Archive for September 6th, 2008
The Empire Strikes Back
The Empire Strikes Back
Sarah Palin’s statements about the bloody, illegal invasion of Iraq being ‘God’s will’: How would she know that? Because George Bush told her? Or does God personally whisper in her ear? Asks John Chuckman.
I’ve reassessed my view of Sarah Palin.
My first thought about her usefulness to John McCain was that she would be a draw for disaffected Hillary supporters in a close race, but then all I knew about Sarah was that she characterized herself as a soccer, or hockey, mom.
But already I’ve learned more about her than I ever would have wanted to know, and her simple, original description of herself proves disingenuous at best, and there is the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of her appealing to Hillary supporters.
A dizzying jumble of images and anecdotes now clutters the Internet. There’s a picture of her in a bikini, with an American flag motif no less, holding a rifle, with a loony grin, poolside. There’s another picture in a black leather mini-skirt, high platform shoes, satiny blouse with revealing décolletage, standing at a bar with a wine glass. There’s the head-shot of her looking through the sight of a military weapon, a la Thatcher in her tank. Then there are the many carefully-posed pictures of her dressed demurely in family groupings, sentimental pictures as familiar to me as her flat Midwestern accent, a holdover from Idaho in her case, which just happens to be America’s favourite refuge for survivalists, private militias, and Aryan lunatics.
Then there are her statements about the bloody, illegal invasion of Iraq being “God’s will.” How would she know that? Because George Bush told her? Or does God personally whisper in her ear? If it’s God, I wonder when He (Sarah being a fundamentalist, it could not possibly be a She) takes the opportunity of speaking to her? When she’s poolside in a bikini, toting a gun, or dressed and scurrying out the door with the clan for Sunday school?
She supported Pat Buchanan, poster boy for everything that is wrong with America, in his Junior Brown Shirt march for the presidency in 2000. Before that, she was a card-carrying member of the Alaska Independence party, not exactly in keeping with Stars-and-Stripes bikinis, but definitely consistent with erratic behavior. There were denials about the Independence party, but the records are there, as is her signature.
She has five children, including her most recent, sadly afflicted with Down syndrome. In this day of certainty through tests, it does seem irresponsible to have such a child, which likely will be dependent on family and society for its entire life. Yes, her behaviour is consistent with her views on abortion – about which she once claimed she would not have an abortion even for a raped daughter – but is it sensible? Does such a decision reflect sound, realistic judgment? Our world today is full of such complex situations and judgments, not a world of simplistic rights or wrongs.
She is against gay marriage, against abortion, and against just about anything else you can find in the “anti” repertoire of religious predators along the lines of Jimmy Swaggert or Jerry Falwell. If she accepts war and mass killing as God’s will, why does she not extend that thinking to gay marriage or tests which help us prevent tragic outcomes from pregnancy?
She’s not much more consistent in her other behaviour and thinking. She’s big on commandments and rules, but that did not stop her from trying to have her brother-in-law dismissed from his job in the state police. Nor did it prevent her hacking into an opponent’s computer to get information to secure her election as mayor. And respect for proper procedures did not cause her a moment’s concern when she used paid lobbyists to land pork-barrel projects for her town.
Sarah is almost an American cartoon character, Daffy Duck waving his wings and flapping his beak madly off in all directions.
Her acceptance speech at the convention was certainly competently delivered, but what did it say? It was literally a set of one-liners, Rush Limbaugh barking away on the radio, without any sense of purpose or direction stated other than winning the election and “serving the people.” God, I would hate to be tasked with listing all the monstrous crimes committed in the name of “serving the people,” almost as many, surely, as those covered by “God’s will” in history.
Actually, there’s very little that is new about Sarah Palin. I’ve seen this act before. In tone and substance and attitude, Sarah is Newt Gingrich in drag. But then Newt was almost as irreligious as John McCain. Sarah, though, has a big fat hunk of old Bob Jones tossed in – after all, in the heady ‘60s, the old man had guards with automatic weapons at the gates of Bob Jones’ University – and that brings us to one of her main purposes in this campaign.
