BRUSELAS 29 JUNIO
La oficina de comunicación del Grupo de los Verdes informó que las integrantes de la delegación son: Satu Hassi, ex ministra del Medio Ambiente de Finlandia y actualmente diputada en el PE y la ex presidenta de la Federación de los Jóvenes Verdes Europeos, la diputada alemana Franziska Keller.
Las eurodiputadas, estarán en México del 30 de junio al 5 de julio de 2010, para reunirse con una delegación autoridades políticas y judiciales, tanto en la Ciudad de México, como en Oaxaca, así como con representantes de organizaciones de la sociedad civil (OSC) y organismos de derechos humanos.
DIPUTADAS EUROPEAS PARTIDO VERDE
04455 31 40 79 20
HOTEL MA CRISTINA RIO LERMA 41 DOMINGO
miércoles, 30 de junio de 2010
lunes, 28 de junio de 2010
tambien el martes, sobre frontera sur, casa colef df
06/10, El Colef Informa escribió:
Retos de la Seguridad y Migración en la Frontera Sur
Seminario de Seguridad
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte invita al seminario internacional: Seguridad y desarrollo en la relación México-Estados Unidos-Canadá, en su quinto ciclo 2010, con la sesión:Retos de la Seguridad y Migración en la Frontera Sur, el martes 29 de junio, a las 9:30 horas (tiempo del centro) en Casa Colef en la Ciudad de México.
En el evento participarán: José María Ramos García, director, Departamento de Estudios de Administración Pública de El Colef; Germán Martínez, profesor investigador de El Colegio de la Frontera Sur; Virginia Ilescas V., Consultora de Proyecto; Hna. Leticia Gutiérrez, Directora Ejecutiva de la Dimensión Pastoral de Movilidad Humana, Área Pastoral de Migrantes; Natalia Armijo, Profesora-Investigadora de la Universidad de Quintana Roo, Casede; Rodolfo Casillas, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales.
El seminario tiene como objetivo presentar los resultados del proyecto Retos de la Seguridad y Migración en la Frontera Sur, apoyado por la Fundación Ford
Retos de la Seguridad y Migración en la Frontera Sur
Seminario de Seguridad
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte invita al seminario internacional: Seguridad y desarrollo en la relación México-Estados Unidos-Canadá, en su quinto ciclo 2010, con la sesión:Retos de la Seguridad y Migración en la Frontera Sur, el martes 29 de junio, a las 9:30 horas (tiempo del centro) en Casa Colef en la Ciudad de México.
En el evento participarán: José María Ramos García, director, Departamento de Estudios de Administración Pública de El Colef; Germán Martínez, profesor investigador de El Colegio de la Frontera Sur; Virginia Ilescas V., Consultora de Proyecto; Hna. Leticia Gutiérrez, Directora Ejecutiva de la Dimensión Pastoral de Movilidad Humana, Área Pastoral de Migrantes; Natalia Armijo, Profesora-Investigadora de la Universidad de Quintana Roo, Casede; Rodolfo Casillas, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales.
El seminario tiene como objetivo presentar los resultados del proyecto Retos de la Seguridad y Migración en la Frontera Sur, apoyado por la Fundación Ford
29y 30 mexico df
presentación de un nuevo documental (Martes 18:30 hras.) y dos libros producidos por los compas de El Faro digital en Centroamérica, en el Proceso (num. 1756) de esta semana (el que salió ayer) hay un reportaje extenso (p. 34-42) sobre el documental y los libros que van a presentar el Martes 29 y Miercoles 30 de Junio en el Centro Cultural de España, ojalá puedas asistir (voy a difundilo con todos los del Comité Promotor) para lograr este contacto personal, su testimonio seria clave en Noviembre!!:
MARTES 29 DE JUNIO 18:30 hras.: Como parte del proyecto “En el Camino. Migración indocumentada a través de México”, este documental narra las historias de tres salvadoreñas Doña Inés, Martha y Sandra, en su paso por México rumbo a Estados Unidos, reflejando la vulnerable situación de las indocumentadas.
Participan: Marcela Zamora (Sv), documentalista; Óscar Martínez (Sv), periodista, y Edu Ponces (Esp), fotoperiodista.
Organizan: El Faro.net, RUIDO Photo y la Fundación Idheas.
MIERCOLES 30 DE JUNIO: 19 hras.: presentación de dos libros
Uno es un libro de fotografías, el otro de crónicas. Ambos son resultado de un año de trabajo de un grupo de periodistas y reporteros gráficos, quienes viajaron como polizones en los trenes, recreando el recorrido que cada día enfrentan decenas de centroamericanos en su paso por México rumbo a Estados Unidos.
Participan: Óscar Martínez (Sv), periodista, y Edu Ponces (Esp), fotoperiodista.
Organizan: los Centros Culturales de España en Miami, México, Honduras y El Salvador; El Faro.net, RUIDO Photo y la Fundación Idheas.
mil gracias y un abrazo Camilo
MARTES 29 DE JUNIO 18:30 hras.: Como parte del proyecto “En el Camino. Migración indocumentada a través de México”, este documental narra las historias de tres salvadoreñas Doña Inés, Martha y Sandra, en su paso por México rumbo a Estados Unidos, reflejando la vulnerable situación de las indocumentadas.
Participan: Marcela Zamora (Sv), documentalista; Óscar Martínez (Sv), periodista, y Edu Ponces (Esp), fotoperiodista.
Organizan: El Faro.net, RUIDO Photo y la Fundación Idheas.
MIERCOLES 30 DE JUNIO: 19 hras.: presentación de dos libros
Uno es un libro de fotografías, el otro de crónicas. Ambos son resultado de un año de trabajo de un grupo de periodistas y reporteros gráficos, quienes viajaron como polizones en los trenes, recreando el recorrido que cada día enfrentan decenas de centroamericanos en su paso por México rumbo a Estados Unidos.
Participan: Óscar Martínez (Sv), periodista, y Edu Ponces (Esp), fotoperiodista.
Organizan: los Centros Culturales de España en Miami, México, Honduras y El Salvador; El Faro.net, RUIDO Photo y la Fundación Idheas.
mil gracias y un abrazo Camilo
jueves, 24 de junio de 2010
FORO MUNDIAL SOBRE MIGRACION Y DESARROLLO
Por primera vez la AGP participa oficialmente en el Foro Mundial sobre Migración y Desarrollo
Este año, la Acción Global de los Pueblos sobre Migración, Desarrollo y Derechos Humanos se incorpora formalmente a la dinámica del Foro Mundial sobre Migración y Desarrollo y asesora a la presidencia de éste en sus trabajos preparatorios.
Para contribuir y ampliar las discusiones e incorporar la perspectiva de los derechos humanos en las discusiones políticas la AGP prepara su agenda temática:
1.- Desmitificación de la relación entre migración y Desarrollo
2.- Desarrollo, Migración y Derechos Humanos
3.- Migración de recursos humanos altamente calificados
4.- Cambio Climático, migración y desarrollo
5.- Fortalecimiento de los movimientos y redes de migrantes.
El Comité Ejecutivo Internacional de la AGP celebrará su reunión en México para desarrollar posiciones comunes a los retos de la migración.
Presentación de la página WEB y mecanismos de preinscripción al evento
Participan:
Fabienne Venet : Directora INEDIM (Instituto de Estudios y Divulgación sobre Migración AC)
Rubén Puentes: Director Ejecutivo de la Red Internacional Migración y Desarrollo
Jorge Romero León: Secretario de Organización de la AGP/México 2010
Fecha: Martes 29 de junio. Hora: 9,30 horas
Lugar: Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social (CENCOS), Calle Medellín 33 Colonia Roma
Entre Puebla y Sinaloa, a una calle de la Fuente de la Cibeles
Contacto: Lucrecia Maldonado tel.: 044 55 13 89 75 60
Lic. Lucrecia Maldonado Zapatero
Comunicación
Instituto de Estudios y Divulgación sobre Migración, A.C.
55 33 49 88 ext.104
Emilio Castelar 131
Col. Polanco, C.P.11560, México, D.F.
www.estudiosdemigracion.org
martes, 22 de junio de 2010
TRASPATIO, EL TRASERO DEL PATIO, PATIO TRASERO, BACKYARD..
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo
El trasero del patio
19 de junio de 2010
Abrió la 49 reunión interparlamentaria entre México y Estados Unidos en el estado de Campeche bajo los peores augurios. Asesinatos de compatriotas nuestros, por electrocución masiva y tortura en San Diego y a mansalva dentro de territorio mexicano en Juárez. La alevosía y carácter emblemático de los crímenes definía el clima del encuentro y la confrontación parecía inevitable.
