Tag: War on terror

My Light Bulb Moment


I was really trying my damnest to understand what was the motive behind the 1225 terror attack on the airliner besides the obvious of scaring the bejesus out of citizens and turning up the hatred of people towards Muslims and people of color.  I was right in that regard but I had a momentary lapse and didn’t extend the argument to the logical conclusion.  The intent of this attack was to make it possible for  the government to scare people enough to willing hand over  more of their rights and freedom.

After a recent attempted terrorist attack set off a debate about full-body X-rays at airports, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll finds that Americans lean more toward giving up some of their liberty in exchange for more safety.The survey found 51 percent of Americans agreeing that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.”

…………………………

To stop terrorists, Americans look first to better governmental coordination and use of intelligence, the poll found, with 81 percent calling that effective and only 11 percent calling it ineffective.

Body scans or full body searches at airports ranked second, named by 74 percent as an effective way to stop terrorism. Nineteen percent called those measures ineffective.

Further restrictions on carry-on baggage ranked third, called effective by 57 percent, ineffective by 34 percent.

New in-flight restrictions such as banning the use of laptops and electronic equipment or restricting people to their seats ranked last, called effective by 50 percent and ineffective by 42 percent.

In other words this is the Obama administration’s attempt at picking up where the Bush administration left off in a somewhat kinder and gentler manner.  Change anyone??  Hand in hand with that is this bit of terrifying news about what could possibly happen to American citizens.  If you want to know what’s in store for you after you have so blindly handed over you rights as an American citizen read the story of Syed Fahad Hashmi, who like Jose Padilla another American citizen, has been brutalized by the government and had his citizenship discarded and ignored.  I wonder if all the tea baggers and birthers know about or feel any kinship with these two American citizens?

Liar, Liar, pants on fire! The NYT and its yellow journalism


We’ve chronicled many places here on the pages of Miscellany101 how the New York Times has been used by it’s racist, Islamophobic elites to falsely and misleadingly  incite public passions against the Muslim minority for the sake of public dissension and war, and they are at it again!  I really don’t understand how newspapers can keep finding harlots to lie and prostitute themselves for the good of the established elites but they somehow manage to keep up a pretty good stable of men and women willing to dispense and even take the kool-aid laced ethnic, religious and racial bigotry that keeps our country fueled for war.   This latest blunder began with  Elisabeth Bumiller’s piece that appeared in the NYT in May of  last year that erroneously stated a high recidivism rate among Guantanamo detainees.  Making stuff wholesale out of sack cloth and ashes Bumiller, like her predecessor, Judith Miller, created a story that was picked up and run with by the likes of Dick Darth Vader Cheney in such a blatant disregard for reality that even the NYT had to backtrack, retract and mea culpa themselves out of another embarrassing situation.

……the article on which he based that statement was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed. It demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.The article seemed to adopt the Pentagon’s contention that freed prisoners had “returned” to terrorism, ignoring independent reporting by the Times and   others that some of them may not have been involved in terrorism before but were radicalized at Guantánamo. It failed to distinguish between former prisoners suspected of new acts of terrorism — more than half the cases — and those supposedly confirmed to have rejoined jihad against the West. Had only confirmed cases been considered, one in seven would have changed to one in 20.

Unfortunately, the NYT lied to us the public again.  Yes, their article was seriously flawed alright…..so much so that they decided to run it again and by the same person!  What’s worse, the Times buried this caveat deep in the article, “the White House had ‘been presented with no information that suggests that any of the detainees transferred by this administration have returned to the fight'” which appeared at the very bottom of the page, in the tenth paragraph of a twelve  paragraph piece.  Why is the NYT so intent in promoting war in as distant and remote a place as Yemen?  Do they think such a misadventure will increase their circulation at a time when advertising dollars and bureau budgets are tight?  Not hardly.  The NYT has an explicit interest like most of the other security consultants, analysts, contractors and assorted acronymed groups in keeping this Nation at war because if it’s not profitable for some of them, it’s profitable for others who in turn trickle down the profits they get from deceiving government and the Nation to fight in far away places.  It’s the old you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours symbiosis of truth, warfare and lies.  The NYT is pretty good at making that a seamless transition.  They’ve been doing it for far too long.

Guantanamo Bay-Terrorist Training Ground


Guantanamo Bay will most likely go down as the place which housed the most terrorist we ever faced in our war on terror, the phony war started  by George Bush, and those terrorists were US personnel who engaged in torture and even murder.  The latest news that three suicides and the resulting investigation was so botched as to lead to more questions than answers can only lead one to the conclusion that the “suicides” were indeed murder and lead to other questions of how many other deaths at Gitmo were at the hands of the captors and not the captive.  The facts from the only independent study conducted are three detainees were found swinging at the end of a ligature in their closely guarded cells with rags stuffed in their throats and one “suicide” victim had his internal organs, heart and kidneys and throat removed before his body was interred.
The removal of internal organs closely dovetails into another story we’ve covered in the pages of Miscellany101 as it regards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who’ve died at the hands of their terrorist captors. That is scary enough, the parallel universe that seems to pervade all that the American and Israeli authorities do to Arab, semitic and Muslim peoples the world over; however, the lengths at which authorities went to blame even the victims for their murder at the hands of those same authorities (for how can a man both hang himself, stuff rags in his own throat and remained undetected for several hours long enough for rigor mortis to develop in a cell that was under 24 hour scrutiny by security guards because said occupant of the cell possessed the super human capability to break loose over power his guards and eventually find his way to the US mainland to wreak further havoc on innocent Americans) is a further nail in the coffin of US legitimacy and credibility.

Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair. “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said. “They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

Or how about this wildly insane comment from a former Bush Administration official who seemed to have the intent correct, i.e. publicity, although assigning it incorrectly to the victims

“It does sound like this is part of a strategy – in that they don’t value their own lives, and they certainly don’t value ours; and they use suicide bombings as a tactic,” Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told BBC’s Newshour yesterday. “Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good PR move.”