Sarah is there to speak to the born-again crowd, people who do not actually trust John McCain as being sympathetic to their views, and with good reason. Born-agains are roughly a fifth of the American population, and the Republicans never can win without their support. So we’ve gone from having the nuttier class of fundamentalists burrowing into every corner of America’s government under George Bush, affecting even the language used in literature at the Grand Canyon, to having one of their own placed “a heartbeat away” from the presidency, and this by a man whose heartbeat just might not last his term.
John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. You can read more of his articles at his blog.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=27732
The Bush Regime’s Imperial Affirmation: Endless War, Endless Conquest, Endless Repression
The Bush Regime’s Imperial Affirmation:
Endless War, Endless Conquest, Endless Repression
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research,
Antifascist Calling…
While people around the world begin to celebrate George W. Bush’s January 20, 2009 departure from the White House, senior administration officials are crafting legislation, rule changes and executive orders that will make permanent the worst excesses of this criminal regime.
And in an election year, you can count on a Democratic-controlled Congress to continue abdicating their role as a brake on the executive branch, ever-fearful that far-right attack dogs and their media accomplices will label them “soft on terror.”
In this light, a recent piece in The New York Times outlines the corporatist trajectory that will cement in place the “friendly fascism” of the Bush administration, inaugurated by the Republican party on December 12, 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed a stolen election to the Bush-Cheney cabal.
As Associate Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his bitter dissent to the Bush v. Gore ruling: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
Ponder those words and then consider all that has followed since that infamous ruling eight long years ago undermined the rule of law and democratic processes in the United States–and the capitulatory cowardice of the putative “opposition” party, the Democrats, who sealed the deal.
Eric Lichtblau reports that as the November 4 general election approaches, “Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush’s defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.”
Seven years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, Bush advisers are demanding that Congress “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”
That al-Qaeda attacks Western targets and visits outrages upon innocent civilians does not mean it is not also a blunt-edged weapon selectively deployed by imperialism to stoke ethnic and religious tensions in areas deemed vital to U.S. geostrategic interests. As investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss has documented,
Sixty years earlier, when the United States began its odyssey in the Middle East, there were other voices who wanted conservative Islam, and early fundamentalist groups associated with the nascent Islamic right, to do battle with the secular left, with Nasser, with Arab communists and socialists. Now, six decades later, the Bush administration is pursuing a strategy in the Middle East that seems calculated to boost the fortunes of the Islamic right. The United States is counting on Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq to save its failed policy in that country, and a major theoretician of that campaign explicitly calls for the United States to cast its lot in with the ayatollahs and the Muslim Brotherhood. (Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005, p. 342)
Long after the Bush administration has sailed off into the proverbial sunset, policies launched across the decades by successive Democratic and Republican governments will continue along the same imperial trajectory: war and covert operations as the preferred instruments for capitalist resource extraction and global domination.
Al-Qaeda: Asset and Adversary
One need only review the role played by al-Qaeda in the Balkans during the 1990s when the United States and their NATO allies, particularly Germany and the United Kingdom, provided entrée to demobilized Afghan-Arab mujahedin fighters as the West dismembered the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, culminating in 1999 with NATO’s murderous 78-day bombing campaign of Serbia to “liberate” Kosovo.
Earlier in the decade, thousands of Islamist fighters flooded Bosnia-Herzegovina, directly recruited by former Waffen SS Handzar Division foot soldier and Islamist ideologue, Alia Izetbegovic, the President of Bosnia and darling of liberal interventionists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy. In calling for Western intervention, Lévy shamelessly described Izetbegovic’s neofascist statelet as an exemplar of “modern, secular Islam”! Quite naturally, Izetbegovic’s Nazi past was covered-up by Western interventionists intent on smashing multiethnic Yugoslavia into smithereens.
Indeed, intelligence analyst and senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, Cees Wiebes, documents in Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, how Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, MI6 and BND assisted major arms transshipments into Bosnia despite a UN arms embargo, often in concert with the reactionary Iranian regime.
