The line must be changed again. New labels must be invented and applied to those insurgents who “don’t have blood on their hands.” (Roughly the gazillionth oxymoron created by the administration in this war. But whose counting?)
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June 26, 2005
WB: Rectification of Errors
Comments
I was having a reflective moment after reading Billmon’s latest great words of wisdom.
What if there was no blogosphere, I thought to myself…….. Death Camps in Iraq, I concluded.
Kudos to Billmon and Moon of Alabama and its’ great posters.
Posted by: Friendly Fire | Jun 26 2005 22:14 utc | 1
A href=”http://www.deviantart.com/view/19655330/”>Marvel Comic Summary
Scary
Posted by: drunk as a rule | Jun 26 2005 22:16 utc | 2
Marvel Comic Summary
Sorry: Hope you have delete
Posted by: drunk as a rule | Jun 26 2005 22:17 utc | 3
sorry while I’m at it suggest above link as piece art for next open thread
He’s Here
Posted by: drunk as a rule | Jun 26 2005 22:26 utc | 4
Here’s something I’ll never understand: Iraq, even in its most stressed out times after a decade of embargoes, was (and still is) a highly sophisticated society with a highly developed system of social services. We hear about oil, water and electricity, but we shouldn’t forget about the schools, hospitals, universities, transport systems, etc. A very large labor force, I should imagine, with a refined divison of labor. So how is the country expected to operate after its liberation? Surely in the manner of Germany after V-E Day, or Japan after V-J Day, or…. But of course all these people were employees of the government, hence Baathists and terrorists–hence unemployable, and, apparently, replaceable by the truly virtuous. Necessarily so, since Americans don’t tolerate terrorists–unless, of course, their names are Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Bremer….
Posted by: alabama | Jun 26 2005 22:31 utc | 5
Here’s our job: we must capture this history and tell it like it is. Our teachers must teach it in our schools to our children. Teaching this history is the one, absolutely necessary course of action to emerge from this wicked business, and woe betide the teacher who presumes to tell his or her students that the lesson has become a “mission accomplished”….Ever.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 26 2005 22:32 utc | 6
I’m waiting for that “Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” moment, when some ambitious pol lays it down that the nation needs a strongman to defend the American Tract Home Existence.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jun 26 2005 22:35 utc | 7
“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
Ronald Reagan, 3/7/87
Posted by: stvwlf | Jun 26 2005 22:54 utc | 8
Reuters
In which the Torturer-in-Chief declares war…against torture, of course. Desperate people, these; they don’t know where to turn; they have no place to turn; their own propaganda turns them into objects of public ridicule.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 26 2005 23:09 utc | 9
Something’s misfiring with that link, folks, but the story’s worth checking out.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 26 2005 23:11 utc | 10
Many thanks, Did….And I wonder: has the White House been spooked by the Italians?
Posted by: alabama | Jun 26 2005 23:59 utc | 12
Could be advance damage control, meant to “prepare the public” for the belief that renegade elements in some third country have, totally unexpectedly, tortured people that our government entrusted to their care for therapy.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jun 27 2005 0:22 utc | 13
Yet again I’m confused. “It’s not really Iraqis that constitute the bulk of the insurgents, terrorists et al, but foreign infiltration of people who hate America’s Freedom and DO NOT want Iraqis to have the same freedom”. Are not these foreign infiltators very similar to the people, who in their home countries, hate their dictatorial governments and want MORE FREEDOM? It’s so confusing. Maybe the common denominator is they hate America.
Posted by: Mary | Jun 27 2005 0:30 utc | 14
Times, they are’a change’in. I felt afetr the election the Bushie junta would really get radical and they tried. I think they overplayed the “political capital” Bushie thought he earned. They managed to hide their failures during the election when the corporate media basically gave Bushie a pass.
Heres what I think happened. That great bastion of conservative fascism Pat Buchanan wrote a article a little while before the election that stated Bushie started the war in Irag, let his admin finish. In other words, stick them with the consequences. I believe this article came out when editors were giving recommendations for prez.
Buchanan was no fan of the war and I think the corp press felt the same thing. Now the corp press is seeing just how unrealistic Bushies original statements on Iraq were. Also, the rethugs are eating their own. The bleeding has started and the shark are circling. I don’t believe Buchanan or the corp media want failure, but the old adage go’s if you give them enough rope!
