Signs of a Sick Society
Source / Comics.com
Fluxed Up World
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Bringing Descriptive Reality to the Afghanistan War
Drones Cannot See What Afghan Civilians See
By David Smith-Ferri / November 9, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan – “We live in constant fear of suicide attacks,” said Laila, an Afghan woman who lives in Kandahar city and who visited with us yesterday. “When will the next one strike and where?”
“Twelve days ago,” she continued, “a good friend was walking home from the mosque. A four-minute walk. An IED was detonated, and my friend lost half his face. Another man lost his leg, and his son lost his leg, too. We live with that kind of uncertainty, when you don’t know what is going to happen from one moment to the next.”
Laila’s descriptions of living with fear and violence in Kandahar contradict the mild U.S. descriptions of the “security situation” there. “The Taliban do not control the city,” said Army General Stanley McChrystal, in a May 13, 2010 briefing concerning a “much-anticipated” military operation in Kandahar. “You can walk around the streets of Kandahar, and there is business going on. It is a functioning city.”
Compare McChrystal’s blithe comments with Laila’s experience. “In Kandahar city, you don’t know what’s going to happen, minute to minute. Every single minute that we live – if you can call it living – every single second there is the thought that this is going to be my last second.”
Laila went on to illustrate this graphically. “A good friend of mine had a ticket to travel to Canada to visit her mom for a family wedding. She dressed in a burqa, and went to say goodbye to some colleagues. When she returned home, traveling by rickshaw, she saw a neighbor outside. So she stood for two minutes to talk to her. In those two minutes, two men on a motorcycle drove up. One man shot her in the head and killed her, and the other man drove them away.”
Laila states that this style of killing – where two men ride a motorcycle and one is responsible for driving, the other for shooting – has become common in Kandahar. “At least 300 – 500 people have been killed in front of their homes, offices, shopping areas. The guys who killed my friend are still roaming around the city. No effort was made to find and question them.”
In late September, after months of “careful and quiet preparation” in Kandahar Province, U.S./NATO forces officially launched what they are calling “Operation Dragon Strike,” currently their largest military operation in the country.
The New York Times reported that winning over Kandahar is crucial to shifting the balance of power in Afghanistan, and Brigadier General Joseph Blotz with the ISAF in Kabul called it the “most significant military operation” in the country. Last week, an AP news report from a journalist embedded in another province declared that “the Kandahar operation has so far produced stunning results.” And on November 6, an NPR correspondent confidently stated his expectation that General Petraeus will declare the Kandahar operation a “big success” when he reports to President Obama prior to the December “review” of U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan.
But Laila and her friends and colleagues haven’t seen any ‘stunning results’ or ‘big success.’
“Now we hear bombardment every night, but no communication about it. Is it really Talibs who are being killed or ordinary citizens? Women? Children?”
Laila, who operates a business in Kandahar, used to travel back and forth everyday from her rented home to her office. “It’s only a three-minute ride,” but because even that is too risky, “I’ve moved into my office.”
In Kandahar, in August and September, the Mirwais Hospital received nearly 1,000 patients wounded by war. These were record high numbers and double the figures from a year before (International Committee for the Red Cross).
Some people have considered the management of “Operation Dragon Strike” a failure because in response to advance publicity many insurgents left the area ahead of time, and international forces have met with little resistance. For people in Kandahar, however, this hasn’t meant a reprieve. While there has been less combat on the front lines, U.S. Special Forces are conducting frequent night raids in the area, breaking into homes, terrorizing families, violating people’s sense of privacy and honor, and generating deep anger and resentment. Further, there are assassinations every day related to politics, business disputes, and the practices of vigilante justice, all of which frightens people and reminds them of the terrible period of civil war between 1992 and 1994.
In addition to undiminished violence, people in Kandahar live with the sour taste and gnawing frustration of unfulfilled promises of development made by the U.S. and the international community. Residents in much of Kandahar, we are told by NGO representatives, have electricity only every third day. Development organizations made a huge investment in hydroelectric turbines for the Kajaki dam only to walk away and leave the project unfinished because insecurity has made the challenge of bringing in materials so daunting and death threats have driven subcontractors to abandon their efforts – six years of work with as yet nothing to show for it. Failed projects cause more than disappointment. Factories in a U.S.-funded industrial park in Kandahar city sit empty for lack of electricity, the employment possibilities they hold yet another undelivered promise. Local people see clearly that development organizations and their staff profit, while leaving little behind. This, too, builds resentment.
In Kandahar, home to the airfield from which U.S. drones operating in Afghanistan are launched, local Afghans refer to the pilotless warplanes as “computer tayarri,” or computer planes. The drones fly overhead daily, but they don’t see what Laila sees.
Note: Laila's name has been changed to protect her identity.
[Kathy Kelly, Jerica Arents, and David Smith-Ferri are Co-Coordinators of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org). They are currently traveling in Afghanistan.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Nader Quizzes the Tea Party on Its Reality
Ten Questions for Tea Partiers
By Ralph Nader / October 23, 2010
Here are ten questions for Tea Partiers that they want or do not want to answer. I say it this way because people who call themselves Tea Partiers do not have the same view of politics, government, Big Business or the Constitution. Their opinions range from pure Libertarian to actively furthering the privileges of plutocracy. Their income and occupational background vary as well, though most seem to be middle-income and up.