What Guantanamo Bay became  and perhaps still is today was a battleground for a disgraced titular warrior and leader of the free world, George Bush and now Barack Obama, to play out fantasies of getting even with a perceived foe at the expense of the Nation’s Constitution and way of life.  He descended into the depths of every type of illegal and immoral activity to satisfy a blood lust to exorcise demons of inferiority and insecurity and in term projected that all onto the national consciousness that have seriously affected our judgement and moral compass until the present.

We’ve been had!!


national-guardI don’t know why folks don’t see it, but we’ve been had and the people responsible for pulling the wool over our eyes  are laughing all the way to the bank…….well make that laughing all the way as they exit the bank!  Trillions of dollars cannot be accounted for by oversight agencies responsible for keeping an eye on the US treasury.  Trillions!!

I think one of the places this money has gone is to nonsense travel junketts the federal government is paying to racialize its police forces and military!!

This fall, U.S. law enforcement personnel will have their final chance to take advantage of a rare opportunity. Participants will travel to Israel to receive “homeland security training,” but the counterterrorism briefings and martial arts practice sessions are only one part of the package. The program also includes visits to Christian religious sites in the Holy Land — an aspect likely to be especially attractive to Christian Zionists — along with other sites such as the Knesset and the Israeli “security fence”.

The Israel program is run by Security Solutions International (SSI), a group that has attracted controversy due to its ties to Islamophobic propaganda groups — as well as its apparent view that indoctrinating first responders with alarmist information about Islam is an essential part of counterterrorism training……….

Unsurprisingly, SSI has been criticized for the alarmist tenor of its “counterterrorism” training. It is not immediately obvious why the Appalachian State University campus security force, or the Yakima, WA police department — to take two representative names from SSI’s clients list — require a crash course in the fine points of jihadist ideology to do their jobs properly.

Critics have pointed out that the most likely effect of such training — particularly for law enforcement personnel who have never had significant contact with Muslims before — is to drum up hysteria, and increase the likelihood of a potentially tragic overreaction when they actually do encounter someone they presume to be Muslim.

……like Henry L. Gates for example?  The shucksters of the war on terror have used every trick in the book to gain the support and or attention of the public while they rob state coffers blind.  Why is the federal government paying the expenses of any police agency’s trip to Israel to train in tactics they can receive the same and better training for here?…..and as it is pointed out in the article not all of the tactics are applicable to circumstances law enforcement faces here, unless you want to talk about home evictions which the Israelis are really good at that perhaps Sgt. Crowley picked up on when he dealt with Henry Gates; the only problem is Crowley didn’t call in the bulldozers to tear down Gates’ home.  (When was the last time your local constabulary had to deal with a suicide bomber, by the way?)   You really should read the comments of the latter of the two links; it highlights the dual loyalties of SSI’s president who has cashed in on the steady diet of hate and fear towards Muslims that he has fed the government and the people of America.  Perhaps someone should ask him about some of the missing trillions of dollars?

Memory Hole Material- Hitler’s Jewish Army


I am placing this article on the blog only to refer to it the next time I’m told because there were Palestinians who may have agreed, met or collaborated with Nazi Germany and Hitler they therefore deserve every bad thing they get……because I want to remind such people there were also Jewish Germans who served in Hitler’s army who fought, guarded over and perhaps even in some cases killed fellow Jews, and therefore by the logical extension of the first part of this sentence ask do the people from whom they came also deserve what they get?

The idea of collective punishment is a common one when talking about the Middle East and especially treatment meted out to the enemies of the state of Israel and Jews in particular.  Would they extend that argument to themselves?

Cambridge University researcher Bryan Rigg has traced the Jewish ancestry of more than 1,200 of Hitler’s soldiers, including two field marshals and fifteen generals (two full generals, eight lieutenant generals, five major generals), “men commanding up to 100,000 troops.”

In approximately 20 cases, Jewish soldiers in the Nazi army were awarded Germany’s highest military honor, the Knight’s Cross.

One of these Jewish veterans is today an 82 year old resident of northern Germany, an observant Jew who served as a captain and practiced his religion within the Wehrmacht throughout the war.

One of the Jewish field marshals was Erhard Milch, deputy to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Rumors of Milch’s Jewish identity circulated widely in Germany in the 1930s.

In one of the famous anecdotes of the time, Goering falsified Milch’s birth record and when met with protests about having a Jew in the Nazi high command, Goering replied, “I decide who is a Jew and who is an Aryan.”

What this shows is the absolute corruptible nature of power.  In the case of Adolph Hitler he no more believed what he was saying about the final solution than he would about the man in the moon, but he went through all of that, and dragged the rest of the world along with him because it was acceptable to the masses of his citizens and people in his military, some of whom were Jews who took advantage of the power they had for personal reasons, in order to amass power, satisfy an ego out of control, and probably along with that collect a whole lot of money in process.  Hitler appealed to the basest of human nature……hatred and fear, even though he knew there was no reason for any of it!  He was giving personal dispensations to people so they would no longer be Jewish so he could retain their services to keep him in power.  If he feared them at all, the last place he would want them would be in the military apparatus that sustained him and his wars of aggression for so long.  He not only kept them he welcomed them into his fraternity of blood lust and murder, and they accepted and served willingly, knowing full well what that service was doing to the rest of humanity, including their own coreligionists.  This is the essence of the intoxication of power; it causes people to forget the rule of law, to bend all conventions of human interaction and contact, to suspend humanity in order to engage in the most ruthless and aggressive behavior asked them of the state they serve.  There are parallels in today’s various wars, and especially the war on terror which has turned into the war on Islam. One of the ways they succeed in enlisting otherwise good decent people to their cause is to demonize everyone that’s not a part of their circle of power; anyone not granted their “exemption” is someone to be considered “against us”, a negative, a negation, an “anti” not worthy of the right to exist, but rather the right to be destroyed, and all for the advancement of state power.  In many ways therefore, this is not about race or ethnicity; Hitler didn’t mind at all enlisting Jews who agreed with his program of the absolute acquisition of Power to work to that end, even while he claimed they were the “problem”, and George W. Bush had no problems lying his way into the ever expanding power of the federal government into wars of aggression where he had allies from the Muslim world who agreed with his demonic plots because they too relish power.

