiers have been rigorously trained to act instead of think. It's been very successful. So successful that the US is now the best country at the world when it comes to killing your own and accidentally targeting civilians. In the first gulf war, 12 Bradley AFVs were destroyed, NINE of them were by US troops. I saw a video during that war of a spotter for an A-10. Even on the poor-quality video we could see it was a Bradley (this was while I was working with an Armored regiment). The A-10 obliterates the Bradley and all the on board were certainly dead, he calls back over the radio, "I believe that was a friendly, over." To which the spotter says, "Oh shit, I was afraid of that."

Your soldiers kill eachother without fear of repercussions. Why the hell would they worry about war crimes against other people?

Its a matter of chicken vs egg. They don't need huge military expenditures because security is provided by the US. But if they and all their neighbors had to provide sufficient defense, mostly against the people who are most likely to invade them (i.e. their neighbors), you get an arms race like you have with India/Pakistan, North/South Korea, Iran/Saudi Arabia. The indirect savings and the refocusing of capital and human resources away from the military in all of these allies countries makes the world a much safer place, since war no longer becomes the go to solution for states to resolve differences.

US bases do fall into 2 categories. Allies who don't want to get invaded again, and enemies who lost and became allies. As for Kuwait, that didn't work out well for Iraq, and Kuwait is still independent and an ally. Ukraine has no US bases, Russia would go ballistic if there were (surprisingly appropriate use of the word). ISIS is the anomaly, but right now you can put that down to the fact that Obama really, really doesn't want to put US troops on the ground (think he would hesitate if ISIS invaded England or Australia for example?), and that Iraq's military is trying to handle this as much as possible on their own and clearly having trouble.

I don't know if we need all 800 bases currently or if some are just vestigial. I'm not qualified to give an opinion on the necessity of them, though

I lost the link to this one old report from early on in the latest Iraq war. Anyone have a link to the one about US troops arresting hot girls off the street so they could gang rape them in prison, where the ones that became pregnant disappeared and were never seen again? They had a bit in the report about higher ups finding out and confiscating the cell phone videos, and the administration saying it would serve no good purpose to release them. I'm wondering if those vids will ever see the light of day... doubt it.

-scheherazade

Spoiler, Hitchens 'wins' the debate. I can't honestly say I've watched or listened to a debate between him and anyone were that did not seem to be the case. As often is the case though too, his grandest victory is understated, brief and easily overlooked.

Ritter thumps hard on the absence of WMD in Iraq to condemn the invasion, which on it's surface seems a strong argument. Hitchens casually references an unwillingness to be lectured on WMD's by those who cautioned against invasion for fear that Saddam would use those WMD on US troops. Scott Ritter went on Crossfire before the invasion to state that Saddam could easily reconstitute his chemical weapons and invading was too risky.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Independence Day In Iraq For US Troops. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

>> ^kevingrr:

@ghark
1 - I'm not sure which swipe of Chris Hedges you are referring to. If it is in regard to the Moral Landscape I can only comment that Hedges takes every opportunity to inject himself into the spotlight. Having read the Moral Landscape I can say that the ideas Harris presents CAN be challenged by legitimate thinkers, of which Hedges is not.
Hedges game has been to misrepresent Harris' point of view as written in End of Faith. I would go so far as to call Hedges an all out liar. See my post in this thread:

2 - Where here is Sam blindly racist? He states that acts of terror are more likely to be carried out by young Muslim men than by 5 year old girls or grandmothers.
If I said that black athletes are more likely to be basketball players and white athletes are more likely to be baseball players would that make me racist? Because in terms of professional sports that simply IS the case. Note I am not saying WHY that is the case - I am simply saying it is and the statistics prove it.
As I have said before Sam is not racist, but he is honest about who is most likely to have some bad ideas and he does not like bad ideas.
3. Sam is not a pacifist but he is not a warmonger either. As I listened to the entirety of the interview I noted he had a very nuanced idea of when war, or physical violence of any kind, is justified.
One last link regarding Hedges:
Here


