Canada's Dreadful Performance in Kabul Reveals the Pathetic Character of This Government

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Kevin Newman: Kabul shows the unflattering truth:

Canada is slow, risk-averse and selfish

While French commandos in buses got their people out, we sent texts (in English)

telling our friends to head to the airport on their own

By: Kevin Newman

It was a brazen move the first time, but twice?

Ten buses screamed out of France’s embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off. 

And then it happened again on Thursday, four buses this time, under the guard of French special forces. As with the first convoy, Paris newspapers reported the buses carried French nationals stranded in Kabul, and hundreds of Afghans and their families the French embassy had given shelter to since before the Taliban roared into and re-occupied the city. Two ballsy airlifts took them to safety at a French military base in the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of desperate people were given a hot meal, questioned about their identities and had their documents confirmed. Most were then sent on to Paris, where they received physical and mental-health support as well as cash, clothing, and places to stay as they begin their new lives.

On those same days in Kabul, another country tried to rescue its citizens and hundreds of Afghan interpreters and their families hiding throughout the city. I’ve pieced together what happened to them from texts and video Canadian veterans have been receiving every hour from people they know in Kabul, and I am sharing them with permission. I have verified each of these facts (from the peace of Canada) with multiple sources on the ground. 

Kevin Newman

There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people. Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. 

They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else. 

Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them. 

It hadn’t. It never existed. Later that night another set of blasts went out again telling Afghans to move on their own to the airport. This time they were told to shout “Canada”  and hope a soldier would hear them and help them through the airport gates. Taliban guards could hear them as well there, which would ensure that the target on their backs they had been trying to hide came completely into focus. 

Two countries, two very different experiences for terrified Afghans, both on the same day. We’ll never know if some of those brave and desperate people didn’t make it through alive with all that futile moving back and forth to the airport in a city surrounded by Taliban. All we know for certain is none of more than one thousand people on the Canadian veterans’ list made it to freedom on Thursday, as France’s evacuees whisked past.

That very same day, Justin Trudeau blamed the Taliban for making it impossible to do better. “Unless the Taliban shift their posture significantly — which is something the international community and Canada are working on — it's going to be very difficult to get many people out,” the Liberal leader said.

But how did France do it? Well, it likely helped that they still had diplomats and military advisors in Kabul to negotiate (maybe bribe?) the Taliban to provide safe passage for their hundreds of refugees. All of our allies had eyes and boots on the ground this week at Kabul’s airport. Canada did not. It closed its embassy and withdrew all its diplomats and military by jet to Ottawa just as the Taliban was rolling into town. The government left no one behind to talk to the Taliban, or our allies, as they organized and negotiated the rescue of thousands. 

Which left the handful of Canadian soldiers who finally returned late Thursday with little if any advance work to rely on. They started from scratch. Their only options were to ask for a lot of very large favours from the thousands of American and British soldiers who had been busy all week rescuing thousands of their own nationals and Afghans. Alliances are meant to share burdens. Canada, in Kabul this week, was only a taker.

We had already given up on about a thousand Afghans in Kandahar who had been allies during our military mission and were in various stages of completing the onerous and complex immigration paperwork for Canada. Those who escaped to Kabul for rescue tried to blend in, 800 of them in safe houses organized by Canadian veterans and funded with donations from concerned Canadians. Public appeals from retired generals and many other ex-soldiers to provide valuable intel they were receiving were largely dismissed, so as a country we had no situational awareness of our own to develop a plan, and rejected the only source of it — from Afghans we trained and veterans who still live and work there. We asked other countries to give us their homework instead.

These early days of this massive rescue effort by Western countries revealed some unflattering aspects of our national character. Canada has been slow to react, risk-averse and selfish. We’ve relied on our neighbours more than each other, turned our backs on thousands who’d proved their loyalty to us, and even blamed criminals for our inability to protect people we know are in real fear of being murdered. Our leaders have declared they wished they could have done more, but gosh, the Taliban won’t let us. Trudeau then batted aside suggestions the IRCC paperwork with its requirement for passport, biometric fingerprints and digital photographs had delayed everything. By Friday afternoon that nonsense was finally dropped. The airport chaos and confusion at the gates grew more alarming.

It was always going to be difficult to leave Afghanistan, but most other countries were a lot more successful at saving thousands of desperate people this week. Canada’s specific evacuation list from Kabul isn’t being revealed by the government, but veterans tracking it say as of Friday afternoon said those who defied the odds and made it onto a flight — any flight — could be counted on two hands. There are still days to try something else and hopefully better. But not many.

Kevin Newman is a retired journalist who reported from Afghanistan. He has been helping the veteran volunteer network trying to save their interpreters and families.