The point of all this is to remind the people who believe in the idea of collectivism that if they want to throw that stone at people who allied themselves with power, they should really look closely at those who worked for the State’s interests.  They might be surprised to find people from their own midst………..and what will they do then?

They Hate us because we are evil


The conventional wisdom for the last several years is that we are dealing with an implacable enemy who is spiritless, evil, murderous and hates us because of what we stand for.  They are the holders of an irrational ideology that causes them to murder and plunder and they do it all because they don’t like that we are the bulwark between them and anarchy or chaos.  The only way to deal with such an opponent, so goes the extended logic, is to kill them wherever they are, to spare no quarter, until we eliminate all of them.  This sounds much like the same rhetoric used in every other campaign of genocide waged by the self-righteous who want to get rid of people who really aren’t foes or threats but against whom the most vicious incendiary language is directed to justify the righteous’ murder and torture.

It has now come to light that we did just that….murder and torture, and it wasn’t because of anything “they” did, but rather something within us that caused nationwide amnesia to the rule of law, sanity, international relations and all the other historical lessons we have taught over the decades but haven’t learned about tyranny and how to fight it.  This lapse of an American  national conscious caused the death of far more Americans than those who died at the hands of the “terrorists” on 911, that according to an interrogator in Iraq.

“The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,” says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

Major Alexander’s attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. “It plays into the hands of al-Qa’ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights”

The stain of legal contempt and immorality in this phony war on terror can only be removed by the application of the law against those who need to be in the words of President Bush, ‘brought to justice’. No amount of bullying, or phony displays of patriotism to selective passages of the Constitution and/or the writings of the Founding Fathers should hide the fact that we, America, alone are responsible for fixing this problem. A mentally challenged president was able to whip up fervor among the people of America to fight an enemy of his own creation and the country responded resoundingly. Why hasn’t an even more intelligent and gifted president not appealed to the soul of the nation that justice must be served against criminals, even those in our midst?  The existence of this country is at stake.  The further we descend into the abyss of lawlessness, the easier it becomes for us to become victimized by groups and nations of the world who have seized upon our hypocrisy to unite others against us.  Leaders would be able to stall this inevitability and stop it with such a declaration.  Mr. Obama, are you listening?

The 2nd Amendment pushed to the limits


gun_toterI am a big time supporter of the 2nd amendment and believe every citizen should exercise his or her right to own firearms.  EVERY citizen.  I am somewhat mildly amused at the demonstrators mingling with crowds of  protesters at President Obama’s appearances at different venues across America, while other citizens take it all in and law enforcement officers are civil during the display of armed resistance to a President of the United States and I ask myself the question what would be the reaction of the very same group of people to the presence of armed Muslims outside a George Bush appearance during his war on terror era?  No doubt it would provoke mass detention of every member of the Islamic faith in America’s borders, and a prohibition of some sort that would single out that group from legally owning firearms.  I doubt very seriously that those who are carrying their weapons at such events as those which Obama has spoken are true supporters of the 2nd amendment in all its meaning but rather using it as a symbol of resistance to government policies.  As such, they are selfish ideologues  whose blatant disregard for the public safety and well being jeopardize the amendment more than anything Obama could do with all of big government behind him.   How would the people openly carrying firearms in protest of Obama’s policies act towards similarly armed citizens in close proximity with signs supporting an Obama led federal government, and what would be the stance of till now completely law observant local and federal law officials to such a situation?  It’s ironic to see such people standing among crowds with signs protesting big government when these same signs were absent during the Bush administration which ratcheted up the size of government by way of its phony war on terror.   I wonder what would be the response of today’s patriots patrolling the grounds near the appearance of a black POTUS to the presence of armed opponents of the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes and wars of aggression at one of Bush’s rallies not so many years ago? I remember clearly supporters of Bush saying sometimes rights have to be curtailed, suspended, abridged, infringed upon, at times in order to protect the public.  Certainly that would not be their cry today, and if they say they believe  fundamentally in the right of citizens to keep and bear arms, no matter what their persuasion, I would ask them to come out and support the trial of Daniel Boyd whose crime it seems is that he too owned guns and differed with the current political winds.  I don’t think you’ll see the guy in the above photo or any others like him at Boyd’s trial.

The Case Against Religion in America


It’s ironic finding myself writing this article against religion in the US on an early Sunday, but perhaps there is no better time to discuss the effect religion, and especially Christianity, has on the American conscience.  I generally thought religion had a positive role to play in the lives of its worshippers until recently when I ran across this survey that suggests six in ten American Protestants consider torture, an illegal activity condemned by the United States under the Reagan and Bush/Clinton administrations, often or sometimes justified!  How did the religion of peace, a derisive term reserved for Islam, get to this point in a democracy which supposedly follows the rule of law?  Had any other religion’s adherents so overwhelmingly advocated breaking American and international law there would be a tremendous shout to get rid of such people from the shores of America, send them back to ‘where they came from’, in whatever way necessary in order to return us to the God fearing, peace loving and law abiding nation we all know we are; yet the faith that holds the majority of followers in this country, also holds the most number of people who think torture is ok.

I don’t think religion is responsible for that fact, although one could possibly point to scripture to substantiate the assertion Christianity is a violent religion, or to historical events wherein Christian inspired leaders of this country and others were responsible for the wholesale plunder and murder of entire civilizations; Vietnam comes to mind in my lifetime.  Most likely scripture and history are not things which people drew on to support their belief in the necessity for torture in modern day America, but that still does not scratch the itch I have to the question why is Christianity so wrapped up in activity that we were told was the sole endeavor of our pagan or Islamic enemy?  Perhaps because like so much else that takes place on the world’s stage, the victor usually re-writes history to support negative notions of the vanquished and our modern day, 20-21st century crusade against Islam has made it possible for us to do that, starting with the conquest of Palestine and upto the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is however another contributing factor to our belief and/or support for terrorism and that is our increased militarism.  It appears our belief in our own military superiority makes us more susceptible to notions of torture than countries not as aggressive as we.  We rank with Egypt, South Korea, Nigeria, Turkey, and India as a country that believes some degree of torture should be allowed, whereas the historical base of America, old Europe and those countries we denigrated because of their reticience to embrace our last Iraq adventure, most notably France, Spain and Britain, are less inclined to support torture.  The totalitarian regimes of Russia and China have less people who support torture than America as does Iran a country under threat of military action from America or its allies.  Does that mean in order to get better, i.e. eschew the idea of torture, we’ll have to get worse first and turn into repressive regimes which have no regard for human rights or the rule of law?