La delegación de Estados Unidos se adelantó a cualquier reclamación: con sensibilidad diplomática y tono convincente ofreció condolencias, pidió un minuto de silencio y ofreció que se haría justicia. Los mexicanos convinimos en no remachar los crímenes —que no estaban en la agenda— y en aprovechar el clima de arrepentimiento para profundizar en sus causas y exigir soluciones verdaderas.
Los debates fueron intensos, mas los resultados magros. La franqueza afloró, sobre todo en la contraparte, y la regla de tres minutos permitió un intercambio parlamentario; esto es, directo, vivaz y áspero por momentos. Siendo la mayoría de nuestros invitados de origen latino, era necesario remontarse a la negociación del TLCAN, cuando ellos mismos o sus organizaciones lo combatieron o intentaron enderezarlo.
Traté de centrar la discusión en el análisis objetivo de un acuerdo asimétrico y ventajista. La tasa histórica de crecimiento de nuestro país se redujo a menos de una tercera parte —de 6.4% a 2.1%—, la desigualdad condujo a una desintegración virtual del país, la economía nacional se contrajo a la exportación de drogas, el ingreso por remesas, la venta de petróleo y gas, la maquila y el turismo. La regresión hacia una economía primaria junto con la disolución del estado de derecho.
Los temas por que lucharon las organizaciones civiles de ambos lados fueron abandonados: la defensa de los derechos humanos, la protección del medio ambiente, las condiciones laborales y la cuestión crucial de la migración, sin olvidar las demandas fronterizas que resurgen dramáticamente. Nuestros amigos reconocieron que su gobierno les aseguró entonces trasladar sus demandas a los “acuerdos paralelos”, cuya fuerza obligatoria resultó nula.
La estrategia de seguridad fue abordada de manera contrapuesta. Mientras el discurso estadounidense es unánime en sostener que nuestro gobierno es el demandante de apoyo militar para la “guerra” contra el narcotráfico, algunos mexicanos insistimos en el fracaso evidente de esa política que fue inducida por la parte norteamericana desde fines de los años 80, a partir del “caso Camarena”.
Se discutió la eventualidad de legalizar la mariguana y subrayamos la incongruencia entre el plan de Obama, fundado en la reducción de las adicciones en ese país y el combate militar del otro lado de la frontera. Al control de la venta de armas de asalto se nos respondió que no, por lo redondo. Respecto a la ley migratoria explicaron las dificultades para obtener una mayoría congresional. Nuestras demandas específicas en el plano comercial también están sujetas a factores políticos internos.
Se evidenció la inequidad política del tratado, que en Estados Unidos sólo tuvo 26 votos de diferencia y en México fue impuesto por el gobierno, con un solo voto en contra —el de quien esto escribe. Debiera ser revisado como el fruto postrero de un régimen autoritario, que no podría ser avalado por una democracia. Hubo reacciones positivas en cuanto a su actualización, pero no su apertura.
Quedó claro que el tratado fue instrumento de la política neoliberal —causante de la crisis— y medio de legitimación de un gobierno fraudulento. En conversaciones informales amigos “hispanos” evocaron la debilidad mexicana en las negociaciones y alguno añadió, fraternalmente: “El gobierno de Salinas entregó el trasero —las ‘nalgas’. Después de hablar con funcionarios mexicanos, pensamos ‘a éstos ya se los llevó la chingada’”.
Es la verdad histórica y el origen de nuestra decadencia política, económica y moral. Sólo un resurgimiento democrático, conducente a un nuevo consenso nacional, podría salvarnos de esta degradante cancelación de soberanía y dignidad.
El trasero del patio
19 de junio de 2010
Abrió la 49 reunión interparlamentaria entre México y Estados Unidos en el estado de Campeche bajo los peores augurios. Asesinatos de compatriotas nuestros, por electrocución masiva y tortura en San Diego y a mansalva dentro de territorio mexicano en Juárez. La alevosía y carácter emblemático de los crímenes definía el clima del encuentro y la confrontación parecía inevitable.
La delegación de Estados Unidos se adelantó a cualquier reclamación: con sensibilidad diplomática y tono convincente ofreció condolencias, pidió un minuto de silencio y ofreció que se haría justicia. Los mexicanos convinimos en no remachar los crímenes —que no estaban en la agenda— y en aprovechar el clima de arrepentimiento para profundizar en sus causas y exigir soluciones verdaderas.
Los debates fueron intensos, mas los resultados magros. La franqueza afloró, sobre todo en la contraparte, y la regla de tres minutos permitió un intercambio parlamentario; esto es, directo, vivaz y áspero por momentos. Siendo la mayoría de nuestros invitados de origen latino, era necesario remontarse a la negociación del TLCAN, cuando ellos mismos o sus organizaciones lo combatieron o intentaron enderezarlo.
Traté de centrar la discusión en el análisis objetivo de un acuerdo asimétrico y ventajista. La tasa histórica de crecimiento de nuestro país se redujo a menos de una tercera parte —de 6.4% a 2.1%—, la desigualdad condujo a una desintegración virtual del país, la economía nacional se contrajo a la exportación de drogas, el ingreso por remesas, la venta de petróleo y gas, la maquila y el turismo. La regresión hacia una economía primaria junto con la disolución del estado de derecho.
Los temas por que lucharon las organizaciones civiles de ambos lados fueron abandonados: la defensa de los derechos humanos, la protección del medio ambiente, las condiciones laborales y la cuestión crucial de la migración, sin olvidar las demandas fronterizas que resurgen dramáticamente. Nuestros amigos reconocieron que su gobierno les aseguró entonces trasladar sus demandas a los “acuerdos paralelos”, cuya fuerza obligatoria resultó nula.
La estrategia de seguridad fue abordada de manera contrapuesta. Mientras el discurso estadounidense es unánime en sostener que nuestro gobierno es el demandante de apoyo militar para la “guerra” contra el narcotráfico, algunos mexicanos insistimos en el fracaso evidente de esa política que fue inducida por la parte norteamericana desde fines de los años 80, a partir del “caso Camarena”.
Se discutió la eventualidad de legalizar la mariguana y subrayamos la incongruencia entre el plan de Obama, fundado en la reducción de las adicciones en ese país y el combate militar del otro lado de la frontera. Al control de la venta de armas de asalto se nos respondió que no, por lo redondo. Respecto a la ley migratoria explicaron las dificultades para obtener una mayoría congresional. Nuestras demandas específicas en el plano comercial también están sujetas a factores políticos internos.
Se evidenció la inequidad política del tratado, que en Estados Unidos sólo tuvo 26 votos de diferencia y en México fue impuesto por el gobierno, con un solo voto en contra —el de quien esto escribe. Debiera ser revisado como el fruto postrero de un régimen autoritario, que no podría ser avalado por una democracia. Hubo reacciones positivas en cuanto a su actualización, pero no su apertura.
Quedó claro que el tratado fue instrumento de la política neoliberal —causante de la crisis— y medio de legitimación de un gobierno fraudulento. En conversaciones informales amigos “hispanos” evocaron la debilidad mexicana en las negociaciones y alguno añadió, fraternalmente: “El gobierno de Salinas entregó el trasero —las ‘nalgas’. Después de hablar con funcionarios mexicanos, pensamos ‘a éstos ya se los llevó la chingada’”.
Es la verdad histórica y el origen de nuestra decadencia política, económica y moral. Sólo un resurgimiento democrático, conducente a un nuevo consenso nacional, podría salvarnos de esta degradante cancelación de soberanía y dignidad.
ARTICULO QUE CAUSÓ LA DESPEDIDA DEL GENERAL MCCHRYSTAL
By Michael Hastings
Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT
This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.
'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.
"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
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The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
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"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.
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"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."
With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.
As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza
Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.
In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.
Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument."
The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit: Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the "least Gucci" place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised. "He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear," she says with a laugh.
The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for "I Suck at Fighting" or "In Sandals and Flip-Flops.") McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York. He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spend around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It's a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.
By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. "Afghanistan!" they bellow. "Afghanistan!" They call it their Afghanistan song.
McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. "All these men," he tells me. "I'd die for them. And they'd die for me."
The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain. This diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal's team to call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in Afghanistan. "It jeopardizes the mission," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. "The military cannot by itself create governance reform."
Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a "clown" who remains "stuck in 1985." Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, "turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it's not very helpful." Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle. "Hillary had Stan's back during the strategic review," says an adviser. "She said, 'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.' "
McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal," says a member of the general's team. "Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on shit."