Some estimates claim that by 1994, as many as 4,000 mujahedin fighters were present in Bosnia. Indeed, none other than Osama bin Laden himself visited Izetbegovic in Sarajevo. As a gesture of appreciation for his support, Izetbegovic gave bin Laden a Bosnian passport. And, a November 1, 2001 account in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal claimed that bin Laden continued to visit the Balkan region as late as 1996.
By 1995 as Wiebes documented, American Hercules C-130 transport planes accompanied by jet fighters began landing at the Tuzla Air Base in eastern Bosnia laden with arms, ammunition and communications equipment destined for Izetbegovic’s Islamist brigades. Similar arms pipelines were opened between Albania, Bosnia, Croatia and later in the decade Kosovo, where Albanian narcotrafficking networks rule the roost and continue to wreck havoc across the region.
As I documented in “Welcome to Kosovo! The World’s Newest Narco State,” beginning in 1998 and perhaps earlier, the London-based cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, the “emir” of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Muhajiroun began a recruitment drive for aspiring mujahedin for the “holy war” in Kosovo at London’s notorious Finsbury Park Mosque.
In 2005, in the wake of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, it was revealed that Bakri, a probable MI6 asset and simultaneously an al-Qaeda operative, was the “spiritual” force behind the deadly attacks that claimed 52 lives and wounded hundreds of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reported that,
The reluctance to take decisive action against the leadership of the extremist network in the UK has a long history. According to John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as the suspected mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. American and French security sources corroborate the revelation. The MI6 connection raises questions about Bakri’s relationship with British authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and outside British jurisdiction, he is effectively immune to prosecution. (“Sources: August terror plot is a ‘fiction’ underscoring police failures,” The Raw Story, Monday, September 18, 2006)
During NATO’s Kosovo aggression, analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote,
Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been fighting in Bosnia. And the Bosnian pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen mercenaries from various Islamic countries are reported to be fighting alongside the KLA in Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors were reported to be training the KLA in guerrilla and diversion tactics. … According to a Deutsche Press-Agentur report, financial support from Islamic countries to the KLA had been channelled through the former Albanian chief of the National Information Service (NIS), Bashkim Gazidede. “Gazidede, reportedly a devout Moslem who fled Albania in March of last year 1997, is presently 1998 being investigated for his contacts with Islamic terrorist organizations.” (“Kosovo ‘freedom fighters’ financed by organised crime,” World Socialist Web Site, 10 April 1999)
As I documented, the Kosovo Liberation Army’s links to both narcotrafficking networks and al-Qaeda was a defining feature of Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, Hashim Thaci’s KLA served as the militarized vanguard for the Albanian mafia whose “15 Families” control virtually every facet of the Balkan heroin trade. Thaci is currently Kosovo’s Prime Minister. Kosovar traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively from Asia’s Golden Crescent. At one end lies Afghanistan where poppy is harvested for transshipment through Iran and Turkey; as morphine base it is then refined into “product” for worldwide consumption. From there it passes into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who control the Balkan Route.
U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely on far-right provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to facilitate the dirty work. Throughout its Balkan operations the CIA made liberal use of these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and provide them with targets. Today, similar features are visible for all the world to see as the U.S. warlord state in Afghanistan battles the Taliban and al-Qaeda for control of the lucrative opium growing and processing regions of that destroyed nation.
As a sometime Western intelligence asset, al-Qaeda is not simply a puppet of the United States and NATO as some believe. Such simplifications mask a harder and crueler reality. In the opinion of this writer, the 9/11 cover-up, rather than burying the Bush administration’s alleged orchestration of the attacks (the “inside job” thesis), concealed something far more sinister: U.S. imperialism’s decades-long collaboration with Islamist extremists to achieve geopolitical advantage over their capitalist rivals.
As with neo-Nazi networks that were reconstituted by the West for war against their domestic leftist adversaries during the Cold War, al-Qaeda and related terror organizations will, at times, share limited tactical goals with the West, such as the destruction of secular, leftist opponents in the Middle East, or as a force for destabilization operations in target countries such as Iran, as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has reported in The New Yorker.
