DiD: Exactly why the legal profession is so reviled by the masses. Seems as though its always been “the end justifies the means”. Where lawyers, and this present administration, is concerned.

Posted by: ben | Feb 21 2006 0:37 utc | 4

Well, wadda ya know?
Not much, I guess

Posted by: biklett | Feb 21 2006 6:04 utc | 6

You realize, of course, that there isn’t much argument between MoA and North Korea ..
U.S. Violation of International Human Rights Norms under Fire
Pyongyang, February 20 (KCNA) — The Law Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences in an indictment on Feb. 19 branded the United States as the world’s biggest human rights abuser and a typical criminal state as it has failed to guarantee its citizens elementary rights and wantonly violated international human rights norms in different parts of the world while being keen on spreading American-style view on value worldwide only.
The indictment said:
The U.S. has violated international human rights norms which call for providing the people with the elementary right to existence.
It has been so indifferent to the state measures to provide the popular masses with elementary right to existence that they are now finding themselves in miserable conditions baffling human imagination.
The disaster caused by hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans last August is a clear indication of the Bush administration’s anti-popular policies.
According to the latest information, 38.2 million Americans are exposed to constant hunger and the number of the unemployed and the homeless reached tens of millions. Los Angeles, a center of the U.S. movie industry considered as a symbol of luxuries, is, in fact, called “city of starvation”. The city health authorities in their official announcement on Sept. 7, 2001 said that about 1.4 million people in the city suffer from the shortage of food and more than 584,000 are languishing in the mire of abject starvation.
In 2001 alone about one million workers became jobless due to the serious economic crisis, an all-time high in a decade.
The rich who account for no more than 0.02 percent of the population of the U.S. hold 60 percent of its assets. According to the report released by the U.S. census institution, more than 43.448 million Americans or 16 percent of the population, are denied medical treatment for the mere reason that they cannot afford to insure themselves for health care.
International human rights norms which call for providing people with political rights are also violated in the U.S.
The U.S. election system has so many restrictions that broad popular masses are not allowed to participate in the election.
There are more than 60 kinds of election restrictions in the U.S. whose federal states have their own laws.
The freedom of thinking is also encroached upon in America. About 200,000 agents and over 21,000 repressive machines are now engaged in quelling progressive ideas in the U.S.
The freedom of speech is also abridged in America.
The U.S. encroaches upon the right of independent mass media at home and abroad. The U.S. claimed its presence in Iraq is to help it in its “reconstruction.” It, however, pressurized and manipulated the Iraqi media to release reports in favor of the U.S., far from helping them observe impartiality and objectivity in their service, thus encroaching upon the freedom of speech of the mass media. According to the information disclosed by the Los Angeles Times late in November 2005, the U.S. paid 40 to 2,000 U.S. dollars for every pro-U.S. article carried by an Iraqi publication and more than 1,000 articles of that content were published by Iraqi media. The Lincoln Group directed by a special institution of the U.S. has 15 Iraqi newspapers under its control.
Such violation of the freedom of speech of the mass media obliged to represent justice and impartiality only is an outright challenge to international human rights norms. The U.S. has also breached international human rights norms which call for eradicating all forms of racial discrimination.
More than one third of the black are denied job for the mere reason that they are colored.
According to information made public by the Los Angeles city authorities on Dec. 20, 2001, from September to December 2001, the year when the Bush administration took office, the number of crimes related to the racial discrimination increased almost eight times in the city as compared with that in the same period of the previous year. To top it all, the living conditions of the black are awfully deplorable as their rights are violated due to racial discrimination.
The U.S. also violates international human rights norms that call for banning torture and providing the prisoners with rights concerning judicial administration. After launching wars in different parts of the world under the pretext of combating terrorism following the Sept. 11 incident, the U.S. administration instructed the military and the CIA to set up secret prisons in its military bases in different countries and regions of the world and aboard its navy warships for the purpose of interrogating POWs and terror suspects. It has practiced medieval and barbarous torture against them.
Its barbaric torture took the lives of more than 70 prisoners in those overseas secret prisons of the CIA in 2002 alone and more than 9,000 prisoners were reported to have been put to unbearable torture in those prisons on charges of being terror suspects as of the first half of 2004.
As seen above, the U.S. is the worst violator of international human rights norms and the world’s biggest human rights abuser. It is illogical and a mockery and an insult to the genuine human rights for such a country to talk about “protection of human rights”. The law institute appeals to the lawyers all over the world who value justice and truth to turn out in the actions to bring the Bush administration to human rights justice.

Posted by: DM | Feb 21 2006 9:24 utc | 8

The Absurdities of Gitmo
Boy, 12, recounts days as terror inmate
Youngest captive spent 17 months detained, a year at Guantanamo

Khuja Angoor, Afghanistan — A single day forever changed the life of 12-year-old Asadullah Rahman.
Struggling to remember the exact date he was captured by American soldiers, or when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the United States holds “enemy combatants” without charges, he presses his fingers to his temples to conjure memories that have grown fuzzy after months in detention.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 21 2006 11:00 utc | 10

Wait! it gets better,
New Wingnut Meme:Sedition Law Needed
Snip:
You would like to think that such unconstitutiuonal episodes would be behind us by now. Yet, the idea of passing a new federal sedition law is once again being bandied about in the right wing corner of the blogosphere. Under the banner of phony patriotism they claim a new sedition act is needed so that “enemies of the state” can be prosecuted for the traitorous assistance their spoken words give to terrorists. Enemies of the state like — well, like Al Gore…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 21 2006 11:36 utc | 12

Some good news for a change: fuckwitted idiot D Irving goes down.

