Musings on Murder and Contempt June 21, 2012

The Drone Murders

The Pakistanis make much of the fact that the United States is sending military drone aircraft into its airspace to kill Pakistanis, including women and children who inconveniently happen to get in the way of Obama’s murderous toys.

The Pakistanis bluster and complain and threaten, but they don’t do the one thing any rational government might do. Shoot the damn things down.

Pakistan has an air force. It has radar. It has air defense. It has missiles. The drones are military aircraft of a foreign nation invading Pakistani airspace and killing civilians. Drones are not the most nimble or speedy craft. Start shooting them down. Yemen, similarly besieged by the D.C. killers, should take similar action.

Otherwise some among us might be tempted to think that these countries enjoy being the killing ground for the primary terrorist state in the world today.

Contempt of Congress?

How amusing is it that a committee of Congress has decided to hold the Attorney General in contempt of Congress?

That would be a House Committee chaired by one of the uglier Republican partisans, Darrell Issa. The short version is that he and his treacherous friends have decided to attack the Presidency for doing pretty much the same thing the last Republican President did. To add to their hypocrisy, it was their Attorney General under that last Republican President who corrupted the entire Department of Justice, but Issa and his crew of thugs (that would comprise the entire Republican Party as it commits a street mugging of American democracy in broad daylight) had nothing to say about Republican corruption of the Justice Department.

But the amusing thing is that any committee of Congress would hold anyone in contempt of Congress.

Some eighty percent of Americans hold Congress in contempt of the American people.

I’d go further and say Congress is in contempt of the American people, the Constitution, the laws of the country, international law, and reason itself.

These people should be running for the hills and hiding under rocks. Unfortunately the people who sent them to Washington are not smart enough to chase them out. In the end there’s just plenty of contempt all around and hardly a bit of functioning brain matter in American politics, especially the Washington version of politics.

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American Terror March 9, 2011

March 9, 2000 Texas 

Federal agents arrest Mark Wayne McCool, the one-time leader of the Texas Militia and Combined Action Program, as he allegedly makes plans to attack the Houston federal building. McCool, who was arrested after buying powerful C-4 plastic explosives and an automatic weapon from an undercover FBI agent, earlier plotted to attack the federal building with a member of his own group and a member of the antigovernment Republic of Texas, but those two men eventually abandoned the plot. McCool, however, remained convinced the UN had stored a cache of military materiel in the building. In the end, he pleads guilty to federal charges that bring him just six months in jail.

From:
The Second Wave: Return of the Militias
Southern Poverty Law Center Special Report

Bin Laden Can’t Get It Up, According To Bush Cutie September 10, 2007

From the endless fount of juvenile thinking that is the White House, Ben Feller of the AP offers the following lead in a page two story in the Globe today:

Seemingly taunting Osama bin Laden, President Bush’s homeland security adviser said yesterday that the fugitive Al Qaeda leader is “virtually impotent” beyond his ability to hide and spread anti-American propaganda.

Francis Fragos Townsend is the adviser who was out there on the talk show circuit yesterday calling OBL a limpie. Her repeated use of the phrase ‘virtually impotent’ pretty much guarantees that she was attacking his manhood as well as his political condition.

Why else put another Republican spokeschippie out there to smear the man? Look at her. She’s pretty. She’s photogenic. Even an atheistic liberal like the Grumpy Lion would like to jump her bones if he didn’t know her politics. The Bushies apparently have a house stocked with these dames. Dana Perino’s another. Why is Bush fronting his administration with cute little chippies? Maybe he’s got a problem with his impotence and is overcompensating? Another fragment of the big lie that is his life and administration?

Apparently the big thinkers in the White House feel that insulting bin Laden will piss him off and drive him into making a mistake that will lead to his capture or demise.

The problem is that OBL most likely doesn’t care what some Bush chippie says about his sexuality. For the Bushies to think a ploy like this would work, the strategists in the White House have to believe that bin Laden would want to bang this dame and therefore would feel insulted by her puerile remark. I suspect Bush and his pals have been watching too many TV dramas. And what makes them think bin Laden is sitting there worrying about his sex life? After all, he’s not the guy who showed up on an aircraft carrier in front of the whole world wearing a codpiece.

And she’s wrong about him politically.

The consensus of the nation’s top intelligence analysts is that bin Laden’s terrorist network is anything but impotent.

And let’s face it, even if the Bush people won’t, no matter what happens with bin Laden, the United States can’t beat him.

If the US kills him, he’s a martyr and more thousands of jihadists will take up his banner.

If the US captures and imprisons him, he’s a martyr and more thousands of jihadists will take up his cause.

If the US never lays a finger on him, more thousands of jihadists will flock to his fight.

Now the Lion would be more than happy to explain all this to Ms. Townsend. It would take all night most likely. But before she would be allowed to gain the insight and experience the Lion offers, she would have to renounce Bush and his policies.

The Lion is quite picky about such things, which unfortunately impacts his social life. But the Lion suspects that bin Laden isn’t getting any either.

George Bush and Gordon Brown: Different Species, Different Planets July 31, 2007

One would like to think that Gordon Brown is more grounded in reality and reason than his predecessor, the unlamented Bush poodle Tony Blair.

