Winter Patriot

What Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri Do All Day, or Why I Cannot Talk About Politics With My Father

2009-10-19T01:54:00.014-04:00

I have finally come to understand why I cannot talk about politics, terrorism or international relations with my father, not that it matters much, except as a glimpse of a much larger phenomenon.

It's not just my father. I can't talk about politics or terrorism or world affairs with anyone who has lived his or her entire life under the great umbrella of American propaganda.

They have insulated themselves under an enormous web of lies, and hidden themselves away from actual knowledge of their nation and its role in the world, both of which they see dimly, if at all: the world as a dark, dangerous, mysterious place, and their nation as the best of all nations -- nay, the best of all possible nations.

They have been content to collect the scraps tossed their way by the American War Machine, although they would never call it that. Nor would they ever consider themselves in any way complicit in America's endless war on the rest of the world, a war they never even acknowledge.

It's a war waged on multiple planes, of which the military, being the bloodiest, is easily the most visible. And it didn't start last week, or last year, or even eight years ago.

It's been going on all their lives -- or since they were little kids. For an ever-increasing percentage of America's population, it's always been there.

Like the land, the sea and the sky, it's the backdrop against which their lives take place.

Only a fool would question the sea and sky.

... or the notion that the American War Machine should be what it is, and is what it should be.

Except that it's not true. None of it is true. And even worse -- they know it's not true.

As long as every little lie stays in place, the umbrella stands, so to speak: the big lies remain sacred, so to speak. But once you start to pull and tug, and separate one lie from another, and expose them to the light of knowledge and reason ... well, that's where it gets intolerable.

And I guess I just love to pull and tug.

I came to this moderately interesting conclusion in the hospital room where I've been spending most of my weekends lately, sitting there with my father and reading the newspaper he read before I arrived.

He's so far from where I grew up that I have no connection with any of the local stories: I read them as if they were field reports from places I may never hear of again, much less visit.

One week there was a story about a guy who took some construction equipment and started blazing a trail through a state park. One week there was a story about a new McDonald's opening in one of the suburbs. This weekend there was a story about a schoolteacher who was sitting alone in her classroom doing paperwork when a buck burst through the window.

You just never know what you'll find in the local news, but all the stories share a common feature: they're verifiable. I could go see the damage to the park. I could eat at the new fast food restaurant. And I could visit the school, admire the new window, and meet the teacher who hid under her desk.

I haven't actually done any of these things, and it's not likely that I ever would. But I could. You could. Anyone could. And the same is true of virtually all the local news: you can't predict what you'll find, but you can certainly check it out.

On the other hand, with world news, and often with national politics, it's just the opposite. What there is to read -- what my father reads every day, and what's he's been reading for his entire adult life -- is utterly predictable, and completely unverifiable. And therefore, he doesn't have any reason not to believe it -- unless I start talking.

I've just had dental surgery and I wasn't doing much talking this weekend. But that's another story -- and one I'll spare you.

I've read a lot of predictable, unverifiable, manure over the years, but I have never seen it more concentrated and hilarious than in Sebastian Rotella's most recent piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Entitled "Setbacks weaken Al Qaeda's ability to mount attacks, terrorism officials say", it had me laughing so hard that I've preserved it for posterity at my "other blog".

I happened to read Sebastian Rotella's newest masterpiece, not because it was in the paper in my dad's room, but because it set off my Google News Alert with its mention of Rashid Rauf. As long-time readers will remember, I wrote extensively about Rashid Rauf and the so-called Liquid Bombers, beginning in August of 2006 when they were arrested, and continuing until I became unable to blog much (or at all). But even when I haven't been writing, I've still been reading, and collecting.

Over the past three years I have preserved more than 330 articles mentioning Rashid Rauf, and it has been fascinating (in an entirely predictable way) to watch his legend develop. (And you can read the word "legend" in either of two ways: it can mean either "a fable" or "an intelligence agent's cover story".)

In 2006, Rashid Rauf was merely a "key figure" in the so-called Liquid Bombing plot -- possibly a messenger of some kind. Then he was the al Qaeda connection. Then he was the bomb-making expert. Then he was the mastermind. Then he was an al Qaeda commander.

The latter was an interesting step in the growing legend. Not everyone gets to be an al Qaeda commander.

I first read that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander from Bill Roggio, who writes the aptly named "Long War Journal". Upon reading that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander, I immediately felt a sense of inadequacy -- having read everything I could find about Rashid Rauf, how could I not have known he was an al Qaeda commander?

Then I got a bit indignant: Why should Bill Roggio know that Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander when I don't know it myself? Later I simmered down a bit and became less emotional and more pragmatic. The question became: How does Bill Roggio know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?

Much to my astonishment, Long War Journal takes comments from unknown visitors. So I left Bill Roggio a comment, saying: "How do you know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?"

To my further astonishment, my comment appeared immediately. So I bookmarked the page and returned a day later, hoping for an explanation from Bill Roggio as to where and how he had learned that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander. Instead of such an explanation, I found -- to no astonishment at all -- that my comment had been deleted. "Aha!" I thought, "That's how we know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander." What a thing to have learned!

We also learned quite a bit about Bill Roggio and his "Long War Journal", none of which could have been news. (Long War Journal? Why do you think it's called that?)

Then Rashid Rauf was also named -- as always, by an unnamed source -- as the al Qaeda contact for the dozen Pakistani students arrested in the UK in April of 2009 under so-called "Operation Pathway". No criminal charges were filed against any of the students, who were released from police custody but nonetheless held pending "deportation hearings" which still haven't started -- and most of the students have now left the UK "voluntarily".

Shortly after the Operation Pathway arrests, Rashid Rauf's legend began to grow again. Soon he was was al Qaeda's Commander for European Operations. Then he was a facilitator for the London bombings of 7/7/2005.

How much more is there? I've been wondering: How long it will take before he was behind 9/11? Or the 1993 WTC bombing? Oklahoma City? Beirut? Who really killed JFK, anyway? Was it Rashid Rauf? Or to put it another way: How do we know it wasn't?

I may have been kidding about that last part but the rest is serious, and Rashid Rauf's legend continues to grow backwards. The most recent additions to the legend have proceeded despite (or because of) the death (or not) of Rashid Rauf in a drone-launched missile attack in Pakistan in November of 2008.

Sebastian Rotella's LAT piece hints -- for the first time of which I am aware -- at a connection between Rashid Rauf and a failed attempt to bomb London in 2004. This is a year earlier than the previous publicly hinted connection: the backward legend-building is only three years short of 9/11 now, and it won't be long ...

It's a sick laugh, and one I can't share with my father, but laughs are scarce in these days of bogus terror everywhere, and unspoken dangers everywhere else. And the people who make me laugh have an impossible job.

The task -- for somebody like Bill Roggio or Sebastian Rotella -- is to make the threat of terrorism appear to be diminishing and increasing at the same time. It has to be serious enough to justify spending hundreds of billions every year, and throwing your civil rights down the drain at the same time, and the results of such an enormous sacrifice must be tangible. And yet, despite the tangible success, the threat must never go away, or even be significantly diminished, because then the hundreds of billions of dollars per year would have to stop -- or at least stop growing. And we can't have that.

You might start clamoring for the return of your civil rights. We can't have that, either.

For all these reasons -- not to mention the oil -- we simply can't have an end to the War on Terror (by whatever name the president wants us to call it these days), and that means no president can ever declare it won and no president can ever declare it un-winnable.

Victory, while always getting closer, has to remain as far away as ever.

Very few writers manage it well, and Sebastian Rotella is a master of the art. But he exceeds even himself in his most recent piece. You have to read the whole thing to get the full sick belly laugh from it, but a few fragments may entice you to read more (at the LAT or at my home away from home).

Rotella leads with this give-and-take combination:

As Al Qaeda is weakened by the loss of leaders, fighters, funds and ideological appeal, the extremist network's ability to attack targets in the United States and Western Europe has diminished, anti-terrorism officials say.

Nonetheless, Al Qaeda and allied groups based primarily in Pakistan remain a threat, particularly because of an increasing ability to attract recruits from Central Asia and Turkey to offset the decline in the number of militants from the Arab world and the West.

Rotella even uses the words "diminished" and "increasing" in his opening paragraphs. The man is a wizard!

And he follows with another combination:

Al Qaeda's relative strength these days is of crucial importance in the complex debate in Washington over future U.S. troop levels and tactics in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Although factions within the Obama administration differ on how best to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, all agree that the paramount priority is defeating Al Qaeda. Unlike the Afghan Taliban, the terrorist network Al Qaeda remains committed to a holy war against the West with a goal of matching or surpassing its devastating attacks in 2001.

Matching or surpassing whose devastating attacks in 2001? There's the rub, isn't it?

All chroniclers of the Terror War, from hacks like Bill Roggio to masters like Sebastian Rotella, must write as if 9/11 had been fully and impartially investigated and that the conclusions of said investigation had been accepted as final by all thinking people. The fact that only non-thinking people believe any of the 9/11 manure is routinely glossed over, by wizard and hack alike.

Rotella is not only a wizard himself but he also has some wizardly sources:

"Some pretty experienced individuals have been taken out of the equation," a senior British anti-terrorism official said in a recent interview.

"There is fear, insecurity and paranoia about individuals arriving from outside, worries about spies and infiltration," said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive topic. "There is a sense that it has become a less romantic experience. Which is important because of the impact on Al Qaeda the brand, the myth, the idea of the glorious jihadist."

"Taken out of the equation" is British math-talk for "killed along with hundreds of civilians in a series of drone attacks".

But "Al Qaeda the brand"?? And "the myth"?? This senior British anti-terrorism official has one foot in the grave and the other on the truth, does he not? Outrageous!!

But it gets better! Enter the president:

President Obama cited the debilitated condition of the terrorist network last week during a visit with U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

"Because of our efforts, Al Qaeda and its allies have not only lost operational capacity, they've lost legitimacy and credibility," he said.

I almost stopped laughing long enough to ask myself: How could this fiction lose "legitimacy and credibility"? Is Obama pulling our leg, too?

Next in line for Rotella: an "ex"-CIA man working for the NYPD (whom Rotella calls a "scholar") virtually confirms the long-simmering notion that the entire al Qaeda legend is built on entrapment:

The number of failed plots in the West, whether directed or inspired by Al Qaeda, also shows that the quality of operatives has declined, scholar Marc Sageman testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

"Counter-terrorism is working," said Sageman, a former CIA officer and New York Police Department expert. "Terrorist organizations can no longer cherry-pick the best candidates as they did in the 1990s. There is no Al Qaeda recruitment program: Al Qaeda and its allies are totally dependent on self-selected volunteers."

Self-selected volunteers, indeed. Knuckleheads of the world unite!

I won't make you wait any longer. Here's the bit you've been waiting for, and once again it's from the unnamed senior British official:

In several recent cases, Western trainees in Pakistan allegedly had contact with Mustafa Abu Yazid, also known as Said Sheik, a longtime Egyptian financial boss. Abu Yazid acts as the day-to-day chief of the network while Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, spend their time eluding capture, said the British official.

It's a thing of beauty, is it not?

Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, spend their time eluding capture.

As I was saying, it's a sick laugh. But it's a laugh all the same.

The pity is that my father (who reads three newspapers a day and has done so for the past 40 years) and millions of other mainstream media Americans believe every word of it. It doesn't matter to them if Osama bin Laden is obviously dead, or Ayman al-Zawahri (whose name is always misspelled as "Zawahiri" in the Western press) is obviously an agent of Israeli propaganda -- just the same as it doesn't matter whether Rashid Rauf is alive or dead: if he's dead, his death is a victory for the forces of good (the US military, of course) and if he's alive, then he's a threat that must be eliminated by the forces of good (ditto, ditto).

It's no wonder we can't catch bin Laden or al-Zawarhi.

And only a fool would question the sea and sky.

So I rubbed my jaw and tried to smile. Dental surgery is such a bitch!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Dear Troops ...

2009-10-10T21:32:00.003-04:00

Tonight I drove past a "Christian" church with sign saying this:

THANK THE TROOPS. WRITE A LETTER.

So I did. And here it is:

Dear Troops,

Thou Shalt Not Kill.

Please always remember this Christian principle, and go find a job which does not require you to violate it.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
WP

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Truth Is Fiction: Peace Prize Fits Obama Like A Velvet Glove

2009-10-10T02:43:00.008-04:00

War Is Peace in Orwell's 1984, and the same is true here and now.

In addition, Truth Is Fiction, as demonstrated in Barack Obama's selection as Nobel Peace Prize winner, and as elucidated in the New York Times, which says: "Surprise Nobel for Obama Stirs Praise and Doubts"

“The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world,” the Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, said in Oslo after the announcement. “And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

Clearly this was one of those unaccountable moments when the list of possible answers was so long that the list itself seemed to disappear. But that's not the first time this has happened to the Nobel committee.

This is the same "Peace Prize", we may remember, that was given to Henry Kissinger, who at the time, as Richard Nixon's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, was directing a massive American bombing campaign against Southeast Asia, part of a "war effort" that killed at least two million people and led directly to the deaths of at least two million more, not to mention damage to the survivors and their countries. Southeast Asia was only one of Kissinger's killing fields. And Kissinger is only one of the war criminals who have won this "Peace Prize".

With his mythical "withdrawal" from the war crimes in Iraq, his aggressive escalation of the war crimes in Afghanistan, his instigation of more war crimes in Pakistan, and his continuation of the war crimes in Somalia, Barack Obama has clearly "done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world" -- certainly much more than anyone on a list so long it seems to disappear.

Similarly, the list of Obama's efforts in support of the atrocities begun under the George W. Bush administration is a long one. And it must have disappeared as well, since nothing of it is ever mentioned in mainstream news reports.

By going to court to keep evidence of torture secret, for example, Barack Obama has inscribed his own name on the list of American war crime enablers -- a list so long no one can find it anywhere. And this list dates back much further than the Bush/Cheney years, back to a history that seems too awful to be countenanced, most of which has apparently evaporated.

But it's not just about Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. The list of countries not currently occupied but still under threat of American force is a long one, and some of the names on it are certainly victims of American interference: Iran, for example, Venezuela, Honduras, Russia, China... The list goes on and on but -- curiously -- it also seems to be invisible whenever the official historians are around.

War Is Peace. Truth Is Fiction. And the fabric of reality is threadbare. Before it vanishes entirely, let us make a few hasty notes:

As the tale of WMD in Iraq clearly demonstrates, the USA is currently engaged in a state-sponsored program of mass murder for fun and profit. One might say the USA is a state-sponsored program of mass murder for fun and profit. Enormous fun for the rubes. Enormous profit for those who pull the strings. Enormous pain and suffering, death and destruction for the rest -- in numbers so large they can't even be seen.

To become a "leader" of the USA, one must excel at the game of politics. Politics in general is the pursuit of power -- normally above all else, inevitably to the exclusion of all else. And politics in the USA is primarily -- or entirely -- the pursuit of power over a state-sponsored program of mass murder for fun and profit.

As the USA is still nominally a democracy, American politics necessarily involves doing one thing while saying another -- constantly, eternally, as a matter of course. And, for structural coherency if nothing else, the pinnacle of this murderous and deceptive power structure must house the mother of all murderous lies. Thus, a Peace Prize for a War Criminal is not only warranted and predictable, but altogether fitting and proper. It's amazing that American presidents don't get Nobel Peace Prizes every year.

None of this depends on Barack Obama personally, or any aspect of his background, or any member or members of his staff. The same could be said of any President in your lifetime who wasn't assassinated in office -- and anyone else who has risen to the top of the system. Indeed, the same could be said of the system itself. And the system is -- and was designed primarily to be -- self-perpetuating.

We appear to be headed for more of the same unless and until we can change the system. And we appear to have no way to change it.

To wit: What are our resources? What are our obstacles? Who are our friends? Who are our enemies?

Speaking of enemies -- enemies of peace, enemies of truth, enemies of humanity -- it is quite clear, is it not, that the Nobel committee is one of them. And so is the New York Times. And so is the president of the United States.

But then, how much of this is news?

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Happy Patriot Day? Not Quite: The Saddest 9/11 Anniversary Of All

2009-09-11T11:59:00.016-04:00

Here we are again, another September 11th. For me it's more painful than any previous anniversary of the "terrorist attacks" of 2001.

I've been trying to write a major essay about it, but it's not coming together. Oh well. Instead I will confine my comments to a few words and give you an opportunity to say what you wish, if you wish...

I think this is the most painful 9/11 since 2001 because we now know, more certainly than ever before, that the official story of what happened that day, and how it happened, is false in almost EVERY DETAIL.

We also now have -- for the first 9/11 anniversary since the "attacks", a Democratic president and a Democratic congress.

And YET we STILL don't have a SINGLE advocate for real 9/11 truth ANYWHERE near the corridors of power.

There used to be one, until just a few days ago, but he got run out for (among other things) having signed, five years ago, a letter requesting an impartial investigation of the crimes of 9/11 and their coverup. Apparently Obama's staff made a hasty decision and approved a man with a touch of truth in his past.

Guided by his Chief of Staff, a foul-mouthed, quick-tempered Zionist who stands against both electoral integrity and 9/11 truth, Obama has been trying not to allow such "mistakes". But occasionally they do happen, and as we have seen so clearly, they need to be corrected as soon as they are detected.

If we had a real opposition, a viable political process, open discourse, access to information, rule of law, a government whose authority derived from the consent of the governed: if we had any these things that supposedly make America great ...

If we had a major newspaper, a television network, a wire service, a national newsmagazine -- any major media source at all, that was willing to do an investigation, or even report on the investigative work of others, or even to do a series on the obvious and brazen way in which Bush and many others evaded their responsibility to defend the country and their concommitant responsibility to investigate thoroughly and openly the events of the day: if we had any or all of these things ...

The obvious (though horrible) truths about 9/11 would be much more common knowledge than they are already.

The perpetrators and their enablers would no longer be able to hide behind their obvious lies.

And the new administration, rather than running one token "Truther" out of town on a rail, would be FULL of people demanding Truth and Justice.

But it isn't. Far from it. We are as far from that as you could possibly imagine, and still going in the opposite direction.

I find this sadder than almost anything else that has happened in the past seven years and 364 days.

But then again, it's not a sad day for everybody.

It's a day of celebration, a day of victory, for some people, such as ... let's just say ... Jerome Hauer:

One segment of [this frequently unavailable] video [starting at 2:30] documents the following exchange, from the morning of September 11, 2001:
Dan Rather: Based on what you know, and I recognize we’re dealing with so few facts, is it possible that just a plane crash could have collapsed these buildings, or would it have required the, sort of, prior positioning of other explosives in the, uh, in the buildings? I mean, what do you think?