Posted by: Dismal Science | Feb 21 2006 14:45 utc | 14

just for fun, here’s letterman givin’ it to cheney,
“just a big bowl of bad”

Posted by: annie | Feb 21 2006 18:59 utc | 16

Wish ’tweren’t so but Letterman will be attacked and described as a partisan, liberal, lying-media, democrat, the sheeple will nod in agreement and go back to munching the new genetically enhanced non-nutitrious green fodder that Amer-Corp has decided will be this year’s hot button consumer item. Regarded as the absolute epitome of corp marketing since the consumers grow, harvest, and throw it away, after which we gather, package, and distribute it.
Only 0.00001% of costs are actual production costs which enables 99.9999% of expenditure to be directed at marketing, packaging, and distribution. A whole new paradigm in a world of rising energy costs.
Note: we don’t call it grass anymore because of the negative associations with drug-addled atheists.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 21 2006 21:11 utc | 18

@ Dismal you are absolutely correct that the dreadful Irving got exactly what had been coming to him for the last 30 years.
He is now tring to play the role of befuddled english eccentric, one that most media appear happy to go along with. One BBC World report referred to him as being in his ’80s when he’s well short of seventy. Everyone is arguing that imprisonment is over the top but if you study this man and his nasty nazi nostalgia you can’t help but wonder why according to Bliar et al he should cop a lesser sentence than Abu Hamza al-Masri a man sensitively referred to by the gutter press in the ten years they have been using him to sell their rag, as HOOK
Although Irving stated during his guilty plea that he now accepted he was wrong about the massacres being a fiction and he now accepted that there had been gas chambers at Auschwitz , MoA-ites should study the link with attention to the photo of Irving coming out to talk to the media during a break after he plead guilty and before he was sentenced. He is holding up a copy of his book, titled “Hitler’s War” which makes the assertions that nobody was murdered by the Nazis in great detail.
Although he describes himself as an historian that probably has less validity than if I claimed to be a barrister on the grounds that I have represented numerous people at employment disciplinary hearings.
Irving is self taught, subjective and only goes to those primary sources which don’t disprove his outrageous claims.
If all the pollies who have been trying to make this issue tie in with the ‘cartoons’ in a vain attempt to divert the sheeple, wanted to honestly confront the machinations behind this trial, they would be wise to front up about Austria’s dubious motives esp in relation to Kurt Waldheim the proven nazi war criminal who was president of Austria in 1989 when Irving made the denials.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 21 2006 22:07 utc | 20

What’s Classified and What’s Not

(A minority of classified information, such as nuclear weapons design information, is specified and protected by statute. The remainder, the large majority, is classified by executive order.)

There’s a helpful if slightly informal and not entirely complete (e.g., 18 USC 798 isn’t mentioned) survey of such matters at http://www.rbs2.com/OFAC2.pdf, that being “U.S. Government Restrictions on Scientific Publications: Statutes and Federal Regulations”

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 21 2006 22:48 utc | 22

Bernhard on the surface it seems that your’s is the most reasonable point of view. We don’t know if al-Masri’s speechifying actually led to the deaths of any innocents, but we do know that the likes of Irving provided a bullshit diversion for those concerned about the rise of nazism in Europe and a pseudo-intellectual justification for attacks on semites across Europe, a number of which, particularly the attacks on Arabs and Turks, led to the horrible deaths of innocent people.
This man is not a ‘crazy eccentric’ his whole life has been about providing a rationale for violent racism. Just because he’s older now doesn’t make him innocent.
The timing of his final destruction is also suspicious. A paranoid may imagine that his detention was a sop to zionists, prior to a merging of their terror tactics and the white-boy/skinhead attacks on muslims.
If the anti-jewish issue can be taken out of European nazism, which is pretty simple really since Hitler and co got their way and drove the majority of Jewish people out of Western Europe, then their policies and attitudes conform pretty much to straight neo-con philosophies.
When I see images of brutish, shaven-headed, jewish fundamentalist ‘settlers’, kicking the crap out of an old Palestinian gentleman who has the gall to imagine he can still graze his beasts on land his family have been using for generations, I see the same braces n boots skinheads that attempted to sabotage the anti-corporatism of the late 70’s with their violent racist claptrap.
I don’t support laws banning certain types of speech either, but Irving is a classic example of karma or as people prefer to say: ‘what goes around comes around.’
If Bliar releases al-Masri and other victims of the selective application of censorship laws then I will argue for Irving’s freedom.
In the mean-time there are far more urgent issues in need of attention than an asshole finally copping whats been a-coming for most of his life.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 21 2006 23:17 utc | 24

@DM I’m spending far too much energy on the creep Irving but the issue isn’t whether he has a PhD as much as whether he knows, understands and practises the pinciples of history.
I don’t believe he does but I’m not an expert so I went to the historian Deborah Lipstadt’s analysis of Irving’s work contained in the judgement which found against Irving’s claim for libel:

“misstates, misquotes, falsifies statistics, falsely attributes conclusions to reliable sources, relies on books and sources that directly contradict his arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the author’s objectives, manipulates documents to serve his own purposes, skews documents and misrepresents data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, bends historical evidence until it conforms to his ideological leanings and political agenda, takes accurate information and shapes it to confirm his conclusion and constantly suppresses or deliberately overlooks sources with which he is familiar because they contradict the line of argument which he wishes to advance”.

The ‘tickets’ are not an issue. The issue was always about Irving’s failure to apply sound historical techniques to his work. There have been many self taught historians about who have excelled in their field. Irving is not one of them.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 21 2006 23:37 utc | 26

On the classification issue:
Maybe they will start denying that those documents were there in the first place. Or rather not deny, just say “that is absurd”. Operation Northwoods is really so preposterous that I thought “this has to be fake” the first time I read it. If the original sources has been reclassified it will be easier to just label it tin-foil and pretend it was not there.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Feb 22 2006 0:28 utc | 28

@DiD
You quote Deborah Lipstatdt. In this link is also :-
anti-Zionist writer Norman Finkelstein described her as being “within the Holocaust Industry”
I don’t know what his opinion is worth, but a couple of pros and cons:-
knows what he is talking about

The critical response has been varied. In addition to prominent supporters, such as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn, especially notable is Raul Hilberg, one of the most famous and distinguished Holocaust historians, whose multi-volume The Destruction of the European Jews is widely regarded as the first seminal study on the Jewish Holocaust, has praised Finkelstein’s book.
When I read Finkelstein’s book, The Holocaust Industry, at the time of its appearance, I was in the middle of my own investigations of these matters, and I came to the conclusion that he was on the right track. I refer now to the part of the book that deals with the claims against the Swiss banks, and the other claims pertaining to forced labor. I would now say in retrospect that he was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy. He is a well-trained political scientist, has the ability to do the research, did it carefully, and has come up with the right results. I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will totally agree with Finkelstein’s breakthrough. [1]

doesn’t knows what he is talking about

Others have said that Finkelstein misrepresents history, and that he promotes anti-Semitic stereotypes. Some prominent … Omer Bartov, Professor of History and European History at Brown University, wrote:
What I find so striking about The Holocaust Industry is that it is almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.
“There is something sad in this warping of intelligence, and in this perversion of moral indignation. There is also something indecent about it, something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid…
This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic’s view of other people’s opportunism… Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a Holocaust industry of his own.

