The utter shallowness of our political debates is exemplified here, thank god in pictures so I don’ have to write a thousand words.
Did Sgt. Robert Bales act alone?
Comments by participants in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War claimed that the incident, though grisly, was not that unusual. “Free fire zones” meant that anyone breathing oxygen was a target, so that soldiers landing in the villages that day were free to kill anyone they saw, no questions asked. Only after a low-level GI, Ron Ridenhour, finally got Seymour Hersh to report on the matter did it become a scandal. And again, it must be noted, Hersh’s report includes comments from participants that the incident simply was not that unusual.
Afghan people are furious that Sgt, Bales was extradited from there to stand trial at home. Afghanistan news media is alive with reports that Bales did not act alone, was part of a coordinated effort, complete with helicopter landings and burned corpses. Could it be that that Sgt. Bale’s unit had free fire authority, and that on landing and finding no “militants” that they simply killed everyone there, My Lai style?
If so, there are many possible outcomes. One is the Calley scenario, where Bales would be allowed to take the fall, stay in jail long enough to escape public memory, and then quietly fade away. In this outcome, Bales sits quietly on trial as he is convicted, apparently penitent. News reports circulate that he was troubled, a loner, had combat stress, maybe even find high school buddies who uncover dark secrets about pornography and drugs.
What if Bales wants to put the Army on trial? That could be nasty, as the Army will not allow itself to be exposed (should the Afghan media be giving us accurate reporting). There would be no public trial, and he would be convicted, possibly executed, certainly put in solitary confinement.
Or, he might commit “suicide.” That would be the Joe Stalin solution: No person, no problem.
Hard to know what is true or factual right now. It would be wise of all of us to watch all reporting on this matter from all sources.
War, Inc.
This comes from WarIsACrime.org – I started reading it with the usual “Yeah, yeah, do go on” attitude, as if something new were about to be revealed. Turned out to be much better than I thought.
Top 10 Genius Reasons to Keep Troops in Afghanistan
1. When you’re setting a record for the longest modern war, cutting it short just increases the chances of somebody breaking your record some day.
2. When Newt Gingrich and Cal Thomas turn against a war, keeping it going will really confuse Republicans.
3. If we pull U.S. troops out after they have shot children from helicopters, kicked in doors at night, waved Nazi flags, urinated on corpses, massacred villages, and burned Korans it will look like we’re sorry they did those things.
4. U.S. tax dollars have been funding our troops, and through-payments for safe passage on roads have also been the top source of income for the Taliban. Unilaterally withdrawing that funding from both sides of a war at the same time would be unprecedented and could devastate the booming Afghan economy.
5. The government we’ve installed in Afghanistan is making progress on its torture program and drug running and now supports wife beating. But it has not yet mandated invasive ultrasounds. We cannot leave with a job half-finished.
6. We have an enormous prison full of prisoners in Afghanistan, and closing it down would distract us from our essential concentration on pretending to close Guantanamo.
7. Unless we keep “winning” in Afghanistan it will be very hard to generate enthusiasm for our wars in Syria and Iran. And with suicide the top killer of our troops, we cannot allow our men and women to be killing themselves in vain.
8. If we ended the war that created the 2001 authorization to use military force, how would we justify our special forces operations in over 100 other countries, the elimination of habeas corpus, or the legalization of murdering U.S. citizens? Besides, if we stay a few more years we might find an al Qaeda member.
9. A few hundred billion dollars a year is a small price to pay for weapons bases, a gas pipeline, huge profits for generous campaign funders, and a perfect testing ground for weapons that will be absolutely essential in our next pointless war.
10. Terror hasn’t conceded defeat yet.
The Big O
Here in this country, Jeremy Scahill reports in the Nation about the imprisonment.
What are you going to do next, Big O – throw Jeremy Scahill in jail? Murder him?
Greenwald writes about the deafening silence on this side of the world about the imprisonment, the air strike itself, which the New York Times has blatantly lied about, and of course, the complicity of Democrats, who are apparently OK with murder and mayhem so long is it is their guy at the wheel.
Stratfor does it with impunity, while Assange is “fucked”
According to Democracy Now, there appears to be a sealed indictment against Julian Assange coming out of the highly secretive Obama Administration. This from Rolling Stone magazine, a few issues ago:
Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western “intelligence source,” and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? “He told me I was fucked,” Assange says.
The Obama Administration has been far worse in the privacy/free speech area than any administration before, and gets away with it because are happy to support any policy so long as the person who puts it in place is a Democrat.
The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published an internal email from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that suggests the U.S. Justice Department has obtained a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The email is one of around five million obtained from Stratfor’s servers by the hacker group, Anonymous. “Somehow you have a private intelligence company, Stratfor, a ‘shadow CIA,’ as people have called it, having information about this sealed indictment—secret again—that Julian Assange doesn’t have, that WikiLeaks doesn’t have, that his lawyers don’t have,” says Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is a legal adviser to both Assange and to WikiLeaks. “What you see here is secrecy, secrecy, secrecy.” News of the indictment comes less than a week after Army Private Bradley Manning was arraigned for allegedly leaking classified U.S. military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks.
Isn’t it interesting that a private corporation has this information, presumably leaked, and bears no scrutiny, while Julian Assange, who has done the very same thing, is “fucked?”
USA: The planet’s lone nut
Lala’s neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines “poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.”
The Pentagon reflexively lies about these things, and will spend far more money and time covering up the incident than investigating. The “lone gunman” notion is quaint.
Continue reading “USA: The planet’s lone nut”
The security of the herd
I have often written here and elsewhere that “Democrats are the problem.” If it were that simple, of course, then Republicans would be a logical alternative. Alas, neither party offers much in the way of hope or change. And it is not so much the failings of individuals, even well-intended ones, as it is herd behavior. People simply do not think their own thoughts, and desire to be led by others. Democrats would reflexively oppose a nominal member of the other party who assassinated American citizens, mandated purchase of private health insurance, extended tax cuts for the wealthy, ran a prison dedicated to indefinite detention and torture, arbitrarily attacked other countries and even attacked a country after Congress voted against allowing him to do that.
Alas, Obama has done all of this, and for this garners high praise from his own party. He is, after all, a Democrat, so it must be the right way to go.
It’s not a failure of leadership either, as the system mandates that those who occupy leadership positions first accept private bribes to gain access to those positions. For a man or woman to accept bribes and then turn on the benefactor is political suicide – there are many ways to remove such a person from office, as Nixon, Spitzer, Kucinich, Feinstein and so many others know. So the idea of changing the system by participation in the system, or to “get active,” as Thom Hartmann says is our patriotic duty, makes no sense. If the only way to affect meaningful change is to join the Democratic Party, then it is time to resign citizenship.
Continue reading “The security of the herd”
American fairy dust
Typical of the way we do things here in our fake democracy, even as officials talk about US military involvement in Syria, we’ve long been involved. Syria claims it is not fighting internal rebellion, but rather a military operation financed and armed by western powers. If the Syrian government is anything like the American government, only one thing three things can be safely said: They lie, they lie, they lie.
The American news media is highly unreliable in matters of US military operations, along with just about everything else except celebrity culture. Syrian media is also suspect. Al Jazeera might be a useful source, but has drawn complaints of complicity with western forces. Has it too been compromised?
Justice, Bush League variety
In February 1990, a group of British relatives [of Lockerbie victims] went to the American embassy in London for a meeting with the seven members of the President’s commission on aviation security and terrorism. Martin Cadman remembers: ‘After we’d had our say, the meeting broke up and we moved towards the door. As we got there, I found myself talking to two members of the Commission – I think they were senators. One of them said “Your government and our government know exactly what happened at Lockerbie. But they are not going to tell you.” (Paul Foot (1937-2004), Private Eye, May, 2001)
Imagine the aftermath:
Officials in the Iranian and Syrian governments, incensed by the event and the arrogance by which a major power like the US can commit such a crime with impunity, seek revenge.
Using Palestinians not connected to the PLO, they arrange for a bomb to be placed aboard a Pan Am flight from London to New York on December 21, 1988. The plane blows up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 aboard and 11 people on the ground.
Continue reading “Justice, Bush League variety”
Bush II rattling the sabers
Obama won’t hesitate to use force to “defend US.”
C’mon people, please. How is this guy in any way different from his predecessor?
That aside, we know now, due to some real journalism, that Isreali insider sources say that Iran’s nuclear program is compromised. Secondly, countries do not commit suicide, so that Iran’s only intent in procuring a bomb is as a deterrent.
We have our share of lunatics in power, as does Israel. But more and more as time goes on I am thinking that the whole purpose of the current war scare is to stop Iran from doing something that might seriously jeopardize the interests of our Mullahs, our Wall Street overlords. And the only thing that comes to mind is preservation of the dollar as the reserve currency for trading world oil – the petrodollar.
But it is about a real threat to power, so that an unprovoked attack on Iran is not out of the question. The most frightening aspect is that to achieve a quick and decisive victory, the War Department might decide that nukes are in order. They would use Israel for that purpose, of course, but there are so many unknown unknowns in such a strategy that civilization might be in serious jeopardy.
Or not. Who really knows?