Jerome Hauer: No, I, uh, my sense is just the velocity of the plane and the fact that you have a plane filled with fuel hitting that building, uh, that burned, uh, the velocity of that plane, uh, certainly, uh, uh, had an impact on the structure itself, and then the fact that it burned and you had that intense heat, uh, probably weakened the structure as well, uh, and I think it, uh, was, uh, simply the, uh, the planes hitting the buildings, and, and causing the collapse.
Jerome Hauer is certainly a remarkable guest, isn't he? On the very morning of the event, he had the whole thing figured out.

The collapse was simply due to the planes hitting the buildings, just the velocity of the plane and of course the fact that it was filled with fuel, and the fact that it burned and of course you had that intense heat which must have weakened the structure ... It's incredible, of course. It's also half of the official story!

But let's get back to the attack itself. Who did it? Who could have done it? If you were watching CBS that morning, you would have heard this:
Dan Rather: What perspective can you give us? I mean, there have been these repeated reports that, well, yes, Osama Bin Laden, but some think he’s been over-emphasized as, as responsible for these kinds of events. I know many intelligence, uh, people at very high levels who say, listen, you can’t have these kinds of attacks without having some state, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, somebody involved. Put that into perspective for us.

Jerome Hauer: Yeah, well I’m not sure I agree that, umm, this is necessarily state-sponsored. Umm, it, as I mentioned earlier, certainly has, umm, the, uh, fingerprints of somebody like Bin Laden.
And that, of course, is the other half of the official story.

How did Dan Rather happen to have a guest with him on the morning of 9/11 who knew the entire official story before it became public knowledge?

[...]

The twin disintegrations of the twin towers certainly looked like explosives-driven demolitions to many reporters who covered them live -- but Jerome Hauer assured Dan Rather and his viewers that it was just caused by the intense heat that weakened the structure!

The attack of 9/11 was of such scope and ferocity that it was virtually unimaginable -- except to the people who planned it -- just a day before it happened. But when it did happen, Jerome Hauer was able to contradict the intelligence experts and claim it bore the fingerprints of somebody like Bin Laden!

Jerome Hauer knew the entire official story before it became public knowledge.

Jerome Hauer helped the official story become public knowledge!

Is that how the deal goes down? Do Jerome Hauer and his buddies win, and do we all lose?

That's how it looks to me, but if you have a different opinion you are certainly welcome to share it.

As a matter of fact, you are welcome to share your opinion even if you agree with me!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Brushes With Death And (Wild) Life

2009-09-09T02:27:00.014-04:00

Medical emergencies (large and small) in my "real life" family are conspiring with my ongoing personal maladies to create vast and nearly impenetrable barriers between me and my various dormant blogs.

I apologize once again to my (relatively few but extremely devoted) readers for my repeated long absences.

My inability to blog (at all, let alone properly) is doubly (or triply) unfortunate in view of events (large and small) about which I would write reams of utter nonsense if only I had more time.

If the planets line up properly (or improperly, depending on your point of view), I may be able to write something worth reading about some of these events, sometime in the unspecified future.

But for the moment, I can only give you what I've got.

My father almost died since we last spoke. He had major surgery a month ago and his recovery has been fraught with complications. And last week we almost lost him.

Fortunately for us, he was moved from a small community hospital to a major medical center, in what became an ambulance race against the Grim Reaper -- and the ambulance won.

So he got into good hands, and just in time, and therefore he is still alive, although he remains in intensive care, in a room very similar to the one shown here. We are fortunate that he has good health insurance, as this is scary enough already.

My dad and I have exchanged heated words once or thrice over the years, and we still have very serious areas of disagreement, some of which I have written about in the past.

And those things still matter to me, but not at this level. He's a good man and we're not ready to say goodbye to him. Yet his condition remains critical and his care remains intensive. So everybody is on tenterhooks, and everything is suddenly tentative.

Which is to say: more tentative than it already was, with 73 simultaneous global disasters imminent, most (if not all) of which remain "over the event horizon" for most (if not all) of the people around me -- in my "real life", that is.

It sometimes seems the only sane people I can think of are the ones I "know" in the virtual world -- in my "unreal life", so to speak.

How fitting for 8th Century Amerika, slip-sliding into the New Dark Ages with a "cultural" view of "reality" so screwed up that only in the virtual world does political discourse maintain any semblance of contact with the truly real.

My father's brush with death was punctuated for me (and my wife and kids) by an episode involving our cat, an orange tabby very similar to the one shown here.

One afternoon a few days ago, he curled up on the couch in my home office and went to sleep. Late that night he was still there, and I wanted to sit down.

I tried to shoo him away but he didn't move. So I reached down to help him get going, and I found out why he wasn't moving. He was all done moving -- all done forever.

Breaking the news to the kids the next morning wasn't a lot of fun. The rest of the day wasn't any easier. We buried the cat under a tree in our back yard. I said a few words. The kids cried and screamed a bit, after which they felt somewhat better. When they lose their only grandfather, the news will be even tougher to break -- and to receive.

We're gonna miss that little cat. And we're gonna miss the old man, too. His passing is not exactly imminent, but he's in rough shape, and even if he does recover and regain a good deal of his former health, he's not about to last forever.

Nobody lasts forever, as far as I know, although it does seem that professional psychopaths and state-sponsored war criminals live several decades longer than normal humans. How old is Kissinger, 185? Maybe that's their secret: they don't stress out over guilt pangs.

When I go to see my dad in the hospital, I have a choice between a long fast drive on the interstates and a couple of slower, more direct routes that run through little towns and villages. Normally I choose the shortest slow route, although I could drive many miles farther and pay tolls all along the way in order to arrive five minutes sooner.

Last week I was doing the slow drive and I came to a crossroads where the light was green, but it had recently been red and the intersection was full of cars. I didn't quite have to stop before everyone in front of me got going, but I had to slow way down.

And as I was creeping along at 2 MPH, a golden eagle drifted across the road in front of me. It was enormous and gorgeous and very similar to the one shown here.

It was just coasting along at my eye level, and at one point its body was almost directly above my front bumper.

The wings were spread but not stretched; one was almost touching the truck in front of me, and the other came within an inch of my windshield. If not for the glass, I could have reached out and touched a wing.

The big bird was heading for a stand of tall trees on my right, and just drifting along. There was a small, slow-moving gap in the traffic, and for some reason that was appealing. I don't understand why: one flap of the wings and the eagle could have been well above the traffic. But that didn't happen. Instead, it just snuck across between me and the truck.

I've never been that close to a bird that big, and -- like any sudden encounter with big wildlife -- it was a jolt from another dimension. Not that I didn't need one.

One of the most common fallacies which infect the current "real-life" political discourse is the notion that always and everywhere there are only two choices. You're either with Bush (i.e. Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza, Gates, Obama, Biden, Hillary, Gates again...), or you're with the "terrrrisss". That's been around for a while. Either you stifle all criticism of Israel no matter what, or you're an anti-Semite. That's been around for a while, too. These idiocies persist, and multiply. Nowadays, either you can have your social security, or you can have "health care reform", but not both. And there is no third option.

That's the basic problem with any two-party system, anywhere, anytime: there is no third option. And that's the starting point for American politics. Throw in centuries of corruption and decades of rampant militarism and now you have a thoroughly corrupt, heavily armed, extremely powerful state in which the two options available are more or less identical, and there is no third option.

In my "real life" I do software design and often I need to answer questions of the form "What are my options for implementing blah blah blah?"

An overwhelming percentage of the time, I come back with a large number of options. There are almost always five or six or eight different ways to do blah blah blah. Rare indeed is the blah blah blah that can only be done in one or two different ways.

This is not to say that software design -- a virtual occupation which relies on truth and logic and pays my real bills in my real life -- is anything like functioning in "the real world" -- where nearly every bit of news and political commentary is likely false, and truth and logic must be abandoned on a daily basis.

On the other hand, very often -- in the virtual world as well as the real one -- there comes a fork in the road which offers more than two options.

In this case, I'd much rather die the way my cat died, than live the way my father is living.

But if I had my choice, I'd be heading for the tall trees with a golden eagle.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Lookout, Obama! The Peace Train Goes Sailing Around Martha's Vineyard

2009-08-23T10:40:00.008-04:00

Martha's Vineuard is abuzz over a presidential visit for which locals are even sporting caps featuring an image of the presidential pooch.

But according to The Times of London, the presidential vacation comes at a time when Obama is also catching "a cold wave of unrest".

Three of the top five titles on the New York Times nonfiction hard-back bestseller list are currently anti-Obama screeds ...

and of course they are all attacking Obama from the right:

Currently topping the bestseller list is Culture of Corruption, the latest right-wing outpouring from Michelle Malkin, a popular conservative columnist who recently declared of her book: “What I have done is to help shatter completely the myths of hope and change in the new politics in Washington by scouring every inch of this administration, and showing how in a very short span of six months they have betrayed every principle and every promise that they have made.”

That's from Michelle Malkin? Am I the only one who thinks that's funny?

Also selling well is Dick Morris’s new book, Catastrophe, which is summarised as: “Stopping President Obama before he transforms America into a socialist state and destroys the health care system.” Third on the list is Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny, yet another conservative manifesto taking aim at “Barack Nobama”.

Out of the discussion, as always, are much more reality-based criticisms coming from the left, which in my cold opinion are far fewer in number than they ought to be.

I do not expect the corporate media news to mention anti-war protests in conjunction with the presidential family's vacation -- or in any other fashion, for that matter. Nonetheless:

Cindy Sheehan is inviting other proponents of peace to join her for a sail!

It's to be a "shipboard peace summit" and if you read anything about it at all, it'll probably be at some low-traffic blog or another.

Excerpts from Cindy Sheehan:

"I am calling in the Peace Movement to encircle our country with our united demand for an immediate return of all U.S. forces around the globe. Bring every one of our troops home NOW! We need them in our families and towns. We need our troops back to help us fix our broken country. Our ships of state must make their voyage home, with our countrymen out of harm's way."

NOW! Imagine that!!

"This is our time to finally draw an end to America's wars. We must abide by the saying of ancient scriptures: Let peace and peace and peace be everywhere. I declare this to be our new national defense policy."

If only our national defense policy could be so declared.

Want to join Cindy Sheehan aboard a sailing ship of peace?

Sheehan will co-captain daily excursions ... aboard the grand sailing vessel dubbed the SS Camp Casey ... [and invites] peace movement leaders, international news 'anchors' and pro-peace members of the public to sail around Martha's Vineyard [with her] as she holds this seaside peace summit. ...

For information, contact:
Laurie Dobson
lauriegdobson@yahoo.com
207-604-8988

or Bruce Marshall
brmas@yahoo.com
802-767-6079

The full details are here.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Drowning In A Giant Cesspool I: Consultation

2009-08-19T07:00:00.011-04:00

Hi. Can I help you?

I hope so, Doc! I really do.

What seems to be the problem?

I suffer from a recurring ... sensation ... that I'm drowning ...

That's not uncommon.

... in a giant cesspool!

Well, that is uncommon. Why do you say "a giant cesspool"?

It's so dark, and so foul. I can't see anything. I struggle just to keep my face above the surface. I breathe through my mouth because the smell is so horrible. And every now and then I bump into something that's floating, and I want to grab it, and hold onto it ... but ...

But what?

... but I know I shouldn't ... because it's probably ... well, why do you think I said "cesspool"?

I see ... You say this is a recurring sensation?

Yes.

How often does it come on? When did it start?

It started in November of '63. One day I was an innocent little kid and the sun was shining; the next day the President was dead, everything was dark, and I was up to my neck in slime. It got worse in the summer of '68, and it's never really gone away -- and never got any better, either. But in the past eight years or so, it's been getting a lot worse, and even more frequent, and now it's a constant feature of my life ... I fight it every night.

So, this dream...

Oh no! It's not a dream! It happens when I'm awake.

When you're awake?

Yeah.

What triggers it?

Reading the paper. Watching TV. Listening to the radio. Surfing the net. Talking to idiots who think they're geniuses, and fools who think they know everything. There are other triggers, but these are the main ones.

And how does it happen? Is it always the same? Or is it always different?

Oh no. It's different every time.

Can you give me an example?

Are you kidding? I could give you a thousand.

Let's start with one, shall we?

OK. Let's start at the bottom of the tank. Look: If I lose it for a second -- if I slip under the surface -- my feet get into muck like this:

Why You Should Love Your Carbon Footprint

By: Paul A. Ibbetson (Right Truth Exclusive)

America, with all its imperfections, is still truly the land of opportunity. This has been the unique component that has brought people from around the world, in every way imaginable, and even some ways not. This opportunity to succeed and, yes, to also fail, is a product brought about by individual freedom that has been unique to America since our founding fathers placed their lives on the line to create a better future for themselves and their families....

You see what I mean? This isn't floating. This is not something I would want to hang onto. This is the sort of poison I am trying to get away from!

How do you know it's poison?

First of all, look at the name of the site. Right Truth. It's a contradiction in terms, flashing in neon, right out in the open for all to see. What does that tell you?

What am I supposed to see in it?

"Truth" is not "Right" or "Left"; those are political labels. Principles of "right" or "left", or the use of any other simplistic labels, get in the way of the truth more often than not -- as ideology always does! -- as ideology is intended to do!!

So when I see a site that's openly marked in such a political way, claiming to tell me the truth, I'm more than suspicious. It's as if they don't even have enough guile to pretend to be neutral observers.

And such is the case here. Paul Ibbetson starts with a mass of lies and then builds on them. And what do you think he builds? More lies!

Ibbetson is opposed to Obama's Cap and Trade bill, which I do not support either, but I see no reason to support my position by telling lies -- such as the claim, advanced by Ibbetson, that Obama's deeply flawed policy is

a symptom of the liberal environmental psychosis, of which capitalism and the free market (and the prosperity both bring), are seen as dangerous and destructive. It is through this derangement that CO2, a naturally occurring substance - crucial for life on this planet, can be seen as a poison and we are all told to hate our "carbon footprint."

It is true that CO2 is a naturally occurring substance, but like every naturally occurring substance, there are limits to how much can naturally occur and still leave the planet in a condition to support life -- any life, not to mention complex social systems such as we "advanced" and "prosperous" "free-market" humans have evolved.

Oxygen is naturally occurring, but if we had too much oxygen in the atmosphere, the next spark would ignite us all.

Water is naturally occurring as well, but if the oceans were a mile deeper ... well, you get the idea, don't you?

The larger point is: environmental destruction is real. It's not a liberal derangement. It's happening -- here in a big way, elsewhere in much bigger ways. The rich export their garbage. And even though our economy is in a spin, we are still the rich of the world. We consume the bulk of the resources. We generate the bulk of the pollution. Our prosperity comes at great cost to the planet, and to the other people with whom we allegedly share it. Everybody else in the world knows this. And to deny it ... is ... so typically American!

But then denying reality is typically American. According to Ibbetson, America is "unique" in offering personal freedom, plus the chance to succeed or fail! What could be more stupid? Do they not have personal freedom in any other country in the world? Can foreigners not succeed? Or fail?

To hear Paul Ibbetson tell it, such opportunities are uniquely American, and therefore foreign success stories must be fiction. Forget Ferrari, Mercedes, Toblerone, Abba; they just don't exist for the bottom-feeders who call themselves "Right" and call what they're selling "Truth". If it weren't so poisonous, it would almost be funny.

Well, it may be incorrect, but why do you say it's poisonous?

Because these introductory lies are used as building blocks for the next layer of lies, and they form a foundation for an edifice of fiction that goes on forever ... with nary a glimpse of reality to be found.

Here's another example, from the same website. "Breaking Big Government", by R.J. Godlewski, contains astonishing admissions of ignorance and hatred, such as:

... we are constantly drilled on the perceived injustices that we supposedly unleashed upon the planet.... We would rather be suckered into believing that our nation has done the world great harm instead of understanding that that [sic] world had [sic] suffered us into nearly every war that we fought.

These lies are multi-faceted, multi-layered and multi-purposed.

We are in no sense "constantly drilled". What America has done to the rest of the world is the best-kept secret of all -- never allowed in American schools, from elementary to university; never allowed onto TV news; only mentioned on the most truth-telling of blogs! -- but the whole sorry saga is well-known to those who have bothered to look for it, and, of course, to those upon whom the damage has been inflicted.

The "perceived injustices" that we "supposedly unleashed" include countless millions of innocent people dead; tens of millions of other innocent people displaced; scores of democratic governments overthrown; dozens of other countries thrown into states of violent chaos that have lasted a generation or longer -- sometimes much longer. Add in chemical, biological and nuclear pollution that runs in the hundreds of thousands of tons, and we're just getting started.

Furthermore, nobody wants to believe that our nation has done the world great harm. Liberals and conservatives both deny it outright, albeit in different ways. Most of us can't even be "suckered into" contemplating the truth for a moment, let alone embracing it long enough to begin to understand it.

As I read him, Godlewski was trying to type "the world has suffered us into nearly every war that we have fought", which makes syntactic sense, even though it does little else -- at least on first sight. On the other hand, it may reveal more than Godlewski intended, for surely the world has "suffered" mightily because of nearly every war we have fought.

As for the world having "suffered us into" those wars, one might struggle a bit with the semantics, but as Merriam-Webster makes clear, "suffer" is indeed the correct word, in more than one sense.

1 a : to submit to or be forced to endure
1 b : to feel keenly : labor under
2 : undergo, experience
3 : to put up with especially as inevitable or unavoidable
4 : to allow especially by reason of indifference

It is no doubt true that the world has "submitted" and been "forced to endure" damage it has "felt keenly"; and that it has been "undergoing" and "experiencing" great pain, which to this point has indeed been "inevitable" and "unavoidable", at least as far as the victims have been concerned.

But to claim that the world has "allowed" America to attack and destroy one defenseless country after another for the past 60 or 100 years by reason of "indifference" is as misleading as any lie you'll ever read.

Clearly the international scene is dominated by the often unspoken but occasionally explicit threat: Who wants to be the next Iraq?

Nevertheless, the stack of lies gows ever deeper, and Godlewski even says this:

Since 2006, our Congress and Presidency have exceeded that which caused the colonists to fight back against King George III; the United States to fight back against Nazi Germany; and America to fight back against Soviet Russia. Yet, we remain silent and submissive. We allow the traitor-ship of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and, most recently, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, to quickly dismantle the very foundations of our liberties and rights while we attentively “listen” for explanation of these transgressions. There is no excuse for treachery, no justification for thievery.