I don’t know what sort of racist Irving may or may not be. I don’t like racists, but sooner or later this debate will have to stop taking pot shots at the messenger, and consider some of the issues on their own merit.
My only position is that with a clear memory of Time magazine spreads about Iraqi soldiers tossing babies out of humidicribs, I would not be too shocked to learn that some details of the Holocaust may have been distorted. But we can not debate this in the current legal and political climate.

Posted by: DM | Feb 22 2006 0:32 utc | 30

i was checking out the dismissal of carlin and instalation of weinstein while doing some research about the missing white house emails surrounding the plame outing. as i recall the announcement fitz was going to take over the prosecution was sept16(or 17th), anyway ,in the article about the changing of the guards they quoted weinstein , who took over in march, as first being contacted for the job sept 17th. or one day after the fitz move. my dates could be a little off, but i remember quite clearly, it was the day after.
i was curious because fitz mentioned the emails had not gone thru the normal archive process, and that made me think maybe they had been archived, just in a different way.

Posted by: annie | Feb 22 2006 1:37 utc | 32

wtf are we ever going to move on?
My 2 cents:
WW2 is somewhat of our basic moral saga. It explain who is good (Britts and Americans and some russians) who is evil (Hitler and a lot of germans, also a lot of russians and japanese), who is brave (soldiers), who is not brave (bureacrats) and who is the victim (the jews). And I am not talking about the war in itself but the war that runs perpetually on the television (at least if you have cable). “Hitlers this and that”, “The blabla front”, “The sockpuppets of the second world war” and so on.
It is like the marvel universe or something, the basic plots are so well established that the most minor detail can be talked about over and over. Of course hugh parts of the actual war never even enters the story. The parts that does (like the Holocaust or D-day or Pearl Harbour or Stalingrad or Hiroshima or Hitler being evil as the devil) can however never be discussed without threatening the foundation of the myth. It can be discussed but only within a very strict non-threathening discourse.
I do not think it has much to do with it being close in time, the Korean war is almost forgotten in the popular culture. I think it could be a thousand years ago and it would not loose any of its power, because the power is not in the war, it is in the myth of the war.
Since it can not have been like this just after the war when everybody remembered it, somewhere along the line it became the founding myth of the western world forged under the pressures of the cold war to explain the existence of the western world in opposition to the rest of the world.
So we are going to move on when the world changes and another story is needed. That story might include 9/11 but that is another story.
Ranting power failing…
Must sleep…

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Feb 22 2006 3:16 utc | 34

on lipstatdt, ward churchill also tears into her hypocrisy & motives in the chapter Assaults On Truth And Memory: Holocaust Denial In Context in his book A Little Matter Of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1942 to the Present.

What has happened is that, in her project’s final pages [Denying the Holocaust], the author has subtly substituted one agenda for another. Without pause or notification, she shifts from the entirely worthy objective of systematically exposing, confronting, and repudiating those who deny the existence of the Holocaust to a far more dubious attempt to confirm the nazi genocide of European Jewry as something absolutely singular, a process without parallel in all of human history. There is a tremendous difference between the two propositions, yet Lipstadt bends every effort to make them appear synonymous. In effect, any “failure” to conceded the intrinsic “phenomenological uniqueness” of the Holocaust is to be guilty of denying it altogether.
Ultimately, only the Truth of the exclusivity of the Holocaust remains unscathed. The fundamental and deliberate distortiveness fo Lipstadt’s formulation speaks for itself. It is a lie, or complex of lies, consciously and maliciously uttered, lies of a type which readily conform in their magnitude and intent to those of the very deniers Lipstadt has devoted the bulk of her text to combatting. In the end, Denying the Holocaust is thereby reduced to an exercise in holocaust denial.
…
The experience of the Jewish people under nazism is unique only in the sense that all such phenomena exhibit unique characteristics. Genocide, as the nazis practiced it, was never something suffered exclusively by Jews, nor were the nazis singularly guilty of its practice. In attempting to make it appear otherwise – and thus to claim the status of an “unparalleled” victimization (“accumulating moral capital” as exclusivist Edward Alexander has put it) – proponents of uniqueness have engaged in holocaust denial on the grand scale, not only in respect to the Armenians, Ukranians, and Cambodians, but as regards scores of other instances of genocide, both historical and contemporary. By doing so, they have contributed to the invisibility of the victims of this hideous multiplicity of processes in exactly the same way the Jewish victims of nazism have often been rendered invisible even by those whose work falls well short of outright Holocaust denial. To this extent, Lipstadt and her colleagues have greatly surpassed anything attempted by Rassinier and his ilk. Those who would deny the Holocaust, after all, focus their distortions upon one target. Those who deny all holocausts other than that of the Jews have the same effect upon many.
…
Deniers of the Holocaust must, of course, be confronted, exposed for what they are, and driven into the permanent oblivion they so richly deserve. But so too must those who choose to deny holocausts more generally, and who shape their work accordingly. Deborah Lipstadt rightly expresses outrage and concern that Holocaust deniers like Bradley Smith have begun to make inroads on college campuses during the 1990’s. She remains absolutely silent, however, about the implications of the fact that she and scores of other holocaust deniers have held professorial positions for decades, increasingly branding anyone challenging their manipulations of logic and evidence an “antisemite” or a “neonazi,” and frequently positioning themselves to determine who is hired or tenured in the bargin.

gotta recall chomsky’s sentiment surrounding the faurisson ordeal – if you’re going to have free speech, you support it whether you like what the other person is saying or not, w/ the crucial test falling on the latter. otherwise, there is no such thing as free speech.

