October, 31 2008, 04:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Managing Editor Pratap [at] corpwatch.org, Global Mobile: +1-202-580-8393
Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch Project Director tonya [at] corpwatch.org, 510 271-8080, 650 273-2475
Sasha Lilley, KPFA Program Director ipd [at] kpfa.org, 510 848-6767 ext 209
CorpWatch and KPFA Radio Launch "Afghanistan 2008: Seven Years After the Taliban" Multimedia Project Collaboration
Seven years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, the country faces an increasingly uncertain future. Award-winning investigative journalists Pratap Chatterjee and Nobu Sakamoto, reported from Afghanistan immediately following the invasion, and now return to the country as part of a CorpWatch/KPFA Radio collaboration to take stock.
WASHINGTON
Seven years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, the country faces an increasingly uncertain future. Award-winning investigative journalists Pratap Chatterjee and Nobu Sakamoto, reported from Afghanistan immediately following the invasion, and now return to the country as part of a CorpWatch/KPFA Radio collaboration to take stock.
"As the United States moves towards perhaps the most critical presidential election in decades, this project aims to bring a spotlight back to both the human cost of war being borne by the Afghan people, and the gross incompetence that has plagued the reconstruction effort here - at significant profit to private military companies like the Louis Berger Group, Dyncorp, and Espial," said CorpWatch project director Tonya Hennessey.
In 2006, Afghan American journalist Fariba Nawa returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction, detailed in the CorpWatch report "Afghanistan, Inc." The findings were tragically disheartening. In 2008, initial observations and interviews show that the situation has continued to deteriorate.
"The reconstruction of Afghanistan has definitely not met expectations. Our research is intended to discover why things have gone wrong and what happened to the money provided for Afghan development," says Pratap Chatterjee, KPFA reporter and CorpWatch Managing Editor and author of "Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation".
In 2007, America's first listener-sponsored radio station KPFA launched the interactive website Warcomeshome.org, featuring hard-hitting stories about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as innovative means of contributing to, and distributing information about, the impact of the conflict on people in the United States. "Afghanistan 2008: Seven Years After the Taliban," is the newest phase of the project, the contents of which are now part of the permanent collection of the U.S. Library of Congress.
"Seven years after the US and its allies invaded, Afghanistan has become the forgotten occupation," says KPFA Program Director Sasha Lilley. "KPFA's War Comes Home project had previously told the story of the costs of the occupation for U.S. soldiers. Yet even more significant are the costs for the Afghan people."
In the spirit of CorpWatch's hard-hitting investigative journalism and KPFA's tradition of media innovation, Warcomeshome.org allows visitors to listen to and share stories about the consequences of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, using their own blogs, email lists, and social networking sites. The website features a blog by Chatterjee, as well as audio interviews, photos, video, and resources for activists.
To learn more about "The War Comes Home: Seven Years After the Taliban," go to www.Warcomeshome.org
LATEST NEWS
Top Brazilian Official Warns Trump of 'Vietnam-Style' Regional Conflict If He Attacks Venezuela
"The last thing we want is for South America to become a war zone," said Celso Amorim, chief foreign policy adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Dec 08, 2025
A top Brazilian official is warning President Donald Trump that a US military attack on Venezuela could easily spiral out of control into a "Vietnam-style" regional conflict.
Celso Amorim, chief foreign policy adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said in an interview published on Monday by the Guardian that a US military strike on Venezuela would inevitably draw nations throughout Latin America into an armed conflict that would be difficult to contain.
"The last thing we want is for South America to become a war zone—and a war zone that would inevitably not just be a war between the US and Venezuela," he said. "It would end up having global involvement and this would be really unfortunate."
Amorim added that "if there was an invasion, a real invasion [of Venezuela]... I think undoubtedly you would see something similar to Vietnam—on what scale it’s impossible to say."
While acknowledging that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is disliked by many other South American leaders, Amorim predicted that even some of Maduro's adversaries would rally to his side in the face of destabilizing military actions by the US government.
He also predicted that anti-US sentiment would surge throughout the continent in the event of an invasion, as there is still major resentment toward the US for backing right-wing military coups during the Cold War in Chile, Brazil, and other nations.