One could look at this in another way, absent the religious/military inference.  Despite all the electronic gadgets we own, and I count myself up there among the techno geeks, and all the access we have to various information sources we still are quite backwards in our thinking, and oppressive in our policy making.   The enlightenment we claim to possess, the exceptionalism we assert is ours is accepted only by third world countries which equally oppress their citizens or have in place draconian laws which are based on class and ethnicity.  We are now wallowing around in the mud they have mixed with the sweat of their citizens and we are no better than they.  The very reasons we have given  for invading countries, their repressiveness towards their own citizens or the threat they pose to their neighbors has now become a staple which we readily accept as a part of our diet.  There are no moral compasses to redirect our wayward ship from the disastrous course it has set for itself into oblivion.  Instead what we have are lighthouses of mass media which are shining beacons of darkness that lead an America towards notions that are perfectly ok with torture, even among the religiously minded followers of the Prince of Peace.  Perhaps instead of his followers we have become his torturers; after all he is said to have died at the hands of an over zealous state intent on destroying the message he brought.  That is the greatest irony; a Christian population which has forsaken its founder and instead identified with his enemies.  America, you have lost your way.

Right Wing Hate


I have been watching and listening with a certain amount of detachment the vitriol aimed at President Obama’s health care proposals because it is nothing more than racism that’s fueling the debate and I really want to stay above that base animal instinct.  The “right” has a habit of pulling the body politic down into the moral abyss of racism and xenophobia, the two ingredients which also were responsible for the phony war on terror which was led by some of the same cheerleaders and talking heads that are spearheading the anti-health care rhetoric now heard in hallowed halls.  Some of the talking heads are so deep in their moral depravity that some of the other right wing groups are saying “enough”!!   I really don’t want to deal with the talking head media types that have spoiled our political landscape….I don’t think they’re worth the bandwidth and some of their supporters are so rabid there’s no amount of convincing in any language that’ll get them to reconsider their positions.

I was cruising through my regular reading one morning and ran across the comment section of a story  entitled, ‘Obama’s Life at risk in health care battle’ and one comment caught my eye and sums up to me what has gone on in this country the last eight years.  The author nails it, so kudos to ‘trippin’ the author of what appears below.  Well done!

A 21st Century Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was a prosperous and moral nation. Their citizens were the envy of the world.

Their rulers became corrupted. They robbed the population in the interest of their political allies, to the point that the once-prosperous nation was now destitute.

Those corrupt political leaders justified their actions by convincing themselves that God hand picked them as leaders, so they were above respecting the moral codes they demanded the citizens abide.

These political figures propagandized the people with easily disprovable lies, but the populace chose not to question. They stoked the flames of discontent at their humiliating fall from grace to whip a jingoistic populace into a frenzy of irrational support for policies that continued to undermine their own interests.

They invaded other nations that were no threat to them, under the guise of self-defense. They used torture designed to elicit false confessions to justify their illegal war. They ginned up stories of imaginary threats to national security, and used them to conduct surveillance on the citizenry. They leveraged the destruction of a prominent building as part of the rationale.

Their military leaders were infused with the arrogance that they were ordained by God. Some interpreted their mission to exterminate all the peoples of a certain religion, a sentiment shared by many of the people who were ignorant of cultures other than their own.

They pitted citizens against each other by spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Those that sought diplomacy were labeled appeasers, those who disagreed, traitors. Violence and mob rule strong armed people into compliance. Bands of thugs shouted down political opponents, and used intimidation to overturn the will of the majority as expressed in elections.

People were shot in churches, police were killed based on rumors propagandized by the media, gay businesses and government buildings were bombed, and even physicians were assassinated.

Citizens of conscience saw the signs early enough to do something, but because it was politically incorrect to draw parallels with past atrocities, they chose to avert their eyes until the entire nation was gripped in fascist totalitarianism. Soon, it was too late.

Name that country.

Trippin’ you get an ‘atta boy’.  Well said!

The Princes of Darkness


Iraq_Children_prostituteMuch has been said on the pages of Miscellany101 about the war on Iraq, the devastation it caused the Iraqi society in general, at the behest of George Bush and his minions of terror.  It appears Bush considered himself acting as the Hand of God in carrying out his murderous, torturous regime against a people who posed no threat to ANYONE, and yet were the victims of a military invasion which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the displacement of hundreds of thousands more from their homes.

Bush, who turns 63 in July and was 54 when first sworn into office in 2001, has yet to comment on the reports, which include last week’s GQ magazine expose into the hawkish use of scripture in 2003, when then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld forwarded secret intelligence memos to Bush embroidered with biblical passages.

“Therefore, put on the full armour of God,” a verse from Ephesians, and “Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter,” from Isaiah, are among the messages that adorn reports prepared for Bush by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, juxtaposed with photographs of U.S. forces storming Baghdad.

Stranger still are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophesy — including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog — in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing.

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins,” Bush said to Chirac, according to Thomas Romer, a University of Lausanne theology professor who was later approached by French officials anxious to understand the context of the biblical reference.

Such ignominy has earned Bush the title of the Prince of Darkness, and this illegal and immoral foray into Iraq must never be forgotten by upstanding citizens of the world who believe in law, order and justice.

Unfortunatelyl Bush is not alone in sharing the nom de plume of Darkness with the latest update about one Erik Prince, CEO of what was once known as Blackwater.  Earlier we chronicled the latest charges against him which include his religiouisly inspired desire to rid the world of Muslims by unleashing his mercenary force against the people of Iraq.  Now comes word he was engaged in a child prostitution ring on his bases in Iraq.

Blackwater was guilty of using child prostitutes at its compound in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone and that owner Erik Prince knew of this activity and did nothing to stop it.The declarations describe Blackwater as “having young girls provide oral sex to Enterprise members in the ‘Blackwater Man Camp’ in exchange for one American dollar.” They add even though Prince frequently visited this camp, he “failed to stop the ongoing use of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, by his men.”

