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On the ten year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there has been an awful lot of naval gazing by our media, sadly with most of it being revisionist history on what happened during the run up to that invasion and occupation, with a lot of glossing over just how complicit the media was in helping the neocons beat the war drums. And as Jeremy Scahill noted during this interview on Martin Bashir's show, there's still a lot to answer for by our politicians on both sides of the aisles -- but in particular, the neocons and Bush administration.

It's too bad there wasn't any accountability for his fellow guest on the program, Michael O'Hanlon, who supported the invasion and who was as guilty as the rest of them with enabling the neocons. Scahill sadly didn't go after O'Hanlon, but I appreciate what he was given a chance to say during the segment.

SCAHILL: People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith should not be able to show their faces in public in this country without being confronted with what they did to Iraq. I mean, the reality is... having spent time in Iraq throughout the '90's... many of the Iraqis I knew are dead. Many of the Iraqis that survived the war are displaced and with the millions of others that have been displaced.

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Ed Schultz talked to The Nation's Jeremy Scahill and Brave New Film's Robert Greenwald about the need to rethink our policies on Pakistan and Afghanistan and this so-called "war on terror."

Robert Greenwald has a petition at his site Rethink Afghanistan -- Osama bin Laden is Dead. Bring the Troops Home.:

How much did YOU pay for war this year?

Did you know that the Afghanistan War alone costs us roughly $2 billion per week? When you include the Iraq War and other military spending, it turns out that more than 27 percent of your income taxes will be spent on war.

We want our money back.

To find out how much of your money has gone to fund a war that's not making us safer, visit our Tax Day Calculator. Enter how much income you earned this year and we'll give you an I.O.U. for what you paid that you can forward to your Member of Congress. Ask for your money back!

Go visit his site to watch the video.

And here's Jeremy Scahill's latest at The Nation -- JSOC: The Black Ops Force That Took Down Bin Laden:

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From Democracy Now -- Jeremy Scahill and Ex-DIA Analyst Joshua Foust on "The Dangerous U.S. Game in Yemen" & CIA Ops in Libya:

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Yemen on Wednesday as part of the unwavering protests for the resignation of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh. We speak to independent journalist Jeremy Scahill, who argues the U.S. secret war has unintentionally played a significant role in weakening Saleh’s regime, and Joshua Foust, who recently left his post as Yemen analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. We also get their reaction to the latest news CIA operatives are on the ground in Libya as part of a covert Western force to aid the U.S.-led bombing campaign.

Guests:

Jeremy Scahill, Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He blogs at TheNation.com.

Joshua Foust, fellow at the American Security Project and a former analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency specializing in Yemen.

You can read the full transcript at their site. Very good informative interview with Scahill and Foust unlike last night on Ed Schultz's show where he basically talked over Jeremy the the better part of the time he had him on. I know we've got a lot of varying opinions about whether it was a good decision to go into Libya or not, but we don't learn anything from people talking over each other.

And from Scahill at the end of the interview:

JEREMY SCAHILL: I also just wanted to say that for people who want to follow Yemen very closely, I would highly recommend checking out the blog of Professor Gregory Johnsen, who’s widely considered to be the leading U.S. expert on Yemen. It’s "Waq Al-Waq," but if you google Gregory Johnsen’s name, you’ll see. And he just has an incredible English-language update of the on-the-ground situation in Yemen.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will link to that at democracynow.org.

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The Nation's Jeremy Scahill and The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart joined Joy Behar to discuss the latest document dump from WikiLeaks and the implications it might have on our diplomatic relations and the debate over our foreign policy.

I agree with Scahill that there's been a lot of attack the messenger here with the rhetoric about Julian Assange's decision to make this information public which has taken away from the larger debate we should be having in America. I for one would like to hear a discussion on why we think that dropping bombs on poor people's heads rather than addressing poverty is a good idea as a means to end terrorism.

The Obama administration has done nothing to hold the Bush administration accountable for their crimes and are continuing way too many of their policies with this ridiculous "war on terror". Peter Beinart's assertion that we'd be having this conversation in our so called "mainstream media" if we just left this to the journalists in America is ridiculous. We've had plenty of journalists like Jeremy Scahill reporting on the these subjects and they've gotten little attention and garnered little discussion on the cable news shows.