Michael Hastings at the ISAF base in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Photograph by Mikhail Galustov for RollingStone/Redux
At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.
"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.
By far the most crucial – and strained – relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry – a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 – can't stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots. He's also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill – a move that effectively increased McChrystal's influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. "In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight," says a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations.
The relationship was further strained in January, when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as "not an adequate strategic partner," and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be "sufficient" to deal with Al Qaeda. "We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves," Eikenberry warned, "short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos."
McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable. "I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," says McChrystal, who adds that he felt "betrayed" by the leak. "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' "
The most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so. Over the past few months, he has accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap.
This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner. "He's been locked up in his palace the past year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General," he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!"
Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.
McChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy started to admit women. The "Prison on the Hudson," as it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated with a tradition called "rat fucking," which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or mud, covered in shaving cream. "It was pretty out of control," says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls "huge talent" and "wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism," also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents – a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination – a record that his classmates boasted made him a "century man." One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. "I'd come visit, and I'd end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area," recalls Annie, who began dating McChrystal in 1973.
McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular: As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note," a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: "The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded."
After graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam. "We really felt we were a peacetime generation," he recalls. "There was the Gulf War, but even that didn't feel like that big of a deal." So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime – nearly two dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path: Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don't go into the Rangers. Displaying a penchant for transforming systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts, required every soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.
In the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far – especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th. "He was very focused," says Annie. "Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don't think his personality has changed in all these years."
By some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous "stuff happens" remark during the looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint – overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force – that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.
After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.
"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.
Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.
The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a "Jedi" commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. ("There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.") He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. "The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal," says a British officer who serves in Kabul. "You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like 'Who the fuck is that?' And it's fucking Stan McChrystal."
It doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government's darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. "JSOC was a killing machine," says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down – often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military. "The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming," says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. "He'd say, 'Hey – you fucking muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.' "
Even in his new role as America's leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19. "You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight," McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he'll add, "I'm going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though." In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
Despite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It's "insurgent math," as he calls it – for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. "For a while," says one U.S. official, "the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident." The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint," a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.
But however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. "Bottom line?" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."
In March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM – a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar – to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. "I am writing because it was said you don't care about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves," Arroyo wrote.
Within hours, McChrystal responded personally: "I'm saddened by the accusation that I don't care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both personally and professionally – at least I do. But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his own." Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went on a foot patrol with the troops – not some bullshit photo-op stroll through a market, but a real live operation in a dangerous war zone.
Six weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram – one of the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with – had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's memorial service. "He started to look up to you," Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.
The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. "These were abandoned houses," fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. "Nobody was coming back to live in them."
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force," the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make arrests. "Does that make any fucking sense?" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a fucking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?"
The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they've been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. "Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on," says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. "I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they're all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're fucking losing this thing."
McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. "I ask you what's going on in your world, and I think it's important for you all to understand the big picture as well," McChrystal begins. "How's the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you're losing?" McChrystal says.
"Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing, sir," says Hicks.
McChrystal nods. "Strength is leading when you just don't want to lead," he tells the men. "You're leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside." Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he's careful not to bullshit the men. "We are knee-deep in the decisive year," he tells them. The Taliban, he insists, no longer has the initiative – "but I don't think we do, either." It's similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it's not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. "This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks," McChrystal tries to joke. "But it doesn't get the same reception from infantry companies."
During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight – like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. "We aren't putting fear into the Taliban," one soldier says.
"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing," McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn't work."
"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir," the soldier persists. "You say we've stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it's getting."
"I agree with you," McChrystal says. "In this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?"
A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. "That's the way this game is," McChrystal says. "It's complex. I can't just decide: It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts."
As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn't succeeded at easing the men's anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. "There's no way I can make that easier," he tells them. "No way I can pretend it won't hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. . . . I will tell you, you're doing a great job. Don't let the frustration get to you." The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.
When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."
In mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command – both in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties. They mention the word "progress" 16 times in under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still, the session represents the most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. "There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years – in education, in health care and economic development," the president says. "As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed – lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier."
It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. "It was one of our first impressions," one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. "So many lights shining brightly." So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned – talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked. "They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."
But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. "There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here," a senior military official in Kabul tells me.
Back in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of "progress," McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch a major military operation this summer in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive turning point in the war – the primary reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a "rising tide of security." The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours $90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.
Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja. "The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says a military official. "We have to remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population." When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.
Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.
This article appears in in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25. www.rollingstone.com
Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT
This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.
'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.
"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
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The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
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"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.
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"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."
With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.
As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza
Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.
In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.
Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument."
The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit: Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the "least Gucci" place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised. "He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear," she says with a laugh.
The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for "I Suck at Fighting" or "In Sandals and Flip-Flops.") McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York. He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spend around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It's a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.
By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. "Afghanistan!" they bellow. "Afghanistan!" They call it their Afghanistan song.
McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. "All these men," he tells me. "I'd die for them. And they'd die for me."
The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain. This diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal's team to call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in Afghanistan. "It jeopardizes the mission," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. "The military cannot by itself create governance reform."
Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a "clown" who remains "stuck in 1985." Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, "turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it's not very helpful." Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle. "Hillary had Stan's back during the strategic review," says an adviser. "She said, 'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.' "
McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal," says a member of the general's team. "Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on shit."
Michael Hastings at the ISAF base in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Photograph by Mikhail Galustov for RollingStone/Redux
At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.
"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.
By far the most crucial – and strained – relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry – a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 – can't stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots. He's also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill – a move that effectively increased McChrystal's influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. "In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight," says a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations.
The relationship was further strained in January, when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as "not an adequate strategic partner," and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be "sufficient" to deal with Al Qaeda. "We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves," Eikenberry warned, "short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos."
McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable. "I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," says McChrystal, who adds that he felt "betrayed" by the leak. "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' "
The most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so. Over the past few months, he has accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap.
This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner. "He's been locked up in his palace the past year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General," he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!"
Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.
McChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy started to admit women. The "Prison on the Hudson," as it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated with a tradition called "rat fucking," which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or mud, covered in shaving cream. "It was pretty out of control," says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls "huge talent" and "wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism," also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents – a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination – a record that his classmates boasted made him a "century man." One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. "I'd come visit, and I'd end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area," recalls Annie, who began dating McChrystal in 1973.
McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular: As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note," a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: "The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded."
After graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam. "We really felt we were a peacetime generation," he recalls. "There was the Gulf War, but even that didn't feel like that big of a deal." So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime – nearly two dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path: Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don't go into the Rangers. Displaying a penchant for transforming systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts, required every soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.
In the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far – especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th. "He was very focused," says Annie. "Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don't think his personality has changed in all these years."
By some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous "stuff happens" remark during the looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint – overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force – that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.
After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.
"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.
Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.
The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a "Jedi" commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. ("There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.") He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. "The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal," says a British officer who serves in Kabul. "You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like 'Who the fuck is that?' And it's fucking Stan McChrystal."
It doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government's darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. "JSOC was a killing machine," says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down – often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military. "The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming," says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. "He'd say, 'Hey – you fucking muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.' "
Even in his new role as America's leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19. "You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight," McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he'll add, "I'm going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though." In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
Despite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It's "insurgent math," as he calls it – for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. "For a while," says one U.S. official, "the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident." The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint," a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.
But however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. "Bottom line?" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."
In March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM – a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar – to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. "I am writing because it was said you don't care about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves," Arroyo wrote.
Within hours, McChrystal responded personally: "I'm saddened by the accusation that I don't care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both personally and professionally – at least I do. But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his own." Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went on a foot patrol with the troops – not some bullshit photo-op stroll through a market, but a real live operation in a dangerous war zone.
Six weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram – one of the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with – had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's memorial service. "He started to look up to you," Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.
The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. "These were abandoned houses," fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. "Nobody was coming back to live in them."
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force," the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make arrests. "Does that make any fucking sense?" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a fucking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?"
The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they've been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. "Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on," says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. "I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they're all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're fucking losing this thing."
McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. "I ask you what's going on in your world, and I think it's important for you all to understand the big picture as well," McChrystal begins. "How's the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you're losing?" McChrystal says.
"Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing, sir," says Hicks.