My guess is that most Tea Partiers come from the conservative wing of the Republican Party who are fed up with both the corporate Republicans like Bush and Cheney, as well as the Democrats like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.
With the above in mind, the following questions can serve to go beyond abstractions and generalizations of indignation and get to some more specific responses.
1. Can you be against Big Government and not press for reductions in the vast military budgets, fraught with bureaucratic and large contractors’ waste, fraud and abuse? Military spending now takes up half of the federal government’s operating budgets. The libertarian Cato Institute believes that to cut deficits, we have to also cut the defense budget.
2. Can you believe in the free market and not condemn hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare-bailouts, subsidies, handouts, and giveaways?
3. Can you want to preserve the legitimate sovereignty of our country and not reject the trade agreements known as NAFTA and GATT (The World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland) that scholars have described as the greatest surrender of local, state and national sovereignty in our history?
4. Can you be for law and order and not support a bigger and faster crackdown on the corporate crime wave, that needs more prosecutors and larger enforcement budgets to stop the stealing of taxpayers and consumer dollars so widely reported in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week? Law enforcement officials estimate that for every dollar for prosecution, seventeen to twenty dollars are returned.
5. Can you be against invasions of privacy by government and business without rejecting the provisions of the Patriot Act that leave you defenseless to constant unlawful snooping, appropriation of personal information and even search of your home without notification until 72 hours later?
6. Can you be against regulation of serious medical malpractice (over 100,000 lives lost a year, according to a study by Harvard physicians), unsafe drugs that have serious side effects or cause the very injury/illness they were sold to prevent, motor vehicles with defective brakes, tires and throttles, contaminated food from China, Mexico and domestic processors?
7. Can you keep calling for Freedom and yet tolerate control of your credit and other economic rights by hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and credit scores? What Freedom do you have when you have to sign industry-wide fine print one-sided “contracts” with your banks, insurance companies, car dealers, and credit card companies? Many of these contracts even block your Constitutional access to the courthouse.
8. Can you be for a new, clean system of politics and elections and still accept the Republican and Democratic Two Party dictatorship that is propped up by complex state laws, frivolous litigation and harassment to exclude from the ballot third parties and independent candidates who want reform, accountability, and stronger voices for the voters?
9. If you want a return to our Constitution—its principles of limited and separation of power and its emphasis on “We the People” in its preamble—can you still support Washington’s wars that have not been declared by Congress (Article I Section 8) or giving corporations equal rights with humans plus special privileges and immunities. The word “corporation” or “company” never appears in the Constitution. How can you support eminent domain powers given by governments to corporations over homeowners, or massive week-end bailouts by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department of businesses, even reckless foreign banks, without receiving the authority and the appropriations from the Congress, as the Constitution requires?
10. You want less taxation and lower deficits. How can you succeed unless you stop big corporations from escaping their fair share of taxes by manipulating foreign jurisdictions against our tax laws, for example, or by letting trillions of dollars of speculation on Wall Street go without any sales tax, while you pay six, seven or eight percent sales tax on the necessities you buy in stores?
Let’s hear from you Tea Partiers. Meanwhile, see the work of video-journalist, Steve Ference, who has interviewed and given voice to those among you in his new paperback “Voices of the Tea Party” published by Lulu.com on July 4, 2010. Contact VoicesoftheTeaParty@gmail.com.
[Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.]
Source / Common Dreams
Thanks to Steve Russell / Fluxed Up World
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Stop the Amerikkkan Propensity for War
Source / YouTube
Thanks to Dr. Stephen Keister / Fluxed Up World
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Nima Shirazi: When Will US Hypocrisy Stop?
International Flaw: With New Iran Sanctions, POTUS Calls Tehran's Kettle Black
By Nima Shirazi / September 29, 2010
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." - Samuel P. Huntington
"By alleging Iran has some problems, America’s problems aren’t resolved. Just alleging that Iran has a problem is not going to resolve Mrs. Clinton’s problems for her." - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking with Charlie Rose, May 3, 2010
On Wednesday afternoon, in a joint press conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner announced that the United States had imposed a new set of unilateral sanctions, including a travel ban and freezing of assets, against a number of top-ranking Iranian officials whom it accused of "serious and sustained human rights abuses" since the presidential election last year. The measure, which comes less than four months after the UN Security Council's latest illegal resolution and the Obama administration's last round of economic sanctions, was enacted via an Executive Order signed into effect last night by the President.
This marked, as Clinton pointed out, "the first time the United States has imposed sanctions against Iran based on human rights abuses." Every US administration since Carter's has issued unilateral sanctions against Iran due to its continued opposition to US imperialism and insufficient deference to American diktat. However, the sanctions have previously been justified using the pretense of Iran's alleged "active support of terrorism," its totally legal and fully monitored nuclear energy program, as well as the wholly fabricated notion that "the actions and policies of the Government of Iran constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States" and required "the declar[ation of] a national emergency to deal with that threat." This last hysterical claim was introduced by the Secretary of State's Presidential husband back in 1995.