That al-Qaeda has reconstituted its military-political-mafia structures along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands and continues to attack targets across the region at will, is testament to the resilience of the organization and the appeal of its reactionary ideology. There is a deadly irony here, since its murderous “tradecraft” was quite literally bequeathed to it by Western intelligence services and America’s preeminent regional allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
The Bush Legacy
As far-right Republican party hordes gather in Minneapolis/St. Paul for the coronation of their presidential candidates, reactionary Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Alaska’s Christian fundamentalist governor, Sarah Palin, the Bush regime’s strategy of preemptive war is viciously playing out on the home front. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald reports,
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. (“Massive Police Raids on Suspected Protesters in Minneapolis,” Salon, August 30, 2008)
The raids were orchestrated by local law enforcement agencies with major assistance from various federal spy outfits such as the FBI, NSA and the Pentagon’s own Northern Command (NORTHCOM). The raids are purely an intimidation tactic designed to squelch peaceful dissent by citizens outraged by Bushist policies throughout these long years of darkness.
Indeed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that police and federal agencies utilized the “services” of informants and provocateurs in their targeting of the anarchist RNC Welcoming Committee.
Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an “anarchist” plan to disrupt this week’s Republican National Convention.
From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience.
The show of force was led by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office in collaboration with the FBI, Minneapolis and St. Paul police, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and other agencies. (Heron Marquez Estrada, Bill McAuliffe and Abby Simons, “Police Raids Enrage Activists, Alarm Others,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 31, 2008)
The “preemptive” raids targeted activists, alternative media and lawyers on-scene. All were handcuffed and forced to lie face-down, while SWAT teams and federal agents ransacked numerous homes in a quixotic hunt for “weapons.”
Greenwald avers, “Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.”
After nearly eight years of massive surveillance and infiltration operations by the federal government across a multitude of federal agencies, often acting in cahoots with reenergized local “red squads” rebranded as Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated through the Office of National Intelligence, the mutant stepchildren of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS and the NSA’s Project SHAMROCK have brought the “war on terror” home in a big way.
The Minneapolis City Pages reported back in May, that police and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force were “soliciting” informants to keep tabs on local protest groups. According to journalist Matt Snyders’s account, FBI Special Agent Maureen A. Mazzola, flanked by a cop, attempted to recruit a University of Minnesota sophomore as a paid “confidential informant.” While the student declined the feds’ “generous offer,” the wider issue of recruiting Stasi-like moles to report “suspicious activities” by citizens exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed right to say “NO!” cuts to the heart of the role of dissent in a democracy.
Outraged by the “preemptive policing” on display in Minneapolis, Glenn Greenwald comments on the virtual blackout by the corporate media, all-too-willing to criticize the actions of repressive government’s thousands of miles away while silently acquiescing to the police state in full-bloom here at home.
So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it’s not difficult to see why. As the recent “overhaul” of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated–preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror–we’ve essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry. (“Federal Government Involved in Raid on Protesters,” Salon, August 31, 2008)
As The New York Times reported, Bushist demands on Congress to “affirm” that the U.S. is at “war” with international terrorism, “carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy,” which as we see on a daily basis, is a war on our freedom to exist as individuals rather than as “soldiers” in an imperialist charade.
The Bushist proposal will provide the legal framework to assert broad executive power “during a time of war,” an interpretation of the commander in chief’s presumed wartime powers that Justice Department lawyers secretly used to gin-up the illegal detention and torture of alleged terrorist suspects and the NSA’s driftnet surveillance of Americans outside the rule of law.
As readers no doubt recall, the September 14, 2001 congressional resolution known as the “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” still in effect, became the pseudo-legal justification for the worst excesses of the Bush regime.
But as former Reagan Justice Department official Bruce Fein told the Times, Congress should not “give the administration the wartime language it seeks.”
“I do not believe that we are in a state of war whatsoever,” Mr. Fein said. “We have an odious opponent that the criminal justice system is able to identify and indict and convict. They’re not a goliath. Don’t treat them that way.”
The same can be said for the war criminals occupying high-office in the Bush administration and Congress. I disagree with Mr. Fein on one salient point: we are indeed “in a state of war.” However, it is a one-sided class war waged by a monstrous system of profit based on the exploitation of our living labor and ecocidal resource extraction by mafia-like associations known as multinational corporations.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.
Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt
The Dumb, the Stupid, the Clueless and the Uninformed
The Dumb, the Stupid, the Clueless and the Uninformed
I’ve been away for awhile… maybe a month or more… maybe I’ve always been away and just drop in on occasion with a new personality for the next period of engagement. It’s hard to know what’s what. Look at the problem people have with reality. They must have a problem with it because they will accept anything but and they generally prefer to be told what is happening rather than look into the situation themselves. By the title of this piece and by your own observations, I guess you know I’m talking about significantly more than half of the population.
I’ve long been of the opinion that all of the great and transformative acts for good that are practiced on this Earth are accomplished by ten percent of the people. I’ve also felt that the majority of evil is accomplished by another ten percent. The people in the middle are the hamburger meat in the fast food restaurant of the times in which we live. Among this group are thirty six personality types and you meet them all as you go and long before you actually leave. There are a handful of unique characters who exemplify their time and there is a much larger group that plays a tape loop over and over again until it wears out. You could no more talk to these people about what is really going on than you could convince them that they have anything to do with it.
These people can go to college and read Kant and Kafka but only for the purposes of conversation… not for any meaningful insight. These writers and the composers and artists are nothing more than suits that these people dress themselves in, in an effort to be admired or get laid by people whose company they richly deserve. They can attend the opera and the ballet (and they deserve that too). They can ponder modern art and then use that, as they use all art and the like as instruments in the service of their vanity… namedropping… repeating the words in scholarly reviews… preening and posturing as if their invented knowledge and limited understanding of something granted them the same cachet as the creator. In respect of most of what is called art, someone still capable of embarrassment wouldn’t even want it. But you can’t embarrass these people. The best you can hope for is to make them angry or feel discriminated against.
However, if you are evil; which is the prevailing fashion accessory of the time, well then… these people are going to hang on your every word and sometimes hang because of them. The more I live the more I begin to think that people get what they deserve and they’ll kill you if you try to protect them from it.
How stupid or clueless do you have to be to still believe what you hear on TV or is reported in the press in any of the mediums it employs? By now with so many lies and so much corruption exposed and increasing by the day how is it possible to still believe the people who lied to you the day before and the day before that? I find it to be a most uncanny magic act. It’s not even very good magic.
My theory is that they send people out into the world to study the types of stupidity and cluelessness that are practiced by the personality types and then they get prototypes to perform it for them so that they can agree with themselves by proxy on whatever BS they’ve assumed to be the truth. It stands to reason that if you can’t accept the truth about yourself, or are far too uninformed to even imagine that such a thing exists, then you can’t accept the truth in any form ever. You can’t and won’t see that 9/11 was an Inside Job. You’re too vain and self-involved to risk censure from those as stupid as yourself. You laugh about it even though you are the target.
You wave little signs that say, “Service” and “Country First” when the only service you are employed in is self service and the only country you possess is the land of ignorance in which your illusions flourish like kudzu along the highway to nowhere that you are traveling on.
You believe that Russia attacked Georgia and not that the Israelis who control Georgia attacked South Ossetia which provoked a Russian response. You believe that Bin Laden is alive and masterminding world terror from a cave in Pakistan when world terror is being formulated in London, Tel Aviv and Washington D.C. You think it’s disgraceful that Sarah Palin has to endure scrutiny about hiding something from people who didn’t bother to look. You wouldn’t know that she was chosen precisely because of her liability by the people who control both sides because it suits their onward agenda for which the fix is already in.
If you’re in the jungle and everything you know about the jungle is a lie then your chances of survival are not very good. They’re even worse when you refuse to accept that your own experiences show you that what you thought to be true was a lie and you just refuse to alter your perceptions even when they are proven to be patently absurd. You’re a marvel really. I can’t imagine what it is to be like you. For me it would be like sitting at the kitchen table and stabbing myself over and over in the back of the hand with a fork while insisting it wasn’t happening.
