November 2, 2009 journal, what difference does one man make by resigning in Afghan. All the difference in the world when he is smart and he can talk expressing the situation. A young junior diplomat in the State Department has resigned over U.S. Afghan policy in killing without cause saying we are accomplishing nothing more than being the cause of the problem. I could not agree with him more. He appeared for the first time today on the cable talk circuit. I hope the president listens to him because he makes more sense than the generals. We simply need to come home from Afghanistan & every other nation. His name is Matthew Hoh and he was an American marine captain who served in Iraq. Hoh is 36 and his resignation has shaken the Pentagon. Richard Holbrooke pleaded with him to stay on offering him a top position on his staff in Afghanistan but he still declined. We have been fighting & killing so long we have actually forgot why we are over there. The following article appeared in The Washington Post -"When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed. But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency. "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end." The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay. U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan . "We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him." While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight," Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis." He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that "if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure," why not be "inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won't have the same political impact?" Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later. "I recognize the career implications, but it wasn't the right thing to do," he said in an interview Friday, two days after his resignation became final. I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the "second-best job I've ever had," his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve. "There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys." But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war." It was the same thing in Iraq. Someone commenting on the TV said we are being judge and jury killing people in war without a trial. What kind of a mad government have we become that fires in the dark? Who are the renegades that call up destitute people trying to collect money out of them? The money scavengers operate 7 days per week and their weapon is to torture to death. It is announced that the Guantanamo Bay inmates will receive the flu shot before most. I do say that is one way of getting rid of those terrorist is to give them all our flu shots. If I were the president I would call Saudia Arabia to send a 747 to take them all back. In court there is a term summary judgment meaning final judgment or liquidation which is how I term the stuation of the United States currently in summary judgment-finished. The termination of this empire has been coming on for a long time by greed gone to seed in banks and corporations. Last Friday 9 more banks were closed and gobbled up by some other banks the Fed putting up new money to support the failed bank when it may just be one bank gobbling up another bank for the sake of winning in the big bank game. I say stop the war and killing and stop terminating banks. If a bank needs money they can get it silently from the Fed. The savings and loan banks could have collected nearly all their money had they been left alone to do so & not summary sold off at 5¢ on the dollar. The Titanic was not too big to sink and America is not too big to fail with C I T the fifth largest bankruptcy in America taking place taking down $2.2 billion bailout down with it. Ford Motor the oldest car company in the world boast of profits but owes $40 billion. What is there left to sell but kidneys to the Japanese for a $1 million each transplant? Matthew Hoh is absolutely right and the first high-level official to sacrifice his career for right. I pray this may be the turning point to bring the troops home out of Afghanistan and Iraq. I look for the military now to speak out more boldly against military massacre. It is high time for these bloody wars to stop even though it will probably be the dollar. It has taken 8 years for the Republican Party to completely destroy itself and continue to destroy itself until now there may be hope for Ron Paul to come back as independent. The Republican candidate in upstate New York quit the race 48 hours before election and endorsed the Democratic candidate for the first time in history. There seems to be a new Conservative Party on the rise out of the tea baggers.