This time around, Hillary Clinton stated, with regard to the eight government officials specifically targeted by the new order, "on [their] watch or under their command, Iranian citizens have been arbitrarily arrested, beaten, tortured, raped, blackmailed, and killed. Yet the Iranian Government has ignored repeated calls from the international community to end these abuses, to hold to account those responsible and respect the rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens. And Iran has failed to meet its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."
Apparently, the United States' own recent history regarding the invasion and occupation of two foreign countries, the kidnapping, indefinite detention without charge, and the physical and psychological torture of thousands of people, including at places like Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib (where prisoners were raped by their American captors) is irrelevant to the administration's finger-pointing charade and ongoing demonization campaign against Iran. Prisoners held by the United States in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, in addition to being "chained to the ceiling, shackled so tightly that the blood flow stops, kept naked and hooded and kicked to keep them awake for days on end," have also been beaten to death by their interrogators. Of the fifteen soldiers charged with detainee abuse ranging from "dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter," all but three have been acquitted. Those three received written reprimands and served, at most, 75 days in prison for their crimes.
In contrast, after reports of torture at Iran's Kahrizak prison surfaced, the Iranian government moved swiftly to close the facility because it "lacked the standards" to maintain "rights of detainees" and launched an investigation into the allegations. Around the same time, 140 detainees were released from Tehran's Evin Prison at the urging of the head of the Judiciary and Majlis ministers.
Additionally, according to a Financial Times report from June 25, 2009 and featured only as an insert in the print edition, several students who had been arrested during the post-election protests, rallies, and riots, were freed in order to join 1.3 million other young Iranians in taking the national university entrance exam.
In December 2009, Iranian authorities announced that twelve prison officials from Kahrizak had been arrested and charged with murder and other crimes, including abuse, negligence and deprivation of prisoners' legal rights. This past June, courts passed down prison sentences and other punishment to those accused and two prison guards were convicted of murder and "intentional assault and battery" and were sentenced to death. It was reported this week that the death sentences have been rescinded at the request of the families of the victims.
Of course, human rights abuses in Iran are indeed serious and deserve condemnation. Most recently, Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, Iran's so-called "blogfather," has been convicted of "collaborating with hostile governments, committing blasphemy and propaganda against the Islamic Republic, and managing an obscene website" and sentenced to 19.5 years in prison.
Meanwhile, the United States continues firmly protecting its own war criminals, maintains a two-tiered justice system, routinely criminalizes dissent and whistleblowing, and breeds soldiers who kill civilians for sport and dismember corpses for fun.
"The steady deterioration in human rights conditions in Iran has obliged the United States to speak out time and time again. And today, we are announcing specific actions that correspond to our deep concern. The mounting evidence of repression against anyone who questions Iranian Government decisions or advocates for transparency or even attempts to defend political prisoners is very troubling," Clinton continued, at the press conference. The Secretary of State also noted the distressing treatment of Iranian "human rights lawyers, bloggers, journalists and activists for women’s rights."
This heartfelt announcement came just five days after the FBI launched its latest surreal assault in the US government's "war on dissent" (as termed by former FBI agent and courageous whistleblower Coleen Rowley) by kicking down doors, raiding homes at gunpoint, issuing grand jury subpoenas, and seizing the personal property, including "documents, files, books, photographs, videos, souvenirs, war relics, notebooks, address books, diaries, journals, maps, or other evidence," such as computers, cell phones, and emails of several American peace and justice activists in the Midwest. The raids were conducted under the guise of determining whether the targeted peace organizers and human rights advocates were actually devious supporters of "foreign terrorist organizations."
Elderly anti-war protesters, graduate students, neuroscientists, and civil rights attorneys have all been held for years by the US government and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences on bogus charges.
Furthermore, the claim that the US government supports "transparency" is deeply ironic, considering Obama's obsession with invoking "state secrets" and "sovereign impunity" in order to shield illegal programs like warrantless wiretapping and spying, extraordinary rendition, torture, drone warfare, and the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens from proper scrutiny and prosecution.
Whereas American officials are quick to declare their unqualified promotion of "new tools of communication" and support for "a free and open Internet," as President Obama did last week at the United Nations General Assembly, the US is itself a surveillance state, which relentlessly monitors its own citizens. The CIA and other intelligence agencies have invested in technology and companies that specialize in monitoring social media and, this past summer, a Senate committee approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that may grant the US president the authority to unilaterally shut down parts of the Internet during a "national cyber-emergency." Just this week, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration will propose new legislation to mandate US government access to all forms of electronic communications, "including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype."
"In signing this Executive Order," Clinton declared on Wednesday, "the President sends the message that the United States stands up for the universal rights of all people" and serves "as a voice for the voiceless."