Shouldn't the definition of terrorism (of which there are many) be carefully examined before making that statement? I assume you are using the 'American mainstream media' version, which of course means, an act in which a colored person with a beard tries to inflict injury or death on other (usually white) people. If the definition is not looked at with mainstream-media-tinted spectacles then it would not be a stretch to say that the 105,000+ documented Iraqi civilian casualties since 2003 were caused by American (and allied troops) terrorism. Political and resource motivated civilian slaughter on a massive scale (and on foreign soil) sounds very terrorist-like to me. Using this line of logic, would it not make more statistical sense to worry about young to middle aged white males having access to military training than scanning middle aged Muslim men at airports.

My point is not to blame the US troops, Australian troops were also involved, my point is simply that someone of Harris' intellect should be above the simple fear mongering and use of blatant misleading generalizations that he's demonstrating in this video. He was one of my hero's for a while there, and seeing him for what he truly seems to be leaves me a bit hollow inside.

As far as Hedges goes, he seems to be on the mark most of the time, and is an excellent speaker, however I thought his shots at Harris were pretty poor form (during his book launch) because it just seemed to be a blatant publicity stunt, so I agree with you on that to a degree.

Please take in mind My BS meter couldn't handle more than about 25-30 mins of the video, and as @LukinStone mentions, Harris explains some of his comments in more detail later in the video, I just couldn't make it that far unfortunately. Most of what I was hearing was self-gratification, "a large American city has about a 50% chance of having a nuclear bomb set off in it within the next decade or so", racist comments and some war mongering, there's only so much I can take

I think one thing not mentioned yet is that the positive things Ron Paul is promising were already promised by the current president (to an extent):

"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama Campaign Promise - October 27, 2007

Yes, the last troops did come home last December, however an enormous private security presence remains - up to 20,000 people costing America ~$3.5 billion a year.
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/12/18/iraq-war-us-troops-are-out-but-blackwater-and-halliburton-will-stay/

...and America is expanding it's wars and troop presence in other countries, e.g. in the Asia Pacific, including here in Australia (FU), and trying to escalate the situation with Iran.

So the war has morphed into something else, and the spirit of his statement has been broken, you don't promise to end wars if you plan on just starting others somewhere else.

He also made plenty of other promises, for example @MonkeySpank about stopping corporate lobbying:
“You said the time has come to tell the lobbyists who think their money and their influence speak louder than our voices that they don’t own this government – we do. And we are here to take it back.” (Sen. Barack Obama, Remarks, Des Moines, IA, 1/3/08)

Here's some more broken promises of his:
http://www.politisite.com/2012/01/05/obamas-failed-promises/

So the point? They are both politicians, they can say whatever they want and continue to do the exact opposite, all they have to worry about is a few people sleeping in a park, there is absolutely no accountability in Washington. Obama got far closer to highlighting many of the issues that face America than Ron Paul ever has, and look at the result, all Ron Paul will bring is fewer broken promises, so the only reason to vote him in is if you want to be 'let down less'.

However I think he has been clearer about the fact all troops need to be brought home, not just some troops involved in a specific conflict, so in that regard I think Yogi is right in that there would be some serious consequences from the establishment if he tried to do that, so it would be impossible for him, even if he is actually telling the truth about wanting to do it. As for the policies he wants to introduce that will have far reaching negative consequences for the vast majority of Americans (e.g. dropping/lowering corporate taxes), those will get passed easily.

>> ^spoco2:

Some of those photos are amazing. Seems a bit US heavy though.
[edit]
To back me up 21/45 of these photos are from the US, with one extra one being of a US troop in Afghanistan.
So, 48% of the photos are US centric.
Well done America, continue thinking you are the centre of the known universe.


US-Centric Blog Posts Article With Almost 50% US Photos!

Oh no!

Some of those photos are amazing. Seems a bit US heavy though.