On a personal note. Went to the cabin today. Huron Beach was great. The Great Lakes are a marvel to look upon. Must have been ten to fifeteen degrees cooler there from in land.
Posted by: jdp | Jun 27 2005 1:59 utc | 15
Aren’t more pictures coming out about Abu Ghraib, etc? BBC had a piece on the visit to camps Delta 2 and 3 at Gitmo and everything looked so wonderful, in a potemkin village sort of way.
that would be the biggest reason for the Rove attack on liberals…damage control over the photos…so what if they tortured, the liberals wanted to massage and coddle, and Rush already said the torture was the equivalent of a frat prank.
I wonder, if, say, James Dobson were held by another nation with no formal charges and part of the program to get him to talk about the money he’s stashed somewhere (or his plan for dominion over the world…whatever…) anyway, what if, as part of that interrogation, Dobson thought that a man was rubbing his dick on his mouth and leaving semen there?
Do you think that would be a fraternity prank for Dobson, with his global condemnation of homosexuals? What if John Ashcroft had a woman rub her breasts on him? He didn’t even want marble ones in back of him.
And those incidents, I’d be willing to bet, were not the worst of them, since, as I mentioned before, a Palestinian man was taken prisoner and raped with a broomstick and later given a “get out of torture chamber free” card because he was, in fact, innocent. I don’t know if that article from Harpers is online or not.
I’ve seen several online sites, btw, with liberal soldiers telling Rove to “come on over to Iraq!” And we all know Rove speaks for the president…maybe Bush thought all those dead soldiers were liberals, and that’s why he couldn’t attend any of their funerals.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jun 27 2005 2:10 utc | 16
“Blood on their hands”, blood on their hands, where have I heard that before? Oh, oh yeah. Oh my. The circles continue to get smaller and larger at the same time, don’t they?
Posted by: DonS | Jun 27 2005 2:43 utc | 17
Sêca Tirana
Although you and I might not think so,
It’s not about the political parties at all,
It’s about gross abuse of political power,
And egregious theft by special interests.
The US Senate and House are a bunch
Of magpies. Imagine, voting 100-0 to
Continue funding for this abomination!
They have to cease acting the cathedral
In front, and yet a cathouse out behind.
Beans, bricks and liveable real wages,
These are the true core issues for US.
Everything else is politics of the drought,
Where we are left, each of US, workers
And business owners, our taxes stolen,
Waiting for the rain.
Without much more effort, our honorable
Politicians will succeed in bankrupting US,
And then all their lofty noble rhetoric about,
“Bring it on,” and “Mission accomplished,”
Of “Stay the course,” and the “Axis of Evil,”
Will become no more than tears on hot sand.
Our tears.
?Shall we then tell to our sons and daughters,
“Children, you must go wander in the wilderness.
Now let US tell you, how you were disinherited.”
(from Arons, Nicholas Gabriel; 2004; Waiting for Rain)
Posted by: tante aime | Jun 27 2005 3:35 utc | 18
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/
Rumsfeld is lying out his coward civilian ass.
His mission from the start was total civilian
control of the Pentagon and massive cost cuts.
His idea of a war is sixty days, in and out,
using no more than five divisions and one mech,
with massive high-altitude precision bombing.
Everything else was just collateral damage.
A real pansy-ass shorty-pants scrotum sniffer.
Amazing he was once touted as The Beltway Stud.
Posted by: tante aime | Jun 27 2005 3:56 utc | 19
Warfare based on phenomenally expensive stand-off ‘weapon systems’, ‘force protection’ as an overarching principle, etc, has its limits (see Iraq & Afghanistan) as does the $cost to the US economy and the inability in the medium and long term to sustain this technologically supremist military … an economic cancerous canker …
Posted by: Outraged | Jun 27 2005 4:08 utc | 20
observation: the same business model that worked for the cia starting in the late 60’s whereby it split off into a rogue, privately-funded intelligence operation, displaying loyalty only to the almight dollar, is being or has already been applied to DoD operations as well. the madsen rpt mentions in Task Force 121 Under FBI Investigation that TF121 , in addition to being linked to illegal kidnapings, posing as U.S. law enforcement agents (including FBI agents) and journalists, and assassinations of foreign political leaders, is also implicated in the cocaine smuggling arrests in Colombia in April.
