If this development isn’t significant, then I don’t know what is.
Earlier this week [in February], the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?” Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report — titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” — for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We have decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
Here is the report’s damning opening lines: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.”
More at RollingStone.com: “The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read” (February 10, 2012)
The full report itself: “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” (pdf, 84 pages)
Wow. Thanks for directing more traffic to this. Terrifying and amazing.
great stuff Matt.Good to see you posting and you’re right, that’s pretty damned disturbing.
especially now after the Koran burnings and now the Staff Sergent that sneaked off base in the middle of the night and murdered 16 people in their homes while they slept.
we need to get the hell out of there. like yesterday.
You’re welcome, Elizabeth. I was rather stunned myself. I suspected all along that something of this nature was going on, but to read it laid out in stark detail by someone who has observed it all firsthand was unnerving. This is just another data point in support of my long-running thesis that we’re living in the midst of a full-on dystopian scenario.
Hi, Pam. My previous comment crossed paths with yours; I was typing it as you left your message.
I very much agree with you. I also strongly suspect — not because I have any actual evidence, of course, but just because of the accumulated critical weight of things like the very report I linked to in this post (and also because of firsthand reports from friends who have been in the military and personally witnessed events that were later misreported in the media in obviously concocted form) — that the story about the staff sergeant is a plain old cover story for an event that involved more than one person. The tactic of blaming such things on one bad egg, one lone wolf, is an old and popular one for trying to manage public perceptions and reactions — in this case, among both Afghans and Americans. Then there’s the fact that the Koran burnings were actually only a single factor in what outraged the Afghan protesters, the other incident being the killing of several Afghan children in a U.S. military action. This information was included in the early media reports along with the info about the Koran incidents, but then it was quickly cut out in order to make the narrative in the U.S. corporate media center solely on the religious outrage. The Koran-centric version of the story also became the sole narrative told by Hilary Clinton.
For real, we’re living in momentously dark and shitty times. No wonder apocalyptic and dystopian fiction has become explosively popular among young adult readers in just the past handful of years.
Regarding my posting here, that’s going to be happening a lot more often, because I’m about to abandon Facebook permanently — that’s where I’ve been doing most of my link-sharing for the past few months — and channel all of my link-sharing and commentary into The Teeming Brain, with some Twitter support as well. This is in tandem with my having spent the last three weeks completely extricating myself from all Google products. I’m now completely Google-free (no use of Google search engine, Reader, Documents, Chrome, Google+, Calendar, or anything else). The convergence of Google’s and Facebook’s ramp-ups to being truly and totally Orwellian in their day-to-day and long-term operations and privacy practices has finally become too much for me.
I really think that’s great Matt, getting away from Google. I’m trying to and got rid of everything but my igoogle and gmail and blogger.
I use a different search engine now but just couldn’t find a way to do the blogs without igoogle where i have all my news feeds for the news blog.
i use gmail because i can send text messages to my daughters and wish that i could find something else.
also, what you said about the Koran burnings really makes sense. I just knew there was more to it than that and about what happened with the killings, early eye witness accounts said it was a group of soldiers, not just the one.
Truly shitty times indeed Matt.
oh shoot, i just emailed you, do you still use your gmail?