McChrystal nods. "Strength is leading when you just don't want to lead," he tells the men. "You're leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside." Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he's careful not to bullshit the men. "We are knee-deep in the decisive year," he tells them. The Taliban, he insists, no longer has the initiative – "but I don't think we do, either." It's similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it's not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. "This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks," McChrystal tries to joke. "But it doesn't get the same reception from infantry companies."
During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight – like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. "We aren't putting fear into the Taliban," one soldier says.
"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing," McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn't work."
"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir," the soldier persists. "You say we've stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it's getting."
"I agree with you," McChrystal says. "In this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?"
A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. "That's the way this game is," McChrystal says. "It's complex. I can't just decide: It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts."
As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn't succeeded at easing the men's anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. "There's no way I can make that easier," he tells them. "No way I can pretend it won't hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. . . . I will tell you, you're doing a great job. Don't let the frustration get to you." The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.
When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."
In mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command – both in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties. They mention the word "progress" 16 times in under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still, the session represents the most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. "There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years – in education, in health care and economic development," the president says. "As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed – lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier."
It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. "It was one of our first impressions," one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. "So many lights shining brightly." So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned – talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked. "They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."
But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. "There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here," a senior military official in Kabul tells me.
Back in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of "progress," McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch a major military operation this summer in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive turning point in the war – the primary reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a "rising tide of security." The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours $90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.
Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja. "The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says a military official. "We have to remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population." When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.
Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.
This article appears in in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25. www.rollingstone.com
lunes, 21 de junio de 2010
JORGE G CASTAÑEDA PIDE BASES MILITARES DE EU EN MÉXICO¡¡
IXTAPAN DE LA SAL 21 DE JUNIO.- El ex canciller advirtió que el país no podrá ganar la guerra contra el narcotráfico sin un plan como el que se implantó en Colombia, que implica entre otras cosas, aceptar la presencia de asesores militares de Estados Unidos en el territorio nacional El ex canciller de México, Jorge Castañeda, advirtió que México no podrá ganar la guerra contra el narcotráfico sin ayuda del gobierno de Estados Unidos tal como lo hizo Colombia, a través de asesores militares en territorio nacional.
El ex funcionario aseveró que una vez que el gobierno federal decidió emprender la lucha contra el crimen organizado, se debe pensar en los aliados y los términos de tales alianzas y comparó los casos de México y Colombia en cuanto a la ayuda recibida del gobierno estadounidense, que aseguró, es el único aliado posible.
"Si no hay un plan México equivalente al plan Colombia aquí no se puede (ganar al guerra)" afirmó.
Destacó también la diferencia en el flujo de recursos hacia ambos países para combatir al crimen organizado y aseguró que los mil 300 mdd destinados al Plan Mérida (350 millones por año) no son nada por el tamaño del país.
"El plan Colombia ha recibido 8 mil millones de dólares en 10 años para un país 2.5 veces menor", sostuvo.
www.ejecentral.com.mx
REUNIÓN BINACIONAL MÉXICO USA EN MATERIA DE SEGURIDAD EN HOTEL MARRIOTT DE IXTAPAN DE LA SAL EDOMEX HASTA EL MARTES 22
El ex funcionario aseveró que una vez que el gobierno federal decidió emprender la lucha contra el crimen organizado, se debe pensar en los aliados y los términos de tales alianzas y comparó los casos de México y Colombia en cuanto a la ayuda recibida del gobierno estadounidense, que aseguró, es el único aliado posible.
"Si no hay un plan México equivalente al plan Colombia aquí no se puede (ganar al guerra)" afirmó.
Destacó también la diferencia en el flujo de recursos hacia ambos países para combatir al crimen organizado y aseguró que los mil 300 mdd destinados al Plan Mérida (350 millones por año) no son nada por el tamaño del país.
"El plan Colombia ha recibido 8 mil millones de dólares en 10 años para un país 2.5 veces menor", sostuvo.
www.ejecentral.com.mx
REUNIÓN BINACIONAL MÉXICO USA EN MATERIA DE SEGURIDAD EN HOTEL MARRIOTT DE IXTAPAN DE LA SAL EDOMEX HASTA EL MARTES 22
JUAN JUAN ALMEIDA EN HUELGA DE HAMBRE EN CUBA: GOBIERNO LE NIEGA PERMISO DE SALIDA
http://www.cubanuestra.nu/web/folder.asp?folderID=72
VIDEO DE JUAN JUAN ALMEIDA CON UN CARTEL PROTESTANDO EN SOLITARIO EN UNA TRANSITADA CALLE DE LA HABANA CUBA JULIO 2010
http://www.octavocerco.blogspot.com/
VIDEO DE JUAN JUAN ALMEIDA CON UN CARTEL PROTESTANDO EN SOLITARIO EN UNA TRANSITADA CALLE DE LA HABANA CUBA JULIO 2010
http://www.octavocerco.blogspot.com/
HOY LO ULTIMO SOBRE LA LEY ARIZONA
Conferencia: LA LEY ARIZONA Y LA OFENSIVA DE LA EXTREMA DERECHA EN ESTADOS UNIDOS
Panelistas: Elvira Arellano, Jorde Durand, Enrique González Ruiz y Camilo Pérez Bustillo
Entrada Libre
Casa Lamm
Fecha: 21-Junio-2010
Hora: 19:00 hrs.
Salón Tarkovsky
Álvaro Obregón 99, Colonia Roma. Tel. 55253938 Conmutador 55144899. D.R. 2010 - Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm.
Panelistas: Elvira Arellano, Jorde Durand, Enrique González Ruiz y Camilo Pérez Bustillo
Entrada Libre
Casa Lamm
Fecha: 21-Junio-2010
Hora: 19:00 hrs.
Salón Tarkovsky
Álvaro Obregón 99, Colonia Roma. Tel. 55253938 Conmutador 55144899. D.R. 2010 - Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm.
martes, 15 de junio de 2010
ALTO A LOS ASESINATOS DE MIGRANTES
CAMPAÑA PERMANENTE FRONTERA DE PAZ
Este jueves 17 de junio frente a la embajada estadounidense 18 hrs MÉXICO DF
Este LUNES 21 de junio frente a la reunión binacional en materia de seguridad del gobernador Enrique Peña Nieto y autoridades de Estados Unidos , HOTEL MARRIOT DE IXTapan de la sal Edomex 12 hrs
Acto en memoria de Sergio Adrián y todos nuestros migrantes caídos
No más asesinatos de migrantes en las fronteras
Porque tenemos derecho a la paz, por eso ahora nosotros ponemos una frontera de paz, una frontera en movimiento, ante tanta violencia impuesta por el sistema.
No tenemos muros, no tenemos armas, sólo nos tenemos los unos a los otros.
No hay nada más alto, más ancho, más fuerte que la solidaridad entre los pueblos ¿quién podrá traspasarla? La solidaridad es abrazar el dolor ajeno, es hacerlo mío y es poner herida con herida y sanarla con la esperanza de construcción de un aquí y un ahora diferentes, ¿quién podría vulnerarla? Es la historia de nuestros pueblos, es su lucha, es su canto y es su alegría de vivir, ¿acaso algo podría derribarla?
HAGAMOS QUE LA "FRONTERA DE PAZ" SEA UN MOVIMIENTO CULTURAL-SOCIAL QUE TRASCIENDA LAS FRONTERAS DE LO FRONTERIZO GEOGRÁFICO Y ALCANCE EL ANHELO DEL PUEBLO DE VIVIR EN PAZ COMO CONTRAPROPUESTA A TODOS LOS TIPOS DE VIOLENCIA, A TODOS LOS TIPOS DE FRONTERAS QUE VIVIMOS, UNA CONSTRUCCION DE LA PAZ DESDE ABAJO. UNA PAZ EN MOVIMIENTO, COMO LOS PUEBLOS.
Asiste y ayúdanos a formar esta frontera de paz, trae flores, velas, listones para construir juntos un mundo sin fronteras.
TE ESPERAMOS!!!!
¡Porque ningún ser humano es ilegal, ilegales son las los estados y las leyes que nos criminalizan!