Posted by: b real | Feb 22 2006 3:29 utc | 36

I don’t have time for a longer post today, so I will try to make this brief.
I can’t tell you have disturbed I am about the gloating over David Irving.
This is the Faurisson affair redux. For those that are unfamiliar, this refer’s to Chomsky’s signing a petition supporting the freedom of speech of a holocaust denier with views remarkably similar to Irving’s.
To quote Chomsky briefly:

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi — such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here — this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense.

You are gloating over the sending to jail of someone who, no matter how cockamamie his ideas are, is exercizing his right to free speech. Don’t you all realize how dangerous this precedent is; particularly at a time like this? Especially when we have the state determining what is true and what is not, what can be said and what can’t?
Folks, wake up and think about the repercussions of this, especially when there are 25 posts a day on this site concerning freedom from government intervention. Read about the Faurisson Affair; there are many links on the web. Do you really want the Truth Police ruling what can be said and what can’t and sending those who cross the official line to jail? Do we want the courts to rule here that Bush got more votes than Gore, that Osama is responsible for 9-11, and that the “War on Terror” is real, and anyone who disagrees should be incarcerated until he recants, because that is what you are advocating.
Half of everything I was taught at school was lies, most of what is printed in the NYTimes is lies. Should we send out the paddywagon and start rounding them all up because it feels good for a moment? I could go on with this but I will leave it to someone else to flesh out the ramifications of this.
As to David Irving, granted he is a nutcase who has gone overboard (partly I believe in reaction to the kind of pressure we have here), nevertheless even Deborah Lipstadt, who sued him, did not believe he should have been incarcerated for his views.
From Wikipedia, perhaps a more balanced view of him by historians:

Prominent British historian Sir John Keegan wrote in 1996 in his book The Battle for History, “Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving’s contention that Hitler’s subordinates kept from him the facts of the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews…” And during the trial, Keegan lambasted Irving: “I continue to think it perverse of you to propose that Hitler could not have known until as late as October 1943 what was going on with the Jewish people.” He later stated that Irving’s view “defies common sense” and “defies reason.”
After the trial, Keegan elaborated on his view of Irving, praising him for his understanding of Hitler’s military strategy. In an 12 April 2000 article in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing Irving’s Goebbels — Mastermind of the “Third Reich”, Keegan wrote that Irving has an “all-consuming knowledge of a vast body of material” and “many of the qualities of the most creative historians,” that his skill as an archivist could not be contested, and that he was “certainly never dull.” Keegan also wrote, Irving “knows more than anyone alive about the German side of the Second World War,” and that Hitler’s War was “indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round.” However, Keegan doubted that even Irving took himself and his claims seriously. [7]
In a six-page essay in The New York Review of Books, Gordon A. Craig, a leading scholar of German history at Stanford University, noted Irving’s claims that the Holocaust never took place and that Auschwitz was merely “a labor camp with an unfortunately high death rate.” Though “such obtuse and quickly discredited views” may be “offensive to large numbers of people,” Craig argued, Irving’s work is “the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War,” and “we dare not” disregard his views.

As to factual assertions, such as Irving’s claim that the death toll in the firebombing of Dresden was between 100-250,000, later revised down to between 50-100,000–let it be noted that leftist author Kurt Vonnegut, who survived the bombing as a prisoner of war, in his bestseller, “Slaughterhouse Five,” cites the number 135,000 from the introduction to Irving’s book by Ira C. Eaker, the General who commanded the Eighth Air Force during World War II. So it goes. Perhaps we should put Vonnegut in jail for pushing lies in a bestseller.
Anyone who has ever been in a relationship knows that they have always been right and the other person has always been wrong–whoops, my id took hold of the keyboard for a sec there–knows how there can be differing versions of the truth among people we respect. And I certainly know that I can learn a lot from reading people I completely disagree with. I hope you all know it too.
Truth, in areas of human scholarship, should be debated publicly, in whatever media and fora are appropriate, between the parties involved. Certainly we should listen to the judgements of experts when the information is too complex for us to fathom. I personally believe the case supporting Global Warming has been made, and it is clear that many of the dissenting scientists have overt ethical conflicts, often being in the pocket of Exxon-Mobil and other polluters. Nevertheless, as reprehensible as these deniers of global warming are, I hardly think incarcerating them is the solution. Maybe we could send them to Gitmo and torture confessions out of them 🙁
Regarding Finkelstein, he is the real deal. He is great and very moderate in his assertions, always relying upon the preponderance of evidence. That is why he is so hated. An excellent introduction to the topic is Counterpunch’s collection “The Politics of Anti-Semitism.” His thesis that the Holocaust is used as a bludgeon to quash legitimate dissent against the policies of the State of Israel is on the mark. Again why he is so threatening to the Zionist powers that be.
I have long thought, and would like to posit here that, similar to the ‘Holocaust industry’, there exists a ‘Hitler industry’ here in the US in particular. What I mean by that is that he is treated as the apotheosis of evil, and that the bringing of Hitler up in argument is actually a rhetorical device meant to a) shut down the rational functioning of the opponent’s mind, and b) quash all dissent or attempts at comparison. It is most often used when the US has commited some sort of atrocity, often causing hundreds of thousand deaths, and we need to prove the insignificance of the scale of our actions, which are, of course, legitimate, because we, unlike Mr. H, are attempting to spread democracy throughout the world, not fascism. (See Chomsky’s “Necessary Illusions, thought control in a democratic society”) Hitler is an easy target in this country, because he appears quite comical in old footage, with his exagerated body language (similar to Chimpy) and silly mustache. I would love to hear from one of the German speakers here how he sounds in his speeches.
In any event, the reductionism of focusing on the unique evilness of Hitler precludes one from making a more balanced structural analysis of the powers (including US and Brit industrial interests) that propelled Hitler into power and supported his policies. See Michael Parenti’s Real History series at TUC Radio for more on this.