NGO: U.S. Lost Track of 3/4 of a Million Guns in Afghanistan, Iraq

I am convinced that if Americans didn't sell guns, either legally or on the black market, or give them to others to sell on the black market, for two consecutive days, that their entire economy would collapse.

How many Americans and American allies have died or been

wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan by weapons made in the USA?

Does anybody know? Does anybody care?

Ceerwan Aziz-Pool/Getty Images

by EDWIN MORA

The Pentagon has lost track of at least 750,000 guns it provided to security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq during 14 years of the ongoing war on terror in response to the 9/11 attacks, according to a tally by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a London-based charity.

The lost weapons could be fueling the black market, reports The New York Times (NYT).

NYT explains:

With a string of Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests that began last year, he [Overton] and his small team of researchers pooled 14 years’ worth of Pentagon contract information related to rifles, pistols, machine guns and their associated attachments and ammunition, both for American troops and for their partners and proxies. They then crosschecked the data against other public records.

The outlet also states:

Today the Pentagon has only a partial idea of how many weapons it issued, much less where these weapons are. Meanwhile, the effectively bottomless abundance of black-market weapons from American sources is one reason Iraq will not recover from its post-invasion woes anytime soon.

The charity’s research covered U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) data from September 11, 2001, thru September 10, 2015.

AOAV found that of an estimated 1.45 million guns the U.S. government gave to Iraq and Afghanistan over that period, the Pentagon could only account for 700,000 (48 percent).

The 1.45 million small arms included more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols, and almost 112,000 machine guns.

AOAV reports:

This [700,000] only accounts for 48% of the total small arms supplied by the US government found in open source government reports.

Such shortfalls highlights [sic] the lack of accountability, transparency and joined up data that exists at the very heart of the US government’s weapon procurement and distribution systems. AOAV’s findings are backed up by previous reviews. For instance, a US Government Accountability Office [GAO] report from 2007 found the US government had issued at least 185,000 AK47s procured for Iraq between 2004 and 2005 alone. Another 5,000 AK47s were recorded as being sent to Iraq in a US Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO) request report in 2015. And yet, the DoD only claims 22,249 rifles of 7.62mm calibre were sent to Iraq. As the DoD pointed out, their data does not include weapons that were provided by the Department of Defense to the security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan without using the Foreign Military Sales system.

A 2014 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report also found, that in Afghanistan, 43% (or 203,888) of US funded small arms had duplicate or incomplete records.

NYT received an email from Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman, trying to explain the estimated 750,000 gap between the DoD’s count of 700,000 and the researcher’s tally of 1.45 million.

Wright wrote, “Speed was essential in getting those nations’ security forces armed, equipped and trained to meet these extreme challenges. As a result, lapses in accountability of some of the weapons transferred occurred.”

The spokesman noted that the Pentagon has improved its oversight and that to ensure “that equipment is only used for authorized purposes,” its representatives “inventory each weapon as it arrives in country and record the distribution of the weapon to the foreign partner nation.”

NYT points out:

Overton’s analysis also does not account for many weapons issued by the American military to local forces by other means, including the reissue of captured weapons, which was a common and largely undocumented practice.

Adding to the suspicion that the number is even larger, Overton is certain that his tally missed shipments, because the data that the Defense Department made available was incomplete or laden with contradictions that were not readily reconciled.

Insanity reigns supreme in arms manufacturing! 'Just keep that inventory moving boys.'

Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel

How 4 heroes who escaped Auschwitz

told the world of the atrocities

The following is the raw story of the effect of four men who escaped from Auschwitz to tell the world about Hitler's final solution. Their stories came out of research done by Joel C. Rosenberg for his book Escape from Auschwitz.


Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were Slovak Jews. They escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944.

Arnost Rosin was also a Slovak Jew. Czeslaw Mordowicz was a Polish Jew. Together they escaped from Auschwitz on May 27, 1944.

Upon making it safely to Czechoslovakia, Vrba, only 19 years old, and Wetzler, 25, linked up with the Jewish underground. They explained Auschwitz was not simply a labor camp, as most thought, but rather a death camp. The Nazis were systematically murdering prisoners, mostly Jews, using poison gas called “Zyklon B,” then burning their bodies in enormous ovens.

The men explained the Nazis were dramatically enlarging an expansion camp a few miles from Auschwitz called “Birkenau,” building new train tracks, enormous new gas chambers, and massive new crematoria. They had also completed ramps leading all those arriving in the cattle cars directly into the gas chambers.

Vrba and Wetzler said they had heard SS guards talking about Hungarian “salami” that would soon be arriving. They knew from their jobs as clerks in the camp that none of Hungary’s nearly 450,000 Jews had yet arrived, even though Jews from most of Europe had come already.