REDES UNIVERSITARIAS y COMITÉ PROMOTOR DEL TRIBUNAL INTERNACIONAL DE PUEBLOS EN MOVIMIENTO, RED MIGRANTE, MOVIMIENTO BINACIONAL POR LA ESPERANZA, COALICION CONTRA LA LEY SB1070, FRENTE UNIDO DE MIGRANTES, UNION CIVICA PRIMERO DE MAYO, MOVIMIENTO 10 DE MARZO, MEXICANOS SIN FRONTERAS, PROYECTO GUERRERO AZTECA X LA PAZ, LTS, POS, PRD, PT, PARTIDO MIGRANTE LOS ANGELES, FRENTE DE MEXICANOS EN EL EXTERIOR, CASA DEL MIGRANTE TONATICO EDOMEX, CEL 722 375 3347
www.lahoradelmigrante.blogspot.com
www.guerreroazteca.org
COALICION CONTRA LA LEY RACISTA 044551688 6985
Este jueves 17 de junio frente a la embajada estadounidense 18 hrs MÉXICO DF
Este LUNES 21 de junio frente a la reunión binacional en materia de seguridad del gobernador Enrique Peña Nieto y autoridades de Estados Unidos , HOTEL MARRIOT DE IXTapan de la sal Edomex 12 hrs
Acto en memoria de Sergio Adrián y todos nuestros migrantes caídos
No más asesinatos de migrantes en las fronteras
Porque tenemos derecho a la paz, por eso ahora nosotros ponemos una frontera de paz, una frontera en movimiento, ante tanta violencia impuesta por el sistema.
No tenemos muros, no tenemos armas, sólo nos tenemos los unos a los otros.
No hay nada más alto, más ancho, más fuerte que la solidaridad entre los pueblos ¿quién podrá traspasarla? La solidaridad es abrazar el dolor ajeno, es hacerlo mío y es poner herida con herida y sanarla con la esperanza de construcción de un aquí y un ahora diferentes, ¿quién podría vulnerarla? Es la historia de nuestros pueblos, es su lucha, es su canto y es su alegría de vivir, ¿acaso algo podría derribarla?
HAGAMOS QUE LA "FRONTERA DE PAZ" SEA UN MOVIMIENTO CULTURAL-SOCIAL QUE TRASCIENDA LAS FRONTERAS DE LO FRONTERIZO GEOGRÁFICO Y ALCANCE EL ANHELO DEL PUEBLO DE VIVIR EN PAZ COMO CONTRAPROPUESTA A TODOS LOS TIPOS DE VIOLENCIA, A TODOS LOS TIPOS DE FRONTERAS QUE VIVIMOS, UNA CONSTRUCCION DE LA PAZ DESDE ABAJO. UNA PAZ EN MOVIMIENTO, COMO LOS PUEBLOS.
Asiste y ayúdanos a formar esta frontera de paz, trae flores, velas, listones para construir juntos un mundo sin fronteras.
TE ESPERAMOS!!!!
¡Porque ningún ser humano es ilegal, ilegales son las los estados y las leyes que nos criminalizan!
REDES UNIVERSITARIAS y COMITÉ PROMOTOR DEL TRIBUNAL INTERNACIONAL DE PUEBLOS EN MOVIMIENTO, RED MIGRANTE, MOVIMIENTO BINACIONAL POR LA ESPERANZA, COALICION CONTRA LA LEY SB1070, FRENTE UNIDO DE MIGRANTES, UNION CIVICA PRIMERO DE MAYO, MOVIMIENTO 10 DE MARZO, MEXICANOS SIN FRONTERAS, PROYECTO GUERRERO AZTECA X LA PAZ, LTS, POS, PRD, PT, PARTIDO MIGRANTE LOS ANGELES, FRENTE DE MEXICANOS EN EL EXTERIOR, CASA DEL MIGRANTE TONATICO EDOMEX, CEL 722 375 3347
www.lahoradelmigrante.blogspot.com
www.guerreroazteca.org
COALICION CONTRA LA LEY RACISTA 044551688 6985
domingo, 13 de junio de 2010
2 VIDEOS DEL ASALTO DE LA ARMADA ISRAELI AL BARCO TURCO EN AGUAS INTERNACIONALES FRENTE A GAZA
http://www.culturesofresistance.org/gaza-freedom-flotilla
HELICOPTERO DE ISRAEL SOBREVUELA BARCO TURCO , DOS ACTIVISTAS SACAN SUS RESORTERAS
HELICOPTERO DE ISRAEL SOBREVUELA BARCO TURCO , DOS ACTIVISTAS SACAN SUS RESORTERAS
JUCHITAN, LOS ANGELES
junio 18, 2010 a las 8pm a junio 19, 2010 a las 5am
Ubicación: Juchitán, Oaxaca
Organizado por: Soid Pastrana Vera
Descripción del evento:
Exposición y presentación del libro dedicado a Bukowski: De Juchitán a Los Ángeles. La música correra a cargo de Tlalok Guerrero, Keyla Ayona y Guillermo Villegas. Después al M7 a eso de las 10 pm
Ver más detalles y RSVP en ZAPOTECOS DEL MUNDO:
http://zapotecosdelmundo.ning.com/events/event/show?id=3343352%3AEvent%3A49605&xgi=0n3LbUcxqd5oI3&xg_source=msg_invite_event
Ubicación: Juchitán, Oaxaca
Organizado por: Soid Pastrana Vera
Descripción del evento:
Exposición y presentación del libro dedicado a Bukowski: De Juchitán a Los Ángeles. La música correra a cargo de Tlalok Guerrero, Keyla Ayona y Guillermo Villegas. Después al M7 a eso de las 10 pm
Ver más detalles y RSVP en ZAPOTECOS DEL MUNDO:
http://zapotecosdelmundo.ning.com/events/event/show?id=3343352%3AEvent%3A49605&xgi=0n3LbUcxqd5oI3&xg_source=msg_invite_event
viernes, 11 de junio de 2010
IRAN RECHAZA VOTO DE CLAUDE HELLER
COMUNICADO DE PRENSA SOBRE EL VOTO DE MÉXICO CONTRA EL PUEBLO DE IRÁN EN EL CONSEJO DE SEGURIDAD.
En el nombre de Dios
Embajada de la República Islámica de Irán
Jueves 11-de junio -2010
La embajada de la República Islámica de Irán en México, en relación a la decisión del día miércoles 9 de junio del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas en aprobar la resolución de sanciones a Irán, considera que el voto de los 12 países miembros del Consejo contra Irán es como elegir la vía de confrontación y no la vía diplomática, considerándolo también como una medida discriminatoria e injusta.
La Embajada de la República Islámica de Irán, lamenta profundamente el voto de países como México, entre los que se consideran en pro de la paz y de los derechos de los pueblos, tales países saben perfectamente bien que Irán basándose sobre el Tratado de No Proliferación (TNP), posee el derecho de enriquecimiento de uranio para el uso pacífico. Los reportes de la Agencia Internacional de Energía Atómica han aprobado en diferentes ocasiones y han mencionado que no hay ninguna prueba para decir que los programas nucleares de Irán no son pacíficos a pesar de las masivas e innumerables inspecciones.
La expedición de la resolución por parte del Consejo de Seguridad así como la demanda de los países miembros del Consejo de Gobernadores de la Agencia con el fin de que Irán suspenda su programa nuclear, va en contra del Tratado de No Proliferación y los derechos del pueblo Iraní. Es un asunto discriminatorio y no aceptable mientras que esos países demandan a Irán para que se asocie con los tratados complementarios. Hasta ahora, con el pretexto de que el régimen sionista de Israel no se ha inscrito como miembro del Tratado de No Proliferación, se evita la inspección de armas nucleares de Israel.
El gobierno de México tiene conocimiento de que Irán ha asumido sus compromisos ante el Tratado de No Proliferación, mientras que éste ha sido ignorado por sus derechos según el mismo Tratado. El gobierno de México había pedido a Irán para que apoye su membresía en el Consejo de Seguridad, e Irán, basándose en la necesidad de respetar los derechos de las naciones y pacifismo, le apoyó en su candidatura. Actualmente, Irán exprime su desacuerdo y protesta enérgicamente sobre el voto de México en el Consejo de Seguridad contra Irán.
Irán tenía la esperanza de que México, como poseedor de una de las curules del Consejo de Seguridad, ignorara las presiones de Estados Unidos y que apoyara los derechos del pueblo de Irán, prefiriendo la vía del diálogo y diplomacia sobre la vía de confrontación, pero desafortunadamente no fue así.
También se esperaba de México, que en el aniversario del bicentenario de su independencia y el centenario de su revolución y los 110 años de relaciones entre ambos países, mejor respeto por la independencia y el derecho de otros pueblos.