It doesn’t occur to you that some impending hurricane wasn’t what it was sold as, or that they knew that all along. It doesn’t occur to you to look around and see what else is happening and which this is a distraction from. You don’t make the leap between the callous indifference to Katrina and the self- serving cries from the people who caused the one and are appealing for help and donations for the other. You don’t think to yourself that if they have done so little since Katrina that they are not likely to do much more about anything else unless they… benefit from it.
You just go along to get along until your number comes up and you get to scream, “Why me?” It doesn’t bother you… the millions of dead and destroyed lives. Even when the press which works for the people who did it admits that it was all a lie which caused it you still don’t get it. You can’t fix something if you don’t know why it is broken. You can’t repair something by replacing the wrong part.
That you have not dragged George W. Bush and Dick Cheney out of the White House and hung them in Lafayette Park years ago tells me that you’d rather have dinner with Sacher-Masoch than De Rouchefoucauld even if they or you could speak the necessary English. Of course with Sacher-Masoch you don’t really have to speak… just scream. Pain like music is a universal language and seems to be something you enjoy
You’d better get your act together before it’s too late. Bad shit has a way of happening to stupid people with more frequency depending on just how bone dead stupid they are. You’d better stop waving bumper stickers and believing everything you are told and worse… acting on it as if it were true. It isn’t possible that the ones lying to, feeding on and controlling you have your best interests at heart. They want you worse than dead and they are working on it right now.
Of course… you are probably not reading this. Someone with lacquered hair and a mouthful of lies is probably talking to you and you’re dreaming of shopping and sex regardless of how unattractive you are. You’ll wake up when the sirens fill the air and the building is on fire. That’s usually how it goes. You’ll wonder why you didn’t wake up and how it got to be too late without anyone telling you. That’s how it always goes. But people were telling you… life was telling you… circumstances were telling you… your conscience was telling you but you… you weren’t listening. You weren’t listening because you were dumb, stupid, clueless and uniformed.
http://smokingmirrors.blogspot.com/2008/09/dumb-stupid-clueless-and-uninformed.html
Pakistan cuts supply lines to NATO troops in Afghanistan – U.S. may step up raids in Pakistan
Pakistan cuts supply lines to NATO troops in Afghanistan
In a move seen as the latest fallout from Wednesday morning’s US attack on South Waziristan, the Pakistani government has ordered that supply lines to NATO troops in Afghanistan be immediately severed for an indefinite period of time.
The move comes as thousands of protesters marched through South Waziristan’s capital of Wana chanting “death to America”. Officials cited repeated attacks which had made it difficult to provide security for transportation across the only border crossing, but Pakistani media cited other sources who said the move came as the government feared retaliation from South Waziristan tribesmen if they didn’t respond to the US attack.
The strike, which was the first confirmed use of US ground forces in Pakistan since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, killed 20 civilians and received widespread condemnation in Pakistan’s government. American officials have suggested that the attack is just the first of many cross-border missions to be expected in the coming months, as the US has expressed growing discontent with Pakistan’s inability to control its long and mountainous border with Afghanistan. The Defense Minister of key NATO ally Germany was also critical of the US attack during his visit to Pakistan, and warned that “Pakistan’s territorial integrity has to be respected”.
With Pakistan’s sole ground link to Afghanistan now closed to them, NATO may be more reliant than ever on Russia for the transportation of non-military supplies to the war-torn country at a time when US-Russian relations are at a post-Cold War low. And while Russia has promised not to block NATO’s overland transport, President Bush’s threat to “punish” Moscow over the recent war with Georgia may put the route in further jeopardy.
http://news.antiwar.com/2008/09/05/pakistan-cuts-supply-lines-to-nato-troops-in-afghanistan
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U.S. may step up raids in Pakistan
Mohammad Sajjad / Associated Press
Despite growing protests in Pakistan over a raid, many Pentagon officials favor a more aggressive approach to counter attacks in Afghanistan carried out by militants based in Pakistan.
By Julian E. Barnes and Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 5, 2008
WASHINGTON — Even as angry protests spread in Pakistan, Pentagon officials said Thursday that the number of cross-border commando missions may grow in coming months to counter increasing violence in Afghanistan.