They urged the Czech Jewish leaders to warn Hungarian Jews immediately so they would revolt and not get on the trains. They also urged that the Allied leaders be notified so they would mount an operation to liberate Auschwitz.

Both men were asked to separately draft detailed eyewitness reports. Their reports were then cross-checked, compiled into a single report, and then simultaneously translated into multiple languages.

Eventually, Mordowicz, 23, and Rosin, 30, escaped as well. When they got to Czechoslovakia, they wrote up reports of their own, which were added to the existing document. But all this took precious time the Hungarian Jews did not have.

The report, known as “The Auschwitz Protocol,” was sent to Jewish and Allied leaders in early June 1944. Excerpts were leaked to the press, creating an international uproar. But the Germans had begun deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in massive numbers on May 15th. And “The Auschwitz Protocol” landed in the hands of President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their top aides just as the Allies were executing the D-Day invasion of Normandy and trying to liberate France.

On July 2nd, the U.S. began bombing Budapest. Admiral Miklos Horthy’s, the Nazi-backed Regent of Hungary, feared the air raid was in reprisal for the Jewish deportations. He ordered the trains halted. Thus, while, more than 300,000 Hungarian Jews had already been sent to Auschwitz and gassed, 120,000 more Hungarian Jews were saved from deportation and certain death.

Sir Martin Gilbert, the British historian, would later note, “The Auschwitz Protocol” was responsible for “the largest single greatest rescue of Jews in the Second World War.”

That said, neither the U.S. nor the British military took direct action to liberate Auschwitz during the war. Nor did they bomb the train lines to the death camps, or bomb the camps themselves, as Jewish leaders had implored.

When the Soviets finally entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, only 7,000 prisoners remained alive. More than 1.1 million had already been exterminated.

Why didn’t Washington and London take decisive action upon receiving detailed, inside intelligence? Couldn’t they have at least tried to stop the Holocaust, or at least disrupt it, knowing the hellish nightmare people in the camps were experiencing?

Historians have been debating this for years.

The moral courage that Rudolf Vrba, Alfred Wetzler, Arnost Rosin, and Czeslaw Mordowicz demonstrated seventy years ago was extraordinary. They understood the nature and threat of evil, and they risked their lives to tell the world the truth.

They deserve to be remembered and heralded by Jews and Christians and all who care about freedom and human dignity.

We must never forget what they did, and why they did it. But we must also be ready to act wisely, bravely and decisively if a mortal threat rises again. For if we learn nothing else from the history of the Holocaust, we had better learn this: Evil, unchecked, is the prelude to genocide.


Joel C. Rosenberg is a New York Times best-selling author of novels and non-fiction books about the Middle East. His latest political thriller, The Third Target, centers on an ISIS plot to attack the U.S., Israel and Jordan.

Now It Begins - Obama's Abandonment of Israel

For years I have been saying that President Obama will abandon Israel when the US is needed most by its ally. Today he took the first step down that path by throwing Israel to the pariahs at the United Nations Human Rights Council. 

The question is: Is this a one-off temper tantrum meant to put Netanyahu in his place, or is it meant to punish the Jewish people for re-electing him, or is it part of a strategy leading to complete abandonment of Israel when it is attacked in full-scale war intended to annihilate the country? As inconceivable as it seems, I believe the last scenario is in play. 

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon speaks during a session of the UNHRC

Pamela Geller

For the first time in modern Israel’s history, the United States has abandoned our ally at the notoriously antisemitic United Nations.

It’s a whole new terrible paradigm. And it isn’t hard to anticipate how the world will react, once it recovers from the shock of such unprecedented betrayal. This is a new reality, unlike anything that has come before. Nothing good can come from America abandoning her closest allies, especially now when the world is embroiled in jihad wars across the world. It’s like cutting off your lungs to spite your breath.

Israel has called for the entire UNHRC inquiry to be shelved over the bias displayed at the UN body.

The Jewish state is the only country in the world with a special agenda item dedicated to it, meaning its rights record is discussed at every session of the UN’s top rights body.

Let me be clear: the United Nations Human Rights Council is a bloody joke. Literally. Their hypocrisy is legendary. This time last year, Prime Minister Netanyahu said this regarding the United Nations Human Rights Council “absurdly” condemning Israel in five resolutions in one week last March while censuring Syria and Iran only once.

“This march of hypocrisy is continuing and we will continue to condemn it and expose it,” he told his cabinet at the start of its weekly meeting in Jerusalem.

“The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC ) condemned Israel five times, this at a time when the slaughter in Syria is continuing, innocent people are being hanged in the Middle East and human rights are being eroded,” he said.

