MoJo Articles | Mother Jones

America's Shadowy Base World

Nick Turse — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:06:42 +0000

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In the nineteenth century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the twentieth century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country.

Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces. Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns. Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year.

Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive. It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the U.S. will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.

Continue Reading »

No Comments | Post Comment

Resources for Dealing With Mortgage Servicers

Andy Kroll — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:45:00 +0000

Having trouble with your mortgage servicer? Fear not, homeowner: There are a number of steps you can take when locking horns with the company that oversees the day-to-day management of your home loan. Step No. 1 is always to contact your servicer directly and try to negotiate a solution. Customer service contact information is usually included on invoices and correspondence from the company. You can also find contact information for major mortgage companies here.

Continue Reading »

1 Comment | Post Comment

Why Banks Love Foreclosure

Andy Kroll — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:40:00 +0000

NO ONE TOLD Deanna Walters she was about to lose her home. Not when her mortgage servicing company foreclosed on it, nor when it landed on the county auction block and sold to the highest bidder. She realized what was happening only when a man taped a note to the front door of her well-kept house in a leafy corner of Stockton, California, last January. "My son went out and took it down," recalls the 43-year-old single mother of two, "and that's when he told me it was a 'three-day or quit' notice."

Walters' discovery that her home had been sold out from under her marked the low point of a four-year fiasco that began when Ocwen Loan Servicing became her mortgage servicer in late 2004. Through no fault of her own, Ocwen incorrectly processed or lost dozens of Walters' payments and charged her more than $2,000 in late fees and thousands more in additional charges—all without notifying her. The Florida-based company tried to foreclose on her three times. After she paid more than $10,000, Walters figured things were settled. But Ocwen had other ideas.

Continue Reading »

6 Comments | Post Comment

Destabilizing Pakistan

Pratap Chatterjee — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:22:21 +0000

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the "enemy" to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids. The secret computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office. They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy’s central headquarters whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting daily.

In remote villages where no reporters dared to go, far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: "The ball game is over."

The campaign was called "Operation Breakfast," and, while it may sound like the CIA’s present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn’t. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact. The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids. Later ones were named "Lunch," "Snack," and "Supper," and they went under the collective label "Menu." They were authorized by President Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) "Bamboo Pentagon," a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.

Like President Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."

Continue Reading »

No Comments | Post Comment

Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: R is for Rush

Steve Brodner — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:59:55 +0000

Sarah Palin's celebrity-burn-rate continues at volcanic temps. We happy blog workers here are always glad to help. Forget the Super Bowl; dig Sarah’s flying wedge...against herself.

So after pissing off Tea Partiers with a very un-populist $100,000 fee for her chirp at their convention in Nashville, she is caught referring to scribbles she made on her hand (remember her "Obama, the guy with the teleprompter"?). Next she carried her "Rahm Emanuel is toast for using the word retard" campaign to Fox News. When asked if it was okay that Rush Limbaugh used it, she said, uh-huh.

I have to wonder, where is the rest of her policy? I'm sure the R-word is written around there somewhere. It's her registered trademark.

From the Huffington Post:

On Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, she said his comments calling liberal groups "f-ing retards" was "indecent and insensitive" and cause for his dismissal.

But the former governor went to great and sometimes awkward lengths to insist that when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh used the same exact term to describe the same exact group, it was simply in the role of political humorist.

"They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh," she said, when read a quote of Limbaugh calling liberal groups "retards." "Rush Limbaugh was using satire...I didn't hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with "f-ing retards," and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there."

1 Comment | Post Comment

In the Land of the Stoner Cops

Nir Rosen — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:30:00 +0000

See a photo essay about the teams of Afghans who risk their lives to disable explosives here.

MAJOR JIM CONTRERAS was awaiting his marching orders. Literally. Stuck in Lashkar Gah, the capital of the Afghan province of Helmand, he was supposed to take his troops, along with a unit of an elite Afghan police force known as ANCOP, to secure the area around Nawa, so the people there could vote. It was part of the past year's biggest US offensive against the Taliban. But he couldn't leave, because his Afghan counterparts hadn't gotten their official order from the Ministry of Interior. The order had been signed five days earlier, but it had to be delivered to the commander, Colonel Gulam Sakhi Gahfori, by courier, with its seal intact. Then again, Colonel Sakhi had also not gotten basic supplies like fuel, ammunition, and radios. Contreras and Sakhi spent a fair amount of time discussing how the Afghans were to refuel at Nawa. Nobody knew if there were any gas stations there.