Obviously, she didn't mean the universal right of self-determination for or the cries for human dignity of the Palestinian people, who have been ethnically cleansed from their homeland to make room for US-backed and nuclear-armed colonial settlers and serial human rights abusers who systematically, and with total impunity, continue to dispossess, disenfranchise, displace, demolish, and destroy the indigenous population of the stolen land they occupy and control.
This should hardly be surprising due to the fact that during the "carefully choreographed" meeting between the American President and Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu in July 2010, described as "empty theater" by Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Booker, Obama pointed out that his administration is "unwavering in our commitment to Israel's security," while making sure to specifically not affirm the safety, human rights, or self-determination of Palestinians.
Last week, at the UN, Obama went even further in demonstrating the blatant hypocrisy entrenched in the United States doctrine of defending Zionist war crimes while condemning human rights abuses elsewhere around the world. The President stated, as he has so many times before, that any "efforts to chip away at Israel's legitimacy [sic] will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States," continuing that "efforts to threaten or kill Israelis will do nothing to help the Palestinian people. The slaughter of innocent Israelis is not resistance - it's injustice."
No mention was made of the constant Israeli murder - with US weaponry - of Palestinian civilians, despite the fact that, in the past decade alone, Israeli security forces have killed 6,371 Palestinians, of whom 1317 were minors, about 250 were police officers bombed to death during the 2008-9 Gaza massacre, and 240 were targets of assassinations. Apparently, this is not "injustice," according to the President, it's just a necessary side-effect of Zionism that didn't warrant a mention.
Hillary Clinton, after announcing the new Iran sanctions, claimed that "[the US] will hold abuse of governments and individuals accountable for their actions." The simplicity of this statement is profound considering it is a complete and provable lie.
Last year, when the United Nations released the Goldstone Report, which found overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that Israel had committed gross "violations of international human rights and humanitarian law and possible war crimes and crimes against humanity" during its 2008-9 Gaza assault, the US government roundly condemned the findings and refused to hold Israel accountable for anything.
Last week, the day before Obama addressed the General Assembly, the UN itself released its findings with regard to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla massacre. The report stated, not only that the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza is illegal under international law and constitutes collective punishment (which is a war crime), but also:
"The conduct of the Israeli military and other personnel towards the flotilla passengers was not only disproportionate to the occasion but demonstrated levels of totally unnecessary and incredible violence. It betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality. Such conduct cannot be justified or condoned on security or any other grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law."
The UN report also found "clear evidence to support prosecutions of the following crimes within the terms of article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: willful killing; torture or inhuman treatment; willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health," and stated that Israel had seriously violated its obligations under the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including the "right to life...torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment...right to liberty and security of the person and freedom from arbitrary arrest or detention...right of detainees to be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person...[and] freedom of expression."
Additionally, in July 2010, domestic Israeli policy and its occupation conduct had been found to violate these very same statutes (among others) by the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Based on both "forensic and firearm evidence," the fact-finding panel concluded that the killing of American citizen Furkan Dogan and that of five Turkish citizens by the Israeli troops on the Mavi Marmara "can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions."
It has also been reported that Israel is not only proud of its actions, but actually awarded the Israeli commando who single-handedly shot most of those killed on the Mavi Marmara with a medal of valor, despite the fact that the government refuses to publicly release the soldier's name. What a hero.
In response, the United States voiced its objections to what it termed the UN report's "unbalanced language, tone and conclusions." It seems that the US government won't hold Israel accountable for the intentional murder of its own citizens, just as it has looked the other way when Israel has killed American sailors, severely injured American peace activists, and blinded American art students.
The same day the US dismissed the UN Flotilla report, President Obama signed his Executive Order sanctioning Iranian officials for human rights violations.
Despite Israel's constant ignoring of international law, UN Security Council resolutions, and blatant disregard for human rights, including brutal torture, beating and raping Palestinian children in prison, rampant police brutality and the aggressive stifling of peaceful dissent and demonstrations in East Jerusalem, the deliberate killing of protesters, the raiding of peace and justice organizations, the restriction of press freedom and enforcing media blackouts, the kidnapping and torture of democracy advocates, the destruction of Bedouin villages in the Negev, and the arresting of Torah-carrying women who dare approach the male side of the Western Wall to pray, the US government continues to provide political cover, financial assistance, and tremendous military aid without reservation.
The US Congress endorses each and every illegal act of Israeli aggression, defends West Bank colonization, praises the flotilla massacre.
In his much-lauded June 2009 speech in Cairo, President Obama declared, "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."
But the illegal colonization of the occupied West Bank didn't stop. Not only that, massive US aid to Israel was completely unaffected by Israel's refusal to abide by international law and weapons trade between the countries actually increased. Eventually, the US just dropped any demand for a settlement freeze of any kind.
Between last year's UN General Assembly address and the one delivered last Thursday, it appears that Obama has also dropped any real demands regarding permanent borders, Palestinian refugees, and the status of Jerusalem.
During Wednesday's press conference, Clinton, on behalf of the American government, declared "solidarity with their victims and with all Iranians who wish for a government that respects their human rights and their dignity and their freedom" and "convey[ed] our strong support for the rule of law." Whose rules and which law she was referring to is unclear.
