Category Archives: War

UPDATE VIII: Lessons About Wicked TSA Appied To WikiLeaks (Patriotism Or Statism?)

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Speech, Intelligence, Journalism, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Propaganda, Republicans, The State, War

You’ve already been designated a terrorist at the nation’s federally controlled airports. As you go about your business, trying to make a living, and pursuing familial and professional contacts around the world—you ought to have an inkling, by now, of what being at the mercy of this accreting evil is all about. I hope you are able to extend these lessons and sensibilities to the persecution of an admittedly far more courageous opponent of the Federal Frankenstein than you and I: Julian Assange, proprietor of WikiLeaks.

First up, here are my reservations about hailing Assange as a folk hero: I suspect that Assange’s opposition to the oppressive impetus of the American state is reserved for causes dear to the Left. Witness the posting by Assange’s WikiLeaks, on 18 November of 2008, the name, address, age and occupation of many of the 13,500 members of the rightist British National Party. This is a wee bit of a give-away. Does he not respect this small group’s rights to live unmolested? Apparently not.

UPDATE II: WikiLeaks was, likewise, nowhere to be found when the Climagedon emails were exposed.

The fascist Fox News is leading its reports on the latest leaks with headlines calling to “designate WikiLeaks a ‘foreign terrorist organization.'”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seconded the sentiment: “Leaks ‘tear at fabric’ of government,'” she lamented. Good.

Let me focus the story for you. Far more serious than the gossipy prattle among diplomats about Iran, revealed in the 250,000 classified State Department documents, leaked on Monday, are the exhortations issued at Foggy Bottom to SPY ON THE WORLD:

The leaks cited American memos encouraging U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to collect detailed data about the U.N. secretary-general, his team and foreign diplomats — going beyond what is considered the normal run of information-gathering expected in diplomatic circles.
Le Monde said a memo asked U.S. diplomats to collect basic contact information about U.N. officials that included Internet passwords, credit card numbers and frequent flyer numbers. They were also asked to obtain fingerprints, ID photos, DNA and iris scans of people of interest to the United States, Le Monde said.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley played down the diplomatic spying allegations. “Our diplomats are just that, diplomats,” he said. “They collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years.”

The fabric of such a government must be torn and shorn; it’s the stuff of society that needs rebuilding.

UPDATE I: I repeat the observation made in “Warbot Wants to Kill WikiLeaker” (08.07.10):

“The politicos, and now even the generals, preach the practice of left-liberalism at its most extreme in every structure of the military and the government. And then, when it appears that their affirmative recruits are crappy—they can’t abide by a code of secrecy (or by a contract); or are unable to refrain from killing their colleagues—then their bosses suddenly turn bigoted and want to kill them.

“These are the same generals and politicians who campaign for free and open sex for hets and homos in the military. What do they expect? Disciplined buttoned-up soldiers?!”

“You can’t run a liberal organization—structurally and philosophically—and expect your members to behave themselves. Left-liberalism is about license and lenience.”

UPDATE III: TRUER WORDS WERE NEVER SPOKEN. Julian Assange’s, that is. The Australian who heads the secret-sharing Web site” said that “the documents will skewer ‘lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil.'”

UPDATE IV (Nov. 30): CLIMAGEDON. Although WikiLeaks’ proprietor did not break the climagedon story, he did “host the full 120MB archive.” I’m not quite sure what this cryptic, Wikipedia statement means. Is Assange committed to exposing power irrespective of ideology? I still don’t know. There is no doubt that he has done liberty a tremendous service so far by pulling back the curtain to reveal the affairs of state we fund.

UPDATE V: Via Fjordman, of the Brussels Journal: “… in 2001, … two out of Norway’s three largest newspapers, Aftenposten and Dagbladet, reported that most … rape charges involve an immigrant perp, which again mostly means Muslims. Both newspapers have since then conveniently ‘forgotten’ about this, and have never connected the issue to Muslim immigration although the number of rape charges has continued to rise to historic levels. They are thus at best guilty of extreme incompetence, since their former articles about this issue are still available online. Norway’s Minister of Justice from 2001 to 2005, Odd Einar Dørum, mentioned the problem in 2001 but has later gone quiet about the issue. The reported number of rapes in Oslo is now six – 6! – times as high per capita as in New York City, yet the media keeps warning against Islamophobia.”

Swedish women, at least, can at last feel safe. The Swedish government is finally getting serious about their rape problem.?!!

“Interpol, at the request of a Swedish court looking into alleged sex crimes from earlier this year, has put WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on its most-wanted list.
The Stockholm Criminal Court two weeks ago issued an international arrest warrant for Assange on probable cause, saying he is suspected of rape, sexual molestation and illegal use of force in August incidents.”