Posted by: Malooga | Feb 22 2006 3:49 utc | 38

This bit of news really cheered me up for the week. Sorta’ cheers me up about real progressive politics and the possibilities open to us.
Gay Lesbian Activist Network decides to play hardball

But the biggest lesson of 2004 and 2005 may be this: Play hardball politics. Every LGBT organizer now agrees that Massachusetts is the model to follow — because LGBT forces actually won. In November 2003, in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down a decision that opened marriage to same-sex pairs. In March 2004, the Massachusetts legislature proposed a DOMA constitutional amendment that would overrule the court if it passed the legislature twice and then was approved by voters. In the first vote, the overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts legislature passed the DOMA 105-92. The political group MassEquality went all out to reelect friends and defeat enemies, the vast majority of whom were Democrats. ﾒWe spent more money on direct mail than the state Democratic Party spent in 2004 Massachusetts elections,ﾓ said Rouse. It also conducted polls, sent money and volunteers into the political campaigns that most needed help, and sat down with other progressive groups to talk about endorsements. MassEquality reelected its friends handily, even in contested races. And it replaced an opponent — Democrat Vincent Ciampi, a longtime legislator whose seat was considered safe — with an openly gay man.
The legislature got the message. On the next round it defeated the DOMA, 157-39. A new citizen-initiated DOMA is threatened for the 2008 popular ballot. As LGBT groups are taking aim, Massachusettsﾕ legislators are far more helpful than they were before.
LGBT groups are taking the Massachusetts show on the road.

Michael Berube argues elsewhere along a slightly-different-but-tightly-related line of inquiry that disablity politics explains discriminatory politics in general, and he’s both convincing and inspiring. Maybe we really can build an alliance out of “the usual suspects.”

Posted by: citizen | Feb 22 2006 4:20 utc | 40

Happily, I see many of you beat me to the punch, between when I wrote 95% of my post this afternoon and now. Churchill’s analysis, as usual, is particulary sharp.
@ A swedish kind of death
Since it can not have been like this just after the war when everybody remembered it, somewhere along the line it became the founding myth of the western world forged under the pressures of the cold war to explain the existence of the western world in opposition to the rest of the world.
Bingo!
Annie, things are always argued to give one side ideological advantage over the other.
WWII, is the mythical good war. The propaganda is particularly overstated to cover up what really happened: a near disastrous collosal fuck-up of Western elite policy. Recall: Western elite had no problem with fascism. Bush’s grandaddy himself was making money hand over fist doing business with the Fascists. He was not unique. Recall: Roosevelt himself was almost overthrown in a fascist coup in 1934, initiated by industrialist Drexler from Philly, which would have suceeded had the planners not had the temerity to include Smedley Butler in their plans. The Elites had no problem with fascism, much as they do not this very day.
The problem they had was their fear of the spread of State Communism from the Soviet Union. The plan was to let Hitler take on the Red Menace, weakening Germany in the process, allowing the Anglo-American alliance to strengthen its control of the world. The fuck-up was that they did not expect Hitler to turn his attentions west, rather than east. Had Hitler limited his focus to the West, he would have, in all probability, defeated the Anglo-American alliance. Despite all the crap we are taught in school about the American defeat of the Nazis, fully 80% of the war, casualties and attritionwise was on the eastern front. The Soviets lost, by some accounts, 46 Million casualties, fully 25% of its population, in breaking the Nazi war machine. The Americans didn’t open the Western front until a mere 11 months before the war ended.
In the end, the US used the war to strengthen its command economy and position itself to assert control over the world. After the war, the US had over 40% of world GDP.
So, the ideological feat, the sleight of hand of western propaganda, was in slyly substituting one official enemy for another, the Soviets for the vanquished Nazis (who after all, were hired back by Reinhardt Gehlen, with western approbation, after the war). The War conditioned the populaces of the western alliance, particularly the US, to accept an official enemy, and the Soviets quickly filled the vacuum.
This is particularly important today, because this is the same technique Bush has employed, in using 9-11, and Osama, to condition the public to war; then adroitly switching official enemies to Saddam. Most of the sheeple can’t tell the difference anyway. After Saddam was ‘caught’, Zarqawi took the reigns of Official Enemy.

