Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, November 29, 2009

Still More bin Laden BS

Commentary By Ron Beasley



There are many things you can blame the Bush administration for but not capturing Osama bin Laden is not one of them.



Senate Report Explores 2001 Escape by bin Laden From Afghan Mountains

As President Obama vows to �finish the job� in Afghanistan by sending more troops, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has completed a detailed look back at a crucial failure early in the battle against Al Qaeda: the escape of Osama bin Laden from American forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001.

�Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,� the committee�s report concludes. �But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.�

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military�s Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden�s escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

The report blames the lapse for �laying the foundation for today�s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.�

As I discussed here Osama bin Laden was probably dead before the US invasion of Afghanistan according to David Ray Griffen.

His conclusion is that bin Laden is certainly dead, and that in all
likelihood he died in very late 2001. Griffin shows that many US
experts in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency came to this very
same conclusion long ago, but their views, which do not support the
continuation of what President Obama, borrowing the term from Dick
Cheney, calls �the long war,� have received very little media
attention. Were they to do so, one of the main props for the war regime
would be undermined.

Osama bin Laden was the bogey man - the villain - the Bush administration needed to justify their wars so he was kept "alive" when everyone knew he was dead.  As we have seen little has changed since Obama took over and a dead man is still being used to justify a war that can't be justified.  They people that produced the above report know that he's dead which qualifies the report as a lie.



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