One of the statements also charges that “Prince’s North Carolina operations had an ongoing wife-swapping and sex ring, which was participated in by many of Mr. Prince’s top executives.”

The irony of all this is religiously inspired behavior on the part of US officials resulted in immoral behavior on the part of those who answered the plea something the US has said its terrorists opponents have been guilty and which started the war on terror.  Perhaps we ought to have a war on terror against the people who claimed to be  fighting a war on terror.  Let us begin at the top, shall we?

The Iran Yo-Yo


yo-yoWith the Republican party all used up, battered and bruised, with dwindling Tea Party numbers, the titular head of the party’s constant insertion of his foot in his own mouth, the Sanford scandal,  the neocons have abandoned ship and returned to their home the Democratic party where they first found a footing during the days of Henry Scoop Jackson and they’re agitating for war with Iran.  The Republicans served their purpose at the beginning of this millenium but after being turned down by voters in 2006 and 2008, the GOP is not the power base the neocons need for their wars of aggression and racism.  Obama’s administration will suit their purposes just fine and they’re firmly ensconced with the party of asses and plotting their war with Iran.

It has been fun to watch the sudden and quick implosion of the GOP, first with the McCain campaign which resembled the Bob Dole campaign of ’96,  and the soap operaesque Sarah Palin and her drama, both personally and politically, but not even right wing nut job radio can revive the party with Obama acting on all four cylinders and practically mimicking the GOP as it expands wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan while allocating tons of money for defense that  not even a Republican secretary of defense requests.

What this means is neocons feel emboldened to continue their psy-ops assault on Iran with nothing less than regime change in mind.  Acting on behalf of the Israelis who are the ones calling for a military attack on Iran, neocons have used every excuse in the book to whip up attack Iran fervor both inside the Obama administration and with the general public which will have to supply the manpower, much like it did for the Iraq invasion, to administer the coup de grace on any attack initiated by Israel.  This past weekend, vice president Joe Biden gave the nod, as far as he and his boss Obama are concerned, for the Israelis to go ahead with the attack.  Of course the tacit meaning is that the US will do any and everything to help Israel when the Iranians respond by attacking Israel.

The Iranians elections were the 911 moment for the neocons whose crescendo-ing rhetoric began even before the elections.  There’s a very good piece, False Sorrow for the People of Iran, which talks about the different devices used by the neocons to demonize, denigrate and de-emphasize the importance of the elections when they thought the winner would try to make peaceful overtures to the US.  It states in part

So the possibility of Iran’s president being a rational, moderate man determined to make détente with the United States frightened the War Party and the Israel lobby. Thus, a week before the elections, Iran’s president was demoted to a powerless man again! The neoconservatives, the War Party, and the Israel lobby all began emphasizing how it does not matter who Iran’s president is, since all the important decisions regarding foreign policy are made by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

However, Iranian leaders have been making peace overtures to the US since almost the inception of their revolution, and certainly since the American hostages debacle when they colluded with the Reagan administration to release the hostages in exchange for weapons to fight the Iran-Iraq war.  Their last attempt was met with scorn and rejection by the Bush administration’s cabal of neocons who want only Israel as an ally among the nation states in the middle east. Maintaining this “special relationship” means Israel can help itself to American largess, building up and defending the country at the expense of US tax dollars, personnel and materiel.

Another attack point against Iran has been its nuclear energy program which some have said is a secret nuclear weapons program, without offering any proof of that assertion.  Of course the neocons are able to muddy the waters, confusing the public by putting the onus of Iran to prove a negative, i.e. prove they do not have a nuclear weapons program going on.  This so resembles the WMD nonsense of Iraq that it would be funny if it weren’t a matter of life and death for everyone.  All this talk of an Iranian  nuclear weapons program continues despite the National Intelligence Estimate of last year that said in effect the Iranians had halted their weapons program at about the same time they were making peaceful overtures to the US in 2003.  The rejection of those overtures was the neocons way of trying to back the Iranians into a corner to resume their program since they assumed, correctly, that any sovereign country would develop a means of defending itself decisively in the face of an hostile neighbor,  something which Iranians have certainly been accused of despite the absence of any evidence.  The kicker is however, that the Israelis don’t really consider the presence of Iranian nukes an existential threat as some in the neocon stable would have us believe.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

Such sentiment is not acceptable to neocons because it would make Israel an equal partner, vis-a-vis the nuclear weapons front  with its Iranian  neighbors and superiority not equality is the only state of affairs the Israelis are willing to  accept in its relations with other countries in the region.  Despite the fact Iran has not developed its nuclear weapons program, the fact that it is enriching uranium is considered a threat, by neocons in the American government, to the existence of Israel even though the Israelis themselves don’t think so.  This is the danger of neoconservatism, which inflates dangers to the point of conflagrations that envelope the world community when they are absolutely needless and pointless.  It also underscores the danger such philosophy has to the well being of nation states and indeed the US itself, which has already been devastated by one needless war and appears to be on the edge of entering another because of the lies of its policy makers, the neocons.

Neo-Conservatives are bad for America


neocons+straussIt’s been extraordinary watching how neocons have made everything up, down, everything black, white and everything evil, good and back again.  In the process they have managed to weaken America, tarnish her image in the world community and imperil the world.  In my wildest of conspiratorial dreams, I surmise they are responsible for the election of Barack Obama in order to undo some of the damage they have done, but they have not kept themselves out of the policy making apparatus of government; they are rather firmly entrenched there and have installed gate keepers at every door of the branches of government.  Rahm Emmanuel in the executive, and policy wonks at State, two previously mentioned here on the pages of Miscellany101.  They are not working in the best interests of the US; American interests take a back seat to interests feuled by tribalism and history they want to rewrite in order settle old scores at the expense of an unconcerned and uninitiated American public.  Sure most of it is based on OIL, oil, Israel and logistics, but personal aggrandizement and wealth also play a part in their deception.

