Afghan Villagers Tell of Slaughter by a American Military Soldier in Kandahar

- By JACK HEALY - August 20, 2013 - The New York Times

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — One by one, the Afghan men and boys took the witness stand inside a military courtroom on Tuesday to tell of a night of gunfire, bloodshed and horror a world away.

They had been flown here on tourist visas by the American military, the first witnesses to testify at a sentencing hearing for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who has pleaded guilty to killing 16 Afghan civilians — most of them women and children — as he stalked through their mud-walled compounds in Kandahar Province in March 2012.

It was a striking sight: for the first time, seven men and boys from homes with no electricity or running water, wearing traditional, flowing shalwar kameez, turbans and skullcaps and speaking through interpreters, came face to face with the crew-cut sergeant in dress blues who has admitted to storming his victims’ homes and opening fire as they screamed for mercy.

“That bastard stood right in front of me,” said Haji Mohammed Naim, 60, his voice rising as he gestured toward Sergeant Bales. “I wanted to ask him: ‘What did I do? What have I done to you?’ ”

Pressed by military prosecutors to delve further into that night, Mr. Naim, who was shot in the attack and lost several family members, began to weep and stood up.

“I’m leaving,” he said. “For God’s sake, do not ask me any more questions.”

Over the next several days, a six-person military jury will decide whether Sergeant Bales, 39, deserves to spend the rest of his life behind bars for carrying out one of the worst American atrocities in years, or whether he could one day be eligible for parole. By pleading guilty in June, he avoided any possibility of the death penalty.

The hearings are expected to offer sharply contrasting portraits of Sergeant Bales, a man who still remains mysterious despite months of hearings and testimony that have illuminated each gunshot, blood spatter and tearful plea in wrenching detail.

Prosecutors have painted Sergeant Bales as someone who felt “inadequate as a soldier and a man”: drowning in debt, behind on his home payments, bitterly unhappy with his family and frustrated with a stalled military career. He had been taking steroids in the weeks before the rampage, and the night of the shooting he drank whiskey with other soldiers and snorted Valium before slipping away from his combat post.

His lawyers have said he suffered from post-traumatic stress and a brain injury, and had been strained by four deployments in a decade — three to Iraq, and the last to Afghanistan. But even now, there is little to fully explain his mind-set on the night of the killings.

When Sergeant Bales pleaded guilty in June, he took responsibility for his crimes. But when questioned about those bloody hours, he said he had no memory of lighting fire to a pile of his victims’ bodies, and struggled to explain why he had done what he did.

“I’ve asked that question a million times since then,” he said. “There’s not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did.”

On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Jay Morse, a member of the prosecution team, read jurors a narrative of Sergeant Bales’s life and his crimes. In grisly detail, accompanied by photographs of dead and wounded women and children, it described how Sergeant Bales armed himself and walked out of Camp Belambay after midnight on March 11, 2012.

The account — which the defense does not dispute — said the sergeant walked to one village, gunned down several families and returned to the American base when he ran low on ammunition. He woke a fellow soldier, admitted what he had done, and then gathered more ammunition and headed off toward a second village.

Sergeant Bales sat impassively through the hearing, sometimes looking away when images of dead children were projected onto the wall. He listened quietly as his victims described houses “full of blood and bodies” and how they had to load their trucks with their wounded brothers, sons, daughters and wives.

One of the youngest to testify was Khan Hekmatullah, a skinny 12-year-old who concluded his testimony with an unanswered question: “What did I do wrong against Sergeant Bales that he shot my father?”

China Takes Aim at Western Ideas

- By CHRIS BUCKLEY - August 19, 2013 - The New York Times

HONG KONG — Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society.

These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.

Even as Mr. Xi has sought to prepare some reforms to expose China’s economy to stronger market forces, he has undertaken a “mass line” campaign to enforce party authority that goes beyond the party’s periodic calls for discipline. The internal warnings to cadres show that Mr. Xi’s confident public face has been accompanied by fears that the party is vulnerable to an economic slowdown, public anger about corruption and challenges from liberals impatient for political change.

“Western forces hostile to China and dissidents within the country are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” says Document No. 9, the number given to it by the central party office that issued it in April. It has not been openly published, but a version was shown to The New York Times and was verified by four sources close to senior officials, including an editor with a party newspaper.