[edit]
To back me up 21/45 of these photos are from the US, with one extra one being of a US troop in Afghanistan.

So, 48% of the photos are US centric.

Well done America, continue thinking you are the centre of the known universe.

This is not how I want things to be, but it's how they are.

Even if by a miracle Paul won, he'd find himself paralyzed. Obamarx initially had a lot more support, but (fortunately for freedom) failed his moonbat brigades on almost every count.

The Fed will not end in even eight years of a Paul presidency, nor will all US troops be recalled (so red china can take over the rest of the world). It's just the way things are.

Put another way, violent revolution is far more likely than a Paul presidency, and at this point we have a fairly good chance of having the former. Still, if Paul somehow gets the nomination, he's got my vote.

>> ^bobknight33:

Jon rips the RIGHT all the time and you just laugh and have a good time nodding you heads saying yes John yes you are right.
Now on this piece he does the same but to a socialist type movement that you are for and you get all pissed about it . How two-faced.


It's not the right, it's money hungry lunatics backed by corporations attempting to destroy the country (and many others) so a few can profit. Saying you are pro-gun, anti-choice and pro-christian does not make you right-wing when your intent is to siphon tens of millions of dollars in corporate donations and public money so you can afford a jet for your niece to get to preschool. Personally I'm sick of the clips ragging on GOP as well, it's just picking low hanging fruit. With few exceptions, the Dems are just as bad, and in some cases worse (Obama).

As an example, your president just flew to our country (Australia) to tell us we're going to be getting a bunch of troops permanently stationed in Darwin, he said that America is "a Pacific power and we are here to stay"

Our Prime Minister lapped it all up, so we'll apparently be getting two and a half thousand more permanent US troops soon. At a time when your school systems are crumbling, your $14 trillion + in debt and your plan of action is to spend millions on new military bases and personnel in a foreign country?

Really?

>> ^marbles:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^messenger:
Yes. They now have that freedom. I don't recommend that course of action for them, but it's better than not having that freedom. Or are you saying here that living in a dictatorship is preferable if the dictator prevents you from doing some things that harm yourself, and perhaps Libyans were better off under Gaddafi?
That's a serious question BTW, not a sarcastic jab.
Or maybe you're suggesting that liberating Libya was just a cynical move on the part of the IMF to get more contributors?
Again, that's a serious question. Your hints aren't clear to me.>> ^marbles:
>> ^messenger:
Yup. And vote. And criticize government.
Freedom doesn't make us smart. It just makes us free.>> ^marbles:
http://i.imgur.com/YqXXg.jpg


And squander their wealth and independence to IMF and World Bank loan sharks.


I'm not clear either. Marbles is either just trolling, or unable to understand the concept of bad and worse.
He readily grasps the potential downsides of instability after the fall of dictator. He doesn't seem to grasp that the alternative was continued dictatorship and the genocide of those that toppled Gaddafi. Either that, or he's a troll that just doesn't care.

You're the last person to understand anything going on North Africa. The continued genocide of al-qaeda rebels? What about the genocide committed by the rebels? Any concern on that?
And how about just last week Obama sent US troops to Uganda to help the dictator there. I guess this is a "reverse-Libyan-style" intervention, where the US is sending troops to crush, not assist rebels rising up against their despotic ruler.


From you that's a compliment.

The evidence of Gaddafi's pending genocide is undeniable, from his own public declarations of it, to his deputy minister to the UN, do Gaddafi's forces deliberate actions to attempt and implement it. What evidence do you have of the rebels genocide? So far, the only source claiming that was Gaddafi's own media, which got really silent on the matter now...

Oh, and before you show any dead bodies remember there is a distinct difference between war crimes like massacres that likely did occur on both sides in the fighting in Libya, and a genocide. A genocide is a concerted effort to track down and exterminate a specific group of people. There is zero evidence the rebels have or ever did have any such plans, while Gaddafi announced his publicly from his own mouth. The fact you can't accept this says something very sinister about what ever glasses taint your vision.