La Embajada de la República Islámica de Irán también expresa su agradecimiento a los gobiernos de Turquía y Brasil por rechazar presiones del gobierno de Estados Unidos, exhibiendo así la independencia de su voto en defensa de los derechos del pueblo de Irán, la elección del uso de la vía de la diplomacia y el diálogo; y oponerse a la confrontación e injusta resolución
En el nombre de Dios
Embajada de la República Islámica de Irán
Jueves 11-de junio -2010
La embajada de la República Islámica de Irán en México, en relación a la decisión del día miércoles 9 de junio del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas en aprobar la resolución de sanciones a Irán, considera que el voto de los 12 países miembros del Consejo contra Irán es como elegir la vía de confrontación y no la vía diplomática, considerándolo también como una medida discriminatoria e injusta.
La Embajada de la República Islámica de Irán, lamenta profundamente el voto de países como México, entre los que se consideran en pro de la paz y de los derechos de los pueblos, tales países saben perfectamente bien que Irán basándose sobre el Tratado de No Proliferación (TNP), posee el derecho de enriquecimiento de uranio para el uso pacífico. Los reportes de la Agencia Internacional de Energía Atómica han aprobado en diferentes ocasiones y han mencionado que no hay ninguna prueba para decir que los programas nucleares de Irán no son pacíficos a pesar de las masivas e innumerables inspecciones.
La expedición de la resolución por parte del Consejo de Seguridad así como la demanda de los países miembros del Consejo de Gobernadores de la Agencia con el fin de que Irán suspenda su programa nuclear, va en contra del Tratado de No Proliferación y los derechos del pueblo Iraní. Es un asunto discriminatorio y no aceptable mientras que esos países demandan a Irán para que se asocie con los tratados complementarios. Hasta ahora, con el pretexto de que el régimen sionista de Israel no se ha inscrito como miembro del Tratado de No Proliferación, se evita la inspección de armas nucleares de Israel.
El gobierno de México tiene conocimiento de que Irán ha asumido sus compromisos ante el Tratado de No Proliferación, mientras que éste ha sido ignorado por sus derechos según el mismo Tratado. El gobierno de México había pedido a Irán para que apoye su membresía en el Consejo de Seguridad, e Irán, basándose en la necesidad de respetar los derechos de las naciones y pacifismo, le apoyó en su candidatura. Actualmente, Irán exprime su desacuerdo y protesta enérgicamente sobre el voto de México en el Consejo de Seguridad contra Irán.
Irán tenía la esperanza de que México, como poseedor de una de las curules del Consejo de Seguridad, ignorara las presiones de Estados Unidos y que apoyara los derechos del pueblo de Irán, prefiriendo la vía del diálogo y diplomacia sobre la vía de confrontación, pero desafortunadamente no fue así.
También se esperaba de México, que en el aniversario del bicentenario de su independencia y el centenario de su revolución y los 110 años de relaciones entre ambos países, mejor respeto por la independencia y el derecho de otros pueblos.
La Embajada de la República Islámica de Irán también expresa su agradecimiento a los gobiernos de Turquía y Brasil por rechazar presiones del gobierno de Estados Unidos, exhibiendo así la independencia de su voto en defensa de los derechos del pueblo de Irán, la elección del uso de la vía de la diplomacia y el diálogo; y oponerse a la confrontación e injusta resolución
jueves, 10 de junio de 2010
VIDEO DE ASESINATO DE SERGIO DENTRO DE MEXICO, POR AGENTE DE LA PATRULLA FRONTERIZA DE EL PASO
www.unafuente.com
PROPORCIONADO POR UNIVISION
PROPORCIONADO POR UNIVISION
miércoles, 9 de junio de 2010
VIDEO DE GOLPIZA A ANASTASIO 28 DE MAYO SAN ISIDRO TIJUANA BORDER
http://www.frontera.info/EdicionEnLinea/Notas/Nacional/09062010/451805.aspx
GRABADA POR UN CIUDADANO EN SU TELEFONO MOVIL
GRABADA POR UN CIUDADANO EN SU TELEFONO MOVIL
martes, 8 de junio de 2010
www.fbi.gov
For Immediate Release
June 8, 2010 FBI El Paso
Contact: Special Agent Andrea Simmons
(915) 832-5373
Assault on Federal Officer Investigated
At approximately 6:30 p.m. on Monday, June 7, 2010, Customs and Border Protection Border Patrol agents responded to a group of suspected illegal aliens being smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico near the Paso del Norte Port of Entry.
One subject, Oscar Ivan Pineda Ayala, was initially detained on the levy. Another agent arrived on his bicycle along the cement apron that forms the river bank on the U.S. side. That agent detained a second subject, Augustin Alcaraz Reyes, but other subjects ran into Mexico and began to throw rocks at the agent.
This agent, who had the second subject detained on the ground, gave verbal commands to the remaining subjects to stop and retreat. However, the subjects surrounded the agent and continued to throw rocks at him. The agent then fired his service weapon several times, striking one subject who later died.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has jurisdiction for any assault on federal officers and is the lead agency. The investigation continues and is being worked with El Paso Police Department, Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General.
The area where this incident occurred is a known high-risk crime area where rocks are regularly thrown at Border Patrol agents and where other assaults have been reported.
Press Releases | El Paso
June 8, 2010 FBI El Paso
Contact: Special Agent Andrea Simmons
(915) 832-5373
Assault on Federal Officer Investigated
At approximately 6:30 p.m. on Monday, June 7, 2010, Customs and Border Protection Border Patrol agents responded to a group of suspected illegal aliens being smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico near the Paso del Norte Port of Entry.
One subject, Oscar Ivan Pineda Ayala, was initially detained on the levy. Another agent arrived on his bicycle along the cement apron that forms the river bank on the U.S. side. That agent detained a second subject, Augustin Alcaraz Reyes, but other subjects ran into Mexico and began to throw rocks at the agent.
This agent, who had the second subject detained on the ground, gave verbal commands to the remaining subjects to stop and retreat. However, the subjects surrounded the agent and continued to throw rocks at him. The agent then fired his service weapon several times, striking one subject who later died.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has jurisdiction for any assault on federal officers and is the lead agency. The investigation continues and is being worked with El Paso Police Department, Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General.
The area where this incident occurred is a known high-risk crime area where rocks are regularly thrown at Border Patrol agents and where other assaults have been reported.
Press Releases | El Paso
CONTACTOS SAN JUAN COPALA
JORNADA DE MOVILIZACIÓN INTERNACIONAL EN SOLIDARIDAD CON EL MUNICIPIO AUTÓNOMO DE SAN JUAN COPALA, OAXACA.
ACOMPAÑAMIENTO INTERNACIONAL DESDE SUS PAISES CON LA CARAVANA HUMANITARIA A SAN JUAN COPALA
Hacemos un llamado a la comunidad internacional (organizaciones sociales y civiles, ONGS y colectivos) para que realicen acciones de solidaridad desde sus países y comunidades con el objetivo de dar cobertura a la Caravana de Solidaridad con el Municipio Autónomo San Juan Copala “Bety Cariño & Jyri Jaakkola” (7, 8 y 9 de junio) durante su recorrido de la ciudad de México al Municipio Autónomo de San Juan Copala en el estado de Oaxaca. Para ello proponemos:
· Realizar manifestaciones en las Embajadas de México en su país, especialmente el 8 de junio, día en que entrará la caravana humanitaria con víveres y medicamentos para las más de 700 familias que habitan el municipio autónomo. [Informar al correo contacto@ucizoni.org.mx y comcausanet@gmail.com las acciones planeadas]
· Enviar cartas diplomáticas denunciando la situación de violencia y asedio que se vive en el municipio autónomo y exigiendo a las autoridades federal y estatal garanticen la seguridad de los miembros de la caravana.
· Cualquier otra acción en espacios públicos (parques, plazas, foros, cine callejero) que visibilicen el recorrido de la caravana.
· Finalmente, los invitamos a estar atentos y seguir la cobertura que dará Radio Plantón de 11am a 5pm por el link: http://giss.tv:8001/plantonsonoro.ogg.m3u y sumarse a las redes de medios libres que también darán seguimiento a la caravana el día 8 de junio.