“In many countries free media are being shut down and the UN Human Rights Council decides to condemn Israel for closing off a balcony. This is absurd,” said Netanyahu.

I'm missing something, can anyone help me with the 'balcony' reference?

And now with Obama’s perfidy and betrayal, it’s open season on the Jews.

US Won’t Defend Israel at UNHRC, Israel Boycotts

Unprecedented step at 47-member state forum where Washington has always defended Israel; Israel skips special session against it.

Love

By Gil Ronen, Sarah Leah Lawent, Israel National News, 3/23/2015

The United States will not take the floor at the main U.N. human rights forum on Monday during the annual debate on violations committed in the Palestinian territories, a US spokesman told Reuters.

The step is unprecedented. The UNHRC is a notoriously anti-Israel forum where Washington has always defended Israel.

Asked for an explanation, a spokesman said only that the US ambassador to the council Keith Harper was in Washington.

The Obama administration has said in recent days that it is undertaking a “reassessment” of relations with the Jewish state.

“The U.S. delegation will not be speaking about Palestine today,” a U.S. spokesman in Geneva told Reuters in response to a question as the debate began. He declined further comment.

Earlier this month, US Secretary of State John Kerry defended Israel before the UNHRC, urging its members to end its blatant bias towards the Jewish state.

In a speech denouncing human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria and North Korea, Kerry spoke about what he said is the council’s “deeply concerning record on Israel.” He stated, “no one in this room can deny that there is an unbalanced focus on one democratic country.” Kerry criticized the council for having criticism of Israel as part of its permanent agenda.

Israeli response?

In a possible response to the American move, Israel’s representative did not take part in the UNHRC special session on Monday.

A source close to the UNHRC council said the absence amounted to a boycott, although a spokeswoman with the Israeli mission in Geneva told AFP “we won’t comment on that.”

Monday’s session had originally been scheduled to discuss a probe on the 50-day war in Gaza last year, but the investigators obtained a delay after the head of the team quit after Israel revealed he had previously consulted for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist group.

“The process cannot be rushed,” former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis, who has taken over as head of the “war crimes” probe, told the council. Davis previously was part of the controversial 2009 Goldstone Report – even Judge Richard Goldstone, who led the committee, later retracted the core accusation of “war crimes” leveled in the report.

Canadian international law expert William Schabas resigned as chair of the Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict last month after Israel complained he could not be impartial because he had prepared a legal opinion for the PLO in October 2012, aside from a long history of anti-Israel bias he had voiced in numerous forums.

UNHRC attacks Israel yet again

Israel has called for the entire UNHRC inquiry to be shelved over the bias displayed at the UN body.

The Jewish state is the only country in the world with a special agenda item dedicated to it, meaning its rights record is discussed at every session of the UN’s top rights body.

Its absence Monday does not mark the first time it has boycotted the council.

It cut all ties with the council in March 2012 over its plans to probe how Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria were “harming Palestinian rights,” and did not resume relations until late 2013.

Monday’s session came after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party soundly defeated Labor last week.

Most other western nations were absent from the meeting on Monday as well, with Pakistan’s representative speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and complaining that it was “a deliberate attempt to undermine the credibility of the Human Rights Council.”

Although the report on the 2014 Gaza war investigation was delayed until June, the UN’s new Special Rapporteur on the situation in the Palestinian territories did not hold back from criticism against Israel at the meeting.

“The ferocity of destruction and high proportion of civilian lives lost in Gaza cast serious doubts over Israel’s adherence to international humanitarian law principles of proportionality, distinction and precautions in attack,” Makarim Wibisono claimed to the council.

Proportionality is an absurd concept - you are only allowed to hit back as hard as you were hit! Meanwhile, your enemy is digging miles and miles of tunnels and stock-piling thousands of bombs preparing for an invasion from which you cannot strike back.

The distribution of leaflets, text messages, phone calls that IDF made before demolishing a building was amazing. I have never heard of such a thing.

He lamented “acute” needs in Gaza, warning that Israel’s continued “blockade keeps Gaza in a strangle hold which does not even allow people to help themselves.”

Since the blockade of Gaza, Hamas has been able to import thousands and thousands of missiles and found the money to build many miles of concrete reinforced tunnels. If they can smuggle in thousands of missiles, they can smuggle in pretty much anything the people need. But their priority is not rebuilding Gaza. They care not one bit for the people of Gaza, only for the destruction of Israel.

Despite his words, 49% of Israeli strikes in the war with the Hamas terrorist organization that deeply embedded in civilian infrastructure were terrorists, meaning the Jewish state achieved a 1:1 ratio of combatants to civilians almost unprecedented in urban warfare.

In contrast, a report last November revealed 96.5% of those killed by US drone strikes in the Middle East were civilians.