Posted by: Malooga | Feb 22 2006 5:32 utc | 42

OK I’ll try this again. I just finished war and peace on Irving and was about to post when I saw Malooga’s post most of which I agree with but a couple of bits I strongly disagree with.
A large part of what I had written was similarly critical of the holocaust industry and it’s effect on zionist colonialism. Irving was good at collecting facts but he wasn’t an historian. Once collected he didn’t use those facts honestly or rationally.
Because of cynicism about the ‘holocaust industry, particularly the way it is used to deflect attention away from Israeli atrocities, Irving’s claims appeared compelling at the time. I had never been to the camps and his claims about there being no gas chambers was credible as well as convenient.
As Malooga quoted Irving is an archivist. That is not an historian. I even quoted (well paraphrased) a bit of Vonnegut too; the thing he said about the most unfortunate outcome of WW2 was it turned out that there was a good and a bad side. This is very rare in war and the victors, particularly the US, have gone on to use that to justify their later atrocities.
Now we diverge. I pointed out that one of the lines of debate at MoA has been that there was barely a generation between the outrages in Vietnam and the outrages in Iraq. That the ink was still wet on the Paris peace agreement when the US leadership was denying My Lai, denying what ‘pacification’ or ‘Vietnamization’ really meant, what hamlets really were, telling the world that Phoenix was little more than a software program designed by criminologists to trace criminal organisations, and worst of all, denying that Agent Orange was chemical warfare.
I proposed that if the US, as part of the reparations they should have had to pay from losing in Vietnam, had been forced to admit to it’s horrific crimes and a law had been passed there to prevent asian slaughter denial, it is unlikely that Iraqis would be getting smashed upside their head by good old boys as I write this.
Yeah maybe it isn’t freedom of speech but societies that slaughter other societies for any reason other than immediate self defence in response to an actual physical attack by the other society, have abused their rights, haven’t acknowledged the responsibility that goes with them and therefore should have certain restrictions placed upon ‘rights’ until they can demonstrate their responsibility.
Now Germany has pretty much achieved that and if it weren’t for the racist, bored and unemployed ‘easties’ it probably should have had restrictions on the promulgation of Nazi style philosophies lifted by now.
Austria 1989 was a different matter. As I pointed out above, Kurt Waldheim,a demonstrated WW2 war criminal was the president of Austria in 1989. I reckon that had a lot to do with the thinking behind Irving’s initial arrest.
Even so Waldheim had slaughtered Serbians and possibly some UK airmen, but not Jewish people so he didn’t seem to be as hounded as many other WW2 war crims. I haven’t put any links in for any of this because like most debates around ww2 atrocities, wikipedia and other ‘reputable’ sites, have been rendered meaningless by a couple of didacts from each side.
The ‘scandal’ and debate occurred in the 1980’s so there are few if any primary source documents on the net. I have therefore chosen to rely on my memory of the affair.
Somehow I doubt that the current generations of Germanic peoples would be so certain in their loathing of nazism had it been OK for politicians and others of the misinformation ilk to deny war crimes and the criminals.
I was in a relationship with a German woman for many years and she, like the German MoA contributors and proprietor (tip of the hat to Bernhard), was also certain of her contempt for nazis and the people who by ommission or commission allowed the atrocities to happen.
That wasn’t true of all her family though, particularly the older generation. I visited Germany with her a couple of times in the ’80s. No I didn’t do a John Cleese and cry out “we beat ya” or “kill any interesting jews lately?” but over the course of a few alcohol powered ‘sessions’ with her mother’s family and friends it became apparent that some people had sought to deal with the uncomfortable reality of the mass murders by denying them. eg:
“history is written by the victor, there was no final solution. no gas chambers and if food was scarce in the camps toward the end of WW2, it was everywhere else as well”
One of the people saying this was a lower court judge!
Pretty much exactly what Irving had been saying in Britain for decades and I may have abhorred it but didn’t think it should be prosecuted then.
However in 1989 in Austria it was a deliberate attempt to sell his bad and deliberately inaccurate ‘histories’ and build a following for his facist friends. It wasn’t harmless, wasn’t true, and was more about making money than disseminating the ‘truth’.
Let’s not forget that the guestworker hostel burnings in East Hermany were yet to come, or is that too subject to revisionism now?
As I said earlier, in the current climate, if anti-jewish sentiment was removed from the skinhead/neo-nazi ideology it would be practically indistinguishable from neo-con ideals.
It is important that the odds of any nazi style resurgence be restricted until Germany and Austria are a couple of generations of political control away from WW2. Then the odds of them falling into old vices will be much the same as any other societies.
Now if only we could do the same thing with USuk!

Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 22 2006 7:07 utc | 44

In regards to the usefulness of the current story of WWII…
I’m a video gamer, and one of the things I am most interested in is the study of games as representatives of popular culture. Most games are violent with war-based storylines. And one thing that has slowly occurred to me is that virtually every game with a storyline represents what we’ve been discussing, the normative, mythological view of WWII.
First of all, there are the outright military history games, which virtually always focus on WWII. Some of the most popular of recent years place the player in the role of a soldier on the Western Front, usually from D-Day. Treated like a war movie, these are the most blatant use of WWII in game culture to support the Americanist mythology.
However, when you take a step back further to the fantasy or science-fiction based storylines, they run along the same lines. An evil empire is rising. It takes over a few unimportant countries, but then it starts attacking a big, good one, which is defeated quickly, launching Our Heroes into action. They build an alliance of resistance, bloody the Evil Empire’s nose, and eventually invade and expose its crimes and defeat its leaders, leading to Complete Victory for the good guys.
The myth of war as something completely winnable, with no ill effects so long as the good guys win, gets perpetuated, and that’s exactly the same myth which America put together after WWII, and it’s done so to people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching a History Channel documentary.

Posted by: Rowan | Feb 22 2006 7:23 utc | 46

3 Charged With Conspiring to Kill U.S. Troops in Iraq

Three Ohioans were charged in federal courts on Tuesday with conspiring to kill American forces in Iraq as part of an Islamic holy war against the United States.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters here that the three, originally from Jordan and Lebanon and living in Toledo, were “engaging in weapons training, sympathizing with the terrorists and seeking to provide help in order to kill people abroad, including our troops.”
…
The indictment charges that the men solicited help from an individual identified only as “the trainer,” who is described as a citizen with experience in the United States military. Much of the case against the men appears to come from the testimony of that individual.
The indictment says the charges are based on a series of activities by the three defendants, including viewing materials on Web sites on building explosive devices like those used against allied forces in Iraq and others that showed how to make a suicide bomb vest.

A sting operation on three people who most probably only had a big mouth and did some websurfing.
I guess they visited Little Green Footballs and followed the links on how to make such vests.

Posted by: b | Feb 22 2006 8:51 utc | 48

Report: Nearly 100 dead in US custody

Nearly 100 prisoners have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, the Human Rights First organisation has said ahead of publication of a new report.
At least 98 deaths occurred, with at least 34 of them suspected or confirmed homicides – deliberate or reckless killing – the group of US lawyers told BBC television on Tuesday.
Their dossier claims that 11 more deaths are deemed suspicious and that between eight and 12 prisoners were tortured to death.

Posted by: b | Feb 22 2006 11:30 utc | 50

I think b posted this story : From Guernica to Fallujah , way back. I bring it up again in light of todays Exclusive: Al Jazeera Reporters Give Bloody First Hand Account of April ’04 U.S. Siege of Fallujah

n April 2004, the United States launched its first assault on Fallujah, the Sunni town west of Baghdad that had come to symbolize Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation. The siege was one of the bloodiest assaults of the US occupation. In two weeks that April, thirty marines were killed as local guerillas resisted U.S. attempts to capture the city. Some 600 Iraqis died and over 1,000 were wounded. While the U.S. military claimed at the time that the vast majority of those killed were members of the resistance, media reports from within Fallujah indicated a large number of civilians were among the dead.
Al Jazeera was one of the few news outlets broadcasting from inside the besieged city, and its exclusive footage was being broadcast by every network from CNN to the BBC. Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Mansur and his cameraman Laith Mushtaq were inside Fallujah, reporting unembedded from the streets for the entire siege. In this Democracy Now! exclusive, they speak about their experience for the first time in an in-depth interview.