Para mayor información sobre Caravana de Solidaridad “Bety Cariño & Jyri Jaakkola” con el Municipio Autónomo San Juan Copala visita las páginas:
http://autonomiaencopala.wordpress.com/
http://www.todosconlacaravana.blogspot.com/
* DONACIONES INTERNACIONALES PARA SAN JUAN COPALA. Número de cuenta: 002180010081009145 (Banco Banamex a nombre de Víctor Castillo)
ORGANIZACIONES CONVOCANTES:
Nacionales: Alianza Mexicana por la Autodeterminación de los Pueblos (AMAP), Congreso Nacional, Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME), Diálogo Nacional, Sindicato de Telefonistas de la República Mexicana (STRM), Red Nacional por la Unidad de las Izquierdas, Frente Sindical Mexicano., Movimiento Nacional para la Construcción de una Nueva Sociedad-Democrática, Movimiento Agrario Indígena Zapatista (MAIZ-NAL), Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), MOCRI-CNPA
Regionales: Unión de Comunidades Indígenas de la Zona Norte del Istmo (UCIZONI-OAX), Comunidades Campesinas y Urbanas Solidarias (COMCAUSA, A.C.), Centro de Derechos Humanos y Laborales de Tehuacán (CDHyL de Tehuacán), Kolectivo Azul-SLP, El Pregón-Mor., , Unión de Mujeres Indígenas de Querétaro (UMIC), MAIZ-VER, Movimiento para el Desarrollo Social (MODES-Qro), Centro de Investigación Laboral y Asesoría Sindical (CILAS-D.F.), Organización ORO NEGRO-Ver, REDIR-MLN, Comité 68 Raúl Álvarez Garín, Sindicato de Trabajador de la Universidad Autónoma de México (STUNAM), GIFAC, A. C.- Tlax., Sindicato de la Unión de Trabajadores del Instituto de Educación Media Superior del DF. (SUTIEMS), Frente Sindical Mexicano (FSM), Grupo Plural de San Luis Potosí, Sección 10 del SNTE-CNTE, Organización Popular Urbana Socialista, Frente Democrático de Organizaciones Sociales y Productivas (FDNOSYP), Organización Campesina Emiliano Zapata-MLN (OCEZ-MLN, Chis.), Organización Social Fermina Zavaleta, Ver.; Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio (RMALC)
Internacionales: Comité Mesoamericano de los Pueblos,; Asamblea de Movimientos Sociales hacia el Alba; Honduras: Bloque Popular; El Salvador: Red Sinti Techan, Red de Activistas Ambientales Salvadoreños (RAA), Movimiento Popular Democrático Salvadoreño; Nicaragua: Movimiento Social Nicaragüense Panamá: Frente Nacional de Derechos Económicos y Sociales (FRENADESO); Perú: Coordinadora Nacional de Comunidades Afectadas por la Minería de Perú. (CONACAMI); Inglaterra Colectivo de la Universidad de Manchester; Italia: ASUD-ITALITA
ACOMPAÑAMIENTO INTERNACIONAL DESDE SUS PAISES CON LA CARAVANA HUMANITARIA A SAN JUAN COPALA
Hacemos un llamado a la comunidad internacional (organizaciones sociales y civiles, ONGS y colectivos) para que realicen acciones de solidaridad desde sus países y comunidades con el objetivo de dar cobertura a la Caravana de Solidaridad con el Municipio Autónomo San Juan Copala “Bety Cariño & Jyri Jaakkola” (7, 8 y 9 de junio) durante su recorrido de la ciudad de México al Municipio Autónomo de San Juan Copala en el estado de Oaxaca. Para ello proponemos:
· Realizar manifestaciones en las Embajadas de México en su país, especialmente el 8 de junio, día en que entrará la caravana humanitaria con víveres y medicamentos para las más de 700 familias que habitan el municipio autónomo. [Informar al correo contacto@ucizoni.org.mx y comcausanet@gmail.com las acciones planeadas]
· Enviar cartas diplomáticas denunciando la situación de violencia y asedio que se vive en el municipio autónomo y exigiendo a las autoridades federal y estatal garanticen la seguridad de los miembros de la caravana.
· Cualquier otra acción en espacios públicos (parques, plazas, foros, cine callejero) que visibilicen el recorrido de la caravana.
· Finalmente, los invitamos a estar atentos y seguir la cobertura que dará Radio Plantón de 11am a 5pm por el link: http://giss.tv:8001/plantonsonoro.ogg.m3u y sumarse a las redes de medios libres que también darán seguimiento a la caravana el día 8 de junio.
Para mayor información sobre Caravana de Solidaridad “Bety Cariño & Jyri Jaakkola” con el Municipio Autónomo San Juan Copala visita las páginas:
http://autonomiaencopala.wordpress.com/
http://www.todosconlacaravana.blogspot.com/
* DONACIONES INTERNACIONALES PARA SAN JUAN COPALA. Número de cuenta: 002180010081009145 (Banco Banamex a nombre de Víctor Castillo)
ORGANIZACIONES CONVOCANTES:
Nacionales: Alianza Mexicana por la Autodeterminación de los Pueblos (AMAP), Congreso Nacional, Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME), Diálogo Nacional, Sindicato de Telefonistas de la República Mexicana (STRM), Red Nacional por la Unidad de las Izquierdas, Frente Sindical Mexicano., Movimiento Nacional para la Construcción de una Nueva Sociedad-Democrática, Movimiento Agrario Indígena Zapatista (MAIZ-NAL), Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), MOCRI-CNPA
Regionales: Unión de Comunidades Indígenas de la Zona Norte del Istmo (UCIZONI-OAX), Comunidades Campesinas y Urbanas Solidarias (COMCAUSA, A.C.), Centro de Derechos Humanos y Laborales de Tehuacán (CDHyL de Tehuacán), Kolectivo Azul-SLP, El Pregón-Mor., , Unión de Mujeres Indígenas de Querétaro (UMIC), MAIZ-VER, Movimiento para el Desarrollo Social (MODES-Qro), Centro de Investigación Laboral y Asesoría Sindical (CILAS-D.F.), Organización ORO NEGRO-Ver, REDIR-MLN, Comité 68 Raúl Álvarez Garín, Sindicato de Trabajador de la Universidad Autónoma de México (STUNAM), GIFAC, A. C.- Tlax., Sindicato de la Unión de Trabajadores del Instituto de Educación Media Superior del DF. (SUTIEMS), Frente Sindical Mexicano (FSM), Grupo Plural de San Luis Potosí, Sección 10 del SNTE-CNTE, Organización Popular Urbana Socialista, Frente Democrático de Organizaciones Sociales y Productivas (FDNOSYP), Organización Campesina Emiliano Zapata-MLN (OCEZ-MLN, Chis.), Organización Social Fermina Zavaleta, Ver.; Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio (RMALC)
Internacionales: Comité Mesoamericano de los Pueblos,; Asamblea de Movimientos Sociales hacia el Alba; Honduras: Bloque Popular; El Salvador: Red Sinti Techan, Red de Activistas Ambientales Salvadoreños (RAA), Movimiento Popular Democrático Salvadoreño; Nicaragua: Movimiento Social Nicaragüense Panamá: Frente Nacional de Derechos Económicos y Sociales (FRENADESO); Perú: Coordinadora Nacional de Comunidades Afectadas por la Minería de Perú. (CONACAMI); Inglaterra Colectivo de la Universidad de Manchester; Italia: ASUD-ITALITA
lunes, 7 de junio de 2010
CARAVANA EN MARCHA A SAN JUAN COPALA OAXACA
Piden protección en Oaxaca para caravana hacia San Juan Copala
Oaxaca, 7 Jun. (Notimex).- En víspera de la incursión de legisladores del PRD, organizaciones sociales e integrantes del MULTI a San Juan Copala, la Comisión para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos de Oaxaca (CDDHO) giró una medida cautelar a la Secretaría de Seguridad Pública.
Heriberto Antonio García, presidente de la CDDHO, puntualizó que esta medida fue dirigida al titular de dicha dependencia estatal, Javier Rueda Velázquez, a quien se le solicitó la garantía de seguridad para las personas que participan en dicha caravana de observación.
Asimismo, dijo, él y otros ocho funcionarios de la Comisión se trasladarán este lunes a la zona triqui, donde se localiza la agencia de San Juan Copala, a fin de 'tomar conocimiento directo de los hechos'.
Dentro de esta comitiva, precisó, se encuentran el director de Quejas y Orientación, el coordinador de Oficinas Regionales, cinco visitadores adjuntos y el coordinador de Comunicación Social del mismo organismo.
Dijo que 'ha tenido una comunicación estrecha con la Secretaria General de Gobierno, con la de Seguridad Pública de Oaxaca, al igual que con la Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado, para atender los planteamientos de quienes integran la caravana'.
En tanto, la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH) envió a esta ciudad a Alfonso Rodríguez Ochoa, director General de Asuntos Indígenas, y José Baltazar Orea Salazar, visitador adjunto de la Cuarta Visitaduría del mismo organismo.
o445516846339
Nueva York | Lunes 07 de junio de 2010 Notimex | El Universal14:25 1 comentarios
Amnistía Internacional (AI) solicitó hoy al gobierno de México que garantice la seguridad del segundo convoy humanitario que intenta entregar asistencia humanitaria a la comunidad indígena de San Juan Copala, en el estado de Oaxaca.