Among the latest stipulations of the new UNSC sanctions, bullied into approval this past June, is the insistence that "States will be required to block Iranian investments outside the Islamic Republic in uranium mining or the production of nuclear materials and technology" and that "States will be barred from supplying Iran with specified categories of heavy weaponry that could potentially be used in offensive military operations," due to Iran's perceived violations of international law.
Nevertheless, the US government has continued to violate international and domestic laws regarding Israel's undeclared nuclear program and the constant shipment of American-made weaponry to the so-called Jewish State.
Recently, the United States has "sold" Israel, among other armaments, AH-64 and AH-64D Apache Longbow fighter helicopters, F-16 and F-15 Eagle fighter planes, F-16 Peace Marble II and III Aircraft, F-35 fighter jets, Boeing 777s, Hercules C-130J airplanes, Arrow missiles, Arrow II interceptors, AGM-114 D Longbow Hellfire missiles, GBU-9 small diameter bombs, bunker buster bombs, Tomahawk missiles, Patriot and Hellfire precision-guided missile systems, D9 Caterpillar military bulldozers, specifically designed for Israel's use in invasions of built-up areas.
Such sales are governed by the US Arms Export Control Act, which limits the use of US military aid to "internal security" and "legitimate self defense" and prohibits its use against civilians along with the Foreign Assistance Act which explicitly prohibits US assistance "to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country."
A more appropriate and accurate description of the State of Israel can not be found.
And yet, the United States shipped 3,000 tons of "ammunition" to Israel in the middle of the 2008-9 Gaza massacre. US weaponry was undoubtedly used in the assault, during which gross violations of international law, abrogation of human rights, and crimes against humanity were committed.
The connection of US outrage and sanctions to international human rights is, quite simply, absurd. One look at the recent $60 billion arms deal the US made with the human rights-challenged Kingdom of Saudi Arabia makes the American contention ridiculous and embarrassing.
The United States fetes European and Israeli war criminals, all of whom call for military aggression against the Islamic Republic, while imposing a travel ban on Iranian officials.
The double standards of the US government continue to betray its real intentions and motivations regarding the Middle East, namely the maintenance of military hegemony, allegiance to Zionist mythology, and the continued demonization and threatening of any country that dares question the moral superiority of the United States or opposes American and Israeli imperialism in the region. While Barack Obama continues to claim that he is "willing to reach out with an open hand to the Iranian government," it seems he's forgotten to first wash off all the blood.
Source / Wide Asleep in America
Fluxed Up World
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Elephant in the Room: Unpunished War Crimes
Rumsfeld, Bush and the Supreme War Crime
By Juan Cole / September 24, 2010
Joyce Battle at the National Security Archive has used the Freedom of Information Act to spring classified documents from 2001 about the Bush administration’s sneaky plans for getting up an aggressive war on Iraq.
Document 8 [pdf] contains notes of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld prepared for a meeting with CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks in Tampa, Fl., on November 27, 2001. It shows a plan to pull a lot of troops out of Afghanistan and put them into Iraq and to ‘decapitate’ the Iraqi leadership. (In other words, Rumsfeld planned to abandon some poor GIs fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban to their fates while putting the money and equipment elsewhere– which got GIs killed).
After all that, the memo sets out points under the heading ‘how start?’, which clearly detail various schemes to start a war under false pretenses, including baiting Saddam into an attack on the Kurds in the north, or breathlessly announcing from the White House that a firm connection had been found between Saddam and Usama Bin Laden. That several such possibilities were listed showed that Rumsfeld did not really care how the war was started, he just wanted that war. And it shows he was entirely willing to manufacture the pretense once it was decided on.
The memo clearly was developed in close consultation with deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz and his subordinate Douglas Feith, both of them part of the Israel Lobby in the Bush administration, whose obsession with Iraq derived from their right-Zionist commitments.
Rumsfeld’s memo certainly violates the charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal on war crimes:
(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that “To initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
That the United States has failed to come to terms with its war crimes in Iraq only sets us up for a repeat performance. For a nation that lives by laws and the esteem of allies to act like an outlaw will ultimately undermine its own foundation. It is like playing golf in a bathroom– you’re going to end up with a lot of self-inflicted bruises.
Source / Informed Comment
Fluxed Up World
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Industrial Agriculture: Killing Us Not So Slowly
Corporate lobbying is blocking food reforms, senior UN official warns
By Juliette Jowit / 22 September 2010
Farming summit told of delaying tactics by large agri-business and food producers on decisions that would improve human health and the environment
Lobbying by "powerful" big food companies is blocking reforms which would improve human health and the environment, a director of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned.
Dr Samuel Jutzi's public comments in London will be welcomed by campaigners who have long complained that big agri-business and food producers have too much power over political decisions about regulation of their industry, as awareness is growing that the sector is the world's biggest user of fresh water, a major source of climate pollution, one of the greatest threats to biodiversity, and an important cause of obesity and disease.