I agree with some of his sentiments, but it's obvious that the problem did not begin in 2006 -- when the Democrats "took control" of the Congress -- and that the list of treacherous thieves is not confined to -- and doesn't even begin with -- Peolsi, Reid, Obama and Biden.

It was the Bush administration -- "Conservative" "Republicans" of the "Right" -- who neglected their national security responsibilities enough to allow terrorists to strike us (or worse!) and then used the resulting "crisis" to implement a regime featuring indefinite detention without charge or trial (but with enhanced torture), warrantless surveillance on an unprecedented scale, unprovoked wars against two (or three) (or four!) different countries, and on and on and on ... not that it was all Bush's fault. Most of this has been brewing since Bush I, if not Reagan, if not Truman, if not Wilson, if not Teddy Roosevelt. And all the while they told us that only they -- and not the Democrats -- could be trusted to provide national security. These clowns who had failed us, or traitors who had sold us down the river, made this ridiculous claim, and the media broadcast it far and wide, day and night. None of these problems started with Obama, or in 2006. But of course such a wide historical perspective is not "Right" or "Truth", and so Godlewski is not selling it.

He's selling this, instead:

We permitted the indiscretions of Bill Clinton and the inconsistencies of George W. Bush to open the doorway to transnationalism and the breakdown of the Republic when it is “Big Government” that deserves our wrath.

Could any analysis ever be more shallow? If only all we had to worry about were Clinton's "indiscretions". And what are we to make of Godlewski's claim about Bush's "inconsistencies"? When has a president ever "stayed" such a brain-damaged (or criminally corrupt) "course" so steadfastly?

As for "the doorway to transnationalism", that's something the US "business community" has been trying, not to open but to obliterate, for more than a hundred years. Having bashed it down is an "achievement" both parties can be "proud" of.

Piling on is a foul in football, but in "Right" "Truth" "journalism", piling on is a proven tactic, and so Godlewski throws in one more lie to close the paragraph, saying that it's "Big Government" that "deserves our wrath" when in fact the problem with our government is not its size but its orientation. If the government were large and powerful and working on our behalf, that would be another story -- a very different story indeed.

Perhaps it's asking too much of Godlewski to tell us some truth. By his own admission, he's spent his adult life immersed in the mother of all giant cesspools:

While Mr. Obama was basking in the glow of his liberal professors, I was actively serving my nation in order to keep the Red Menace off Main Street. While he was practicing law, I was defending America. Later, when Mr. Obama left college he went on to become a “community organizer”. When I left the Navy I went on to organize efforts to defeat global terrorism.

Perhaps it's asking too much of Godlewski to understand that there was never any "Red Menace" to Main Street; on the contrary there were many years when the lion's share of the "membership" dues collected by the Communist Party of America came from FBI agents who had been assigned to infiltrate the Party.

Perhaps it's asking too much of Godlewski to understand that he has spent many years "defending America" against a "threat" that never existed at all, except insofar as it was fomented by the Pentagon and her Mossad friends, and exaggerated by politicians and media moguls.

And given all that, perhaps it's not very surprising that a man who has been immersed in toxic waste for his entire life could write:

I begin every day with a simple prayer that God drops a large asteroid upon our planet for I cannot bear seeing a future without my beloved United States of America at its helm.

But I can't help starting every day with a similar prayer -- that God drops bolts of lightning on J. R. Godlewski and every other ignoramus who "thinks" the way he does, and who spreads manure so vile that it sinks to the bottom of the cesspool immediately!

Perhaps you're over-reacting?

Perhaps you didn't understand me! But that's ok, because we're just getting started.

We may just be getting started, but unfortunately our time is up. We can schedule another session, if you like.

Sure. What does it cost? Oh, never mind. Just send my bill to the White House!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Obama's Pakistan Campaign: Brilliant President Plus Smart Bombs Equal Humanitarian Success

2009-08-08T00:26:00.016-04:00

I note with proud amazement a new article from Dubai's Gulfnews dot com, describing the ongoing campaign of bombing attacks by unmanned planes against Pakistan (which the American government and media will not usually talk about -- officially -- but which are widely understood to be undertaken by the CIA at the direction of the president).

Unofficial government sources have been weighing in lately, all unequivocally in favor of continuing the attacks. For instance, a July 14 editorial in the Wall Street Journal says that

Far from being "beyond the pale," drones have made war-fighting more humane.

This point of view may seem a bit strange, given that the "success" claimed on behalf of the drones has been rather spotty. In fact, according to Pakistani government sources, as of April 8 of this year, US attacks on Pakistan had killed 14 al Q'aeda terrorists and 687 civilians.

The success ratio -- with alleged terrorists accounting for nearly one-fiftieth of the people killed -- may have been slightly over-estimated in this government report, since one of the "high-value targets" allegedly killed in these attacks (and included among the 14) is Rashid Rauf, the alleged leader of (or at least an alleged key figure in) the supposedly dangerous transatlantic-airline liquid-bombing plot (which I have discussed at great length in the past: for a technical overview of the plot, see "Ludicrouser And Ludicrouser: The Alleged Liquid Bombing Plot, Revisited Again"; for an explanation of what this means, see "Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War").

Rashid Rauf was reportedly killed in a drone attack in November of 2008, but his body has never been produced and his family's plea for the return of his remains was ignored by the Pakistani government; Rauf's family and his attorney say he may be dead, but they dispute the claim that he was killed then and in that manner.

You don't have to be a lunatic moonbat conspiracy theorist or a Pakistani terrorist-sympathizer to claim that Rashid Rauf probably wasn't killed in a drone attack. Long War Journal proprietor Bill Roggio, who usually gets inside information before the marginally-less-complicit-but-still-criminal mainstream press, declared back in April that Rashid Rauf is still alive and dangerous and plotting against us all.

If that's true, then the numbers would be more like: 13 terrorist leaders dead, and 688 innocent people. And that's giving the official statistician the benefit of every doubt. As Bill Roggio wrote just a few days ago,

Reports of senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed in Pakistan have been highly unreliable. In the past, al Qaeda leaders Ayman al Zawahiri, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, Abu Obaidullah Al Masri, Adam Gadahn, Ibn Amin, and Rashid Rauf have been reported killed in strikes, but these men later resurfaced. Similarly, Sa'ad bin Laden was recently reported killed, but he is now thought to be alive. And Abu Khabab al Masri was reported dead several times before he actually was killed in a July 2008 strike.

Given all the billions we spend on intelligence gathering, and all the billions we spend on developing smart weapons, you might think we should be doing a better job of killing terrorists and sparing innocents. But that's a shallow criticism, because after a shaky start we did start doing a better job, as you can see when I break the statistics down chronologically.

According to the report from Pakistan which I mentioned above,

Two strikes carried out in 2006 had killed 98 civilians while three attacks conducted in 2007 had slain 66 Pakistanis

for a total of 164 civilian deaths -- and no terrorists were among the dead in either 2006 or 2007!

By contrast, according to the same report,

385 people lost their lives in 2008 and 152 people were slain in the first 99 days of 2009 (between January 1 and April 8)

for a total of 537 innocent civilians killed, along with the "14 wanted al-Qaeda operatives".

It may not seem like much, but considering the opening phase of this campaign, these reports reveal a double-dose of success. The total of "wanted al-Qaeda operatives" allegedly killed has ballooned from 0 in 2006-7 all the way to 14 in 2008-9, and at the same time the number of innocents killed per terrorist has dropped from 164:0 (an infinite ratio) to only 537:14 (about 38:1) -- provided of course that Rashid Rauf and all the other terrorists described as dead are actually dead, and were actually terrorists.

Some people may have felt these improvements were good enough, but clearly Barack Obama was not among them. As we know, anything is possible for can-do Americans, and as the newest report from Dubai indicates, we have enhanced our performance significantly since the Pakistani report was compiled in April.

Here's the most amazing part: According to Gulfnews, the number of Pakistani civilians killed since the beginning of 2008 is now only 480! That's down by 57 since the total was 537 in April!

So think about this: In the last four months, we have continued bombing Pakistan, killing (or at least claiming to have killed) more and more "high-value targets", such as Osama bin Laden's son Sa'ad (who in addition to probably surviving the attack in which he was "killed", may not have had anything to do with terrorism at all, other than being sired by an undercover CIA operative), and Baitullah Mehsud (who in addition to probably surviving the attack in which he was "killed", has likely been the CIA's most powerful weapon in South Asia since Osama bin Laden died in 2001).

We have been able to do all this without killing any additional civilians, and -- even more amazingly -- we have managed to revive 57 innocent people who were dead back in April but who are not dead anymore!

This is the sort of "humanitarian intervention" we were always hoping for but could never achieve -- not under Republican scoundrels such as Bush, Bush and Reagan; not under Democratic scoundrels such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

Of all the presidents in the history of our great nation, only Obama The Wonderful has managed to turn America's awesome firepower into a healing force.

Clearly, none of this would be possible without Obama's brilliance. He's the first President we've ever had who has been smart enough to use our wonderful smart bombs to their maximum humanitarian potential.

Similarly, none of it would be possible without our fantastic remote-controlled planes and the computerized bombs they carry. The Wall Street Journal was right! Drones have made war-fighting more humane!

What? You doubt me? Oh, please!! You'd have to be awfully naive to think we could raise scores of people from the dead with conventional weapons!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Anti-Semitism In Action: UK Lowers Terror Threat Level; Guardian Reports On The Change

2009-08-06T04:01:00.012-04:00

Is anti-Semitism on the rise? You bet it is, and for good reason. It's well-funded.

Consider, for example, the following piece from Alan Travis, home affairs editor of The Guardian, which appeared on July 20, 2009. The headline reads: "Britain downgrades al-Qaida terror attack alert level". The sub-heading says "Officials reduce assessment of threat from 'severe' to 'substantial', its lowest level since 9/11", and the text of the article reads:

The official assessment of the threat level of an al-Qaida terrorist attack on Britain has been lowered from "severe" – where an attack is deemed highly likely – to "substantial", where an attack is considered a strong possibility.

The decision to lower the official threat level follows a new assessment by MI5 and the joint terrorism analysis centre, based on intelligence gathered in Britain and abroad on how close terrorist groups may be to staging an attack.

The designation of a "substantial" threat level is the lowest since 9/11. It confirms that the swine flu pandemic is now a bigger threat to the life of the nation than terrorism.

The home secretary, Alan Johnson, acknowledged that fact on Sunday, when he told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme that swine flu came "above terrorism as a threat to this country". He said the long-term preparations had involved the whole "Cobra machinery", a reference to the Cabinet's emergency committe [sic] that handles major disasters.

The decision reportedly follows an official assessment of Operation Pathway, one of MI5's biggest counterterrorism campaigns, which led to the arrest of 11 Pakistani men in April. All those arrested were released without charge, and no explosives or weapons were found.

The system of threat levels is made up of five stages. At "critical", an attack is expected imminently. At "severe", an attack is regarded as highly likely. At "substantial", an attack is a strong possibility. At "moderate" an attack is possible but not likely. And at "low", an attack is deemed unlikely.

The home secretary said in a statement: "We still face a real and serious threat from terrorists and the public will notice little difference in the security measures that are in place, and I urge the public to remain vigilant. The police and security services are continuing in their thorough efforts to discover, track and disrupt terrorist activity."

Did you catch the anti-Semitism in this piece? Don't feel badly if you didn't; it's very subtle and it takes an expert to detect it. Fortunately, such an expert happened to be available -- eventually. But first, a number of Guardian readers made comments reflecting the obvious absurdity of the situation, such as this from nega9000:

Hang on a minute, weren't we being told just last month that a, quote, 'spectacular' attack was being planned?

Oh, I get it, whoever's our equivalent of Jack Bauer averted said attack in the nick of time, killed all the terrorists and is, as we speak, copping off with the foxy but feisty young agent who was there for no discernable reason other than to offer expository dialogue.

Phew. Was getting worried there for a minute.

and this from metalvendetta:

Let me get this straight, they arrested eleven Pakistanis and couldn't find anything to link them to terrorism, so now the threat is reduced? Could it be that they just arrested the wrong people? Or is this decision based on intelligence - the same kind of intelligence that led them to believe that those eleven innocent men were terrorists in the first place?

Haywire asks:

Does this mean i now have to stop rifling through my neighbours' bins looking for empty 'chemicals' containers which may well have been used for making bombs, as was suggested by a recent publicity awareness campaign? If so, what the hell am i now going to do with my Sundays? Go to church??!!

nimn2003 asks:

Does this mean we no longer need ID Cards and the Database? Thank the Lord for that!

and ChrisWoods answers:

No we still need ID Cards and database because although there is more chance of dying by eating peanuts, the risk of death by terrorism is still too great and we need total surveillance of you all the time and also need to know all your private details, phone conversations & email just to make sure you will be ok in the future.

Do you see it yet? Nobody has mentioned Israel, and nobody has said anything about any Jew or Jews in particular, nor has anyone said anything about Jews in general. But still, for those with the correct viewpoint, there's anti-Semitism dripping from every word.

Evantually -- belatedly but better late than never -- comes along GnosticMind, with a comment to set them all straight:

I am shocked at the inhrently anti semitic slant displayed in the entire article , not to mention in the tone of the public responses-- Only in the Guardian is such blatant anti semitism, and anti israel rhetoric allowed, and even considered manifestly praiseworthy.

The very next comment was from butteredballs, who wrote

@ GnosticMind

please explain yourself

but GnosticMind was busy elsewhere, apparently. And the comments on this article are now closed, so GnosticMind could not come back and explain, even if she wanted to. Not -- as I see it -- that she would want to.

You see? It's so ineffable, you could never explain it.

It's inherent. It's blatant. But it can't be put into words -- at least not by GnosticMind, or any of her cohorts... and not by anybody else who just happens to be working for the Israeli government.

According to an article published July 5th in Calcalist, a Hebrew-language paper based in Tel Aviv,

The Foreign Ministry is in the process of setting up a team of students and demobilized soldiers who will work around the clock writing pro-Israeli responses on Internet websites all over the world, and on services like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. The Foreign Ministry’s department for the explanation of Israeli policy* is running the project, and it will be an integral part of it.

We're reading an English translation prepared by George Malent for Occupation Magazine, courtesy of MuzzleWatch.

In a footnote, Malent explains the astertisk: for "the Foreign Ministry’s department for the explanation of Israeli policy" you can read "the Ministry of Propaganda".

The piece continues:

“To all intents and purposes the Internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” Elan Shturman, deputy director of the policy-explanation department in the Foreign Ministry, and who is directly responsible for setting up the project, says in an interview with Calcalist. “Our policy-explanation achievements on the Internet today are impressive in comparison to the resources that have been invested so far, but the other side is also investing resources on the Internet. There is an endless array of pro-Palestinian websites, with huge budgets, rich with information and video clips that everyone can download and post on their websites. They are flooding the Internet with content from the Hamas news agency. It is a well-oiled machine. Our objective is to penetrate into the world in which these discussions are taking place, where reports and videos are published – the blogs, the social networks, the news websites of all sizes. We will introduce a pro-Israeli voice into those places.

Yes, of course! That's exactly what's missing today, among the endless array of pro-Palestinian websites: a pro-Israeli voice!!

Will the responders who are hired for this also present themselves as “ordinary net-surfers”?

“Of course,” says Shturman. “Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the Foreign Ministry developed.”

What will they be required to do? Shturman continues:

Their missions will be defined along the lines of the government policies that they will be required to defend on the Internet.

and here -- finally! -- is the explanation of the anti-Semitism in The Guardian.

The Israeli government wants you to be frightened of the militant Islamofascist suicide bomber jihadis and jihadi-wannabes who are everywhere and who are always plotting against you. The Israeli government wants you to be afraid of them, even if they don't exist, not because it's good for you to be afraid of things that don't exist, but because it's good for the Israeli government.

From the correct -- Israeli -- point of view, it's bad enough that Britain has downgraded the threat level. That's a blatant betrayal by a close ally, and it's inherently made worse by the Guardian's having the nerve to report on the government's downgrade. But worse still are the comments, making fun of the British government for taking so seriously -- or pretending to take seriously -- a threat which -- dare I say it? -- has been vastly overblown, if it existed at all.

But how can employees of the Israeli government say this? They can't, unless they are very highly placed, with chutzpah in professional abundance and a swarm of faux-journalists running interference for them.

Ordinary Israeli government employees can merely mouth the party line, as supplied by the Foreign Ministry's department of policy-explanation: the official propagandists cannot say "You must believe this lie even though it's bad for you, because it's good for us."

That would be just a touch too transparent.

Instead we get nonsense like this:

I am shocked at the inhrently anti semitic slant displayed in the entire article, not to mention in the tone of the public responses -- Only in the Guardian is such blatant anti semitism, and anti israel rhetoric allowed, and even considered manifestly praiseworthy.

which -- let's be honest -- is not transparent at all!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Moonwalking To Oblivion Without A Billionaire Sponsor: What's A Blogger To Do?

2009-06-30T03:47:00.011-04:00

The early death of Michael Jackson has triggered some powerful memories, very few of which have anything to do with Jackson or his sudden demise. Nonetheless, let me take you back 25 years...

In the summer of 1984, Michael Jackson was on his "Victory Tour", moonwalking his way through cuts from "Thriller" in his first public performances after he "set his hair on fire for Pepsi" in late January of that year.

I had spent the early months of '84 trying to piece together the remnants of a jazzy-punky rock band which had finally gelled after months of preparation, played a fantastic set on New Year's Eve, and then imploded -- in my own living room, on the same weekend when Michael's hair was burning.

In our case, the fragments which were not mortally wounded in the implosion eventually reunited, wrote some new material, and played in public together again just a few times before a second implosion. And one of those performances fell on a hot and humid Saturday night almost exactly 25 years ago, a night when Michael Jackson was in town.

Were we crazy to play opposite such a huge concert? Not at all. None of the people who went to see Michael Jackson could be bothered with us, and none of the people who came to see us could be bothered with moonwalking or "Thriller" or any of the other very popular, totally inane artefacts of the little dude who somehow became "The King of Pop".

Forgive me if a bit of disrespect is showing. I will not for a moment deny that Michael Jackson was a fantastic singer, especially as a youngster, or that we would have been very lucky to have such a talented vocalist in our band.

On the other hand, I remain convinced that we made a good move by scheduling a gig when his fans were elsewhere. Our music was direct and honest, often too raw but never too polished, not commercially marketed or even amenable to such treatment. Michael could not have said this of his material, in 1984 or at any stage of his long and very successful career.

We once wrote a song that (among other things) made fun of him. But he never mentioned us. So there's another point of asymmetry.

On the Monday morning after our simultaneous concerts, while I was returning the PA gear we'd rented from a local music store, I heard this on the radio: Scalpers had been getting more for a pair of tickets to see Michael Jackson than it cost us to stage our entire show.

He drew about a hundred thousand fans. We might have drawn a hundred. And we didn't even play well that night. I remember being disappointed about that.

But on the other hand, the people who came to see us that night, the people who came to hear us, the people who came with their eyes and ears open ... they got something they couldn't have found on the Victory Tour, or anywhere else, for that matter. Some of them still talk about that show -- in complimentary terms! It wouldn't have mattered whether we played well or not. What we were doing -- what we were trying to do -- appealed to a few people, maybe one in a thousand, maybe less. But it touched them in a much deeper way than the "King of Pop" -- or anything "pop" -- could have done.

There's a lesson in all this, or a moral to the story, and I'm still not sure what it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it helps to explain why my blog readership never seems to grow, no matter how much or how well I write; neither does it seem to shrink, no matter how rarely I post and no matter what I choose to write about.

What you get here is direct and honest, often too raw but never too polished, not commercially marketed or even amenable to such treatment. It's no wonder so few people are interested. But you can't get it -- or anything similar -- anywhere else.

Maybe it's no big deal, but I got thinking of all this when I heard of Jackson's death, and it all came back to me again when I read this piece from Scholars and Rogues, and even more especially when I considered an earlier, related piece there which deals with a pointed political question: Why don't progressive billionaires fund progressive bloggers (in much the same way that conservative billionaires fund conservative bloggers)?

I would argue that such funding is neither to be expected nor to be welcomed. I would argue that there's no such thing as a progressive billionaire, although there are a few billionaires who might pretend to be leaders and/or funders of a "progressive" opposition.

The earlier S&R post -- "Devil, meet Deep Blue Sea: how much should progressives spend reaching out to progressives?" -- quotes Jane Hamsher of FiredogLake, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog, all of whom are upset that major Democratic organizations are asking for (and receiving) their support, but aren't supporting them in any tangible way, not even by advertising on their sites.

It may be pointed out that those who obtain support for free have no incentive to pay for it.

Much more importantly, in my view, the sites in question share a common approach to all the most important issues: they bury them if they can't ignore them altogether. This tendency is unfortunately prevalent at all high-traffic "progressive" websites, including the one where I used to volunteer my services.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder and chief director of censorship at DailyKos, was trained by the CIA and makes no bones about the fact that posters who entertain conspiracy theories regarding 9/11 are not welcome at his site.

The other sites mentioned above are a bit less pointed and a touch more subtle but they are nevertheless written by and for people who are not much interested in certain very inconvenient facts: facts about 9/11 in particular; facts about bogus terrorism in general; facts about how the entire "global war on terror" (or whatever Obama wants us to call it this week) is based on a fictional view of history and our role in it; facts about how the Democrats have been complicit in selling both the fictional history and the endless, limitless war it entails.

Would I want to see these sites better funded? Would I want to see them drawing even larger audiences? Would I want their reporting even more constrained by vague doubts about what the billionaire sponsor might think? Dare I even hint of the possibility of explicit instructions from such a sponsor? Or, conversely, can anyone imagine a billionaire-sponsored website without an explicit list of instructions?

An alliance between faux-progressive billionaires and faux-progressive bloggers would be a powerful way to destroy any hope of a meaningful political opposition arising in 21st-century America. But then again, there's no need to destroy things that don't exist.

And that's why it won't happen. There's no need for it. And it wouldn't matter anyway, because 99% of all Americans surveyed have already said ... that given the choice ... they'd prefer moonwalking!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Home Improvement, Post-9/11; Part II: Jackhammers? Who Needs 'Em?

2009-06-22T22:17:00.010-04:00

My wife and I had a problem with the "steps" outside our "back door", if you don't mind what you say.

We call it the "back door", but it's at the side of the house, near the back corner. And we called them "steps" but they were actually concrete slabs, stacked and broken.

They were never properly grounded; they had shifted over the years and they were tilted in, toward the house. So water collected there, and the steps were always wet and moldy, except when they were icy, and we'd been hoping they would fix themselves, but that didn't happen, so we decided to do something about them.

At first we thought if we poured a cement cap over them and slanted it away from the house, that would do the trick, but then we had a home building specialist come and look at them and he could see that they were still moving. He told us pouring more concrete over the problem would only make it worse. And it was hard to argue with that.

But I did argue when he said the best thing we could do would be to rent a dumpster, score the concrete with a diamond-tipped saw, bust it up with a jackhammer, and haul it to the dumpster one piece at a time in a wheelbarrow.

"You could do it in a weekend," he said, "but you'd be sore by the time you were done!"

I couldn't believe it! That is so September 10th thinking! It was as if he had never seen the World Trade Center collapse.

I said, "Why don't we just crash an airplane into them?"

He laughed and said "That would be dangerous. What about the neighbors?"

I said, "Look, it's not as if we're trying to bring down a skyscraper. It's probably not even a yard of concrete. We could do it with a little remote-controlled toy. Fill it with kerosene, crash it into the steps. The concrete disintegrates, the wind blows it away. We don't have to carry anything anywhere."

He said, "No, no. You can't do it with fire alone, or with fire and a little bump. You need high-speed impact and a fire. And you don't have a good clear approach here, unless you fly through your neighbor's house. So that's really not a good idea."

I thought I was out of options but then I had a brainstorm. "Let's use the Building 7 method," I said. "We can pulverize the concrete by burning office supplies near it."

So that's what we did. But it took a few tries.

At first, we drilled little holes in the steps, and filled them with pens, pencils and sticky notes, plus some upholstery that I pulled out of an old chair. We lit it all on fire, but nothing happened.

"What have we done wrong?" I wondered, but just for a second. Then I had another brainstorm. "We forgot the diesel fuel!"

We went to a truck stop and bought a container of diesel fuel, sprayed it all over the steps, lit them again ... and again nothing! The fuel burned off, but the steps were still there.

"What else have we forgotten?" It took me a couple of minutes to figure it out.

Then we went to the local mosque, brought a couple of Muslims back with us, set it all up again and got them to light it. It burned a little better, but nothing spectacular, and they watched for a while and left, saying, "It's not happening."

For a while it looked like they were right. We couldn't put the fire out, but it didn't get any bigger, and we figured nothing special was going to happen.

But then a remote studio truck arrived from the BBC, and they did a live broadcast in which a reporter stood in front of our burning steps and announced that they had collapsed!

About ten minutes later the police came along and evacuated the neighborhood, and we all heard what sounded like strings of firecrackers going off, except they were a lot louder than firecrackers. Then we saw a big plume of dust, and it blew away in the wind, and when the police let us come back home, our steps were completely gone!

Unfortunately, most of our neighbors are now dead or dying of lung disease, and we can't use our basement anymore because it contains pools of molten steel. Also, the cops called the feds, who destroyed the mosque and apparently killed a large number of innocent people. But nothing about any of this ever made the news, so who cares?

All in all it worked out pretty well. We didn't have to rent a dumpster, we didn't have to carry anything, and we are now rebuilding our steps. Plus, the mosque is gone.

You don't believe me, do you?

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Home Improvement, Post-9/11; Part I: Wood Chips Tell A Sad Story

2009-06-19T10:03:00.010-04:00

I've just finished helping a friend set up some new flower beds and trim them with a border of wood chips.

It's a good way to mulch, with recycled organic matter blotting out weeds on the way to becoming plant food.

We used 12 cubic yards of chips. That's not a lot by industrial standards, but it took us two days to put those chips where we wanted them.

And while we were doing that, I was playing around with a few numbers...

There are 3 feet in a yard and therefore there are 3x3x3 = 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard. We moved 12 cubic yards or 12x27 = 324 cubic feet of wood chips.

That's enough to cover a path 3 feet wide, 4 inches thick, and 324 feet long.

On a football field, such a path would extend from one end zone to the other.

There are 12 inches in a foot and therefore there are 12x12x12 = 1728 cubic inches in a cubic foot.

We moved 324 cubic feet or 324x1728 = 559,872 cubic inches of wood chips.

That's about half a million cubic inches of chips.

Picture a cubic inch: it's about the size of a golf ball. You can hold it between your thumb and forefinger. You can put it in your shirt pocket.

Remember that cubic inch; hold on to that image. Now let's get hypothetical...

If each cubic inch of wood chips were worth two dollars, the chips on that path -- three feet wide, four inches thick, from one end zone to the other -- would be worth about a million dollars. Even with inflation, a million is still a very large number.

If each cubic inch of wood chips were worth a million dollars, the chips on that path would be worth about $500 billion, which is roughly the size of the Pentagon's annual operating budget, not including black-budget programs or additional appropriations for actual wars, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Think of this: A million dollars per cubic inch. Three feet wide; four inches thick. One end zone to the other. Year after year after year. And that's just for standard operations.

Clandestine acts of terrorism and overt wars of aggression cost extra, of course.

How much extra? Look at it this way: If each cubic inch of wood chips were worth two hundred thousand dollars, the chips on that path would be worth about $100 billion, roughly as much as congress just approved to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going until the end of September!

And that's just the cost to America. It's a pittance compared to the cost borne by the rest of the world.

And how much is that? Consider Iraq:

If each cubic inch of wood chips represented three people killed, at least six others injured, and nine more refugees, the chips on that path -- four inches thick, three feet wide, from one end zone to the other -- would show just some of the damage we have done to Iraq.

The people of Iraq, if you recall, never attacked us, never intended to attack us, and never could have done us any damage even if they had wanted to. That didn't matter to the president who started the war, it doesn't matter to the president who is continuing it, and it doesn't matter to the Americans who support it.

We are talking about mass murder of innocent people as a matter of state policy. And there's no reason for it, none at all ... except:

If each cubic inch of wood chips were two million barrels of oil...

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Message From Guantanamo: "America is Double Hetler in unjustice"

2009-06-04T00:49:00.010-04:00

I direct your attention to the following article, dated June 3, 2009, by Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star:

Gitmo protest captured on film

WASHINGTON – A Guantanamo Bay detainee committed suicide late Monday just hours after two Chinese Muslim captives staged the detention centre's first public protest, increasing the pressure on U.S. President Barack Obama to outline his plan of how he will close the offshore prison.

Was it really a suicide? No details on which to base a judgment seem to be available, which is par for the course. And as for Obama and "pressure" to "outline his plan", that's not all the so-called "suicide" increases, but journalists can only say so much, even if they work in foreign countries.

Yemeni Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, 31, is the first prisoner to die since the White House changed hands four months ago. His suicide follows weeks of criticism from both ends of the political spectrum over the fate of the remaining 240 Guantanamo detainees.

News of the suicide was emailed to the media just as a flight bringing journalists from Guantanamo landed in Maryland.

Based on the track record of the organization sending that email, it might be best to refer to Muhammad Salih's death as a "so-called suicide", at least until further details emerge.

But I say this with two caveats, neither of which is likely to be satisfied, ever.

First, even if further details about Muhammad Salih's death do emerge, will they be credible? Probably not, especially if they are not corroborated. Will they be corroborated? Probably not, especially considering that detainees are being held at Guantanamo precisely to hide them, both from the media and from the protections normally afforded accused individuals under US and international law.

And second, how much is a man supposed to take? How much of the responsibility for Muhammad Salih's death must be laid at the feet of our government -- which held him for more than seven years, with no charge or trial or hearing, and no prospect of any of these in the near or distant future? -- which went to extreme lengths to deny him and all the other detainees any legal recourse or challenge, even though it never intended to charge them? -- which offered mountain tribesmen thousands of dollars apiece for any "terror suspects" they happened to capture, at the same time as innocent civilians were fleeing the bombing of their homes in Afghanistan?

Or to put it another way, given the scope and scale and ferocity of the forces arrayed in a deliberate and knowingly unjustified attempt to ruin the lives of Muhammad Salih and many others like him, how could his death be considered anything other than murder?

The press had been at the U.S. naval detention centre for the war crimes court hearing of Canadian Omar Khadr.

Khadr, 22, is accused of war crimes, including the murder of a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002.

And he's still in prison in Guantanamo despite two very inconvenient facts: that he was a child when he was captured, and that the "evidence" against him is clearly fabricated.

But then again, the same forces that ruined the life of Muhammad Salih are deployed against Omar Khadr, as they have been ever since ... since ...

Here's the big news! A protest! and information coming from detainees:

Hours after Khadr's brief hearing Monday, fewer than a dozen journalists on the trip, including a Toronto Star reporter, witnessed a rare unscripted moment on the base when two Uighur (pronounced Wee-gur) detainees managed to hold an impromptu protest.

The group was at an Oceanside prison known as "Camp Iguana," where 16 Uighur and one Algerian detainee are imprisoned.

As the journalists neared the fence line, the captives held up messages written in crayon on prison-issued sketch pads, knowing the Pentagon prohibits journalists from speaking to detainees.

For a few minutes they silently turned the pages quickly, as journalists shot video, photos and scribbled down their messages.

"We are being held in prison but we have been announced innocent a corrding to the virdict in caurt," one message said. "We need to freedom (sic)."

Most of the detainees currently held at Guantanamo are (or surely must be considered) innocent, either because they have been cleared of wrongdoing by a military court or because they have never been charged to begin with. And that's why

[a]nother stated, "America is Double Hetler in unjustice," seemingly comparing their treatment by the U.S. government to that of the Nazis.

Seemingly? Seemingly?? What else could they possibly be talking about? They were obviously comparing their treatment by the U.S. government to that of the Nazis. But then again, journalists can only say so much.

The Uighur prisoners with Chinese citizenship have been cleared for release but there's nowhere for them to go since the minority group is persecuted in its Communist-controlled homeland. The U.S. government has tried for months to find a country willing to provide the group asylum.

That's a laugh. It's a sick laugh, to be sure, but that's the only kind of laugh we get anymore.

The US government has spent years and years telling anyone who will still listen that these people are despicable terrorists, "the worst of the worst", and so on. Even now Dick Cheney is going around saying that if they are merely transferred to civilian prisons in the US, they will be plotting terrorist attacks against us from their cells. It's ludicrous, but that's what takes priority now according to the mainstream media. And reporters can only say so much ...

Reporters were ushered away from the fenced-in area shortly after the Uighurs had their written protest. One of the captives yelled as the gate was locked behind the group: "Is Obama Communist or a Democrat? We have the same operation in China."

Journalists were later forbidden from sending photos or video footage of the signs until Guantanamo officials received clearance from the White House – which didn't come until about 14 hours later.

No, truly. It's a free country. Always has been, always will be. Seriously.

But the best [read: worst] is yet to come:

Pentagon ground rules signed by reporters stipulate that images of detainees must be pre-screened and cannot identify the captives due to regulations in the Geneva Conventions prohibiting the exploitation of prisoners of war.

Isn't that just rich?

A whole new category of mock-legal language was created, and the prison camp at Guantanamo was built, precisely in order to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and their prohibitions against the exploitation of prisoners of war.

And that's why Guantanamo detainees like Muhammad Salih are not normally called "prisoners", much less "prisoners of war". Instead they are called "enemy combatants" or "illegal enemy combatants" or simply "detainees".

Long, involved, and utterly cynical "legal" documents were created in order to give a semi-plausible veneer to some of the most blatant falsehoods of the terror war, documents whose existence has never been a secret, documents some of which have themselves been coming into the public eye recently: documents whose purpose appears to have been to deny these people "prisoner of war" status so that the protections mandated by the Geneva Conventions can be semi-plausibly described as not applicable to them -- and so that the Pentagon can ignore the Geneva Conventions in dealing with them.

So for the Pentagon to turn around and say that journalists cannot publish the names or faces of the captives, because to do so would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions...!

They don't even care anymore how transparent their lies are. They really couldn't care less whether or not you can see through their charade instantly. Is it because they have the big bucks, and the big weapons, and the big media, and the big politicians on their side, while we only have one another and the truth?

Back to the alleged suicide.

Hours after the protest guards found Salih unresponsive in his cell in a separate area of the prison and attempts to revive him failed.

We can be sure that the attempts to revive him were most vigorous, but what happened to Muhammad Salih in the hours before he was found unresponsive? And what happened to him in the years before that?

At least we know the answer to the latter question.

He had been held without charges at Guantanamo since February 2002 and appeared to have joined a lengthy hunger strike, according to medical records released in response to an Associated Press lawsuit.

How many years could you be held incommunicado, halfway across the world from your family, with no charges or evidence filed against you, no right to challenge your incarceration, and no prospect of ever obtaining your freedom, much less justice -- how many years of that could you take, even without any "enhanced interrogation techniques", before you decided it might be a good idea to stop eating?

Then again, a journalist can only say so much.

On the other hand, Michelle Shephard does manage to provide the photo above, and some very telling context:

Three detainee suicides in June 2006 under the George W. Bush administration drew international outrage, further fuelled by comments about the military's reaction.

"They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own," then-Guantanamo commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr. said. "I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

The psychopathy [*] on display here is striking, and perfectly fitting for a commander of a place such as Guantanamo.

They killed themselves -- and nobody else -- as an act of warfare against us!

We -- their oppressors: the people who held them in captivity for years, with no charges, no evidence, no due process and no hope -- are the victims of their deaths.