Contreras is a small man with a big grin who served in Bosnia, Haiti, and the first Gulf War. He was excited about his work in Afghanistan. He believed he was fighting to protect the American way of life. His wife had been working near the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11. "This is in its infancy," he said. "We're beginning to see the military might that we as a nation can bring."

Continue Reading »

4 Comments | Post Comment

Udall on Reform: Slow and Steady

Tim Murphy — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:00:57 +0000

Alabama Senator Richard Shelby has placed a "hold" on all pending nominations before the Senate (that's more than 70 nominees) until he gets a few extra billion dollars to fund projects in his state—or as his spokesperson spun it, "due to unaddressed national security concerns" (read: defense contracts). What this means, basically, is that Shelby has informed the Senate leadership of his intent to block movement on any nominees; overcoming his objection is technically possible, but immensely time consuming, as David Waldman explains.

All of this just goes to show how much of a boondoggle (try to imagine Mitch McConnell's voice when you read that) the current procedural rules of the Senate really are. So are things liable to change any time soon? Depends on what you mean by "soon." Late last month Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced a resolution to allow the the Senate to adopt a new set of rules when the 112th Congress convenes next January. I talked to Udall yesterday (before the Shelby story broke) about the prospects for reform and what he specifically hoped to accomplish.

Continue Reading »

1 Comment | Post Comment

Obama's Secret Police

Stephanie Mencimer — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Does Obama want to impose martial law to shut down the Tea Party movement?

For months, much of the right-wing blogosphere has been fuming about Executive Order 12425, which Obama amended in mid-December. The one-paragraph document grants Interpol, the international law enforcement agency based in France, special privileges within the United States—mainly immunity from the Freedom of Information Act and from lawsuits over activity considered part of its official duties. It's no secret police conspiracy.

But thanks to Glenn Beck, the National Review, Newt Gingrich, and others, this obscure directive has fueled a firestorm of right-wing paranoia. Conservative activists warn that Obama intends to use Interpol as a "secret police" with the power to knock down doors and arrest law-abiding American citizens. No matter that Interpol agents don't even carry guns and have no right to arrest people, or that its American office boasts all of five people. And the hysteria over the executive order is not confined to the Tea Party movement. It has also reached the highest levels of politics—that is, the US Congress.

Continue Reading »

42 Comments | Post Comment

The Commercials Are the Super Bowl

Robert Lipsyte — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:33:25 +0000

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In 1987, an evangelical Christian missionary in the Philippines, Pam Tebow, sick and near term, ignored doctors' advice to abort her fifth child. How could they know he would grow up to win a Heisman Trophy and lead the University of Florida to two national titles?

Twenty-three years later, before he even turned pro, Tim Tebow made himself the player to beat in Sunday's Super Bowl XLIV by starring in a 30-second commercial for Focus on the Family, a Christian group that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. That the ad would run represented a reversal of CBS's long-time policy against advocacy ads. At this late date, it is still not certain if Tim's creation myth will be included in the commercial, or even if the ad will be aired at all.

Whatever happens, the controversy put the game's spotlight back where it belongs—on the advertising.

Super Bowl Sunday is America's holiest day, our all-inclusive campfire, and with 100 million viewers, almost half of them women, about as close as we get, without a presidential election, to taking the national pulse. The ads tell us who we are and where we are going. They are also Madison Avenue's best chance—at a reported $3 million or more a minute—to create a buzz. In fact, in a world in which TiVo-ing is spreading like wildfire, they may be Madison Avenue's last chance to actually get watched on TV.

Continue Reading »

5 Comments | Post Comment

Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: Half-Time Preview

Steve Brodner — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:57:05 +0000

On Sunday's Super Bowl, the Halftime Show will take its cue from the groundbreaking commercial scheduled by Focus on the Family in which Tim Tebow, college football star, makes his anti-abortion case by stating that he wasn't aborted and he's darned glad about it. Immediately following this announcement the teams will take the field at halftime. The Colts, playing assassinated abortion doctor George Tiller, will attempt to carry a pregnant woman downfield. The Saints, naturally, will try to save the life of her unborn fetus with firearms.

In the grand finale, with the field bathed in red, the cleansed spirit of Dr. Tiller rises in the shape of an enormous Madonna Macy's balloon, cradling a brand new plump and very happy-looking football.

No Comments | Post Comment