Speaking at the Compassion in World Farming annual lecture, Jutzi, director of the animal production and health division of the FAO, said powerful lobby groups were able to delay decisions, sometimes for many years, and "water down" proposed improvements. Their job was made easier because the FAO works by consensus, so persuading as few as two or three national governments to oppose an idea was enough to block it, he said.
"I have now been 20 years in a multilateral organisation which tries to develop guidance and codes for good agricultural practice, but the real, true issues are not being addressed by the political process because of the influence of lobbyists, of the true powerful entities," said Jutzi.
Jutzi then compared the impact of such powerful interventions with the failure of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December. "Many of us tend to lose hope in this process as we go on, and as we make only very small steps towards the objectives," he added.
He said action to reform the way global agriculture works was essential in light of the projected doubling of food production by 2050 at the same time as increase water, land and energy scarcity.
Speaking afterwards to the Guardian, Jutzi said an example of the power of the corporate lobby was the obstacles put in the way of proposals two years ago for a voluntary code of conduct for the livestock industry. These would have rewarded countries which introduced better standards for health, and environmental regulations such as how many animals an area of land can support without long-term damage. Because some countries have insisted on more evidence and reports, the voluntary code was now likely to take as long as 10 years to implement, said Jutzi.
"We ran into very serious problems: that's where we noted that the economic interests of the lobbyists have [worked] in the background so certain governments would come up with strict opposition, really strict opposition," he said.
In another case, following the publication of a major report in 2006, Livestock's Long Shadow - which among other things calculated that the livestock industry was responsible for nearly one-third of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions - "you wouldn't believe how much we were attacked," Jutzi told the audience.
Jutzi declined to name individual companies or countries, but defended some parts of the industry, saying not all companies were involved in obstructing the FAO's work. "We know that some of the private sector companies are more progressive than some of the politicians from countries which [have] major livestock interests," he told the Guardian.
Joyce d'Silva, CIWF's director of public affairs, said: "Organisations like Compassion in World Farming engage in dialogue with the FAO - and other international agencies. However our funds are limited and cannot hope to match those of the major agribusiness companies or the budgets of governments which are hostile to, for example, further improvements to animal welfare guidance from these agencies."
She added that it was "horrifying" that, "the narrow interests of certain commercial sectors can have more influence than organisations which represent the values and aspirations of millions of citizens."
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London, said there have been concerns about corporate lobbying of UN organisations including the FAO and the World Health Organisation for decades, a problem made worse by the widespread acceptance of the power of private companies.
Another example of the success of lobbying was the watering down and low impact of another important report by the European commission, Eurodiet, in 2000, which aimed to give advice about healthy food and drink, said Lang.
"What we have had in the last 25 years is an economic paradigm where it's assumed that markets rule and that global powers are the future, and the global powers par excellence are not countries but companies," he said. "What Dr Jutzi was referring to was the ritualised way in which it has been applied in the meat and animal industry. It [would have been] astonishing if he hadn't said it, but it was nevertheless wonderful that he did."
Although Jutzi stressed that the impact of lobbying was via national governments, Lang said corporate interests had also become "embedded" inside UN organisations through close and regular contacts between the people involved. "They don't need to lobby increasingly, and mostly they are part of the architecture of power," he said.
Despite the problems, Jutzi said there was great scope for improvements. "The sector has significant opportunities to transit to a more sustainable and responsible development path if necessary policy guidance is enforced," he said.
Source / The Guardian
Fluxed Up World
Sunday, September 19, 2010
What If the Tea Party Was Black ???
See also this video of an interview concerning the same topic from CNN.
Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / Fluxed Up World
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Religious Intolerance: Nothing New in Amerikkka
They used to Burn Catholic Churches, now they Burn Mosques
By Juan Cole / September 9, 2010
The hysteria about mosques in the United States is nothing new in our history. Even though the United States was founded by a ragtag series of religious heretics seeking freedom to worship as they would; even though its constitution enshrines freedom of religion– even so, periods of religious intolerance have reared their ugly heads repeatedly in American history.
The kind of opposition nowadays expressed toward the mosque and the Quran was directed in the 1840s against Olde St. Augustine Church in Philadelphia, its ‘dangerous’ Irish congregation, and their Catholic Bible.
Even though Pennsylvania was founded on the principle of religious toleration as set out in William Penn’s Charter of Liberties, even though its leaders in the 18th century made a place for Catholics and Jews and various Protestant groups, by the 1840s a bunch of bigotted yahoos called ‘Nativists’ were desecrating those noble American values.
In 1796 two Irish friars were sent by the Vatican to buy land for the church, and its cornerstone was laid. “Contributors to the church included President Washington, Commodore John “Father of the U.S. Navy” Barry …, and Constitution signer Thomas Fitzsimons.” Note that the Founding Generation supported the church even though it received Foreign Funding. And, in Britain (and British-ruled Ireland), Catholicism labored under severe disabilities, having been until the late 18th century more or less outlawed. Even in the beginning stages of Catholic emancipation, Catholics were required to assert that they rejected the idea of the Pope having temporal power in order to get basic rights.