It doesn't get much more "Hetlerian" than that.

~~~

Psychopathy -- the personality disorder we see in the people-without-conscience who are variously called psychopathic, sociopathic, anti-social, and moral imbeciles -- comes in a variety of forms.

The most common psychopathic personality type is called "aggressive narcissism".

The following traits have been identified in a seminal work by Robert D. Hare as indicative of aggressive narcissism.

Read this list and try not to think of Harry Harris Jr., the former Guantanamo commander.

* Glibness/superficial charm
* Grandiose sense of self-worth
* Pathological lying
* Conning/manipulative
* Lack of remorse or guilt
* Shallow affect
* Callous/lack of empathy
* Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Read that list again and try not to think of the Pentagon, or the mainstream media, or the "leaders" of our mainstream political parties.

Read it one more time and try not to think of our long record of violent foreign intervention, or our history of slavery and racism, or the obliteration of the people who lived here before America was "discovered", and the utter contempt with which their cultures and their descendants have been treated ever since.

"Double Hetler in unjustice" may be spelled incorrectly, but it is seemingly an understatement.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Too Obvious To Mention: Obama-Era Lies Protect Bush-Era Crimes

2009-06-03T01:08:00.009-04:00

Our new transformative president Obama's decision to fight a court order requiring the release of photos depicting the well-documented abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib -- while entirely in character for this transformative new administration -- is being widely described as shameful enough on its own, let alone for a president who portrayed himself as a champion of transparency and accountability in government.

But then again Obama was once a candidate and now he's a president. And when he was a candidate, certain people (like his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright) were portrayed as troublemakers and cast out of the national scene because they dared to point out that Obama was a politician!

Seriously! The campaign pretended the candidate was not a politician. How transparently false is that? Fortunately for Obama, he had to run against a man who was obviously certifiably insane, and a woman who was obviously even crazier. In that respect Obama's victory in the November election was more inevitable than remarkable. So what if he's part black? A green and blue guy could have won that election, if he was a half-decent politician.

And yet somehow it comes as a big surprise that the tales told by a politician when he was a candidate turn out to be false once he gets elected. Thus people are shocked and even mildly disappointed when their man, now in office, turns out to be somewhat different than he was portrayed during the campaign. When will we ever learn? I'll rephrase that: Will we ever learn?

Obama wants to suppress the photos even though their release is required by law, under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA]. In his defense of his new position, Obama echoes Pentagon claims that the release of the photos would inflame our enemies and endanger our troops. And our old friends, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, have gone so far as to craft legislation that specifically exempts from FOIA any photographs

taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States ...

if the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, determines that the disclosure of that photograph would endanger (A) citizens of the United States; or (B) members of the Armed Forces or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States.

Glenn Greenwald has been good on this topic, and so has Chris Floyd. I've read some others on the subject, not as many as perhaps I should have, but then again my eyes aren't what they once were. And they've had their fill. Nonetheless, I do report that in all my travels I have not once seen anyone make any hay via the the following obvious points:

First of all, it's the abuse that enrages and inflames people, not the photos. If we really want to avoid inflaming the rest of the world, the way to do that is to stop abusing people. And that means a lot more than the obvious facts that we have to stop smearing prisoners in excrement and dragging them around on leashes, and that we have to stop raping them or forcing them to engage in other sexual practices, and that we have to stop all the other indecent treatment. But we also have to end the despicable practice of indefinite detention without trial, without a hearing, without any evidence, and without any charges.

Aside from moral questions of right and wrong, there's also the obvious (but apparently unmentionable) fact that it's only propagandized and brainwashed Americans who don't know what's been going on at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and who would be shocked and enraged by the release of the photos. The people in Iraq, for example, and in Afghanistan, and in far too many other countries, know all about the torture that's been happening in the American and American-friendly torture chambers of the world. So how much will they really be inflamed by the photos? And conversely, how much will they be inflamed by the attempt to keep those photos hidden?

Second, if Obama and Graham and Lieberman and their ilk really cared about the safety of "members of the Armed Forces or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States", they would not block the release of the photos, but instead they would vow to end the Bush-era wars immediately, and to quit attacking foreign countries that never did anything to us, never could have, and never even wanted to. But of course they will never do any such thing. They are obviously concerned about the safety of the troops, exactly to the extent that the troops further the goals of empire.

And third, if instead of destroying one country after another, based on one lie after another, the US spent its annual hundreds of billions building roads and schools and hospitals, and water treatment plants and electric generating plants, in one country after another, then "members of the Armed Forces" could go get real jobs, because "employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States" would be viewed outside the United States as friends, not enemies.

It's all so obvious. No wonder nobody mentions it.

What's also obvious is that Obama and the Pentagon don't want to release the photos because of the impact they would have on "the home front", where we're the enemy and the ongoing battle is about control of information.

But here's the rub: what would happen if Americans knew a bit more about what went on during the Bush administration?

Not much, probably. The usual goons would celebrate a few more "Ay-rabs" "getting what they deserve", and the rest of us would hang our heads in shame. But fundamentally nothing would change, not only because most of us don't give a damn, but also because the rest of us have no means by which to change the vicious and corrupt system.

When they hand out the prizes for the most pathetic remnant of a former democracy, we'll be Number One. And that's pretty obvious too.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Pathway To Darkness, Part 2: Babar Ahmad and the TSG

2009-05-29T01:19:00.002-04:00

In March of 2009, Babar Ahmad, who is Officially Described As (ODA) a "UK terror suspect", was awarded £60,000 in damages pertaining to an exceptionally violent arrest which he endured more than five years earlier.

Ahmad [photo] is accused of supporting terrorism by raising money and equipment for jihadi groups through a pro-terrorist website and is fighting extradition to the USA.

He is wanted in the case involving Hassan Abujihaad, in a story that involves William "Jameel" Chrisman and (tangentially) Derek Shareef, all of whose names have graced these pages in days past.

To recap briefly: Derrick Shareef, ODA "a mall bomber", is currently serving 35 years in federal prison after trading a pair of stereo speakers for a box which he thought contained four grenades. The grenades were non-functional, the arms dealer who took the speakers as payment was working for the FBI, and the bogus arms deal was arranged by William "Jameel" Chrisman, a convicted felon now also working for the FBI.

Although Chrisman is always ODA "an informant", it's quite clear that he is primarily an agent provocateur, and his primary target in this instance appears to have been Hassan Abujihaad, a former US Navy signalman who once lived with Derrick Shareef.

Abujihaad, a Muslim convert formerly known as Paul R. Hall, is serving 10 years after being found guilty of sending confidential US Navy information to Babar Ahmad in April of 2001, when Abujihaad was stationed aboard the USS Benfold and Babar Ahmad was allegedly running Azzam Publications.

For federal prosecutors, the main problem in the case against Abujihaad was that there was no "forensic footprint" on the information police say they found on a disk belonging to Babar Ahmad. In other words, they had no way of proving that the information was in fact sent by Abujihaad.

This wasn't their only problem, however, since it turned out that the information in question was not so secret after all.

To get a conviction in this case, the prosecution needed more than circumstantial evidence, and Abujihaad was convicted partially on taped conversations between Abujihaad and Chrisman.

William "Jameel" Chrisman [photo] was sent by the FBI from Buffalo, New York, to Rockford, Illinois, and was tasked with meeting Shareef and gaining his confidence.

As it turned out, Shareef was looking for a place to live when Chrisman walked into his life. So Chrisman took him home to live with him and his family -- his three wives and nine children.

From that point until he was arrested, Shareef was under Chrisman's roof as well as under his influence, although the FBI was careful not to divulge these facts until after Shareef had been convinced to plead guilty. (Chrisman testified against Abujihaad later the same day!)

As revealed by a close reading of the affidavit filed by the FBI against Shareef, Jameel Chrisman fabricated every important detail of the "terror plot" to attack CherryVale Mall in Rockford on the last Friday before Christmas, 2006. Chrisman suggested the target, he suggested the date, he suggested the hand grenades ... and Shareef went along with him every step of the way, up to and including the phony arms deal that sent Shareef to prison.

And while that was happening, Chrisman was encouraging Shareef to talk to his old friend Abujihaad, and get him talking about doing some "jihad". Unbeknownst to Shareef, Chrisman was recording all the conversations. But Chrisman wasn't getting anywhere through Shareef, so eventually he began to call Abujihaad directly, trying to get Abujihaad to incriminate himself.

Abujihaad [photo] apparently suspected that he was being set up, because he shifted into code, speaking of "fresh meals" and "cold meals" in response to questions about whether he had been planning any terrorist missions.

Since Abujihaad spoke to Chrisman in code, he must have been hiding something, and that something must have been related to terrorism, and therefore he must have been the one who delivered US Navy secrets to Babar Ahmad, or something like that ...

So Abujihaad is in jail, but the feds are still desperately looking for something to use as evidence against Babar Ahmad, who was arrested in December of 2003. After Ahmad's arrest, according to the AP via KTAR:

Ahmad was released without charge but was re-arrested in August 2004 on a U.S. extradition warrant. He remains in custody.

American officials accused the Pakistani native of running Web sites to raise money for the Taliban, appealing for fighters and providing equipment such as gas masks and night vision goggles to terrorists.

Babar Ahmad, as the AP notes, is still in prison, but the AP report fails to mention that he has never been formally charged with a crime and no evidence has ever been presented against him in a court of law.

On the other hand, Babar Ahmad can now expect five-figure "compensation" for what he endured on the day of his arrest. According to The Guardian,

During his arrest, Ahmad was punched, kicked and throttled, the court heard.

Officers stamped on the 34-year-old's feet and repeatedly punched him in the head before he was forced into the Muslim prayer position and they shouted: "Where is your God now? Pray to him."

After a sustained attack, he was forced into the back of a police van, where he was again beaten and punched before being put in a "life-threatening" neck hold and told: "You will remember this day for the rest of your life."

At one stage, one of the officers grabbed his testicles and he was also deliberately wrenched by his handcuffs – a technique known to cause intense pain.

The Guardian also notes:

The Met [Metropolitan London police] had repeatedly denied the claims, saying officers had used reasonable force during the arrest.

However, lawyers for the force's commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, today admitted at the high court that Ahmad had been the victim of gratuitous and sustained violence at his home in Tooting, south-west London.

"The commissioner has today admitted that his officers subjected Babar Ahmad to grave abuse tantamount to torture during his arrest," Ahmad's solicitor, Fiona Murphy, said outside the court.

During the hearing, it emerged that the Met had lost "a number of large mail sacks" containing details of other similar allegations against the officers who assaulted Ahmad.

Murphy said the few documents that had not been mislaid should have triggered a thorough investigation.

"The horrifying nature and volume of complaints against these officers should have provoked an effective response from the Metropolitan police and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) long ago," she said.

"Instead, it has fallen to Babar Ahmad to bring these proceedings to achieve public recognition of the wrong that was done to him."

She said other crucial documents relating to the case were also lost.

They included all the officers' contemporaneous notebooks and the taped recording of an interview with the senior officer in the case.

Murphy added: "The papers will be referred to the director of public prosecutions for urgent consideration of criminal charges against the officers concerned and for an investigation as to whether events surrounding the mislaid mail sacks constitute evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice."

The Guardian provides just enough context to dash any such hopes.

An IPCC investigation in 2007 ended with no action being taken against any officer.

The police officers who arrested Babar Ahmad in such a brutal fashion belonged to the Territorial Support Group (TSG), which is essentially the Met's SWAT team.

Assigned to deal with terrorism, public disorder, and high-priority crime, the TSG is never ODA a SWAT team, but there's no doubt that the TSG employs special weapons and special tactics.

The weapons include batons and shields and tasers, and the tactics are revealed in a subsequent article in The Guardian, which reports that

the Met was aware for years that the six [TSG] officers involved [in the arrest of Babar Ahmad] were the subject of repeated complaints. According to documents submitted to the court, four of the officers who carried out the raid on Ahmad's home had 60 allegations of assault against them - of which at least 37 were made by black or Asian men. One of the officers had 26 separate allegations of assault against him - 17 against black or Asian men.

The Met has confirmed that since 1992 all six officers involved in the Ahmad assault had been subject to at least 77 complaints. When lawyers for Ahmad asked for details of these allegations it emerged that the police had "lost" several large mail sacks detailing at least 30 of the complaints.

Senior figures in Scotland Yard admit there are concerns about the conduct of the officers. Although the Independent Police Complaints Commission supervised an investigation carried out by the Met, none of the officers has been disciplined for the assault on Ahmad and all but one are still working in the territorial support group. Asked about the string of allegations against the officers, the Met said that all but one had been found to be unsubstantiated following inquiries.

The Guardian lists some of the allegations.

Documents submitted to the high court and seen by the Guardian list details of some of the alleged assaults carried out by the officers:

• March 2007: one officer is accused of bundling a man into the back of a police van where he was told to "get on his knees". When he replied this was not Guantánamo Bay he claims the officer grabbed him round the neck and "discharged his CS gas while continuing to hold his throat". He says he was then thrown from the van, leaving him with eye, neck and head injuries. According to the document no action was taken because the complaint was either "incapable of proof" or there was "no case to answer".

• November 2005: two of the officers were accused by a "black male" of attacking him in the back of a police van. The document states that he was subjected to "constant kicking to his head and stomach (approx 12 kicks). Head lifted off the floor by grabbing his right ear and lifting head." The attack left the man with bruising and swelling to his face but the case was not pursued, the Met said, because of "non-cooperation" by the complainant.

• October 2005: the document stated that two of the officers were involved in another assault on a "black male". It read: "In van repeatedly assaulted - kicks to the face, stamps on his head whilst handcuffed." The victim said afterwards he "felt like he might die". Vomiting and blood coming out of his ears, black swollen eye, lip busted, hands very swollen.

• June 2003: two officers accused of beating a "black male" in the back of the TSG van. "The beating continued in the van and in a search room at the station."

The Guardian continues:

The allegations against the officers came to light after the high court issued a disclosure order on 13 February demanding that the Metropolitan police release all "similar fact allegations" against the officers involved in the Ahmad case.

The Met's legal team wrote to Ahmad's lawyers a few weeks later to say that "because of the sheer volume of unsubstantiated complaints" against the officers they would only be able to provide a schedule of the claims rather than the files in time for the deadline.

The schedule outlining 77 separate complaints against the officers was subsequently submitted to the court, along with a sample of complaints taken from 27 files containing some of the allegations. The police said they had lost several large mail sacks detailing at least 30 other files.

During the hearing it emerged that other crucial documents, including the officers' contemporaneous notebooks and a taped recording of an interview with the senior officer in the case, had also been mislaid.

Ahmad's lawyers say they are now calling for a judicial inquiry into the case and seeking a criminal prosecution against the officers involved. Murphy said: "The failure of the Metropolitan police and the IPCC to take effective action long ago against this group of officers can only be addressed by a full judicial inquiry and we will invite the director of public prosecutions to support the family's call for an independent judicial inquiry."

It doesn't take an independent judicial inquiry to figure out what's happening here. There's a reason why so many mailbags of complaints about police brutality have been lost. There's a reason why notebooks and tape recordings have disappeared. There's a reason why TSG officers with long histories of complaints about brutality remain on the force, without so much as a reprimand.

And it's all the same reason: they're simply doing what they're supposed to do.

~~~

Previous: Part 1: "The Easter Bombers"
Next: TBA

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Come, Let Us Celebrate The Best Of America, Living And Dead

2009-05-25T23:18:00.017-04:00

To honor America and observe Memorial Day, let us now savor a few words from an anonymous AP stenographer, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times:

Obama marks Memorial Day with tribute at Arlington

In brief remarks after he laid the wreath and observed a moment of silence at Arlington, Obama saluted the men and women of America's fighting forces, both living and dead, as "the best of America."

"Why in an age when so many have acted only in pursuit of narrowest self-interest have the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of this generation volunteered all that they have on behalf of others?" he said. "Why have they been willing to bear the heaviest burden?"

"Whatever it is, they felt some tug. They answered a call. They said 'I'll go.' That is why they are the best of America," Obama said. "That is what separates them from those who have not served in uniform, their extraordinary willingness to risk their lives for people they never met."

What kind of people are willing to risk their lives -- and throw away their souls! -- for the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, or Bill Clinton, or George H. W. Bush, or any of their predecessors?

Obama called them "the best"; he forgot to mention that they're also "the brightest".

Obama said he can't know what it's like to walk into battle or lose a child.

"But I do know this. I am humbled to be the commander in chief of the finest fighting force in the history of the world," he said to applause.

This is beneath derision, and it went down swimmingly, of course. I understand completely.

Let's all have big parades to honor our professional and patriotic mass murderers, living and dead!

Let us line the streets to watch the psychopaths and fools -- and those who support the psychopaths and fools -- march by.

Let us complain about how nothing much has changed since the election, how Barack Obama shows the same chicken-hearted reluctance to move that ruined the second Bush-Cheney administration, and how -- despite years of furtive planning -- we still haven't got off our butts and righteously obliterated Iran.

Let us join together and decry the incompetence in the Beltway, which explains why we haven't won yet in Iraq or Afghanistan, and why we may not make any real progress there until after the next election.

Let us weep for the "victims" of the seemingly endless series of "government accidents" which have got us involved in "the wrong wars" at "the wrong times".

But let us never say a word word about the millions of people our heroes have killed over the years; the tens of thousands our heroes have incarcerated and tortured; the tens of millions whose homes and families our heroes have destroyed; the hundreds of millions whose homelands our heroes have violated, overtly or otherwise, and in whose nations "democratic institutions" are allowed to exist only if the "duly elected representatives" find it politically expedient to toe the line.

That's our line, by the way.

So let us celebrate that line, just as we celebrate the psychopaths and fools who enforce it.

Let us wave our flags for those extroardinary people who have made sure -- on our behalf -- that the kids in these pictures, and millions of others just like them, never had a chance.

After all, we wouldn't want to be anti-American, would we?

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

First Principles ... or Why I Cannot Support Barack Obama

2009-05-20T00:07:00.008-04:00

Let us begin with the fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney were never legitimately elected to the Oval Office: not in 2000, and not in 2004.

In the American system, the authority of our government is based on the consent of the governed. This consent was not earned in either "election".

Therefore, the Bush-Cheney administrations of 2001-2009 were illegitimate, and the policies implemented by these illegitimate administrations are themselves illegitimate. Period.

If somebody steals your credit card and you report the theft, you are not responsible for purchases made on that card after it was stolen. We reported the theft in 2000; we screamed about the theft in 2004; but it did us no good at all.

The most destructive "terrorist attack" that ever took place on American soil occurred during the first Bush-Cheney administration, and it was never legitimately investigated. The story that was told to explain it is not only false; it's impossible.

Therefore the policies implemented as "reactions" to the "terrorist attack of September 11, 2001" would be illegitimate even if they had been enacted by a legitimately elected government. But they weren't.

Furthermore, many of these same policies contravene both national and international law, and for this reason they would be illegal, and indefensible, even if they were enacted by a legitimately elected government in response to a legitimate threat.

But they were not: all these illegal, immoral, and deeply detrimental policies were enacted by an illegitimate government in "response" to a bogus event.

If we had legitimate opposition politics in this country, it would would begin by calling these policies what they are.

And if we had a legitimate successor government, it would begin by repealing every single one of them, holding accountable those responsible for their implementation, and making amends insofar as possible to those who have suffered the most.

