By Debra Sweet 
ALERT: Street Protests & Die-Ins on the evening President Obama announces the plan to expand the occupation of Afghanistan. That’s the night the media will be looking for response from the people. Get signs and banners ready, and make your gathering plans now.
Whether Barack Obama announces a troop increase to Afghanistan, or chooses the covert operations & unmanned drone option to try to "win" in Afghanistan, we should be in the streets opposing any escalation.
The only acceptable announcement to come from the administration would that they’re withdrawing combat troops, support troops, CIA drones, covert operations, and all private contractors NOW.
The CIA, Obama, and "Targeted Assassination"
When World Can’t Wait began in 2005, we identified a direction under the Bush regime of pre-emptive war and illegitimate occupation that outraged the world. Dick Cheney talked about sweeping up the Middle East, "going massive;" Rumsfeld and Tenet swaggered about the world asserting the right to attack anyone, at anytime. And Bush himself…well, he was on a mission from God, and according to Secretary Rice, "if the President does it, it’s not a crime." People were right to oppose all of this.
Then along came the Obama administration claiming a different approach to the world, one more of negotiation and "multi-laterialism" than bullying and aggression.
But, if you will, watch Leon Panetta, Obama’s Director of Central Intelligence justifying targetted assassination by US operatives — in any country, anywhere. This is not just going "back" to the Bush years, but back to pre-1975 Church commission cover policy. No wonder Hilary Clinton stumbled so badly when trying to assure Congolese youth earlier this year that the US wouldn’t kill Patrice Lumuumba now. She knows the deal!
A little history from Christopher Ketcham’s The Education of Bob Baer: Unlearning the CIA: “Congress under the direction of Sen. Frank Church in 1975-76 issued a devastating series of reports on the criminality of the agency. The CIA had sponsored coups and fixed elections in Greece, Italy, Burma, Indonesia and dozens of other nations.
It had smuggled Nazi war criminals out of Germany to fight communism in Eastern Europe; it worked arm in arm with narcotics traffickers in Asia, Europe, the Middle East (and always seemed to leave behind a thriving drug nexus wherever it intervened); it supplied security forces worldwide with torture equipment, torture manuals, torture training. In Vietnam, its massive Saigon Station oversaw the kidnapping and killing of tens of thousands of suspected Vietcong, many of them innocents, doing a good job of turning the peasant population against the US. The rot came out almost daily as the Church Committee dug it up.
By the late 1970s, the CIA had planned or carried out the assassination of leaders in more than a dozen countries; CIA jokers called this "suicide involuntarily administered," courtesy of the Agency’s "Health Alteration Committee." The agency’s work disrupting governments was often in service of corporations with close ties to Congress and the White House and whose business interests were threatened by anything that smelled of socialism.
The agency had been busy too on the homefront, in violation of domestic law, overseeing mind control programs in which unwitting Americans were poisoned with drugs, experimented upon, effectively tortured; opening the mail of US citizens; surveilling the political activity of Americans; infiltrating the media with disinformation; lying habitually to elected officials. The CIA appeared in this light as a threat to the republic itself.”