Dear CCI Followers,
Often our CCI professionals send me their commentaries that elucidate or question what is appearing in our U.S. mainstream media. Below is one commentary that I asked Sylvia Demarest’s permission to share with you. Sylvia is the retired trial lawyer who took the Catholic Church to court and won huge reparations for innocent altar boys who had been abused by Catholic priests. Further, she collected an archive of documents of the sex abuse crisis and compiled a database of priests who had been publicly accused of abusing children. The documents and the database were donated to Bishop Accountability and is on line at https://www.bishop-accountability.org. Any parishioner who has a question about a priest moving to their diocese can check the registry to see whether the priest has a prior history of abuse. It is planned that the document collection and the database will be donated as an archive to an educational institution to be available for scholarly research. Among Sylvia’s other vital NGO tasks, she is a cherished CCI volunteer.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Commentary by Sylvia Demarest, Attorney from Dallas, Texas
The Debacle in Afghanistan —The Wall Street Journal
There’s a similar article in the Financial Times—titled Joe Biden’s Credibility Has Been Shredded in Afghanistan—which is true—but it’s not just Joe’s credibility that’s been shredded— the credibility of the entire US political establishment, the US foreign policy establishment, the US military along with the military contractors who have been feeding off of all these destructive policies, along with the wars they promoted, has also been shredded—yet no one of any note has the courage to point any of this out. Instead, none of these “failures” are being discussed in our so called media. Nothing about the long history of US foreign policy failure—nothing about the long history of pentagon waste and abuse—about all the failed weapons systems—and nothing about these failed wars.
Let’s look at one failure: The US military and its contractors, trained, equipped and funded a huge Afghan army along with an air force. Biden bragged on it about a month ago. This army is now collapsing before our eyes. But this isn’t the first army we built recently that collapsed. Remember Iraq? There was an equally expensive and lavishly funded and trained “army” that also collapsed in Iraq. ISIS took over the Iraqi weapons and equipment then—just as the Taliban will soon take over all the abandoned weapons, including aircraft. Why the silence about such abominable failures?. No one is pointing a finger at the Department of Defense and their contractors who have now wasted at least 6 trillion on these 2 pointless wars—or the talking heads that talked us into war—no one.
Here’s another failure: Namely, the failure of the entire US foreign policy establishment including not only the military and it’s contractors, but the talking heads, think tanks, and all the people in Congress who stuff themselves with political contributions while they funnel more money into the DOD black hole of a budget as we witness foreign policy failure after failure. All this money and effort while our own country is slowly coming apart at the seams. Shocking to think about.
Given the degree of failure we have witnessed, for decades, what is the point of having a Department of State, of having this lavishly funded DOD, of continuing all these wars, these bases, these bombings, these failed weapons systems, these destructive wars, and this constant saber rattling?
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The Debacle in Afghanistan
Biden and Trump share responsibility for the looming defeat.
By The Editorial Board
Updated Aug. 12, 2021
Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates famously wrote that President Biden has been on the wrong side of every major foreign-policy issue in his long career. The world is getting another example as Mr. Biden’s hell-bent, ill-planned withdrawal from Afghanistan is turning into a strategic defeat and moral debacle.
The Taliban march to Kabul continues with the fall of more provincial capitals each day. The last count was 12 capitals, including Ghazni City on the road between the major cities of Kandahar and Kabul. Reinforcing Afghan forces defending Kandahar will become harder if the road is blocked.
The Afghan government is trying to mount a counterattack, and President Ashraf Ghani has sacked another army chief. But the Taliban now controls at least eight entire provinces, according to the Long War Journal, and its reach includes areas in the north that the Taliban didn’t control when it ruled the country before 9/11. The city of Herat also fell Thursday, and Kandahar could be next.