In other words, if a legitimate opposition government had taken power in January, American use of torture against "terror suspects" would be history. All the secret prisons would now be closed. There would be no more extraordinary renditions, and no more military tribunals.

Warrantless surveillance would have been stopped. All American troops would have been removed from both Iraq and Afghanistan, including the "defense" and "security" contractors and clandestine special forces. Rather than propping up puppet governments and blackmailing them at the same time, we would now be financing -- but others would be building -- new infrastructure in both countries. We would also be paying reparations on a scale that would make the bank bailouts look like a drop in the ocean.

And the people most responsible for the abomination that America has become would be in prison by now, if they were allowed to remain alive.

But none of this has happened, and none of it is about to happen, soon or ever.

Instead we have a president who has declared that his first priority is the defense of Israel, and a vice president who has declared that during his 36 years in the Senate, no one has been a better friend to Israel than he has.

Why can't we have a president whose first priority is the defense of our own country?

Why can't we have a vice president who is prouder of having befriended his own nation than of having befriended a foreign one?

And why can't we find a single columnist in a single national publication asking questions like these? Because the system is broken.

We know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We know that the story about the Iraqi WMDs was chosen for "bureaucratic reasons" -- in other words not because it was true but because it was the story we were most likely to believe. We didn't believe it, on the whole. But the war went ahead anyway.

Far more people believed the 9/11 story about Muslim hijackers and Osama bin Laden and skyscrapers "collapsing" due to "impact and fire", but some of us knew it was false on the day, and it has turned out that we were absolutely correct.

And yet the transparently false story about 9/11 has been used to "justify" all manner of abuses, from illegal surveillance to homeland "security", to an endless limitless war against the rest of the world. No matter how obviously false that story is, no matter how many people have learned since then that the story is false, all this has gone ahead anyway.

I cannot support any of it. I cannot support any politician who supports any of it, let alone a president who continues the worst of it. And I cannot support any journalist who supports that president, or who tells those murderous lies.

In my opinion, the people who support Obama now are at least as bad as -- if not much worse than -- the people who supported Bush when he was doing the things that Obama is now continuing, and expanding. It pains me to think of how much time and energy I spent trying to help some of them.

Even George Bush and Dick Cheney never managed to blackmail the Pakistani army into attacking its own people. And the Obama misery is just beginning.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

?? Hersh Says Cheney Had Bhutto Assassinated For Saying Osama bin Laden Is Dead ??

2009-05-18T23:06:00.009-04:00

UPDATE: The story originally posted in this space has been denied.

Here it is, as written:

~~~

Hot news from Anwar Iqbal of the the Pakistani daily, Dawn:

Cheney ordered assassination of Benazir Bhutto: Hersh

WASHINGTON: A special death squad assassinated Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on the orders of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, claims an American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Mr Hersh, a Washington-based journalist who writes for the New Yorker magazine and other prominent media outlets, also claims that former US Vice President Dick Cheney was running an ‘executive assassination ring’ throughout the Bush years. The cell reported directly to Mr Cheney.

... and it was manned by the best and the brightest, who were doing a necessary job to keep their country safe ... and blah blah woof woof.

The story, as Anwar Iqbal tells it, fits with what we know about Cheney. It fits with what we know about the Bhutto assassination. It certainly fits with what we know about bin Laden.

And who knows? It might even be true.

~~~

UPDATE: Or maybe it isn't. The same link from Dawn now leads to a story entitled "I did not say Cheney killed Benazir: Seymour Hersh" which says:

The story regarding Hersh’s reported claim that Cheney ordered the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was published on our website among other publications. We regret the error.

WASHINGTON: American journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday denied news reports that quoted him as saying a ‘special death squad’ working under former US vice president Dick Cheney had killed Benazir Bhutto.

The award-winning journalist described as ‘complete madness’ the reports that the squad headed by General Stanley McChrystal – the new commander of US army in Afghanistan – had also killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafique Al Hariri and a Lebanese army chief.

‘Vice President Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Ms Bhutto. I have never said that I did have such information. I most certainly did not say any thing remotely to that effect during an interview with an Arab media outlet,’ Hersh said.

‘General McChrystal ran a special forces unit that engaged in High Value Target activity. While I have been critical of some of that unit's activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Mr Cheney, as the published stories state.’

‘I have never been asked by any journalist…about such allegations. This is another example of blogs going bonkers with misleading and fabricated stories and professional journalists repeating such rumours without doing their job -- and that is to verify such rumours,’ Hersh said.

Raw Story has more, including this:

The only Arab television channel to interview Hersh recently is Gulf News, which spoke to him during the Arab Media Forum in Dubai. In the interview, Hersh does not even mention Bhutto’s name, but does condemn former Vice President Cheney for running an “executive assassination ring” which carried out operations all over the world.

A video of Hersh speaking to Gulf News reporter Abbas Al Lawati is available on the Internet.

Serious questions have been asked about this story, and some wild suggestions have been made; I will give you the answers of which I am certain:

Benazir Bhutto is still dead.

Osama bin Laden is still dead.

And one of two things must be true: Either Hersh did indeed refer to Benazir Bhutto's assassination in his interview with Gulf News, only to have that portion of the interview censored (exactly as Benazir Bhutto's comments to David Frost regarding bin Laden's death were cut by the British "journalist") ... or Anwar Iqbal is in big trouble.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

How Not To Fix The Economy

2009-05-15T14:29:00.010-04:00

Some ideas arrive too soon, some come along too late, and others simply wind up in the wrong place.

Here, courtesy of Atlantic Free Press, is an open letter to the president from William C. Carlotti, entitled "How to Fix the Economy":

Dear Mr. President,

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America’s economy. Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $2 million a piece severance for early retirement---$80 million dollars is less than 10% of the $85 billion that you gave to CitiCorp.-- with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed.

It can't get any easier than that!

P.S. If more money is needed, have all members in Congress and their constituents pay their taxes...

If you think this would work, please forward to everyone you know. If not, please disregard.

Respectfully,

William C. Carlotti
North Montpelier
Vermont, May 9, 2009

I have no wish to be presumptuous, and of course the president may answer Mr. Carlotti's letter (or not) as he sees fit.

But if I were the president I would surely write back:

Dear Mr. Carlotti,

Unfortunately, if the government were to give 40 million people $2 million apiece, that wouldn't cost $80 million ($80,000,000).

It would cost $80 trillion ($80,000,000,000,000) -- roughly 25 times the amount the entire federal government spent last year.

So your suggestion is not exactly feasible.

However, some of my friends like the way you describe $80 million as "less than 10% of ... $85 billion"; in fact it is much less than that: $80 million is less than 1/10 of 1% of $85 billion.

My friends, who like the way you think, would like to help you. And judging from what you have written, you appear to be ideally suited for a job as an auditor. Have you considered submitting a resume to the Pentagon?

I would do so immediately, sir. You're just the sort of bean-counter they're always looking for.

Yours sincerely
Winter Patriot, POTUS

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

More Thoughts About The War Between The USA And Pakistan

2009-05-13T22:08:00.007-04:00

Since I wrote my recent post about the war between the USA and Pakistan, some questions have come up which have put me in mind of a piece I posted about 18 months ago, featuring some very sharp commentary from a young female Pakistani journalist.

In a column published November 4, 2007, the day after emergency rule was declared in Pakistan, and in the midst of a strict political clampdown, Fatima Bhutto [photo] honored the restriction against ridiculing the President, General Pervez Musharraf, by not mentioning him at all.

But she extended no such courtesy to her aunt, Benazir Bhutto, whose welcome-home convoy had been the stage of an obviously false-flag terror attack. Fatima Bhutto referred to her estranged (but not yet assassinated -- did anybody say "martyred"?) aunt in glowing terms such as "a formerly self-exiled political dynamo" and "the Daughter of the East (read: West)".

Fatima also mocked the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), which granted amnesty to all (read: selected) former politicians. The NRO paved the way for the return of Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, but denied the same courtesy to another former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who was arrested at the airport and deported to Saudi Arabia when he tried to enter Pakistan in September.

The amnesty law, drafted in secret negotiations between Musharraf and Benazir, was brokered by Americans desperate to forge an alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto no matter what the cost to the country, and was proclaimed a step toward civilian democracy. But not everyone was deceived, even before the state of emergency was declared.

Fatima Bhutto's column was published in Pakistan's The News, and it was ostensibly a reaction to Newsweek's October 29, 2007 piece, "Where the Jihad Lives Now", but it covered quite a bit more ground.

The original link is ancient history, but fortunately the piece is not. I've added the photos. In light of what we have learned about Baithulla Mehsud since this piece was written, the text seems to take on a fresh air of overpowering evil. But I don't want to prejudice you against it.

As Fatima Bhutto says, "Let's spend a moment imagining just how spectacular our Iraqi style democratic landscape is going to be."

Iraq redux?
Wither Iraqi style democracy? According to a very ominous cover story in Newsweek, it's here in Pakistan. Newsweek is confident in asserting that 'today no other country on earth is arguably more dangerous than Pakistan'. Not even Iraq. In fact, according to Newsweek Iraq is so 2006, Pakistan is it now; we're the new black. We've managed to kick Iraq off the pages as the world's most horrifying, most destructively precarious country and reclaim the title for ourselves. According to the Newsweek article, Pakistan has 'everything Osama Bin Laden could ask for' including a vibrant jihadi movement, political instability, access to worrisome weaponry, and a lonesome nuclear bomb. The article quotes a now deceased Taliban commander as romantically noting that 'Pakistan is like your shoulder that supports your RPG'. It is swoon worthy stuff really.

While the Newsweek article is no doubt an excited piece of fear mongering journalism, is it actually so far off the mark? Not really. We have recently been brought Iraqi style democracy by a formerly self-exiled political dynamo (remember to say thank you). Our nascent 'democracy' has been shipped over to Pakistan at the behest of delightful Neo-Con masters -- George W. Bush et al. -- and is complete with letters from the United States Senate and phone calls from Condi. If this isn't enough to strike you as eerily familiar, there's more.

Like our own harbinger of 'democracy', Iyad Allawi, the American choice for Iraq's post occupation Prime Minister, was deftly assisted by a Republican lobbying firm in Washington D.C. Allawi's firm spent $340,000 in their campaign to push him as the people's Prime Minister. How much did the Daughter of the East (read: West) spend on her campaign for a glorious return? Democracy does nothing if not advocate transparency and accountability of its public servants, but not in Pakistan where we are a step above the rest thanks to the fact that our criminals are cloaked by the National Reconciliation Ordinance.

Similar to Iraq's foray into Neo-Con democracy, ours has kicked off with a spate of portentous violence. One hundred and forty dead? No problem. That's called collateral damage. They died for democracy, just like the estimated 655,000 dead Iraqis did. As Mistress Condi would say, these are the birthing pangs of democracy. Our Iraqi style democracy will be bloody, but we're being heralded into a new era. That should be a comfort to us. Before we go silently into this good night, it's worth taking a look at our predecessor. Let's spend a moment imagining just how spectacular our Iraqi style democratic landscape is going to be.

The corruption that plagued the Iraqi occupation will be no problem for Pakistan. The US led provisional Authorities, headed by Paul Bremer, managed to 'lose' $8.8 billion dollars worth of funds meted out by the US government by the time they handed power over to a 'democratic' Iraqi government. The Iraqi Central Bank also faced a mysterious cash shortage as millions of dollars disappeared from its vaults. Allawi's government, in time, managed to drain one fund of $600 million dollars, leaving no paperwork behind. What amateurs these Iraqis are. We're set. We have the NRO; there will be no money troubles in Pakistan, the new Iraq.

Poverty? We have that in spades. Figures from 2006 place eight million Iraqis as living on less than $1 a day. Almost 70 per cent of Iraqis are unemployed thanks to Neo Liberal shock therapy economics and some 96 per cent of Iraq's population depends on food rations. In Pakistan we don't have food rations for our poor, we let them starve. Note to self, we'll have to get on that.

Underdevelopment is also something we Pakistanis will beat Iraq at. Who does Newsweek think they're kidding? We've long been worse than Iraq and our successive governments continually pride themselves on doing absolutely nothing about it. More than 500,000 residents of Baghdad are deprived of running water and when they do have access to it, it's not potable due to the fact that 65 per cent of Iraq's water plants have been subject to leaks and sewage contamination. These figures, largely from US Foreign Relations Committee hearings and other independent American sources, offer proof of America's wanton destruction of Iraq. Pre-war Saddam era figures don't even come close.

Households in Baghdad receive on average only two to six hours of electricity a day, largely due to the collapse of Iraq's supply grid after the invasion. Prior to March 2003, Iraq's total power generation was around 4,300 megawatts, after Operation Iraqi Freedom it dropped to 3,700 megawatts. Isn't Neo-Con democracy wonderful? We have so much to look forward to.

A United Nations study of 2005 found that one third of Iraqi children suffer from malnourishment, whereas an Iraqi Health Ministry study of the previous year found that 'easily treatable conditions such as diarrhea' account for 70 per cent of deaths among children. We can match those figures, those brutal figures, and we don't even have a large-scale war going on. Baghdad has nothing on Karachi -- the many million residents of Lyari are routinely denied access to water and electricity. Households across this city in Malir, Ibrahim Hyderi, and Saddar -- you name it -- have always been deprived of these basic rights and not by occupational governments, but by our own 'elected' representatives. Tragically, we choose the very men and women who keep our city's neighborhoods entrenched in poverty. We vote for them. We'll probably vote them in again in 2008. As voters, we Pakistanis are either incredibly forgiving or monumentally stupid.

When Pakistan enjoys the same democracy that Iraq does -- and you know certain people are hanging their careers on this happening -- we won't even need hired armies like Blackwater to come in. Our police out-Blackwater Blackwater. They already behave like private mercenary forces, for hire wherever power and money call them. They do not protect and serve, no, not our police force. They are the protected and they serve only their own interests. Police brutality in Pakistan has raged for many years; Iraqi style democracy won't tame our vigilante cops, only empower them.

The violence is building, it's getting bloodier. Rawalpindi, Dera Bugti, Wana and that's only in the past week. Look at Swat. Once known for its beautiful Buddhist ruins and idyllic Northern beauty, it has been consumed by death and ruin. Just as Najaf and Karbala were overcome, just as Fallujah and Mosul were earmarked for destruction, so has Swat been. And what about those left behind? The victims of this rising violence? Like Cindy Sheehan, the courageous mother who followed President Bush all over the country holding a vigil for her son Casey, killed in the unjust Iraq war, we have our own mothers, wives, and sisters sitting Shiva outside government offices protesting the disappearance of their loved ones. Newsweek was not prescient; truthfully, they're a little late to the party.

As I wrote at the time,

The same could be said for the bulk of the American media, of course. A little late to the party, and with blinders on.

As for the American people, we still haven't even come to the party.

What is going to prevent Iraq-style democracy from taking Pakistan?

What is going to prevent the same thing from taking the USA?

If not us, who? If not now, when?

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Pathway To Darkness, Part 1: "The Easter Bombers"

2009-05-11T22:55:00.031-04:00

On April 8, 2009, amid a blaze of publicity, police in the north of England arrested 12 men who were Officially Described As (ODA) "terror suspects".

England's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, congratulated the police and intelligence agencies on having broken up "a very big plot".

Police spokesmen were mostly mum but anonymous sources told the British media that the authorities had foiled an imminent attack which would have involved multiple suicide bombers.

Eleven of the suspects were ODA Pakistani nationals living in the UK on student visas. Sources told the British papers the suspects came from the "lawless tribal region" of northwest Pakistan and were linked with the al Qaeda terrorists whose global headquarters is ODA in the same region.

Police said they had been watching the suspects for several months in an anti-terror operation code-named "Operation Pathway", and that to the best of their knowledge the alleged terrorists had not yet selected a target. Many potential targets were suggested in the media, nonetheless.

And no dates were confirmed either, but the police were ODA taking no chances with public safety, especially with the Easter weekend approaching.

The arrests, we were told, had been planned for the morning of April 9th, but had to be moved forward by about 12 hours because of what was ODA a "blunder" by Britain's most senior anti-terror officer, Robert Quick.

Quick, who at the time was Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan London Police, arrived at No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with the Prime Minister on April 8th and emerged from his car carrying a couple of file folders.

Outside the folders was a document ODA "secret", outlining the planned arrests in which the "Operation Pathway" suspects would be taken.

Photographers are always camped outside the Prime Minister's office, of course -- with digital cameras and telephoto lenses. And Bob Quick was ODA realizing the implications of his "blunder" immediately. The British authorities moved promptly to suppress publication of any photos of the "secret" document, and they also moved promptly against the suspects.

And Bob Quick promptly tendered his resignation, which was promptly accepted. After 30 years on the force and more than a year as the top anti-terror officer, he retired, supposedly in disgrace but with a six-figure pension. And at the same time, the anti-terror SWAT teams went to work.

Normally, the police prefer to arrest suspects in their homes, while they're sleeping. No muss, no fuss, no resistance. But in this case, with the operation suddenly public, the police were ODA "forced" to take the suspects from public places, in broad daylight, with considerable muss and fuss.

Thus two men were taken from a university library in Liverpool. According to one of them, police forced them to the floor, tied their hands behind their backs, and held machine guns to their heads for an hour before taking them away.

In Clitheroe, a small town about an hour north of Manchester, more than a hundred armed officers surrounded a home improvement supply store which was preparing for its grand opening, and arrested two men who were working there as security guards. (The store opened the next day as planned.)

Another suspect was taken from his car, which was stopped at gunpoint on the highway. And so on. All twelve suspects were arrested within an hour, which gives us an indication of how serious the alleged plot was considered to be, and how closely the suspects were being watched.

With the suspects safely out of the way, the search began for what was ODA "the terrorists' bomb factory". Police searched the suspects' apartments, and found nothing: no weapons, no ammunition, no bombs, no bomb-making equipment, no bomb-making ingredients.

Then they temporarily relocated some of the suspects' neighbors and started searching whole apartment buildings. Again they came up with nothing.

Next they took the suspects' computers, books, notes and other personal items for forensic analysis, and found nothing incriminating in any of them: no plans, no hints of plans, no dates, no targets, nothing.

And so, within two weeks of the arrests, all the suspects were ODA "released".

But even though they are now ODA "released", eleven of the twelve -- the Pakistani students -- are still in prison. And rather than facing criminal charges pertaining to terrorism, they face deportation, for reasons ODA related to national security.

The Pakistani students have appealed against the deportation order, hoping to remain in Britain and continue their studies. So they won't be leaving without at least a hearing.

And since they are ODA a serious threat to the national security of Great Britain, their deportation hearings will take place in secret. So whatever evidence the authorities may have against them which is not admissible in open court will apparently be presented behind closed doors, if at all.

According to a recent report, the men who were ODA terror suspects have requested anonymity, so the British press may not publish their names, not that it's going to make much difference. The police have never released an official list of the names of the people who were arrested. And the news media don't usually try for names anyway; they've simply been referring to the "Easter Bombers" or the "Manchester Terror Plot".

Aside from leaving some families in Pakistan wondering whether their sons have been arrested, the failure by police to name the people they have arrested, along with the prospect of having the rest of the drama played out behind closed doors, leads a skeptical observer to wonder whether there's more here than meets the eye -- or maybe less!

The stunning security breach ODA "Quick's blunder" is only one fascinating and illuminating aspect of the "Operation Pathway" story. There are many others. In future installments of this series, I intend to explore as many of them as possible. But first, a few words about the timing of the arrests and the timing of the "releases".

~~~

On April 1st, a week before the alleged plotters were arrested, a high-profile G20 meeting began in London. Protesters took to the streets, and so did the police, of course. The police used a technique they call "kettling", in which they cordon off part of the city and refuse to let anyone (except other policemen) into or out of the cordon.

So people were trapped in the heart of the city for hours without food or water, with no sanitary facilities, surrounded by surly police with attack dogs and truncheons. It was almost as if the police were trying to provoke violence in a peaceful protest.

There are other reasons to suspect the police of trying to provoke the crowd. A Member of Parliament has brought to light reports of another incident involving two "protesters" who were throwing bottles at police and urging others to do the same. When these two individuals were accused by actual protesters of being police agents provocateurs, they made straight for the cordon, presented some identification to the police there, and disappeared through the police line.

When Ian Tomlinson finished work that day, he found himself inside the cordon. Tomlinson, a 47-year-old newspaper seller, started walking home. But he never made it.

After a quick police autopsy, Tomlinson's sudden death was ODA caused by a heart attack, and the story was mostly ignored by most of the British papers. The police released a statement explaining that when Tomlinson suffered his heart attack, police tried to come to his assistance but were prevented from reaching him by protesters throwing bottles. One newspaper even accused the protesters of throwing bricks! But none of this was true.

Tomlinson's family requested a second autopsy, which ascribed his death to internal bleeding. And the falsity of the police account of Tomlinson's death was convincingly proven on April 7th when The Guardian published excerpts from testimonies of numerous witnesses who all described something very different.

In addition, The Guardian posted on its website a video showing Ian Tomlinson walking along with his hands in his pockets, and being hassled by police, then suddenly knocked to the pavement by a policeman attacking him from behind.

The video continues, showing protesters attempting to help Tomlinson, while police stand by with their shields and dogs. It shows no flying bottles, nobody throwing bricks, and no attempt whatsoever by the police to rush to Tomlinson's assistance.

By the most amazing coincidence, less than 24 hours after the video appeared online, Bob Quick appeared at the front door of No 10, with Operation Pathway's secrets on display.

~~~

Customarily in Britain, the police can hold criminal suspects for only 96 hours -- four days -- before they must either charge or release them. Under the new anti-terror laws, the authorities have a maximum of 28 days to either charge or release terror suspects, but the 28 days' detention are parceled out a week at a time.

So if the police don't have enough evidence to lay charges within a week of the arrests, they must appear before a judge and try to convince him that there is reason to believe another week's detention would allow the police to find the evidence they need to support criminal charges.

After a second week, the process must be repeated, and it can be repeated again after the third week, but each time the judge must be convinced that the evidence collected so far justifies holding the suspects for another seven days. And after four weeks, the deadline is immovable: the police must either charge the suspects or release them.

Fairly often in Britain, people ODA "terror suspects" are held for slightly less than two weeks before being released without charges. Usually this means the police have brought nothing to the table at the end of the first week, and the judge has granted them a second week, but told them not to bother coming back unless they find some evidence.

It appears that the same thing may have happened in this case. But it's hard to tell. This much is certain: if police did appear before a judge after the second week, he was not impressed with what they brought with them.

And here we come to another amazing coincidence: even though the police had enough on all these suspects to make a big splash with very public arrests, they didn't have enough on any of them, even after two weeks of searching, to convince a judge that holding any or all of them for another week would likely result in the discovery of incriminating evidence.

~~~

In this post I haven't provided any quotes or links, but future installments of this series will look at various facets of the story in great detail and will include plenty of quotes, and dozens if not hundreds of links.

If you wish to read more about the case in the meantime, you might enjoy a visit to my newest other blog, "Operation Pathway". There you will find more than 200 news articles, and links to many more news and blog items.

Coming soon: detailed articles about Quick's "blunder", the surveillance and arrests of the suspects, the alleged al Qaeda connection, and much more.

~~~

Next: Pathway To Darkness, Part 2: Babar Ahmad and the TSG

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Thoughts On The War Between The USA And Pakistan

2009-05-08T14:31:00.017-04:00

Scrub towers in the distance,
Riders cross the blasted moor
Against the horizon.
Fickle promises of treaty,
Fatal harbingers of war;
Futile orizons…
-- Van Der Graaf Generator: "Arrow"

Signs and omens, suddenly everywhere, tell us war between the USA and Pakistan is imminent.

Chris Floyd has been doing his usual fine job in covering the recent developments and reading the tea leaves. Particularly disappointing is the flow of war propaganda from McClatchy, in the person of Jonathan Landay. McClatchy and Landay were among the few voices of skeptical reason on the national media scene during Bush's pre-Iraq propaganda campaign. But apparently they are now on board with Obama's pre-Pakistan propaganda campaign. Success at last! This must be the change we were hoping for, just as Obama's marketers promised!

As you might expect if you've been paying attention for any of the previous six years, or six decades, all the reasons given for war by US politicians and media types are quite false, and transparently so -- yet no one in the national media can tackle any of them head-on. It's a remarkably dangerous situation, of course: the world's most heavily armed nation is still under a media blackout against certain aspects of reality, just as if Obama's election and inauguration had never happened. Fancy that!

The signs are misleading. War between the US and Pakistan is not imminent. It's ongoing. So far the US has made more than 60 airstrikes against Pakistan using unmanned aircraft, and one commando raid using ground troops and attack helicopters. These attacks have killed more than 700 people, and even the most "optimistic" government reports count only 14 al Qaeda leaders among the dead.

It goes without saying that if any foreign country flew just one bombing mission against the USA, or mounted a single commando raid, it would be regarded as an act of war and treated accordingly. Of course this sort of analysis, putting the shoe on the other foot as it were, is missing from our national political discourse, because in mainstream American political analysis, there is no other shoe; there is no other foot; and anyone who suggests otherwise is promptly banished.

In any case, "imminent" is the wrong word. The war is not imminent. What's imminent is a grave escalation. And the escalation, in my view, is not only imminent but inevitable.

A major, horrific war between the USA and Pakistan is, as I understand it, not only inevitable now; it has been inevitable for many years. I'm quite certain about this. The only question remaining in my mind is: How many is "many"?

If you're with me so far, you may be wondering: How do I know the reasons given for the war are false? And if the reasons are all false, why is the war imminent, much less inevitable? And why has this war been inevitable for many years?

If you'll stay with me for a few more minutes, I'll try to explain. But it's not easy, because we have to untangle a pack of interwoven lies.

Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies
-- Fleetwood Mac: "Little Lies"

Depending on which warmongers you listen to, you may be hearing that America must wage war against Pakistan in order to prevent the Taliban from conquering (or at least destabilizing) Pakistan and seizing the country's arsenal of nuclear weapons, and/or to ensure that terrorists can never attack the United States as they did on September 11, 2001, and/or to eliminate the "safe havens" from which "insurgents" are attacking American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and/or because the Pakistani army hasn't been able to defeat the scourge of terrorism all by itself.

But none of this makes any sense. Pakistan's nuclear weapons are under American control, as they have been since September of 2001. The "loose nukes" scenario, which the war against Pakistan is supposedly designed to prevent, is not only a thoroughly fictional argument, but a thoroughly cynical one as well.

If Pakistan's nukes were not under American control, the Americans wouldn't dream of attacking Pakistan. (If you've been paying attention for any of the previous six years, or six decades, you may recall that the US only attacks countries which have no chance to defend themselves, or to retaliate.)

Furthermore, an all-out attack on Pakistan by the US is more likely to cause fragmentation and destabilization in Pakistan than to bring peace and democracy. (Think of Iraq; think of Afghanistan.) So the idea that an American intervention is necessary to prevent a horrific outcome is equally false, and equally cynical. In fact, a horrific outcome -- fragmentation and destabilization -- is much preferred by the American warmongers, and that's why they're so intent on waging this war. It's really quite simple, once you cut through all the propaganda.

Meanwhile, the only way to ensure that terrorists cannot attack us as they did on 9/11 would be to run a complete and open investigation of the attacks of that day, and who made them possible, and who benefited from them ... and to hold the guilty parties accountable. This has manifestly not been done, and clearly, had it been done, we would be in a much different position today. Significantly, president Obama has no intention of allowing an independent investigation into the so-called "terrorist" attacks, so the official fiction remains in place now and is poised to remain in place forever.

The myths of 9/11, monstrous and murderous though they may be, carve out a space in which all manner of other monstrous and murderous fictions can thrive. And these other lies create an environment in which endless war is inevitable. So it's not easy to answer questions such as: How long has this war been in the cards? Has it in fact been inevitable for "many years"? And what do we mean by "many"? But we do need to try.

"Many" is a word
That only leaves you guessin'
Guessin' 'bout a thing
You really ought to know
-- Led Zeppelin: "Over The Hills And Far Away"

If you take a short-term view, you might say President General Pervez Musharraf signed Pakistan's death warrant in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

It was all quite simple. George Bush declared the attacks of 9/11, which he and his administration had done so much to enable, "an act of war". Then he blamed it on "terrorists of global reach" and he asked the world's leaders, "Are you with us, or are you with the terrorists?"

Pervez Musharraf, no dummy in situations of this type, said "We're with you!"

Choosing any other option, of course, would have ensured Pakistan's immediate destruction.

But by choosing as he did, Musharraf allied himself with a lie, and made Pakistan complicit in the war crimes and crimes against humanity that were about to unfold in Afghanistan.

The American and NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has sparked the inevitable reaction, from people we know as "terrorists" and "insurgents". Our terminology implies, falsely, that the US and NATO troops and the puppet government they installed and support are there legitimately. But this is not true, or even close to the truth.

In fact, the resistance to American subjugation, no matter what we call it, correctly sees Pakistan both as America's number one ally in an effort to destroy Afghanistan, and as America's primary regional source of logistical and other support. So counter-attacking in Pakistan makes at least some strategic and tactical sense, from the Afghan point of view. Most Americans know little or nothing about any of this. So we guess about the things we really ought to know.

Suppose -- here's that other shoe again -- Russia bombed, invaded and occupied the US, in a campaign based in and supplied from Mexico. Would an American resistance spring up? Would the resistance attack Russian installations in Mexico? Would it also attack Mexican institutions that supported the Russians? One could only hope so.

The shoe's on the other foot now
Bet you're wondering how.
And it's just something you're going through...
You'd better keep your eyes open
-- Graham Parker : "Something You're Going Through"

If only the truth were that simple. The reality is much worse than the hypothetical. Since a semi-plausible rationale exists for Afghan attacks against Pakistan, the Americans in Afghanistan, always eager to foment a little terrorism which then requires a reaction, have been using Afghan proxies to attack Pakistan, according to reports from Asia which you will never read in any American newspaper.

It's no coincidence that spectacular bombings and gory suicide attacks keep happening in Pakistan whenever it seems the government is approaching a condition of peaceful co-existence with the so-called militants who live in the mountains near the border with Afghanistan. Or is it?

It's no coincidence that American forces were moving freely, un-hampered by the usual security precautions, in Islamabad's Marriott Hotel just before the hotel was the site of a spectacular bombing attack. Or is it?

It's no coincidence that Baithulla Mehsud, Pakistan's public enemy number one, who has recently been blamed for virtually everything, and who has made outrageous public threats against the American homeland, eludes the Pakistan security forces whenever they get close to him, while communicating using encryption they cannot crack. Or is it?

It doesn't take a genius to connect these dots. Or does it?

And I have met my destiny
In quite a similar way
The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself
-- ABBA: "Waterloo"

A longer-term view of Pakistan's current problem would show that its roots were planted almost exactly 30 years ago. In the mid-70s, Afghanistan had shaken off its long-standing feudal monarchy and was beginning to move in progressive directions. A democratic election had empowered a legitimate, representative government, for the first time in Afghanistan's history, and a new social and economic awakening seemed imminent.

Unfortunately for the people of Afghanistan, these developments provided an opportunity certain Americans had been waiting for. They called their plan "Operation Cyclone" and they implemented it in secret. It involved recruiting the baddest bad-guys they could find in the Muslim world, and bringing them to the US for training in terrorist techniques such as murder and sabotage. Once trained, they were sent to Pakistan, were infiltrated into Afghanistan, and began to wreak havoc.

The new government of Afghanistan -- still trying to figure out how to make social democracy work in an Islamic context -- was not at all prepared to deal with terrorists, and asked the Soviet Union for help with security. The Soviets wanted no part of Afghanistan's problem, but neither could they sit back and watch while terrorists destabilized a neighboring country. And the Afghans kept begging for help.

In December of 1979, six months after "Operation Cyclone" went into effect, the Soviets sent troops to assist the Afghan security services -- just what the Americans had hoped for. Immediately, propaganda organs around the world began to trumpet the "fact" that the Soviets had "invaded" Afghanistan. The terrorists who had been sent to attack Afghanistan now turned their attentions to the Soviet troops, and suddenly what had been an internal security problem became the trigger for a major war.

The war raged for almost a decade, killed more than a million people, and destroyed what little infrastructure there was to destroy in Afghanistan; it also did untold damage to the already-crumbling Soviet Union. This was all to the good, according to American policy-makers.

The USSR was at the time America's most powerful "competitor" in the "grand game" of global domination; its fall was a blessing to those American leaders who had been yearning to become the world's only superpower.

And as for Afghanistan, the experiment with social democracy there could not be allowed to stand, much less succeed, for the same reason that similar experiments cannot be allowed to stand anywhere else in the world that American military power can reach: to preserve the myth that capitalism -- unbridled dog-eat-dog militarized capitalism -- is the only path that can possibly lead to prosperity.

There were other factors involved, to be sure. We shouldn't say anything about Afghan poppies and CIA heroin trafficking. We shouldn't say anything about natural resources or pipeline routes either. To do so would put us off the map -- well beyond the limits imposed on "polite" political analysis and far too close to the reality behind the American occupation of Afghanistan today.

Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was the target, Afghanistan was an expendable battlefield, and Pakistan provided the logistical base. Now the situation is slightly different: China is the target, Afghanistan is the logistical base, and as for Pakistan ...

In terms of the "grand chessboard", one might be tempted to say that turnabout is fair play for Pakistan. Those who do the bully's dirty-work always end up as victims themselves. And what's been happening to Pakistan lately, and what's about to happen to Pakistan in the near-term Obama-driven future, could be seen as blowback: retribution for the crimes Pakistan has committed, in complicity with the Americans, against Afghanistan.

But the "grand game" is simply an abstraction, one that "justifies" mass murder on a horrific scale in defense of dimly perceived "national interests". In reality, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people whose lives are about to be destroyed, or in the process of being destroyed, as the "players" continue to see strategic advantage in the destruction and destabilization of foreign countries.

And -- for the most part, and as always -- the victims, and the soon-to-be victims, have done nothing wrong. They've been trying to live their lives and provide for their families under a repressive government which came to power with American support, and which, for most of the past several decades, has been doing America's bidding. Is it a coincidence that the people of Iraq can say the very same thing?

"Operation Cyclone", which filled Afghanistan with terrorists and planted the roots that grew into both the Taliban and al Qaeda, was started during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The Carter administration's marketing slogan -- "Human Rights" -- gave it perfect cover for a clandestine program of fomenting terrorism in one country in order to destabilize another. And the chief architect behind the plan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Carter's National Security Advisor, is now one of Barack Obama's inner circle. That's no coincidence, either.

And this, ultimately, is what makes a major escalation of the war between the US and Pakistan inevitable. The Obama administration embodies none of the change we were hoping for. We are still governed by Bush/Clinton retreads, neo-con chicken hawks, friends and agents of Israel, and Wall Street bankers. None of these people see anything wrong with the American imperial project. The destruction of Pakistan is, and always has been, essential to that project. And the movers and shakers don't care how much pain and suffering they cause.

To prevent a disastrous war between the USA and Pakistan, it would be necessary to dismantle the American imperial system, and this -- as we keep seeing over and over and over -- is not about to happen.

We are all on the run
On our knees
The sundial draws a line upon eternity
Across every number.
-- Van Der Graaf Generator: "Arrow"

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Big Surprise: Human Rights Watch Says UK And Pakistani Agents Colluded In Torture

2009-03-20T09:46:00.000-04:00

Last month the Pakistani daily Dawn reported:

A shocking new report alleges widespread complicity between British security agents and their Pakistani counterparts who have routinely engaged in the torture of suspects, a report in the Observer has revealed.

Quoting from the report, which will be published next month by the civil liberties group Human Rights Watch, the Sunday newspaper said that at least 10 Britons are identified who have been allegedly tortured in Pakistan and subsequently questioned by UK intelligence officials. It warns that more British cases may surface and that the issue of Pakistani terrorism suspects interrogated by British agents is likely to ‘run much deeper.’

Much deeper indeed.

The piece in Dawn, "Pakistani, British agents accused of torture", and the report in the Observer to which it refers, "UK agents 'colluded with torture in Pakistan'", both describe the alleged al Qaeda terrorist Rangzieb Ahmed, who claims Pakistani interrogators removed three of his fingernails with pliers, after which his left hand looked like this:

Mark Townsend in The Observer:

Ali Dayan Hasan, who led the Pakistan-based inquiry, said [...] evidence collated from Pakistan intelligence officials indicated a "systemic" modus operandi among British security services, involving a significant number of UK agents from MI5 rather than maverick elements. Different agents were deployed to interview different suspects, many of whom alleged that prior to interrogation by British officials they were tortured by Pakistani agents.