I spend a great deal of time monitoring those shows and if you're not watching Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, you're not hearing these sorts of discussions very often, if at all. They're drowned out by debates from "the left" and "the right" and who's ahead in some poll for the week and what Sarah Palin is posting on her Facebook or Twitter page. Joy Behar looked like she couldn't wait for the segment to end so she could move on to the rest of the really important things she was covering on her show, like celebrity gossip. She'd have better served her audience by allowing these two the full hour to continue the conversation here.

WikiLeaks next document dump is apparently going to give our masters of the universe on Wall Street some headaches, which I look forward to since they haven't been held accountable for their actions either.

Full transcript below the fold.

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The Nation's Jeremy Scahill sat down with his colleague Chris Hayes who was filling in for Rachel Maddow to discuss the latest farce concerning our occupation in Afghanistan and the lack of intelligence on the ground there.

Scahill recently spent a great deal of time actually doing some reporting on the ground in Afghanistan and you can read more about that here -- Taliban Leader Mullah Omar: The US and NATO Are Being Defeated in Afghanistan :

In a communiqué marking the beginning of the Muslim holiday Eid-al-Adha, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, claimed his forces were making gains against US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and announced a new plan to increase attacks aimed at delivering a "crushing and decisive blow" against the presence of foreign forces. "The aim is to entangle the enemy in an exhausting war of attrition and wear it away like the former Soviet Union," declared Omar in his address on the "Festival of Sacrifice." Omar wrote that his forces had developed new short- and long-term strategies, saying that, overall, "our strategy is to increase our operations step by step and spread them to all parts of the country to compel the enemy to come out from their hideouts and then crush them through tactical raids." [...]

Current Taliban commanders and former senior officials of Omar's Taliban government recently told The Nation that while the US Special Operations Forces' targeted killing campaign against Taliban commanders has been successful, the strikes were actually producing a more radical generation of fighters and commanders. In his communication, Omar did not address the issue of the targeted killing campaign, but he did claim that morale among the Taliban remained high. "Our Mujahid people will never feel exhausted in the sacred path of Jihad, because it is a divine obligation," he wrote. "Fatigue can have no way into it."

Go read the rest and Scahill summed up some of his reporting during his interview here with Hayes.

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Keith Olbermann talked to the Nation's Jeremy Scahill about the recently released WikiLeaks documents that confirmed what those of us paying attention already knew about the death toll and the torture going on in Iraq. Sadly, the chances of the Obama administration or the Congress doing anything about these war crimes is somewhere between slim and none.

OLBERMANN: Thousands of American lives lost, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost, trillions of dollars down the drain. We were led to war in Iraq based on lies. And as the largest classified military leak in American history proves, the falsehoods did not end there. Our third story, the Bush administration knew exactly how bad the situation was in Iraq and repeatedly lied about it.

The website WikiLeaks releasing nearly 400,000 documents detailing the war and occupation of Iraq as reported by American soldiers, putting the amount of Iraqi civilians killed at 66,000, even though many of those deaths went unreported by the U.S. military. Such as in the aftermath of the bombing of a Shia shrine in Samara in February, 2006, "the Washington Post" reported 1,300 dead based on counts on the ground, in the morgues, while the Pentagon put its estimate at about 350 people.

But as the documents from WikiLeaks show, the Pentagon knew the number of deaths was much higher than that. And so Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld chose a different tack: lie and blame the media.

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Keith Olbermann and The Nation's Jeremy Scahill respond to the "revisionist historian", "credit where credit's due" right wingers who are demanding that everyone "thank Bush" after Obama's speech on Iraq this week. They've got some thanks for him alright, as in yeah, thanks a lot of your illegal invasion and wrecking our economy while enriching your defense contractor buddies. Thanks.... thanks for nothing.

John McCain, Stephen Hadley, Karl Rove, Dan Senor and the rest of these war mongers who think we should be praising Bush for invading a country that wasn't a threat to us and squandering our tax dollars should be ashamed of themselves, but that would imply that they have the capacity to feel shame.

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Jeremy Scahill spoke to a group of young journalists at the Campus Progress Journalism Training Summit about the future of journalism and the need for more young people to pursue quality reporting and not just the "info-tainment" that passes itself off for journalism in the media today.

You can watch the entire segment in C-SPAN's video library here.

IRAQ WAR, BLACKWATER, AND WIKILEAKS

I'm sure Jeremy Scahill and the work he's doing over at The Nation is part of that "professional left" that Robert Gibbs was carping about last week.

Here's part two of the speech. The Q & A segment is very good as well. If you've got an hour to spare watch the whole thing.