As with today’s anti-Muslim bigots, who charge Muslims with wanting to rule the world and impose their religious law on everyone, so the mainstream Protestant rap against the Catholic church was also the charge that it sought political dominance.
The Liberty Bell had been cast in 1752 in England to celebrate Penn’s charter of liberties, but was cracked. Another was cast, the Sister Bell, which ultimately was put in the Olde St. Augustine church.
So Olde St. Augustine was hallowed ground in the history of American religious freedom.
(I might interject that one branch of my family, the Catholic Kohls/ Coles, arrived from Darmstadt in 1830 and settled in Chambersburg, Pa., and would have witnessed the rise of the Nativists in their new home.)
The Bible was still taught in American schools in the early 1840s, and Bishop Francis Kenrick successfully petitioned the school system to allow Catholic students to use a Catholic Bible. Furious Protestants accused him of being anti-Bible and of plotting to gradually push the Bible out of the school curriculum altogether.
The Nativists came out in numbers to mount demonstrations in Irish Catholic neighborhoods in north Philadelphia. One of them turned violent and four Protestants were killed. The Nativists asserted that one of their martyrs had been trying to raise an American flag as he was killed by the “Papists.”
After that mobs formed and burned St. Michael’s Catholic church. Then they attacked Olde St. Augustine and burned it down, library, Sister Bell, and all. William Penn and George Washington were spinning in their graves.
When they poured the library’s books into the street and set them afire, the Nativist mob ended up burning the Bible.
The Catholics rebuilt the Olde St. Augustine. A boys school founded by the friars evolved into Villanova University. In 1960, an Irish Catholic, John F. Kennedy, won the presidency.
People who would burn down a church to which George Washington had made a donation don’t care anything about American values.
And people who would burn a mosque might as well buy a copy of the constitution and light it up.
In the real United States it doesn’t matter what your religion is, and you can build your house of worship where you please, and you don’t have to be born here to be a citizen. Nativists believed the opposite of all these things. They formed a secret party in the nineteenth century that they called the “Know-Nothings.”
They are back.
Source / Informed Comment
Fluxed Up World
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Jon Stewart: The Extremist Makeover
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Extremist Makeover - Homeland Edition | ||||
| ||||
For a full, factual chronology of events surrounding the Islamic center project four blocks from the former site of the WTC, read this article by Gary Leupp.
Source / The Daily Show
Fluxed Up World
Medea Benjamin: The Truth About the Iraq War
The Iraq Legacy: Tell It Like It Is
By Medea Benjamin / August 20, 2010
With the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, the administration, the military and the media are trying to put a positive spin on this grim chapter of U.S. history. It would certainly give some comfort to the grieving families of the over 4,400 soldiers killed in Iraq if their sacrifices had left Iraq a better place or made America safer. But the bitter truth is that the U.S. intervention has been an utter disaster for both Iraq and the United States.
First let's acknowledge that we should have never attacked Iraq to begin with. Iraq had no connection with our 9/11 attackers, had no weapons of mass destruction and represented no threat to the United States. We were pushed into this war on the basis of lies and no one -- not George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld -- has been held accountable. The "think tanks," journalists and pundits who perpetuated the lies have not been fired. Most of them can be found today cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan.
It's true that Iraqis suffered under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein but his overthrow did not lead to a better life for Iraqis. "I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college," Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi told me. "I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything -- electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein."
Dr. Al-Arabi has joined the ranks of the nearly four million Iraqi refugees, many of whom are now living in increasingly desperate circumstances in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and around the world. Undocumented, most are not allowed to work and are forced to take extremely low paying, illegal jobs or rely on the UN and charities to survive. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has reported a disturbing spike in the sex trafficking of Iraqi women.
The Iraq war has left a terrible toll on our troops. Over 4,400 have been killed and tens of thousands severely injured. More than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the Iraq war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment. "PTSD rates have skyrocketed and in 2009, a record number of 245 soldiers committed suicide," said Geoff Millard, chair of the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War. "If vets coming home from Iraq don't get treated, we will see a rise in homelessness, drug abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence."
It has also drained our treasury and contributed to the present financial crisis. As of August 2010, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $750 billion on the Iraq war. Counting the cost of lifetime care for wounded vets and the interest payments on the money we borrowed to pay for this war, the real cost will be in the trillions. This money could have been used to invest in clean, green jobs, or to rebuild our nation's schools, healthcare and infrastructure-ensuring real security for Americans.
In addition to harming our troops and economy, the war has deeply tarnished our reputation. The US policy of torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, violent and deadly raids on civilian homes, gunning down innocent civilians in the streets and absence of habeas corpus has fueled the fires of hatred and extremism toward Americans. The very presence of our troops in Iraq and other Muslim nations has become a recruiting tool.
And let's not forget that our presence in Iraq is far from over. There will still be 50,000 troops left behind, some 75,000 private contractors, five huge "enduring bases" and an embassy the size of Vatican City. As Major General Stephen Lanza, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told the New York Times: "In practical terms, nothing will change".
