Billmon:
You gotta hand it to those terrorists: That’s one fiendishly clever disguise.
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September 23, 2006
WB: The Hard Core
Comments
Billmon is missing the *attitude* thing here: Everybody who wears a robe and a turban is guilty until proven innocent and it is better to inter a few innocent towelheads than to let a potential terrorist slip through and take out a transatlantic flight with explosives hidden in his tube of Dent-U-Grip.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 23 2006 6:11 utc | 1
…the current administration doesn’t mind “collateral damage.”
It’s a pity that, compared to the current boot-up-yer-ass possé in the White House, that the Wicked Witch of the West has a better grasp of foreign policy:
“This things must be done …del-i-cat-ely.”
Posted by: Darryl Pearce | Sep 23 2006 16:23 utc | 3
On last night’s Real Time With Bill Maher, Sandy Rios trotted out the latest talking point: Heaven’s to Betsy, the USA doesn’t engage in torture; not at all. We merely employ methods of coercion. There’s difference, don’t ya know, although Sandy had a hard time making the distinction. Bill asks “if your son or daughter were captured in combat, would waterboarding be acceptable treatment?”
****crickets chirping*****
Not so much, as it turns out. But when we are talking about, as ralphieboy points out, brown people in turbans, well that’s a different matter, and besides, THEY ALL WANT TO KILL US.
And when the fuck did “protecting the American people” become Shrub’s most important job? I could have sworn that it was to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. I wish I could opt out of his “protection”; I’ll take my chances, thanks.
3-1/2 years ago, Senator George McGovern wrote a column for The Nation that, at the time, brought tears to my eyes. For some reason, it popped into my head this dark morning:
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America’s bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.
But in God’s good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man’s inhumanity to man.
Selah.
This is becoming the toughest battle for the US military since they had to defeat the communist hordes of Greneda.
Posted by: pb | Sep 23 2006 17:34 utc | 5
Moqtada al Sadr controls about 140,000 militia members, and has only been restrained from unleashing them upon the Americans and British by Iran.
Iran wants those British and American troops to remain in place. They make great hostages, a real deterrent to Bush bombing Iran. It would be impossible to supply them or save them once Iran released Sadr’s brigades upon them, and sent a hundred thousand militia of its own across the border.
Bush is gonna do it; of that there is no doubt. He simply cannot, cannot back down from here. He’d have to return to governing within the bounds of our Constitution and of international law, and deliver a fireside chat to America about how we are bankrupt unto the the third generation out from here, and will need to tighten our belts about five notches in order to live within our actual means.
He’d have to stop, back up, and turn around. Admit his many mistakes, and set to fixing them.
Easier to burn the whole world down than do that.
Hitler handled his errors the same way. Once he understood that the German people did not deserve his protection, he made sure they died in droves right to the last possible minute.
America does not deserve Bush’s protection.
Posted by: Antifa | Sep 23 2006 18:00 utc | 6
As a possible counterpoint to Antifa, consider this just in from Asia Times. China has new leverage in the situation:
Speaking at a conference under the rubric “Summit on Energy Security” at West Lafayette, Indiana, this month, the powerful chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, characterized Venezuela, Iran and Russia as “adversarial regimes” that were using energy supplies as “leverage” in foreign policy.
Lugar said: “We are used to thinking in terms of conventional warfare between nations, but energy is becoming a weapon of choice for those who possess it.”
Senior Russian figures were quick to dismiss Lugar’s admonition as “groundless Russophobia”, but the US administration is already opening new battle fronts against Russia in the energy war.
Next week’s meeting in Beijing on energy security involving the United States, China, Japan, India and South Korea is a dramatic manifestation of the new battle plans and war doctrines that Washington is conceptualizing. The conclave in Beijing, significantly, leaves out Western Europe.
Lugar had first publicly floated the idea of a formal tie-up by the US with China and India at a major speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington in March when he proposed that an unusual coalition of interests over international energy issues among the three countries coincided with a “seminal moment in American history”, quintessentially comparable to the late US president Richard Nixon “using his anti-communist credentials to open China”. From Controlling China’s Access to Oil, to Alliance Building
And, what to make of Western Europe being left out? Is it now a subsidiary of Wall St. Predators Inc?
Posted by: jj | Sep 23 2006 18:26 utc | 7
Gitmo is the US’ focus-group concentration camp. It is the visible, tolerated example, of arbitrary detention, of harsh inhuman treatment, of incarceration of minors without cause, of denial of habeas corpus, of refusal of ordinary legal right, a proper court case, lawyers, etc. It was set up for that purpose. Surely the US knew that Cuba would not prevent pictures being taken; TV pictures on International media have been amply distributed by the US itself…
So, the imprisoned, such as the handicapped, the elderly, the innocent, the children, will be featured in the media (accompanied by the proper hand-wringing). It is disgusting and immoral, but that is what occurs, it can happen to anyone..
But not to you! Or yours!
Apparently, Americans – and others in the ‘West’ – are naive enough to assume that such horrors can only be visited on the other, the foreignor, the stranger, the outsider, the exception, the enemy…. rigorous action is vital to stamp out terrorism…
Examples like that of this elderly man serve to reinforce a feeling of immunity. Auntie Mae, an a-politcal old lady, diabetic and missing one leg, would never be imprisoned in the US, nor in Afghanistan. The absurdity and indignity of the example serves to underline the idea:
it can’t happen here.
There are no pictures (afaik) of Camp Cropper, which is one of the places the Abu Ghraib inmates were moved to when it was closed.
Posted by: Noirette | Sep 24 2006 16:03 utc | 8
The yahoos have to get real: if a billion plus people wanted us ALL dead, a f-ing lot of us would by now be deceased.
Posted by: Brian Boru | Sep 25 2006 5:11 utc | 9