En un comunicado, la entidad pro derechos humanos también pidió a los grupos armados que impidieron el paso de un primer convoy con asistencia humanitaria que permitan el paso de este segundo cargamento.
'Todos los involucrados deben respetar los derechos humanos y tomar cada paso necesario para asegurar que este convoy pueda proceder esta vez de manera pacífica sin temor a ser atacado', expresó Kerrie Howard, directora alterna de Amnistía Internacional para América.
De acuerdo con el organismo, la comunidad de San Juan Copala vive un virtual estado de sitio debido a que grupos armados ilegales han cortado el paso a la comunidad y han restringido así el acceso de alimentos, electricidad y recursos hídricos.
El 27 de abril, dos activistas humanitarios -la mexicana Beatriz Alberta Cariño y el finlandés Jyri Antero Jaakkola- murieron a manos de grupos armados ilegales cuando intentaban entregar asistencia humanitaria a unas 700 personas de San Juan Copala.
'Los gobiernos federal y estatal deben mostrar su compromiso duradero con el respeto, la protección y el cumplimiento de los derechos de toda la gente de San Juan Copala. Asegurar el tránsito seguro a la comunidad para el convoy humanitario resulta esencial', enfatizó Howard.
Oaxaca, 7 Jun. (Notimex).- En víspera de la incursión de legisladores del PRD, organizaciones sociales e integrantes del MULTI a San Juan Copala, la Comisión para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos de Oaxaca (CDDHO) giró una medida cautelar a la Secretaría de Seguridad Pública.
Heriberto Antonio García, presidente de la CDDHO, puntualizó que esta medida fue dirigida al titular de dicha dependencia estatal, Javier Rueda Velázquez, a quien se le solicitó la garantía de seguridad para las personas que participan en dicha caravana de observación.
Asimismo, dijo, él y otros ocho funcionarios de la Comisión se trasladarán este lunes a la zona triqui, donde se localiza la agencia de San Juan Copala, a fin de 'tomar conocimiento directo de los hechos'.
Dentro de esta comitiva, precisó, se encuentran el director de Quejas y Orientación, el coordinador de Oficinas Regionales, cinco visitadores adjuntos y el coordinador de Comunicación Social del mismo organismo.
Dijo que 'ha tenido una comunicación estrecha con la Secretaria General de Gobierno, con la de Seguridad Pública de Oaxaca, al igual que con la Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado, para atender los planteamientos de quienes integran la caravana'.
En tanto, la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH) envió a esta ciudad a Alfonso Rodríguez Ochoa, director General de Asuntos Indígenas, y José Baltazar Orea Salazar, visitador adjunto de la Cuarta Visitaduría del mismo organismo.
o445516846339
Nueva York | Lunes 07 de junio de 2010 Notimex | El Universal14:25 1 comentarios
Amnistía Internacional (AI) solicitó hoy al gobierno de México que garantice la seguridad del segundo convoy humanitario que intenta entregar asistencia humanitaria a la comunidad indígena de San Juan Copala, en el estado de Oaxaca.
En un comunicado, la entidad pro derechos humanos también pidió a los grupos armados que impidieron el paso de un primer convoy con asistencia humanitaria que permitan el paso de este segundo cargamento.
'Todos los involucrados deben respetar los derechos humanos y tomar cada paso necesario para asegurar que este convoy pueda proceder esta vez de manera pacífica sin temor a ser atacado', expresó Kerrie Howard, directora alterna de Amnistía Internacional para América.
De acuerdo con el organismo, la comunidad de San Juan Copala vive un virtual estado de sitio debido a que grupos armados ilegales han cortado el paso a la comunidad y han restringido así el acceso de alimentos, electricidad y recursos hídricos.
El 27 de abril, dos activistas humanitarios -la mexicana Beatriz Alberta Cariño y el finlandés Jyri Antero Jaakkola- murieron a manos de grupos armados ilegales cuando intentaban entregar asistencia humanitaria a unas 700 personas de San Juan Copala.
'Los gobiernos federal y estatal deben mostrar su compromiso duradero con el respeto, la protección y el cumplimiento de los derechos de toda la gente de San Juan Copala. Asegurar el tránsito seguro a la comunidad para el convoy humanitario resulta esencial', enfatizó Howard.
martes, 1 de junio de 2010
DIP PORFIRIO MUÑOZ LEDO CONDENA ATAQUE
COMISIÓN DE RELACIONES EXTERIORES CÁMARA DE DIPUTADOS MÉXICO
INFORMACION PARA LOS MEDIOS
MARTES 1 DE JUNIO DE 2010
CONDENABLE EL ATAQUE DE LA MARINA ISRAELI A BUQUES CON AYUDA HUMANITARIA A LA FRANJA DE GAZA: DIPUTADO MUÑOZ LEDO.
El Diputado Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Presidente de la Comisión de Relaciones Exteriores de la Cámara de Diputados condenó este mediodía, el ataque en el mar mediterráneo, de la Marina y Ejército israelí contra un convoy de buques que transportaba ayuda humanitaria para la población palestina asentada en la Franja de Gaza.
Es inverosímil la versión oficial del gobierno de Israel, de que el ataque sobre la flotilla humanitaria que “querían violar el cerco marítimo sobre la Franja de Gaza, los soldados israelíes se enfrentaron a una fuerte acción física de los manifestantes, que los atacaron con disparos de fuego, armas blancas y cuchillos (sic), e incluso, secuestraron armas de uno de los activistas”.
La acción de la Marina Israelí que provocó la muerte de por lo menos 20 integrantes de la flotilla humanitaria, es inaceptable toda vez que su arribo y trayecto fue anunciado con toda oportunidad al gobierno de Israel. El barco guía tenía claramente la bandera de Turquía, lo cual constituye una agresióny una declaración de guerra a ese país hermano.
Se abandonan nuestros principios de política exterior contenidos en el art. 89, fracción X de la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, cuando de manera timorata se abstuvo ante Informe Goldstone, presentado en la Comisión de Derechos Humanos de la ONU, que documentó las agresiones de Israel contra la población palestina en la franja de Gaza en enero de 2009.
El Dip. Muñoz Ledo urgió a la comunidad internacional a fin de que se garantice a la mayor brevedad, la creación de un Estado Palestino Independiente y Soberano, con fronteras claramente delimitadas por la ONU, que será contribución a la paz en el Oriente Medio y en el mundo
INFORMACION PARA LOS MEDIOS
MARTES 1 DE JUNIO DE 2010
CONDENABLE EL ATAQUE DE LA MARINA ISRAELI A BUQUES CON AYUDA HUMANITARIA A LA FRANJA DE GAZA: DIPUTADO MUÑOZ LEDO.
El Diputado Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Presidente de la Comisión de Relaciones Exteriores de la Cámara de Diputados condenó este mediodía, el ataque en el mar mediterráneo, de la Marina y Ejército israelí contra un convoy de buques que transportaba ayuda humanitaria para la población palestina asentada en la Franja de Gaza.
Es inverosímil la versión oficial del gobierno de Israel, de que el ataque sobre la flotilla humanitaria que “querían violar el cerco marítimo sobre la Franja de Gaza, los soldados israelíes se enfrentaron a una fuerte acción física de los manifestantes, que los atacaron con disparos de fuego, armas blancas y cuchillos (sic), e incluso, secuestraron armas de uno de los activistas”.
La acción de la Marina Israelí que provocó la muerte de por lo menos 20 integrantes de la flotilla humanitaria, es inaceptable toda vez que su arribo y trayecto fue anunciado con toda oportunidad al gobierno de Israel. El barco guía tenía claramente la bandera de Turquía, lo cual constituye una agresióny una declaración de guerra a ese país hermano.
Se abandonan nuestros principios de política exterior contenidos en el art. 89, fracción X de la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, cuando de manera timorata se abstuvo ante Informe Goldstone, presentado en la Comisión de Derechos Humanos de la ONU, que documentó las agresiones de Israel contra la población palestina en la franja de Gaza en enero de 2009.
El Dip. Muñoz Ledo urgió a la comunidad internacional a fin de que se garantice a la mayor brevedad, la creación de un Estado Palestino Independiente y Soberano, con fronteras claramente delimitadas por la ONU, que será contribución a la paz en el Oriente Medio y en el mundo
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