"I know South America," he emphasized. "Our whole continent exists because of resistance against foreign invaders."
The Trump administration in recent weeks has signaled that it plans to launch attacks against purported drug traffickers inside Venezuela, even though reports from the US government and the United Nations have not identified Venezuela as a significant source of drugs that enter the United States.
The administration has also accused Maduro of leading an international drug trafficking organization called the Cartel de los Soles, despite many experts saying that they have seen no evidence that such an organization formally exists.
Trump late last month further escalated tensions with Venezuela when he declared that airspace over the nation was "closed in its entirety," even though he lacks any legal authority to enforce such a decree.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that Maduro is remaining defiant in the face of US pressure, as he is refusing to go into exile despite the threat of an attack on his country.
According to the Post's sources, Maduro's inner circle of allies "shows no signs of imminent collapse," even as he has limited his public appearances and beefed up his personal security amid fears that he could be the target of an assassination attempt.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Mike Johnson Touts $901 Billion Military Budget Plan After Gutting Medicaid, SNAP
"At such a time, bipartisan agreement to provide additional funds to the Pentagon would deliver a cruel message to the American public," advocacy groups warned.
Dec 08, 2025
Republican congressional leaders unveiled a sprawling military policy bill late Sunday that would authorize $901 billion in US military spending for the coming fiscal year, just months after GOP lawmakers and President Donald Trump pushed through the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who aggressively pushed cuts to Medicaid by peddling false claims of large-scale fraud, touted the 3,086-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as legislation that would "ensure our military forces remain the most lethal in the world."
The bill, a compromise between House and Senate versions of the annual legislation, would authorize $8 billion more in US military spending than Trump asked for in his 2026 budget request.
If passed, the 2026 NDAA would pump billions of dollars more into the Pentagon, a cesspool of the kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse that Johnson and other Republicans claim to be targeting when they cut safety net programs, stripping health insurance and food aid from millions. The Pentagon has never passed an independent audit and continues to have "significant fraud exposure," the Government Accountability Office said earlier this year.
"The surge in Pentagon spending stands in sharp contrast to the drastic cuts in healthcare and food assistance programs imposed by the reconciliation package."
Final passage of the NDAA would push total military spending authorized by Congress this year above $1 trillion, including the $150 billion in Pentagon funds included in the Trump-GOP budget law enacted over the summer.
Last month, as Common Dreams reported, a coalition of watchdog and anti-war groups implored Congress not to approve any funding above the originally requested $892.6 billion, warning that additional money for the Pentagon would enable the Trump administration's lawless use of the military in US streets and overseas.
The groups also noted that "the surge in Pentagon spending stands in sharp contrast to the drastic cuts in healthcare and food assistance programs imposed by the reconciliation package."
"At such a time," they wrote in a letter to lawmakers, "bipartisan agreement to provide additional funds to the Pentagon would deliver a cruel message to the American public, one out of step with Democratic messaging over healthcare, reconciliation, and the shutdown."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Billionaire Palantir Co-Founder Pushes Return of Public Hangings as Part of 'Masculine Leadership' Initiative
"Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age," said one critic in response.
Dec 07, 2025
Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data platform company Palantir, is calling for the return of public hangings as part of a broader push to restore what he describes as "masculine leadership" to the US.
In a statement posted on X Friday, Lonsdale said that he supported changing the so-called "three strikes" anti-crime law to ensure that anyone who is convicted of three violent crimes gets publicly executed, rather than simply sent to prison for life.
"If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law," he wrote. "We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others."
Lonsdale then added that "our society needs balance," and said that "it's time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable."
Lonsdale's views on public hangings being necessary to restore "masculine leadership" drew swift criticism.
Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter "The Nerd Reich," argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale's call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are "entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization."
"For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump's authoritarian rule," Durán explained. "Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale."
Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.
"A point of nuance here: 'masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable' is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions," he observed.
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale's remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.
"Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age," he wrote.
Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.
"Well, Joe, Mark Zuckerberg has sole control over Facebook, which directly enabled the Rohingya genocide," he wrote. "So let’s have the conversation."
And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing "thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular