Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

I notice that the United States has pretty much "moved on" from the war in Afghanistan.  At least, it thinks it's moved on from it. 

Perhaps the Soviets thought that too when they pulled out, after a war and occupation that lasted only half as long,  But, it's widely recognized that the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan was a major factor in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union.  

Over here, there is still some bickering about how it ended: the final actions that led to the deaths of 13 young Americans. That tragedy was followed by another a few days later when we killed a family of 13, including 10 children. But, that's happened a lot of times throughout the 20 year war. How about the time we killed 30 pistachio nut harvesters? 

So yeah, there is still a little Biden-bashing going on, but that will settle down, and we'll go on thinking that we are the greatest military might on Earth, and we will blank out on how the Afghanistan War came about, which was that we attacked and invaded another country over an extradition- and we didn't even have an extradition treaty with that country! It's the only time that's happened in the history of the world. We demanded bin laden; they said no, but in a nice way and offering alternatives. It's not as though they said: fuck you. But, we responded with: fuck you, and we sent our armada across an ocean and two seas to attack them over an extradition. 

Keep in mind that at the time, there was no court-ordered arrest warrant for bin laden in any country, including ours. He was not wanted by Interpol. Nothing within the U.S. judicial system had been activated to charge him with the crimes of 9/11. It was just a claim of the Bush administration that he was responsible. 

Let's compare it to what is going on right now with Julian Assange. He is in jail in England, stemming from sex charges in another country that got dropped. But, even though they got dropped, and he's not going to be charged with sex crimes in England, he's being charged with skipping bail and evading arrest. And the U.S. wants to extradite him for espionage and more- a big long list of crimes relating to his Wikileaks revelations. But, UK hasn't agreed to extradite him so far, and now that it's been revealed that the Trump administration considered assassinating him- the way they savagely assassinated Solemani- his lawyers are obviously going to use that to get the Brits to refuse the extradition. 

It just might work, and what are we going to do if it does? Bomb and invade England? No. We're not going to do anything but bellyache. 

Look at all the years we tried to extradite Roman Polanski, and from several countries, including Poland, Switzerland, and France. Not one of them would do it. Did we invade? No, of course not. And those countries we had extradition treaties with. 

International law does not allow a country to attack and invade another country over an extradition. And in this case, there were no formal charges against bin laden: just lipflapping from the Bush administration. 

The point is that the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan was a crime from the beginning. We had no right, no justification, no legal basis to do it. There is no basis to think that the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11, and there is no basis to think that Osama bin laden had anything to do with 9/11 either, since the only "evidence" against him that has ever been put forward is the video tape of (F)atty bin laden (a different guy).

So, the U.S. may want to move on from the Afghanistan disaster, but it may not be able to. The consequences have only begun to be felt from what we did: a 20 year murderous rampage, marked mostly by the numerous times we had to apologize for killing civilians. 

This war has been a disaster for our reputation as a civilized country, and also for our reputation as a military force. We have only just begun to feel the consequences of it.