Opponents of one-party rule, it says, “have stirred up trouble about disclosing officials’ assets, using the Internet to fight corruption, media controls and other sensitive topics, to provoke discontent with the party and government.”

The warnings were not idle. Since the circular was issued, party-run publications and Web sites have vehemently denounced constitutionalism and civil society, notions that were not considered off limits in recent years. Officials have intensified efforts to block access to critical views on the Internet. Two prominent rights advocates have been detained in the past few weeks, in what their supporters have called a blow to the “rights defense movement,” which was already beleaguered under Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Mr. Xi’s hard line has disappointed Chinese liberals, some of whom once hailed his rise to power as an opportunity to push for political change after a long period of stagnation. Instead, Mr. Xi has signaled a shift to a more conservative, traditional leftist stance with his “rectification” campaign to ensure discipline and conspicuous attempts to defend the legacy of Mao Zedong. That has included a visit to a historic site where Mao undertook one of his own attempts to remake the ruling party in the 1950s.

Mr. Xi’s edicts have been disseminated in a series of compulsory study sessions across the country, like one in the southern province of Hunan that was recounted on a local government Web site.

“Promotion of Western constitutional democracy is an attempt to negate the party’s leadership,” Cheng Xinping, a deputy head of propaganda for Hengyang, a city in Hunan, told a gathering of mining industry officials. Human rights advocates, he continued, want “ultimately to form a force for political confrontation.”

The campaign carries some risks for Mr. Xi, who has indicated that the slowing economy needs new, more market-driven momentum that can come only from a relaxation of state influence.

In China’s tight but often contentious political circles, proponents of deeper Western-style economic changes are often allied with those pushing for rule of law and a more open political system, while traditionalists favor greater state control of both economic and political life. Mr. Xi’s cherry picking of approaches from each of the rival camps, analysts say, could end up miring his own agenda in intraparty squabbling.

Condemnations of constitutional government have prompted dismayed opposition from liberal intellectuals and even some moderate-minded former officials. The campaign has also exhilarated leftist defenders of party orthodoxy, many of whom pointedly oppose the sort of market reforms that Mr. Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang have said are needed.

The consequent rifts are unusually open, and they could widen and bog down Mr. Xi, said Xiao Gongqin, a professor of history at Shanghai Normal University who is also a prominent proponent of gradual, party-guided reform.

“Now the leftists feel very excited and elated, while the liberals feel very discouraged and discontented,” said Professor Xiao, who said he was generally sympathetic to Mr. Xi’s aims. “The ramifications are very serious, because this seriously hurts the broad middle class and moderate reformers — entrepreneurs and intellectuals. It’s possible that this situation will get out of control, and that won’t help the political stability that the central leadership stresses.”

The pressures that prompted the party’s ideological counteroffensive spilled onto the streets of Guangzhou, a city in southern China, early this year. Staff members at the Southern Weekend newspaper there protested after a propaganda official rewrote an editorial celebrating constitutionalism — the idea that state and party power should be subject to a supreme law that prevents abuses and protects citizens’ rights.

The confrontation at the newspaper and campaign demanding that officials disclose their wealth alarmed leaders and helped galvanize them into issuing Document No. 9, said Professor Xiao, the historian. Indeed, senior central propaganda officials met to discuss the newspaper protest, among other issues, and called it a plot to subvert the party, according to a speech on a party Web site of Lianyungang, a port city in eastern China.

“Western anti-China forces led by the United States have joined in one after the other, and colluded with dissidents within the country to make slanderous attacks on us in the name of so-called press freedom and constitutional democracy,” said Zhang Guangdong, a propaganda official in Lianyungang, citing the conclusions from the meeting of central propaganda officials. “They are trying to break through our political system, and this was a classic example,” he said of the newspaper protest.

But Mr. Xi and his colleagues were victims of expectations that they themselves encouraged, rather than a foreign conspiracy, analysts said. The citizen-activists demanding that party officials reveal their family wealth cited Mr. Xi’s own vows to end official corruption and deliver more candid government. Likewise, scholars and lawyers who have campaigned for limiting party power under the rule of law have also invoked Mr. Xi’s promise to honor China’s Constitution.