Posted by: uncle $cam | Feb 22 2006 15:04 utc | 52

one thing i didn’t have time to comment on last night, when i posted on the QDR objectives for 2007, is that the plan to increase the SEAL operations & develop riverine warfare capability probably indicates a gearing up for jungle-environment clandestine ops & counterguerilla warfare, likely targets being africa & south america (peru, colombia, bolivia), &, oh yea, don’t think the occupiers are planning on pulling out of iraq any time soon…
Navy Riverine Force to Report for Iraq Duty in 2007

The Navy expects to deploy three riverine squadrons in 2007. The units will relieve Marines who currently are conducting maritime security operations in the ports and inland waterways of Iraq.
According to preliminary plans presented at a conference in Panama City, Fla., the force would have a fleet of 36 armed and armored combatant craft, with 12 boats per squadron, and would be able to transport the equivalent of one Marine Corps rifle company. Two crews would be assigned to each craft for round-the-clock operations.
Though the force would be deployed to Iraq initially, the idea is that these river commandos could be employed around the world, in hotspots where terrorists have developed niches along inland waterways-places such as the Niger delta, Colombia, Indonesia and the Philippines, said Rear Adm. Donald K. Bullard, commander of the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command.
…
The Navy will study options for possibly buying new boats in the future.
“It may be not a single boat,” he said. Riverine missions may require a variety of boats. A high-speed craft, for instance, would be needed for security and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance interdiction functions. Another type of boat may be needed to move a rifle company.
…
Military leaders, at home and abroad, have voiced the need for a riverine force.
“Two things happened last year,” Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Gordon Nash, director of the Navy’s expeditionary warfare division, told conference attendees. The chief of operations from the Peruvian Navy visited Adm. Vernon Clark, then U.S. Navy chief, and informed him he had found 14,000 miles of navigable river mostly between Peru and Colombia. That area, Nash noted, is providing refuge to Colombian terrorists, and the Peruvian Navy was seeking help from the United States in monitoring that long stretch of water.
Then in November, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Army Gen. John Abizaid, insisted he needed a riverine capability, Nash said. The Marines had decided to stand down their units, and Abizaid feared he would not have enough help patrolling the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Speaking at the same conference, Lt. Gen. James M. Mattis, commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said the enemy in Iraq has exploited the lack of U.S. dominance in inland-waterway warfare.
“The enemy is definitely going to frown when they hear the U.S. Navy is going into the brown and green water. They are not going to like that,” he said.
The Navy already has a riverine capability embedded in its special operations forces.
“But they’re at capacity. So we’re trying to increase capacity” with the new riverine force, said Bullard.
In a written response to questions from National Defense, a Naval Special Warfare Command spokesman said that the riverine force will cover more conventional types of operations, but that the riverine and special operations forces will train and fight together.

Posted by: b real | Feb 22 2006 16:36 utc | 54

Would you like your force feeding tube green or orange today?
Force-Feeding at Guantánamo Is Now Acknowledged

The military commander responsible for the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, confirmed Tuesday that officials there last month turned to more aggressive methods to deter prisoners who were carrying out long-term hunger strikes to protest their incarceration.
…
According to newly declassified interview notes, several detainees who had been on hunger strikes told their lawyers during visits late last month that the military had begun using harsher methods more widely in the second week of January. One Yemeni detainee, Emad Hassan, described the chair to lawyers in interviews on Jan. 24 and 25.
“The head is immobilized by a strap so it can’t be moved, their hands are cuffed to the chair and the legs are shackled,” the notes quote Mr. Hassan as saying. “They ask, ‘Are you going to eat or not?’ and if not, they insert the tube. People have been urinating and defecating on themselves in these feedings and vomiting and bleeding. They ask to be allowed to go to the bathroom, but they will not let them go. They have sometimes put diapers on them.”
…
Like Mr. Hassan, Mr. Murbati said he had been fed two large bags of liquid formula, which were forced into his stomach very quickly. “He felt pain like a ‘knife in the stomach’ ” Mr. Colangelo-Bryan said.
Detainees said the Guantánamo medical staff also began inserting and removing the long plastic feeding tubes that were threaded through the detainees’ nasal passages and into their stomachs at every feeding, a practice that caused sharp pain and frequent bleeding, they said. Until then, doctors there said, they had been allowing the hunger strikers to leave their feeding tubes in, to reduce discomfort.
…
In a letter to a British physician and human rights activist, Dr. David J. Nicholl, on Dec. 12, the former chief medical officer at Guantánamo, Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding any detainees but “providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment.”
General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of their feeding tubes.

Posted by: b | Feb 22 2006 17:40 utc | 56

Ballistics of a 28 gauge shotgun.
From 15 to 18 feet away…

Posted by: citizen | Feb 22 2006 18:26 utc | 58

i was over at wampum checking out the blog awards, voting is starting soon and noticed this post about medicare,talk about making my blood boil.

Now, $800,000,000,000 over a decade is $80 billion per year. There are about 131,000,000 individual tax returns filed per year. That works out to about $610 per year per taxpayer, or just over $50 per month.
Please note that the $50 per month per taxpayer does not actually buy any medicine for Granny. That charge is just to allow Republicans to pay off their interest groups so as to keep the money flowing into their campaigns from the big drug companies and HMOs.