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Jeremy Scahill joined Keith Olbermann to discuss the company formerly known as Blackwater, Xe's new contracts despite their horrible record. Here's more from Scahill at The Nation.

Obama Administration Keeping Blackwater Armed and Dangerous in Afghanistan:

Blackwater is up for sale and its shadowy owner, Erik Prince, is rumored to be planning to move to the United Arab Emirates as his top deputies face indictment for a range of alleged crimes, yet the company remains a central part of President Obama's Afghanistan war. Now, Blackwater's role is expanding.

On Friday, the US State Department awarded Blackwater another "diplomatic security" contract to protect US officials in Afghanistan. CBS News reports that the $120 million deal is for "protective services" at the US consulates in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif. Blackwater has another security contract in Afghanistan worth $200 million and trains Afghan forces. The company also works for the CIA and the US military and provides bodyguards for US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry as well as US lawmakers and other officials who visit the country. The company has four forward operating bases in Afghanistan and Prince has boasted that Blackwater's counter-narcotics forces have called in NATO airstrikes.

The new security contract was awarded to one of Blackwater's alter egos, the United States Training Center, despite the indictments of five senior company officials on bribery, weapons and conspiracy charges. Its operatives in both Afghanistan and Iraq have been indicted for killing innocent civilians. The Senate Armed Services Committee has called on the Justice Department to investigate Blackwater's use of a shell company, Paravant, to win training contracts in Afghanistan. Despite these and numerous other scandals, the State Department once again awarded the company a lucrative contract.

Of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Blackwater (UPDATED):

The mercenary firm Blackwater is clearly more teflon than Gen. Stanley McChrystal. While McChrystal sips Bud Light Lime, watching Talladega Nights and ponders what private sector job to scoop up, Erik Prince's crusading private soldiers will still be running around Afghanistan and other theaters of undeclared US wars globally with the CIA. All with the blessing of the Commander in Chief.

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Jeremy Scahill debated Ed Koch about the Israeli attack on the flotillas headed for Gaza with humanitarian aide. Jeremy Scahill wrote in his post at The Nation:

During the commercial break during my debate with Koch, the former mayor called me a "terrorist supporter." I told him, "Say it on the air." He didn't.

Figures. Scahill would have torn him up more badly during the interview than he did already. Here's more from Scahill's blog at The Nation. My TV Debate with Ed Koch About Israel's Gaza Flotilla Massacre:

On MSNBC today, I debated former New York Mayor Ed Koch about the deadly Israeli attack on the humanitarian Flotilla attempting to deliver much needed goods to the people of Gaza, who are forced to live under a constant state of siege and blockade imposed by Israel. Among the dead is reportedly a 19-year old US citizen, Furkan Dogan, who was shot four times in the head and once in the chest.

Israel and its apologists like Mayor Koch attempt to portray the humanitarian Flotilla as terrorist-affiliated, a "hate boat" in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, "capable of smuggling large amounts of weapons" that "was trying to break the naval blockade of Gaza, not bring humanitarian aid." But Koch and the Israeli spokespeople conveniently leave out the fact that there were no weapons being smuggled on the Flotilla and that members of the Flotilla included former US diplomat Ann Wright, who helped reopen the US embassy in Kabul after 9-11 and former US ambassador to Iraq Ed Peck, as well as a member of the Israeli parliament and other international politicians and diplomats.

On the show today, I read from a list of the items Israel has banned from entering Gaza. Among these are such dangerous spices as sage, cardamom, cumin, coriander, as well as children's toys, fruit preserves, ginger, fishing rods, chocolate, fresh meat and well-known terrorist sympathizers such as horses, donkeys, goats, cattle and chicks. See a list of the banned and permitted items for yourself here [PDF].

As Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister, said earlier this year. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet."

When I asked Koch how a goat or a horse or a children’s toy could be used as rocket to hit Israel, Koch responded by saying only, “that’s nonsense.” When I pointed out that there were respected international diplomats on the Flotilla, contrary to his characterization of it as a terrorist vessel, Koch would only say, "I don't want to argue with you."

h/t Marcy and as she and Jeremy noted, here are some of the items prohibited by the blockade.

* sage
* cardamom
* cumin
* coriander
* ginger
* nutmeg
* chocolate
* seeds and nuts
* fishing rods
* various fishing nets
* fabric (for clothing)
* sewing machines and spare parts
* size A4 paper
* writing implements
* notebooks
* razors
* toys