Even these relatively measured campaigns proved too much for party leaders, who are wary of any challenges that could swell into outright opposition. Document No. 9 was issued by the Central Committee General Office, the administrative engine room of the central leadership, and required the approval of Mr. Xi and other top leaders, said Li Weidong, a political commentator and former magazine editor in Beijing.

“There’s no doubt then it had direct endorsement from Xi Jinping,” Mr. Li said. “It’s certainly had his approval and reflects his general views.”

Since the document was issued, the campaign for ideological orthodoxy has prompted a torrent of commentary and articles in party-run periodicals. Many of them have invoked Maoist talk of class war rarely seen in official publications in recent years. Some have said that constitutionalism and similar ideas were tools of Western subversion that helped topple the former Soviet Union — and that a similar threat faces China.

“Constitutionalism belongs only to capitalism,” said one commentary in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily. Constitutionalism “is a weapon for information and psychological warfare used by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to subvert China’s socialist system,” said another commentary in the paper.

But leftists, feeling emboldened, could create trouble for Mr. Xi’s government, some analysts said. Mr. Xi has indicated that he wants a party meeting in the fall to endorse policies that would give market competition and private businesses a bigger role in the economy — and Marxist stalwarts in the party are deeply wary of such proposals.

Relatively liberal officials and intellectuals hoped the ousting last year of Bo Xilai, a charismatic politician who favored leftist policies, would help their cause. But they have been disappointed. Mr. Bo goes on trial on Thursday.

Hu Deping, a reform-minded former government official who has met Mr. Xi, recently issued a public warning about the leftward drift. “Just what is the bottom line for reform?” Mr. Hu said on a Web site run by his family to commemorate his father, Hu Yaobang, a leader of political and economic relaxation in the 1980s.

Mr. Xi will face another ideological test later in the year when the Communist Party celebrates the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth. The scale of those celebrations has not been announced. But Xiangtan, the area in Hunan Province that encompasses Mao’s hometown, is spending $1 billion to spruce up commemorative sites and facilities for the occasion, according to the Xiangtan government Web site.

“You have to commemorate him, and because he’s already passed away, you can only speak well of him, not ill,” Professor Xiao, the historian, said of Mao’s anniversary. “That’s like pouring petrol on the leftists’ fire.”

Detroit Files For Bankruptcy Despite Millions in Hidden Investment Funds

- By Foster Gamble - August 14, 2013

Local, state and federal governments in the U.S. are in a serious financial crisis. Since 2010, thirty-six US governments have filed for bankruptcy. (See below for references.) Twenty-one states are not financially sound. Sixty-one of the largest US cities are poised to file for bankruptcy. Chicago owes $19B in pension payments they say they don’t have. Los Angeles is more than $30B in the hole. And it’s much the same in every major city — Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, St. Paul, Jacksonville, New York, Baltimore…and more. Detroit is the largest American city to ever file for bankruptcy, and yet it’s just the next drop of rain in the gathering storm…

But what if I were to tell you it didn’t have to be this way, and that instead of filing for bankruptcy, these governments could all wipe out their debt, pay their bills, continue to employ their workers, and eventually minimize and eliminate the need for taxes? People are saying that Detroit doesn’t have the $3.5 billion to pay its former government employees — teachers, firefighters, police and more — BUT IT DOES!!!!

How is that possible? It’s a little known fact that governments are not just using your taxes to pay for government services, they are also investing your taxes in businesses all around the world, and making millions of dollars. Like big banks, they use your hard-earned money and invest it elsewhere to accrue interest over the years. Although the evidence for these funds is posted on the Internet annually, the mainstream media has colluded for forty some years to keep this quiet.

All municipalities, including Detroit, have two sets of accounting books — one is the public operating budget that you and I hear about, and the other is this investment fund. The key to paying workers and supporting our communities is in the second set of private books…there are literally trillions of dollars available in these government investment funds that were set up for “rainy days” and could be used to balance government budgets, and even have a surplus.

These reports can be discovered in what are called CAFR’s — Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports — that reveal the existence of trillions of hidden dollars across the United States. You can learn more about CAFR’s in my previous blog.