Posted by: annie | Feb 23 2006 1:48 utc | 60

Interesting points, but unlike some of the chaps and chapesses here at MOA I am not a liberal on free speech issues. Lies have consequences, often in the form of dead bodies. Of course Bliar has the freedom to lie to us about WMD in Iraq if he so chooses, but I also think he should be banged up for it. He can then be banged up some more for the criminal act of the invasion itself.
My concern w/ Irving is that he is a racist fuck who continues to attempt to foment race hate in Europe at a time when the far right is (re)gaining ascendency in far, far too many countries here (eg see slothrop’s recent remarks on Denmark; Netherlands Pym Fortyn &c.)
Plus he is a coward – he didn’t care to defend his stated beliefs of decades because he knew he faced a jail term of up to ten years – compare and contrast with Mandela.
He is now pulling the “I’m an old man” schtick. Wasn’t that previously used by the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, who changed his name to “Klaus Altmann” (lit. Klaus Old Man) when hanging out w/ the generals in Bolivia…)

Posted by: Dismal Science | Feb 23 2006 11:05 utc | 62

Tom Engelhardt does a nice conflation (is that the right word?)
War of the Quailhawks

The comparisons of Iraqi enemies to various prey animals certainly indicated that the military had its share of hunters and fishermen, but these were also classic denigrating images of battle in which the enemy loses his humanity altogether, becoming in flight nothing more than a hunted animal. (This language remains a commonplace of American-style war. Just the other day, Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter, laying out the dicey security situation in the Iraqi city of Samarra, described the aftermath of an ambush of an American patrol by Iraqi guerrillas, two of whom were killed, this way: “Five other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division scrambled down [from their Humvee], pulled two of the insurgents’ bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud. ‘Strap those motherf—–s to the hood like a deer,’ said Staff Sgt. James Robinson, 25, of Hughes, Ark. The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood… and tied them down with a cord. The dead insurgents’ legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along. Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers.”)

Posted by: beq | Feb 23 2006 16:12 utc | 64

“Contingency planing”:
US marines probe tensions among Iran’s ethnic minorities

The intelligence wing of the US marines has launched a probe into Iran’s ethnic minorities at a time of heightened tensions along the border with Iraq and friction between capitals.
Iranian activists involved in a classified research project for the marines told the FT the Pentagon was examining the depth and nature of grievances against the Islamic government, and appeared to be studying whether Iran would be prone to a violent fragmentation along the same kind of fault lines that are splitting Iraq.
The research effort comes at a critical moment between Iran and the US. Last week the Bush administration asked Congress for $75m to promote democratic change within Iran, having already mustered diplomatic support at the UN to counter Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme.

Posted by: b | Feb 24 2006 8:29 utc | 66

b real, thanks for the link. i read it yesterday right after you linked but the implications freaked me so much i couldn’t respond. i think its worthy of its own thread .
after katrina i read a diary on kos by a woman in the ozarks who, hearing of one of the ‘camps’ developing in her area, took a little drive in the middle of nowhere down 20 miles of remote road to an old church camp that was in the process of renovation for katrina ‘refugees’. she took a lot of photos. there were guard checkpoints staffed w/state troopers. she was allowed to enter w/her daughter because she had some affiliation w/the church and brought provisions. what she recorded was frightening. there would be no way for people to leave for one thing and the groups were divided into dorms separtaed by sex. separate guard facilities. very strange.

Posted by: annie | Feb 24 2006 18:09 utc | 68

@DM this is probably the story annie is referencing. it was linked here when it first came out. I just got back from a FEMA Detainment Camp
@annie let’s hope that the admin is just trying to scare off people from using their voices & privilege to speak truth & disseminate factual evidence & share empirical observations about what is being done in everyone’s name.

Posted by: b real | Feb 24 2006 18:42 utc | 70

yep, that’s the story

Posted by: annie | Feb 24 2006 19:18 utc | 72

As always Jerome puts these issues in perspective. Thanks for the link b.
I read these things and get less and less reactive because of all the false alarms that I’ve encountered over the years. However I doubt many here will not agree that there is a imminent crisis in the brewing. So another tidbit from Ron Paul,one of the few, IMO, rational members of the US congress with some integrity and intelligence.
The End of Dollar Hegemony
A hundred years ago it was called “dollar diplomacy.” After World War II, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, that policy evolved into “dollar hegemony.” But after all these many years of great success, our dollar dominance is coming to an end.

Posted by: Juannie | Feb 24 2006 19:51 utc | 74

There was a recent article somewhere that Norway is also considering setting up an oil bourse.
This “meeting place” in the Internet world can be anywhere.
One comment by Jerome which I will dispute is this:-

in today’s world, a bourse is essentially a big IT operation, with systems able to provide complete market information to all participants in real times, treat operations as they are decided, and provide an unambiguous audit trail to all interested parties to a transaction.
Again, that requires a lot of specialised competences on the ground: programmers, developpers, consultants to install them, the specialist hardware providers, etc… all people that need some (or a lot) of understanding of what’s going on in the market. That’s highly specialised knowledge, which is, naturally concentrated in the few places that carry bourses, i.e. a few large cities in the West. Iran will be hard pressed to attract such people to Tehran or thereabouts.

And what I am disputing is the “big IT” – too complicated for Iran meme. Maybe some big money to be made, but IT systems are simple — easy — and well within the capabilities of Iranian programmers. The don’t need American, British, or French help for that!

Posted by: DM | Feb 24 2006 20:08 utc | 76

@askod
The resolution is very low, but even so I could see that the intial spread pattern at 30 yards (90 feet) was too wide to have left appx. 4/5 of the pellets in the man’s body. I couldn’t see well enough to know why the narrator settled on 15-18 feet.
However, what was extremely clear was that anyone with a shotgun and a place to shoot it at cardboard targets, watermelons, and interestingly a punch dummy made of soft rubber, anyone could replicate this and see for themselves about the spread pattern and penetrating power. I suspect a number of hunters have done so and told their friends that 90 feet is a load of crap. Also, the narrator demonstrated the field of fire (appx. 120 degrees) which he claimed was common courtesy among hunters who are trying not to shoot each other. 120 degrees or so is pretty broad, so showing how that looks allows people proper evidence based on which to judge for themselves whether or not it is compossible to claim that Dick A) wheeled and fired, and B) is a careful hunter. The narrator also mentioned that state and local laws do require that police investigate a shooting, and those laws were broken in order to prevent the normal course of justice.
So, I’d like to see that tape in higher resolution, but it was clear enough to establish that anything under 30 feet is patent obfuscation. And when you see it on tape, 15-20 feet feels really close.

Posted by: citizen | Feb 24 2006 20:47 utc | 78