The developments threatened to aggravate U.S.-Pakistani tensions just before the country’s presidential election Saturday, in which attitudes toward the United States are likely to be a key issue. The U.S. raid Wednesday and its aftermath also fanned a long-standing debate within the Bush administration over how to deal with militants in Pakistan.
Pakistani officials said U.S. troops flew into South Waziristan by helicopter in the raid and that as many as 20 people were killed, many thought to be civilians. The White House, State Department and Pentagon all moved to clamp down on administration discussion of the assault, but government officials confirmed the broad details provided by the Pakistani government.
U.S. military officials insisted that there was no new policy authorizing an increase in raids into Pakistan. Assaults by U.S. special operations forces into Pakistan have taken place before, and U.S.-operated unmanned aircraft have attacked sites believed to be used by militants.
But pressure has been building within the military for more aggressive use of existing practices as U.S. casualties have increased with the rising number of attacks carried out in Afghanistan by militants based in Pakistan.
California’s War Dead
Profiles of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus reactions from readers.
Browse by: Age, Cemetery, Country of Birth, High School, Hometown, Number of Children, … “You can’t allow a haven,” said a military officer, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity about the raid. “You have to get to the areas that they rest, relax and train.”
Many within the Pentagon and among military officers in the region are skeptical about the value of increased U.S. operations in Pakistan. These officials believe that stepped-up operations risk a backlash and that a better approach would be to steadily press the Pakistani military to take on the extremists.
In Pakistan, parliament passed a resolution Thursday condemning the raid, a day after the government lodged a diplomatic protest with the U.S. ambassador.
The frequency of U.S. raids in the future may depend on the Pakistani reaction. U.S. officials are monitoring both the public response and the private reaction from leaders of the fledgling Pakistani government. Some military officials considered the initial Pakistani response relatively restrained, although protests continued to build.
Military officials said that the U.S. had used existing authorities negotiated with former President Pervez Musharraf to launch the raid. A senior military official said the volatile political situation in Pakistan had prevented any new negotiations for U.S. operations in the country.
The U.S. has long claimed the right to cross the border in “hot pursuit” of militants. Although the details are unclear, Wednesday’s raid does not appear to be a case of hot pursuit.
A U.S. official suggested that the raid was conducted in response to border attacks, and that no high-ranking militant leader was captured or killed.
“There are targets other than formally designated high-value targets,” the official said.
U.S. special operations forces have conducted raids before, including a 2006 mission in which the elite SEAL Team 6 went into Damadola to attack an Al Qaeda compound.
In a new report of an attack, villagers and officials in North Waziristan on Thursday reported a missile strike they said was carried out by a U.S. aircraft, an unmanned Predator drone. The blast was said to have killed eight people, five of them identified by local officials as “foreigners.” That term is often used to describe Al Qaeda militants from Arab countries or Central Asia. It was not immediately known whether any was a high-profile insurgent figure.
U.S. intelligence officials said the raid Wednesday was along the border, not deep in tribal areas. Officials have noted that boundaries are in dispute in many locations.
White House and State Department spokesmen refused to discuss the incident and limited their remarks to calls for cooperation with the Pakistani government.
Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior U.S. military officials met with the Pakistani army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, last month aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. A senior Defense official said that there was no discussion of increased action by the United States. Instead the meeting focused on how the U.S. could help the Pakistani military increase its counterinsurgency efforts.
But a senior Pentagon official said that pushing for more aggressive action by the new Pakistani government also carries risks. Any Pakistani politician perceived to favor more U.S. latitude in Pakistan would suffer, the Pentagon official said.
“If you want to lose,” the official said, “just be the one that gets caught talking to Vice President Dick Cheney about U.S. incursions across your border.”
Saturday’s presidential contest will be decided by members of parliament and the country’s regional assemblies. Asif Ali Zardari, husband of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of her Pakistan People’s Party, is the front-runner. Zardari is seen as relatively pro-American, and the recent raid could affect his candidacy.
julian.barnes@latimes.com
greg.miller@latimes.com
Times staff writers Laura King in Istanbul, Turkey, and Peter Spiegel and Josh Meyer in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-uspakistan5-2008sep05%2C0%2C6935562.story