So while going through my daily reading I wandered on this article which reinforced these notions above.  What picqued my interest and aggravated my anger was the explicit statement that Saddam wanted the help of America and would have entered into a defense pact with the US in order to defend him against Iran.  That’s not altogether surprising since Saddam fought the Iranians before in the 80s for eight years, at no expense to US personnel or materiel.  Saddam wanted to talk to Bush about that and if he had been successful in pitching the idea all the American lives killed and money wasted at great expense to the country could have been avoided with an even better policy result!  But Bush was convinced to ignore Saddam’s overtures, no doubt with the blessings of the many neocons entrenched in his government who advised against such acceptance.  Instead these people using fascist tactics of deception and the increased powers of the state  got Bush to promote the lie of WMDS and consequently,  America has  installed  a pro-Iranian regime, and destabilized one of the largest Arab speaking countries of the region.  All this happened because neocons have been pitching the idea of regime change to Democrats and Republicans alike since the mid 90s.

They have managed to pitch war at the expense of peace before, when they similarly got Bush to ignore Iranian attempts at rapprochement with America in 2003.  Now a second US administration is being led by the nose with the help of a belligerent ally, Israel, that wants a war and ostensibly drag America into it, with a country that wants peace and is willing to  make major concessions towards that aim.  Such a war would not be in the interests of America and could prove to be more costly than even the Iraq debacle.  The authors of American government advised this country in its infancy from foreign entanglements and that advice still reverberates throughout time but there are few in government who are able to hear it because of the noise being made by neoconservatives and their spin doctors.  The fact that Obama has further embraced them, making government positions a revolving door for the enemies of America to spin, deceive and escalate and involve this country in military adventures means there isn’t much that has changed with his election.  It’s time for Americans to show neocons the door.

An interesting aside to the talk about torture

Desertion is a moral imperative when continued service implicates a soldier in crimes against God and mankind.


Will Griggs who writes excellent pieces on is blog, Pro Libertate addresses frankly what it is people in the military are to do when confronted with commands from superiors that they commit illegal acts. Stopping along the way in his argument to point out that putting our soldiers in harms way is something they must expect when they enlist in the military, Griggs thinks there is no excuse for not releasing the photos.  He writes:

Yes, it’s entirely likely that releasing the photographs of torture and sexual assault — including homosexual rape and, God forgive us, the defilement of children — would lead to dangerous and potentially lethal complications for armed government employees who are killing people and destroying property in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, countries they invaded and continue to occupy by force.

If our rulers were genuinely concerned about danger to “our troops,” they would release the Abu Ghraib documents and bring the troops home. There — problem solved! Instead, they are illegally suppressing the photos and keeping the troops in the field — and now letting it be known that the U.S. military will remain mired in Mesopotamia (which is the more tractable of the two ongoing conflicts) for another decade or longer.

Well stated and let’s not forget several commanders of troops in war theaters have already averred that decisions regarding the “interrogation”, read torture, of detainees have put American personnel in danger with the indigenous societies they occupy, yet we hardly hear any objection to such tactics raised on those grounds.  What the release of those pictures would entail is the inescapable conclusion that US personnel must be prosecuted for war crimes, or at the very least criminal behavior, as it did in the case of several army personnel currently serving time for their part in actions caught on camera.

Griggs takes things a step further than any other writer I have read to date.  He chides and refutes the official reason for not releasing the photos, ‘the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy’ by saying, ‘the foreign policy referred to entails open-ended entanglements in the affairs of nearly every nation on earth, as well as plundering huge sums from taxpayers to sustain a grotesquely huge military establishment and bribe political elites abroad. That foreign policy cultivates misery and harvests war and terrorism.’  Griggs thinks, as do I, that there should be consequences for illegal activity and if releasing the photos causes some to fear those consequences, so be it.

Although I wish harm or death on no human being, it seems to me a good idea to adjust the current set of incentives in such a way that at least some American military personnel, as they deal with another gust of blowback, will have an overdue confrontation with their conscience and decide unilaterally to end their service of the world’s largest criminal enterprise, the government of the United State (spelling intentional).

Am I trying to incite desertion? Reducing the matter to terms simple enough for Sean Hannity to understand them — yes, I am, where desertion is the only way to avoid upholding an immoral, unsustainable policy and serving a depraved Regime. Desertion is a moral imperative when continued service implicates a soldier in crimes against God and mankind.

Perhaps that is one of the consequences the military establishment is trying to avoid, i.e. the moral awakening of its enlisted corps and their refusal to support goals that are anathema to American values. It’s a particularly sticky situation for politicians to espouse American values which include life, and liberty while asking people to risk their lives to curtail those very things either on a foreign and distant soil or on our own here in America. The turmoil caused by an awakening that such requests are inconsistent with all we’ve been taught is probably more traumatic than fighting the war itself. I have often wondered whether this conflict in the soul of the military is the reason for such a high incidence of suicide in the military; if that were the case, desertion would be a far better alternative.  Griggs makes a very powerful and strong case for members of the US military not remain within the military as long as it asks them to commit illegal and morally reprehensible acts against people under its authority. I fully concur.  Well done, Mr. Griggs!

We were wrong!


Once again we are told our conduct during the war on terror was criminal in nature, and this time it comes from almost the top!  General David Petraeus went on live television, thank God it was live and not something that could be later edited out of an interview, and said the United States of America violated the Geneva Conventions, read that broke the law. Petraeus was appointed by the Bush administration to lead the war effort in Iraq and I think it’s significant he would come out so publicly and disavow the direction his boss took in carrying out the war on terror.  However, most of us knew that  long before Petraeus joined in this fracas, and indeed many have been saying so since the  inception of the war on terror; it  was a diversionary one meant to mask or cover up the real agenda of the people in power during the Bush years.

The whole issue of torture is also an indication of where America is as a Nation.  Sixty years ago, post World War II,  there would be no discussion of whether waterboarding was torture, and what the consequences are for those who participate in such illegal activity, let alone whether such tactics are effective.  Now however, a lot of time and effort has been put into describing this technique as ‘enhanced interrogation’ to make it as benign as possible and allow some a chance to escape from the penalty of law.  I’m glad to see someone on the front line of war and terror, Petraeus,  saying that it is a violation of international law, as opposed to the arm chair quarterbacks and political pundits who seem to make their punditry akin to the life and death of fighting in real wars proclaiming the opposite.