And one would already know that George Bush’s only connection to reality occurs when he goes to the bathroom, and even that is tenuous at best.

The two got together yesterday for some reason. Here’s how it went, according to Ben Feller of the AP.

Bush described terrorism as an ideological struggle of good against evil.

Brown said, “Terrorism is not a cause; it is a crime. It is a crime against humanity.”

Bush said he listened carefully to Brown’s thinking and was reassured. “He gets it,” Bush said.

“What’s interesting about this struggle … is that he understand [sic] it’s an ideological struggle, and he does,” Bush said.

George apparently wasn’t in the same country as Brown, likely not even on the same planet.

Brown also called Afghanistan the front line against terrorism. Bush of course has convinced himself it’s Iraq. Apparently neither of them thinks terrorism is used in Indonesia, the Philippines, Asia, South America, the United States (oh, you forgot Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph?), England, Europe, yada yada yada.

Yeah, okay guys, get it yet? There is no front line. Armies don’t stop terrorism. Armies create terrorists.

To which the Bushbaby says:

“This is going to take a long time in Iraq, just like the ideological struggle is going to take a long time.”

No, George, it’s not an ideological struggle. It’s a religious war. It’s a race war. It’s an oil war.

I’d bet Gordon Brown went home muttering to himself, “That man is daft. He should be locked up.”

At least he’d be sure he was right on that.

Spotting Bias In The News From The Bush Administration. A Really Really Serious Skill… July 26, 2007

Seldom do you come across a story with such blatant bias that even a mainstream news reporter can spot it. Such is the case with a story in the Globe today headlined “Study says 95% of Guantanamo detainees had posed a threat”. The story was nicely written by William Glaberson of the New York Times News Service.

Some key points:

• “…a new study requested by the Pentagon argues that large numbers of the detainees there were a direct threat to US forces”
• “The report, by a terrorism study center at West Point…”
• “…(the report) asserts that publicly available information indicates that 73% of detainees were (a threat)…”
• “The authors make clear that one of their goals was to affect public attitudes.”

And the last graf:

The report analyzes previously released military summaries of the unclassified evidence used in 516 of the military hearings that determine whether detainees are properly held as enemy combatants. It was written at the request of the Pentagon by the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point, a teaching and research center that describes itself as “actively involved in supporting the global war on terror.”

Is there any reason at all to think that this report is truthful?

How about a little context? “Publicly available information”? You mean what the Bush/Cheney/Pentagon military complex chooses to make public, which is very little and which they won’t make public unless it serves their political and propaganda goals? This administration could announce that the sun is shining on a sunny day and you know they would be lying or distorting or undermining more of the Constitution and the law.

As for the prisoners, it has been well established that any hearings that they manage to get are little more than kangaroo courts. Prisoners of the Spanish Inquisition were better off. Our vaunted and honorable military refuses to tell these guys what evidence is held against them. The operational rule is “It’s a secret, nyah nyah nyah raghead.”

And if you read the Chris Hedges article in The Nation, The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness (you may need a subscription), you’ll quickly discover that there’s an incredibly high likelihood that, yup, most of the guys in Guantanamo are guilty of nothing more than getting in the way of a pissed-off American soldier breaking into their homes at three in the morning, shooting their dog, and terrifying the wife and kids.

As for the prisoners who might actually have sought to harm American soldiers, well, hello, of course. Invasion. Occupation. Death. Destruction. Atrocities. Slaughtered women. Murdered children. Iraqis fighting to defend their country, their homes, their children, their women – oh, yeah, that’s a real crime deserving of indefinite lockup in an American hellhole a la Kafka. They have a right to kill Americans. Even the soldiers know it.

Maybe, too, someone should remind the geniuses at the Pentagon and the White House that our army is fighting on Iraqi (and Afghani) home soil. Even the fighters from other countries have commonality with Iraq. It’s Arab. It’s Muslim. Does anyone seriously think those people will ever – ever – stop fighting us?

I wouldn’t if the situation were reversed. Never. But I would never fight for the sick, pathetic, delusional bastards who run this country now. The United States, yes. Bush and company, never -  I’d throw them to the enemy sooner rather than later.

As for the article Glaberson wrote, I’m not picking on him. He did a nice, if delightfully unsubtle,  job revealing the bias of the Pentagon report. A good thing would be for more reporters to follow his lead and make the constant and daily biases and distortions clear instead of falling back on the ultimately ludicrous idea of ‘objective balance’.

We, as citizens, have to question everything, especially these days. And remember what I. F. Stone said:

All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.

It might be a good idea, in that context, to remember that Bush was a cokehead and a drunk.

Police? Army? Police? Army? Who’s Got the Terrorists? June 16, 2007

Two stories in the Globe today, one on top of the other, tell of the police in Britain and Indonesia respectively, busting some terrorists, using intelligence and good police work.

Just shows to go ya, you cut down on terrorist threats not with armies, not with spurious military invasions, not with bombastic rhetoric and political posturing which has the sole purpose and effect of inciting fear (and which is itself a form of terrorism), but with solid, coordinated police and intelligence work.

You listening, Georgie. All you’ve done is kill thousands of innocents, destroyed a couple of countries, and created more terrorists than a sane man would have wanted to imagine.