Among the 10 identified cases of British citizens and residents mentioned in the report is Rangzieb Ahmed, 33, from Rochdale, who claims he was tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents before being questioned by two MI5 officers. Ahmed was convicted of being a member of al-Qaida at Manchester crown court, yet the jury was not told that three of the fingernails of his left hand had been removed. The response from MI5 to the allegations that it had colluded in Ahmed's torture were heard in camera, however, after the press and the public were excluded from the proceedings. Ahmed's description of the cell in which he claims he was tortured closely matches that where Salahuddin Amin, 33, from Luton, says he was tortured by ISI officers between interviews with MI5 officers.

Townsend mentions a number of other cases and continues:

Hasan said that evidence indicated a considerable number of UK officers were involved in interviewing terrorism suspects after they were allegedly tortured. He told the Observer: "We don't know who the individuals [British intelligence officers] were, but when you have different personnel coming in and behaving in a similar fashion it implies some level of systemic approach to the situation, rather than one eager beaver deciding it is absolutely fine for someone to be beaten or hung upside down."

He accused British intelligence officers of turning a blind eye as UK citizens endured torture at the hands of Pakistan's intelligence agencies.

"They [the British] have met the suspect ... and have conspicuously failed to notice that someone is in a state of high physical distress, showing signs of injury. If you are a secret service agent and fail to notice that their fingernails are missing, you ought to be fired."

The poster in this photo (also from Dawn) poses an interesting question: What does torture teach our children? Equally interesting: What does torture teach us?

For most of us, it seems, the answer is "Not Much".

But for the rest of us, for those with enough courage to face our common reality (at least some of the time), torture teaches us to loathe and fear our government.

And that, from all indications, is exactly what it is intended to do.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Screwed Again: Seymour Hersh Puts Pro-War Spin On What We Would Normally Call Acts Of Terrorism

2009-03-18T12:31:00.012-04:00

Famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh ruffled a few feathers last week with comments in Minnesota regarding an alleged "executive assassination ring" -- a squad of elite killers who have allegedly been infiltrating foreign countries and murdering ... well, officially, nobody knows who their victims have been, really, but if this story were officially acknowledged (whatever that means these days), we would no doubt be told that the alleged victims of the alleged murders were "the worst of the worst", without whom America will now be safer, huzzah huzzah.

Here's Hersh, as quoted by Eric Black of the Minnesota Post:

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders [sic], a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

The article in the New York Times to which Hersh refers [or here] was written by Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, and the admiral in question is Rear Admiral William H. McRaven, Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), former Commander of Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR) and the first Director of NATO Special Operations Forces Coordination Centre (NSCC).

He's a special operations specialist, and a proud Navy Seal!

"Special Operations", of course, is intelligence jargon for "high-deniablilty" "clandestine" raids: sabotage, murder and other acts of what we would normally call terrorism.

In order for an act of international terrorism to have "plausible deniablilty", the perpetrators cannot share their plans with the ambassador or the CIA station chief. So that part of Hersh's statement is not surprising.

Neither is this: the NYT piece makes it very clear that the "stop" Admiral McRaven ordered was temporary, limited, and local -- and that it's history. In other words, the executive killing spree has resumed.

McRaven's order applied only to Afghanistan, and apparently was largely a matter of spin-control. The piece by Mazzetti and Schmitt is, as usual, full of spin itself, but nonetheless it's worth a look. It starts like this:

The commander of a secretive branch of America’s Special Operations forces last month ordered a halt to most commando missions in Afghanistan, reflecting a growing concern that civilian deaths caused by American firepower are jeopardizing broader goals there.

The spun part here, of course, is the alleged context. The "broader goals" mentioned by Mazzetti and Schmitt are only hinted at, but never specified in any detail -- not in the New York Times, at any rate.

Why are we there? What do we want? What sort of situation would make us declare victory? And if that situation somehow were to occur, would that be enough to make us leave? Our nation's paper of record cannot bring itself to ask any of these questions, much less answer them. The most it can do is spill a few beans now and then. Thus Mazzetti and Schmitt continue:

The halt, which lasted about two weeks, came after a series of nighttime raids by Special Operations troops in recent months killed women and children, and after months of mounting outrage in Afghanistan about civilians killed in air and ground strikes. The order covered all commando missions except those against the highest-ranking leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, military officials said.

The context here is breathtaking, is it not? After a series of raids killed women and children (and not, therefore, Taliban leaders and al Qaeda terrorists, as the Pentagon always claims victims of such raids to have been -- if it acknowledges them at all), the admiral ordered a two-week halt to all commando raids except "those against the highest-ranking leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda"!

So: There was a two-week period in which the "executive assassination ring" in Afghanistan could attack only the leadership of our alleged enemies! And this is what Hersh -- and the NYT scribes -- called a "stop", or a "halt".

Mazzetti and Schmitt again:

American commanders in Afghanistan rely on the commando units to carry out some of the most delicate operations against militant leaders, and the missions of the Army’s Delta Force and classified Navy Seals units are never publicly acknowledged. But the units sometimes carry out dozens of operations each week, so any decision to halt their missions is a sign of just how worried military officials are that the fallout from civilian casualties is putting in peril the overall American mission in Afghanistan, including an effort to drain the Taliban of popular support.

Even spun, the story stands out clearly: It's not the deaths of innocent and defenseless civilians that worries the American brass: it's the fallout. If only the stories could be contained, then the dozens of operations per week could be resumed ...

Military officials said the halt was ordered in part to allow American commanders time to impose new safeguards intended to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. They said it was also intended to help the military release information about civilian casualties more quickly, to pre-empt what some said have been exaggerated accounts by Afghan officials.

American spokesmen, eager to make it seem as though the American intervention in Afghanistan were a humanitarian gesture, always lie about the numbers of casualties, especially civilian casualties. This is particularly difficult when the Afghan government, sometimes in the person of hand-picked American sock-puppet Hamid Karzai himself, speaks frankly to the press about the nature of the raids and the numbers and types of the casualties. And therefore,

One senior official said that procedures had been set up to allow American troops to report more quickly the number of enemy and civilian deaths after a specific operation, and to quickly disseminate the information to Afghan officials in Kabul, the capital, and at the local and provincial levels.

And presumably, once the government officials in Kabul and elsewhere are told what to say by the Americans, they will release the proper information, and we will have no more contradictary reports about the secret raids that are killing innocent people in foreign countries. So when they bomb a wedding party and tell us they've killed five terrorists and nobody else, no elected or appointed Afghan official will dare to say anything else. Thus will more truth be hidden.

So: McRaven gave Special Ops in Afghanistan a two-week slowdown to get their propaganda operation in order.

The propaganda operation is by no means limited to Pentagon insiders or acknowledged supporters, as Hersh convincingly demonstrates when he says:

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

And so, here we are, in never-never land. Even Seymour Hersh, famed investigative reporter, can't help slinging it, one shovel-full at a time.

They're not murderers, even though what they're doing is murder. But how do we define a "murderer"? Is it not someone who murders? Hersh can't even bring himself to call it that, but he will go so far as to say that they're "committing what we would normally call murder".

I'm not a writer. I'm just doing what we would normally call writing. And you're not a reader. You're just doing what we would normally call reading. Really. No exaggerations. It's all highly specialized.

Apparently it's "very complicated", at least in Hersh's imagination. And it might not be murder, even though it's what we would normally call murder, because the murderers are not actually murderers but instead "young men that went into the Special Forces".

Special Forces, of course, are those on the front lines of Special Operations. What we would normally call our own terrorists, if it weren't so very complicated.

So: They're not murderers because they're hired to kill people, or more properly they're not murderers because they've volunteered -- and qualified -- to be cogs in their country's elite force of hired killers.

And these killers who are not really killers are in fact the "best and the brightest"? Possibly they are, in Hersh's imagination -- but please! Let's be serious here. The lie about "the best and the brightest" has been around since at least the early 60's, and it's even less true now than it was then.

The best and the brightest don't join the militarization of America. They fight against it.

The best and the brightest didn't get all hyped up after 9/11 and decide to go kill people. The best and the brightest could see, on the day itself, that the government/media story was hogwash.

The best and the brightest have been working for years -- decades in some cases -- to counteract the very propaganda Hersh is so fond of spewing.

But for all his inside connections, Hersh cannot see it any other way. By his own admission, he has no outside connections.

Hersh insists [...] that his close ties with the underside of the defense world are the reason he’s so confident about his understanding of that reality. “I’m not working with guys outside the system,” he tells me. “You do understand that, don’t you? I’m not outside the system in what I do. I’m really not.”

So perhaps it's not entirely imaginary. Perhaps for Sy Hersh, and for everyone else who works entirely within the "national defense" "system", the Navy Seals and the Delta Forces and all the other Special Operations not-murderers really are the best and the brightest. Which is to say: they are the best and the brightest of those who are not quite good enough or bright enough to see that the American military is a blight on both America and the rest of humanity.

By fighting one war after another in defenseless foreign countries on false pretenses, the American military has shown its hand over and over and over ... so they must be the best and the brightest of those who have sold their souls to the devil. They can't even claim ignorance. It is, after all, a devil that we all know very well.

The best and the brighest would never willingly harness themselves to such a demonic force. And the draft is a thing of the past. So what does that tell you about the people who spend their lives in support of the system?

Hersh was joined in Minnesota by another venerable working-within-the-system type, the former Democratic something-or-other, Walter Mondale. According to Eric Black, the event moderator, Larry Jacobs,

walked the two elder statesmen [sic] through their experiences of:

* The My Lai massacre, which Hersh first revealed publicly and which he last night called “the end of innocence about us and war.”

* The Pentagon Papers case, which Mondale called the best example of the “government’s potential for vast public deception.”

* Henry Kissinger’s secret dealings, mostly relating to the Vietnam War. (Hersh, who has written volumes about Kissinger, said that he will always believe that whereas ordinary people count sheep to fall asleep, Kissinger “has to count burned and maimed Cambodian babies.”)

* The Church Committee investigation of CIA and FBI abuses, in which Mondale played a major role. (He talked about the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover not only spied on Martin Luther King but literally tried to drive him to suicide.)

* The Iran Contra scandal. (Hersh said the Reagan administration came to office with a clear goal of finding a way to finance covert actions, such as the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, without appropriations so that Congress wouldn't know about them. Mondale noted that Reagan had signed a law barring further aid to the Contras, then participated in a scheme to keep the aid flowing. Hersh said that two key veterans of Iran-Contra, Dick Cheney and national security official Elliot Abrams, were reunited in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key lesson from Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration knew about it.)

* And the Bush-Cheney years. (Said Hersh: “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extaordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney, and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.” Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.")

The continuity here is remarkable. It's not just a devil that we know, but one that we've known for a long, long time.

Ever since what Hersh calls "the end of innocence about us and war" -- more than 35 years ago -- how could anyone willingly support it? How many times can we lose our innocence?

Even knowing what we know now -- as if what we knew 35 years ago were not enough -- Hersh still claims that the people who line up to do the system's dirtiest of dirty work -- what Mazzetti and Schmitt flatteringly call "delicate" operations -- are "the best and the brightest".

As an invesitgative journalist he is often amazingly shallow. Perhaps that's one of the reasons Seymour Hersh is so well-respected. Here's Eric Black again:

Jacobs pressed both men on the question of whether the frequent abuses of power show that the Constitution fails, because these things keep happening, or whether it works, because these things keep coming to light.

Mondale stuck with the happy answer. “The system has come through again and again,” he said. Presidents always think they will get away with it, but eventually reporters like Hersh bring things to light, the public “starts smelling this stuff,” the courts and the Congress get involved. Presidents “always, in the long run, find out that the system is stronger than they are.”

This is the sort of nonsense we always get from politicians. Are we supposed to believe that "the system has come through again and again" because the crimes against humanity committed by our leaders are eventually publicized? On the contrary: no president, and no other high-ranking government official, has ever been prosecuted for the war crimes, the crimes against humanity, or the crimes against America that they have all committed. And none of them ever will. And they all know it.

Former presidents, secretaries of "defense", and other career "national security" types trundle off into the sunset and/or multi-million dollar "jobs" as directors of the war profiteering corporations that drive the evil machine, but prefer to be called "defense contractors". It's working, all right. The system is working fine. It's doing just what it was designed to do.

Can we get a more "journalistic" take on that?

Hersh seemed more troubled by the repetitions of the pattern. The “beautiful thing about our system” is that eventually we get new leaders, he said. “The evil twosome, Cheney and Bush, left,” Hersh said. But he also said “it’s really amazing to me that we manage to get such bad leadership, so consistently.”

It's a beautiful thing how we get new leaders every so often but the policies never seem to change very much. It's beautiful how Bush and Cheney take the rap for being "evil" and now Obama and Biden can do the same sorts of things without being "evil". That's the beauty of the imaginary reality, where even the anti-war reporting has a pro-war spin.

But then again, it's all spin, even from "the best and the brightest" investigative journalists. Any serious observer, certainly anyone worthy of the respect accorded Seymour Hersh, would be able to explain why we get "such bad leadership, so consistently". He wouldn't express amazement, because there's nothing amazing about it. It's not even remotely surprising anymore.

The sad fact -- which Hersh won't touch -- is that party politics is nothing more than an intersquad scrimmage, an exhibition game intended to convey the impression that the two "competing teams" are adversaries.

They're not. They're partners. They're working together to put on the big show every four years. And we know this is true because of what happens to prospective players who are not interested in furthering the big show, but would try to change the game. Most of them don't even get onto the field. And those who do never last very long.

We've seen what the Democrats and the media did to Mike Gravel, which was exactly what the Republicans and the media did to Ron Paul. We've seen the cold silence -- or jeering derision -- which has greeted every serious attempt to uphold the rule of law, to stop the war in Iraq, to stop the war in Afghanistan, to investigate the crimes of 9/11, to reform a clearly broken electoral system, to rein in a clearly complicit national media, or even to bring just a little bit of accountability to our government. These were all efforts to change the game in one way or another, and no such efforts will be tolerated.

This is the system. This is what it does. The time for amazement is past.

~~~

Aha! Here's something in a similar vein, from the cold archives:

You Know We're Really Screwed When ... Even The Anti-War Propaganda Has A Pro-War Bias

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Torture And Terror And Tales From The Tub

2009-03-17T19:17:00.009-04:00

Following the sudden outbreak of trouble in my upper back, I was in great pain for a month, and barely able to work, let alone blog. After two weeks I was able to type a bit, and I wrote a post saying I'd be back when I could. And after two more weeks of massage and stretching and soaking in hot water, I got myself into the hands of an osteopath who straightened me out, using some amazing techniques. And now my pain is mostly gone and my mobility and strength are returning, and I'm starting to enjoy some of the things I took for granted not long ago.

Why am I telling you this? I always say I won't write about myself on my blog; then something always happens to make me do so. Oh well. I'm not a professional journalist; I'm not trained in any of this; I'm just doing my best, when I can do anything at all. Sometimes it's not much. And sometimes it's nothing. Oh well. I appreciate my readers and I'm amazed that they keep coming back, so I want to keep them in the loop, even when the loop has nothing to do with the subjects they usually read about from me. Oh well.

Almost three months of almost no blogging has changed the way I see some things, especially since I was living for some of that time in serious pain. I spent many hours able to think but unable to write, asking myself questions like:

What if this pain were not an accident or a fluke but deliberately inflicted? What if instead of spending hours every day pampering my aching body, I were spending every hour of every day obeying the commands of the people who had inflicted all the pain?

What if instead of soaking in a tub of hot water, I were hanging in a cage? Or chained to the floor?

What if instead of over-dressing, trying to keep myself as warm as possible, I had to wear an orange jump suit, officially sanctioned underwear and nothing else? What if somebody else decided my cage would be cold, so my pain would be enhanced? And what if there were nothing I could do about it?

What if instead of being able to sleep when I needed to, I were being prevented from sleeping? What if instead of being able to see an amazing osteopath, I were being prevented from seeking any medical help at all?

What if instead of having to endure the pain of lifting my arms to cook dinners, set the table, and clean up afterwards, I had to endure the pain of wondering whether my kids were being fed, and how much they had changed since I last saw them, what they looked like now, and whether I would ever see them again?

What if the "heinous crime" for which I had to endure a lifetime of punishment amounted to reading the wrong magazine article, or having a name similar to that of a supposed bad guy, or being captured and sold into captivity, possibly while fleeing the bombing of my homeland?

None of these questions is hypothetical. Not a single one of them is new. But they seem much more tangible now than they ever did before. Sometimes pain can inspire clarity. Perhaps some of that has been happening to me lately. It would be a reward for all the suffering.

I will try to be more focused in the future. I will try to write more about pain and torture, no matter how difficult I find it. And I will try to focus on some other important issues too, but in a different way than I did before I began my extended leave of absence. But before I do any of that, I have to tell you about my most recent unfortunate injury.

I'd been soaking in the tub, trying to loosen up my back. The water was very hot, and by the time I was ready to get out, I was dizzy. My ears were full of water, so I grabbed a Q-Tip on my way out of the bathroom and staggered to the bed. And I had just inserted the Q-Tip into my ear when I lost my balance and fell over, landing on the Q-Tip and driving it deep into my ear canal.

The pain was so sudden and intense that it took me a few minutes to stop screaming. And in that time I had horrible visions of Vietnam.

They used to kill people that way, not with a Q-Tip but with a pencil. They'd kidnap some guy, strap him to a chair and start driving a pencil into his ear, while asking him questions about matters he probably knew nothing about. When he failed to answer, or failed to answer to their satisfaction, they'd keep hammering on the pencil.

As an "enhanced interrogation technique" it was totally ineffective. But this wasn't about interrogation. It was outright murder. It was a deliberate effort to disrupt and terrorize the civilian population of a country which had proven remarkably resilient to American military intervention.

The pencil murder was only one of the "interrogation techniques" used in "Operation Phoenix". Nobody ever survived an "interrogation". And by the time it was over, it had killed more than 20,000 people.

As clandestine operations go, Phoenix was none too secret. But you might have a hard time finding information about it on the net, because Google searches mostly return articles about a video game with the same name. Come and see how we glorify our psychopaths!

So there I was, writhing and screaming and thinking about all this. It made me want to write more about Vietnam and especially about Operation Phoenix -- and I may do that someday. At the moment I am deaf in one ear and hoping that this loss will prove to be temporary. I also feel a bit closer to the horror of Vietnam than I have felt for a long time.

So there's your update. It's intended as background for the posts I want to write next, which will not touch on my personal circumstances at all, if I can help it.

I'll have something more substantial for you as soon as possible.

It's good to be back.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.