Now comes word that sugar free cookies went further to produce actionable intelligence than waterboarding.

The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.

Abu Jandal had been in a Yemeni prison for nearly a year when Ali Soufan of the FBI and Robert McFadden of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service arrived to interrogate him in the week after 9/11…..

While Abu Jandal was venting his spleen, Soufan noticed that he didn’t touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: “He was a diabetic and couldn’t eat anything with sugar in it.” At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal’s angry demeanor. “We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him,” Soufan recalls. “So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.”It took more questioning, and some interrogators’ sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda — including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers — but the cookies were the turning point. “After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans,” Soufan says. “Now he was thinking of us as human beings.”

What does that say about a country far more interested in torture and sadism to get information than cookies and respect?  This isn’t the first time we’ve heard that interrogation methods that stressed identifying with the prisoner, affording him his rights and treating him with respect got more information out of him than banging his head against a wall or waterboarding him.  Post 911 we were an angry country and some people in government took advantage of that rage to settle age old scores of tribes and jealousy which have had a devastating impact on the psyche of the country.  We have worsened this problem by refusing to admit it exists and/or addressing it and the ultimate abuse of the country is to allow the perpetrators of this criminal activity to go free.  Forgetting about the criminality and who did it does not spare the collective from our mental anguish.  American military personnel  felt perfectly justified posing and smiling next to dead bodies, or smearing human feces on people to take their pictures and laugh or as has been more recently asserted, raping and sodomizing women and children all under the guise of authorities of the United States.  We should not give any one that kind of power to abuse what the country has fought for and sustained for so many years until now.  Nothing will do more to drive that point home than for the citizenry to rise up and demand all people who participated in illegal activity in our name be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  I hope you will join me in making that proclamation!

Why haven’t they caught Osama bin Ladin? You ever wonder?


The idea that a man can conduct a global jihad against the most powerful country in the world from remote places in the world with just a cell phone and or a courier to take his electronic messages all over the world should now be considered  no more than a myth.  Technology exists that enables us to know the exact location of any and all cellphones, what’s being said on them and what’s being said around them!  Check out the video on the link above.

Let them eat cake


Republicans are up in arms about the declaration of Homeland Security which warns ‘the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and
government authorities similar to those in the past; right wing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first
African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda’,  They claim the federal government is picking on them.  Glen Greenwald who eviscerates the right in his column which you can read here,  points out how the same people from the right were cheering on the federal government’s usurpation of power when fighting Islamic terrorism, rousing from the sidelines a behemoth federal government to its  slow but steady encroachment of the rights of its citizens until they too became  the vanquished.  It serves them right, but there is a kernel of truth to the feds assessment of the threat from the right  which you can read about here.   That was/is easily forgotten however and so the whining continues from the newly dispossessed who also say they’re being singled out by a vengeful leftist, fascist government, but  that notion too has been discredited.  What we have here is basically a ‘chickens coming home to roost’ situation where the political right is now reaping what it sowed the last eight years, which is why Marie Antoinette’s disdainful ‘let them eat cake’ couldn’t be a more appropriate epithet.

George Bush had no sense of humor and for that a man spent 7 years as a terrorist


I’ve written about a lot of bizarre things surrounding the George Bush administration’s 8 year tenancy and this story ranks right up there as one of the strangest, sickest and abusive to come to light.

A British ‘resident’ held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a ‘joke’ website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night.

…The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the offending article – called How To Build An H-Bomb – was first published in a US satirical magazine and later placed on a series of websites.

Written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the publication’s food editor, Rolling Stone journalist Peter Biskind and scientist Michio Kaku, it claims that a nuclear weapon can be made ‘using a bicycle pump’ and with liquid uranium ‘poured into a bucket and swung round’.

Despite its clear satirical bent, the story led the CIA to accuse 30-year-old Mohamed, a caretaker, of plotting a dirty bomb attack, before subjecting him to its ‘extraordinary rendition programme’.

The satirical article, published in Seven Days magazine, says its authors were given ‘three days to cook up a workable H-bomb. They did and we have decided to share their culinary secrets with you’.

It adds: ‘Not that Seven Days supports nuclear terrorism. We don’t. We would prefer to die from familiar poisons like low-level radiation, microwaves, DDT or food dyes, rather than unexpectedly, say as hostage to a Latvian nationalists brandishing a home-made bomb.’

The recipe is highly detailed and plainly ridiculous. The prospective bomb maker is instructed to transform uranium gas into liquid by ‘subjecting it to pressure’, adding: ‘You can use a bicycle pump for this.’

The instructions continue: ‘Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride.

‘Attach a 6ft rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes.

‘Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor. The U-235 – a uranium isotope which can be used to cause an explosive chain reaction – will have risen to the top, where it can be skimmed off like cream. Repeat this step until you have the required 10lb of uranium.’

There you have the essence of the war on terror.  Billions of American tax payer money spent chasing, rendering, and torturing people over satire, because a slightly insane president of the United States didn’t want to deal or work  with  his own institutions of government.

This is why we lose wars


I read  on some forums how what we see in the video is supposed to be a kick in the seat of the pants motivational speech for the Iraqi police.  Somehow I got the impression the person for whom the tirade was directed, the one who was supposed to get something out of this was not the Iraqi police but the US soldier himself.  He probably had come to the realization at the time he went on his rant that the war for him was over, that the wizard had been revealed and the reason for his being there was a lie, yet he had to get something out of the experience of being in a land that posed no threat to him or his country; he had to find some meaning out of the deception of it all so that it could make sense to him.

On another level however, the words and the method of that military officer are indicative of where the US has come in the last 50 years of wars and deception.  We have become a vulgar nation intent on dominating people.  We made up reasons for being in other people’s territory; made these reasons up just enough to get young men and women to sign on to the idea of fighting non-threatening people only to have that very fighting force realize mid-way through it was not worth the human sacrifice they were asked to make.  That epiphany turned itself into a rage that was directed toward essentially a non existent enemy, and eventually onto ourselves.  The statistic that more US military men died at their own hands, suicide, in January, 2009, is an indication of the futility of this and all other wars we’ve fought since WWII.  No longer able to say we are a light onto the nations, that we have an ideology that is liberating when practiced fully, we have turned into a nation of torturers, invaders, exporting an obscene philosophy of death and destruction and corruption and ignorance.