So let us mark this moment with a deep sense of shame for the suffering we have brought to Iraqis and American military families, and a deep sense of shame that our democracy has been unable to hold accountable those responsible for this debacle.
The lessons of this disastrous intervention should serve as an impetus for Congress and the administration to end the quagmire in Afghanistan. It's time to end these unwinnable, unjustifiable wars and bring our war dollars home to tackle the most strategic task for our national security, i.e. rebuilding America.
You can join the coalition calling for accountability by signing up here.
[Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Amerikkka: In Permanent Denial
Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the US Criminal Justice System
By Bill Quigley / July 26, 2010
The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.
The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?
Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system – from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.
One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.
Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.
Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.
African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites – according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.
Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.
Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”
Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.
Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial – the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, “Who wouldn’t rather do three years for a crime they didn’t commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn’t do?”
Eight. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.
Nine. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.
Ten. As a result, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Marc Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.
Eleven. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.
Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.
Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.
Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!
So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.
Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.
Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.
Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. “These people”, whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.
This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country’s police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror - domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.
What to do?
Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.
We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?
It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says “Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system.”
Bill is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Quigley77@gmail.com
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Sunday, July 4, 2010
The Truth About the Star Spangled Banner
Restoration Of 'Star Spangled Banner' Uncovers Horrifying New Verses
Source / Today Now
Thanks to Deva Wood / Fluxed Up World
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Morons (and Liars) Abound in the Right Wing
Steele blames Obama for Afghanistan, Defends Iraq War
By Juan Cole / July 3, 2010
Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele has provoked a furor by remarks he made on President Obama’s Afghanistan policy at a GOP fundraiser in Noank, Ct. (where he mumbled on for all the world like a third-rate lounge lizard at an off-off the Strip Vegas discount casino before an audience mesmerized into zombiehood by its subsidized lunch buffet). The speech appears to have been secretly recorded, and is now on the Web. Geo at the Right Vs. Left blog put up a transcript of Steele’s comments.
The Republican line on the Afghanistan War is apparently that it is a good war, well-fought, but has the misfortune to be overseen by Obama, who, despite personally ordering all the elements of the war that the GOP praises, is nevertheless somehow an inappropriate leader of it.
Self-contradiction poses no conundrum for politicians as long as the public does not notice it. That it is illogical to denigrate Obama as leader while praising the troop surge and the counter-insurgency strategy that he authorized appears not to occur to anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line. Conservatives (with the exception of Libertarians) can embrace this paradox because they hold twin premises. The first is that the United States should always be at war and all of its wars are glorious, righteous and beneficial to all concerned, even the enemy. The second is that a Democratic president is sort of like gay marriage; it is against nature and intrinsically wrong, and while it may actually exist in some times and places, it must be vigorously ignored until it can be undone and safely forgotten about. With a Democratic president in the White House, the munificent War must resemble the virgin birth, having no human author and yet bestowing infinite grace on all.
Steele violated this both-sides-of-the-mouth absurd discourse every which way from Sunday. He attributed the war to Obama, restoring him as commander-in-chief, a presidential epithet applicable only to GOP heads of state. Steele said that Afghanistan “was a war of Obama’s choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”
Steele seems to have missed the part where the Bush administration gradually committed the US to war-fighting in Afghanistan. He has paid no attention to what has been going on in Afghanistan since the Taliban were overthrown or at least sidelined in 2001. He does not seem to realize that the NATO and US troops were doing active war-fighting in Afghanistan all through 2008, when 159 Americans gave their lives and nearly that number again of NATO and allied troops also died.
Then Steele openly said that the war, far from being magnificent and beneficent, is actually a Major Mistake and almost certain to End Badly. He said that if Obama
is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Alright, because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed, and there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan ...
(I would argue that it is actually only since Afghans began learning how to manufacture [in artisan style] hand-held firearms that they have become truly formidable, i.e. from the late 1600s.)
Steele’s remarks on Afghanistan can be distinguished from those of Denis Kucinich only insofar as the RNC chairman complained about Obama’s ‘demonization’ of the Iraq War (as if it had actually gone very well and been unproblematic, deserving none of the opprobrium heaped upon it by mere reality). Steele said, “But it was the President who was trying to be cute by half by building a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should in Afghanistan.” Other than his attachment to a war launched in impudent violation of the United Nations charter and all subsequent international law, which killed perhaps a million persons, wounded 3 million and displaced and made homeless another 4 million… Steele sounded like a left-wing Democrat. He seems to have been reading Ann Jones at Tomdispatch (would that more GOP officials did).
Here is the video; turn the audio way up:
Having delivered himself of the only principled and sensible arguments he has put forward since the Good Old-boy Party humorlessly made him its public face, Steele now faces demands by the hounds of the Right that he resign in ignominy. When Bill Kristol, who has notoriously been Wrong about Everything, demands that an RNC chairman resign, it can only mean that the party has a choice between reviving Neoconservatism– which is pernicious but creepily coherent as a nihilist ideology of perduring destruction– and muddling along with no positive message at all.
Source / Informed Comment
Fluxed Up World
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