CAFR’s reveal that not only is there money available, but there is big money available in nearly every major city. For example, the small city of Stockton, California had at least $208 million in liquid investments when it filed for bankruptcy and in 2012 the “failing” state of California had $755 billion in its “rainy day” CAFR fund.

CAFR’s also reveal an accounting trick that governments and banks use to hide money from taxpayers: they confuse the labeling of “assets” and “liabilities”. This allows them to hide money they do have and imply that they don’t have enough. As Clint Richardson says:

“The fact is that 99% of the entire structure of municipalities across the nation could be out of debt tomorrow and still have money and investments to spare (be in the black) if it weren’t for the fact that governments enjoy, promote, and profit from the interest (usury) created by debt.”

Here’s an example of this type of deceptive accounting from Detroit: on page 41 of Detroit’s CAFR it lays out the scam in its “Statement of Net Assets”. The gist is that the City declares over $10.6 billion in “liabilities”, which it then “balances” against about $10.3 billion in “assets”. The trick used has to do with timeframe for the accounting. The government counts in the present all the money they will owe on contracts and pensions, so instead of amortizing the liability over the many years that they have to pay it, they instead count it all as due right now. Not only does this mean the government does not get to include any offsetting revenue that could be used to defray those costs, like fees and taxes collected in that timeframe, it also forces a negative balance by lumping all liabilities as due in the present when this is simply not the case. It would be like you adding the total cost of your mortgage in your yearly expense column.

In Detroit, this results in a “balance” that gets shown to the people as a negative $300 million dollars. But $9.1 billion of that is not due until sometime in the future — at the rate of about $300–400 million per year. So the $10.3 billion in assets that are real right now for Detroit could be used to rectify the situation and take care of human beings rather than be squirreled away for the politicians and bankers.

As Richardson puts it:

“…government is forcing itself to pay future liabilities today — which just happens to have the good-for-government and bad-for-the-people side effect of creating the unnecessary illusion that bankruptcy is needed. And so government is now the largest defaulting entity in history. And the people blindly support what they don’t understand, allowing that fraudulent government machine to place the responsibility for its actions upon the backs of those people in the form of sheer usurious debt, while laughing all the way to the bank.”

………

“Government is not in the business of helping people. It is a financial mega-corporation with branches in every square mile of the United States with investments in the entire world economy.”

There is no evidence that this will stop until we stop them. There’s talk of Obama now bailing out Detroit…with more of your tax money! And then what happens with the other cities? If Washington bails out the cities, who is going to bail out Washington? Can you hear the rattling of more debt chains coming — for you and your children’s children?

People talk about government “incompetence” in this type of situation, and “fiscal irresponsibility.” This is not ignorance or incompetence. This is blatant fraud.

So what can we do? Walter Burien has been working on exposing the CAFR scam for the last 20 years, and has worked out a brilliant solution with the following steps:

1. Publicize the truth of the money available.
2. Put the money to work for the people who funded it — that’s you!
3. Use the millions and billions in the government’s true asset funds as an endowment for the community.
4. Replace taxation with this investment fund as the source from which to meet community needs.

Burien calls this approach the “TRF” — Tax Retirement Funds — because that is just what they do: phase out and terminate the need for taxes.

Does all of this sound impossible? For a glimpse at a similar scam — a tip of the iceberg, check out the California state parks department getting caught just last year with $54 million squirreled away while claiming they needed to close parks.

Please help spread the word, demand truth from your representatives and press your local papers or radio and TV channels to cover this.

You can access state CAFR reports here. We also encourage you to sign up in our Solutions Hub — simply click on “Find a Group” to search for others in your area who may be interested in working with you on CAFRs. If there aren’t any people listed in your area, consider registering a new group and make sure to list “CAFR” as your group focus. We will be updating the Solutions Hub to be more effective in the coming year — for now it can be a useful resource to connect with others.

Let’s take this tragedy and use it to inform how to take our power back!

Sources

• Detroit: The Latest Bankruptcy Lie by Clint Richardson
• Warning to all Police, Firefighters, Schoolteachers: Most Government Pensions to be Confiscated Within a Decade by Mike Adams
• Walter Burien’s Website
• Walter Burien explains the CAFR
• Taxpayers Strike it Rich? by Foster Gamble