In an Iran-contra scandal redux, some TF 121 units operating in Latin America, particularly in Colombia, have been linked to the smuggling of cocaine to finance off-the-books operations being carried out by the covert Pentagon commandos. In April, five U.S. troops were arrested by Colombian authorities for attempting to smuggle cocaine on a military flight to Texas. A month later, two more U.S. troops were arrested in Colombia for attempting to smuggle 32,000 rounds of ammunition destined for the Colombian counter-narcotics units to the right-wing paramilitary terrorist and narcotics smuggling group, the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia.
In addition to cocaine-rich, Colombia, TF121 also operates throughout the poppy-rich terrain of Afghanistan, whose narcotics biz has coincidently exploded after the 2001 u.s. invasion.
the secret war in laos & other operations were financed by the opium poppies of the golden triangle, w/ the active involvement of an increasingly rogue cia, skirting congressional awareness & oversight.
heroin was smuggled into dover afb in the bodybags & stomachs of dead u.s. soldiers
if the pentagon is supposedly replacing the cia, how far will they go?
Posted by: b real | Jun 27 2005 4:58 utc | 21
especially since the corporate media and a sizable fraction of the American people now seem to carry portable memory holes around in their own heads.
SsssssssWEET!
Posted by: Werther | Jun 27 2005 15:01 utc | 22
An Orwellian challenge, but one I’m sure the Cheney administration is up to meeting — especially since the corporate media and a sizable fraction of the American people now seem to carry portable memory holes around in their own heads.
Right you are Billmon. The corporate media could have done the same thing you just did — factually list and discuss the many ways the Bushies have tried to ID the opposition. But that wouldn’t prop up Bush, wouldn’t support the war, and would look very un-conservative.
Via Atrios, check out New Pravda’s philosophy on expanding “balance” in its hiring of reporters and others. Now the GOP has it perfect: the most important newspaper in the country is carrying its water and at the same time it can continue blasting that same newspaper for its liberal policies. And I guess The Times will have to become “conservativer” and “conservativer.”
But I do love all those stories about young republicans and Christians that are gracing the paper. Now, if we could only get the Daytona 500 results story on the front page . . . .
Posted by: Phil from New York | Jun 27 2005 16:13 utc | 23
An Orwellian challenge, but one I’m sure the Cheney administration is up to meeting — especially since the corporate media and a sizable fraction of the American people now seem to carry portable memory holes around in their own heads.
Right you are Billmon. The corporate media could have done the same thing you just did — factually list and discuss the many ways the Bushies have tried to ID the opposition. But that wouldn’t prop up Bush, wouldn’t support the war, and would look very un-conservative.
Via Atrios, check out New Pravda’s philosophy on expanding “balance” in its hiring of reporters and others. Now the GOP has it perfect: the most important newspaper in the country is carrying its water and at the same time it can continue blasting that same newspaper for its liberal policies. And I guess The Times will have to become “conservativer” and “conservativer.”
But I do love all those stories about young republicans and Christians that are gracing the paper. Now, if we could only get the Daytona 500 results story on the front page . . . .
Posted by: Phil from New York | Jun 27 2005 16:13 utc | 24
Indeed, it is impossible not to allude to Orwell or Huxley in these dystopian days.
The key aspect of Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language.
In addition, words with opposite meanings were removed as redundant, so “bad” became “ungood”. Words with similar meanings were also removed, so “great” became “plusgood”. In this manner, as many words as possible were removed from the language. The ultimate aim of Newspeak was to reduce even the dichotomies to a single word that was a “yes” of some sort: an obedient word with which everyone answered affirmatively to what was asked of them.
The Bushies talk of the Clear Skies Initiative or No Child Left Behind or Regime Change, or extraordinary rendition and the Bushspeak is just a Carl Rove adaptation of Orwellian thought control.
I referenced some of this myself in this article.
“Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.” – George Orwell
Posted by: stefan michael | Jun 27 2005 18:45 utc | 25