On yet another level, what was shown in that video should have been expected by all, and the way the Iraqi police endured the diatribe marks the beginning of the end for them as well.  Once they acquiesced to the invasion of their country by a foreign force clearly intent on destroying them, not just getting rid of their corrupted ruler, they signed on to the notion of indentured servitude.  The American officer despite all that’s wrong with where he is at this time still has a human nature that revolts at the idea that people can accept slavery  and that too contributed to his anger towards them.

I suspect in the end, the officer’s rage was directed towards himself, as he probably asked himself the very question many of us have asked these last eight years, and then some; how in the hell did we get here as a country? What is really going on?

Stunning words from the mainstream


Paul Craig Roberts is a maverick of sorts, ever since he left the Reagan administration and began writing editorials about current events.  He still reflects fondly on Reagan, the conservative most modern day conservatives like to pattern themselves after, but speaks disdainfully of GW Bush and the people who surrounded him, calling them ‘brownshirts with the same level of intelligence and morals as Hitler’s enthusiastic supporters.’ Amen to that.  However, he has written a damning editorial on the war on terror, written by the way, at about the same time as Dick Cheney’s rather high treasonous remarks, which speaks volumes on how that war has been carried out and whether it’s real.  I’d like to produce exercepts of it below. He does a far better job of saying it than I ever could.

According to US government propaganda, terrorist cells are spread throughout America, making it necessary for the government to spy on all Americans and violate most other constitutional protections. Among President Bush’s last words as he left office was the warning that America would soon be struck again by Muslim terrorists.

If America were infected with terrorists, we would not need the government to tell us. We would know it from events. As there are no events, the US government substitutes warnings in order to keep alive the fear that causes the public to accept pointless wars, the infringement of civil liberty, national ID cards, and inconveniences and harassments when they fly.

The “war on terror” is a hoax that fronts for American control of oil pipelines, the profits of the military-security complex, the assault on civil liberty by fomenters of a police state, and Israel’s territorial expansion.

There were no al Qaeda in Iraq until the Americans brought them there by invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who kept al Qaeda out of Iraq. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization, but a movement attempting to unify Afghanistan under Muslim law. The only Americans threatened by the Taliban are the Americans Bush sent to Afghanistan to kill Taliban and to impose a puppet state on the Afghan people.

Hamas is the democratically elected government of Palestine, or what little remains of Palestine after Israel’s illegal annexations. Hamas is a terrorist organization in the same sense that the Israeli government and the US government are terrorist organizations. In an effort to bring Hamas under Israeli hegemony, Israel employs terror bombing and assassinations against Palestinians. Hamas replies to the Israeli terror with homemade and ineffectual rockets.

Hezbollah represents the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon, another area in the Middle East that Israel seeks for its territorial expansion.

The US brands Hamas and Hezbollah “terrorist organizations” for no other reason than the US is on Israel’s side of the conflict. There is no objective basis for the US Department of State’s “finding” that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations. It is merely a propagandistic declaration.

The retired American generals who serve as war propagandists for Fox “News” are forever claiming that Iran arms the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents and Hamas. But where are the arms? To deal with American tanks, insurgents have to construct homemade explosive devices out of artillery shells. After six years of conflict the insurgents still have no weapon against the American helicopter gunships. Contrast this “arming” with the weaponry the US supplied to the Afghans three decades ago when they were fighting to drive out the Soviets.

The films of Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza show large numbers of Gazans fleeing from Israeli bombs or digging out the dead and maimed, and none of these people are armed. A person would think that by now every Palestinian would be armed, every man, woman, and child. Yet, all the films of the Israeli attack show an unarmed population. Hamas has to construct homemade rockets that are little more than a sign of defiance. If Hamas were armed by Iran, Israel’s assault on Gaza would have cost Israel its helicopter gunships, its tanks, and hundreds of lives of its soldiers.

The great mystery is: why after 60 years of oppression are the Palestinians still an unarmed people? Clearly, the Muslim countries are complicit with Israel and the US in keeping the Palestinians unarmed.

The unsupported assertion that Iran supplies sophisticated arms to the Palestinians is like the unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. These assertions are propagandistic justifications for killing Arab civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in order to secure US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.


Giving aid and comfort to the enemy


cheneyDick Cheney has gone off the deep end of things in ways that are really unfathomable.  In an interview on “friendly” territory where hard questions don’t exist and he can get away with the most inflammatory language that only Dick Cheney can spew he said, ‘that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.’  That’s pretty strong language coming from a member of the Republican party that spent the last eight years challenging anyone  and everyone’s patriotism who questioned the direction of the Bush Administration.  You can go here to see a very long list of such accusations of treason against Bush policy, but here are some of the juicier remarks.

“while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.” Zell Miller, D. Ga.

“[T]he liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.” – Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY)

“divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country.”- Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA)

What Cheney has done is far more egregious than give aid to an enemy, he’s practically incite it to violence towards the US by implying it should happen because of Obama’s policies.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry…”

This is Cheney at his best, using the politics of fear from afar, he almost seems to challenge terrorists to strike an America that is preoccupied with ‘reading them their rights’ rather than with killing them.  Those are the only two choices to Dick Cheney and his collection of  backyard warriors who watched others  fight wars they managed to miss, and who enlisted still more to fight wars built upon lies and misleading information.  He lives in his  testosterone induced haze where everything is do or die, you are either with us or against us, “us” being he and his circle of friends that languish in think tanks scattered around Washington who alone can determine who the real enemy is, and you’d better damn well fight them their  death or else you are guilty of treason.

I think the very same language used against Bush/Cheney detractors the last eight years  should be used against Cheney himself.  He is inciting the enemy to acts of violence against America and thereby giving aid and comfort to those who seek to do us harm….in the over inflated language of W. Bush and everyone should take the opportunity to say that.  Mr. Cheney, you are a traitor.