Now what a coincidence this trumped up charge is, don’t you think?

UPDATE VI (Dec. 1): It is interesting how the collectivist impulse has kicked in among so many so-called defenders of freedom. A single man exposes the wicked workings of the US empire—an arm of which is the terrorist TSA—and that individual has become the enemy of the good.

The use of the term “anti-American,” vis-a-vis Assange, moreover, is so childish and utterly inaccurate. Assange is anti-American only if one equates America with her government. Proceeding from this error, the people who can-can for the criminalization of Assange’s speech draw the conclusion that by opposing state criminality, Assange is anti-American. So far, the one Assange action to qualify as unpatriotic and awful is his exposing of the home addresses of members of the rightist British National Party. That was a bully-boy tactic; it certainly qualifies as an ideological stand; a show of hatred to rordinary, peaceful citizens.

This is not a neoconservative site. Yes, we despise the Obama regime, but we despised the rule of Genghis Bush just as much—and almost from its inception.

People confuse statism with patriotism. This is how this classical liberal writer has defined patriotism (which is why Bad Eagle is wrong: American Indians can be patriotic):

“Patriotism in my view is a very modest thing. I feel patriotism when I encounter many people in my immediate community, or among my readers. The arborist who came to trim my trees the other day told me he was not a Republican or a Democrat. He said he hated the war in Iraq and loved his guns as well as keeping what he earned. This independence of mind is quintessentially American. I feel patriotic when I encounter such an American. Ditto the gentleman who installed my alarm system recently. He too expressed his disdain for politics, and moved on to discuss his gun collection. The sight of the Jeffersonian arborist swinging heroically at the top of my giant cedars, giving them a trim, and the cowboy-clad alarm installer makes me patriotic. People like Dr. Yeagley make me patriotic. There are quite a few Americans such as these around. Not enough, but enough to make me want to fight the good fight for them. …”

“So what is patriotism? Here’s what it’s not: It’s not an allegiance to the government of the day, or to its invariably wicked, un-American policies. It’s an affinity for your community; it’s an understanding of the great principles upon which this country was founded—which have been excised by successive governments, Republican and Democratic alike. And it’s a commitment to restoring the republic of private-property rights, individual freedoms, and radical decentralization.”

UPDATE VII:

“I miss the old WND,” writes Clay Smith, at the Letters section on WND:

I was sadden to read Mr. Farah’s article, “Nobody asked, nobody told.” I remember under President Clinton, WND would be a beacon of liberty, questioning government on everything. Back then WND even honored the “informer” by naming its magazine “Whistleblower.” I really miss that old WND.
Who cares if Pfc. Bradley Manning is a deviant, godless homosexual? The message is what I’m looking at, not the messenger. An individual tells me my house is on fire … I don’t stop and ask him whether he is a godless homosexual. I check his sincerity and validity of the information. In the case of WikiLeaks, the information has showed us numerous forms of government abuse.
There are no secrets in a free and open society – only with governments that keep their citizens in the dark, dictatorships, empires and those who engage in black ops. This is the root cause of terrorism in the first place. Ron Paul was right when he said, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”

I read Joseph’s column. I did not take away that he opposed whistle-blowing. What I deduce is that he thought the military appointed the wrong people, a point I made earlier in this post: “You can’t run a liberal organization—structurally and philosophically—and expect your members to behave themselves. Left-liberalism is about license and lenience.”

UPDATE VIII: Vox day writes this on On the heroics of WikiLeaks:

“If WikiLeaks meets the legal criteria of a “U.S.-designated terrorist organization” then so does Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Governments always want to operate in the dark and keep their subjects in ignorance, which is why Julian Assange should not be assailed by the American people, he should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, regardless of whatever his motivations in making all of this information available to the public might be.

WikiLeaks is nothing more or less than a technological blow for American freedom. Assange is no traitor; the accusation doesn’t even make sense considering that he has absolutely no connection with the United States. But it should come as no surprise to the readers of this blog that the verbal attack against the organization is being led by one of those freedom-loving Republicans.”

UPDATED: Reeducating Occupied Afghanis

Drug War, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

The American people are not the only dupes to be patronized and bullied by the Empire’s congressional-military-media complex. According to RawStory.com, “A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of Afghans surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to ‘destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan.'”

As the report would have it, these silly people simply don’t understand that the entity we call NATO, but is really the US, needs to be in Afghanistan for their own good; the good of the Afghan people. For example, to destroy their only source of income: the poppy fields.

And so a reeducation program must commence. “‘We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,’ ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.”

Remember “Radio Sawa”? You should. If you are a tax payer, you pay for it. Part of the neocon’s democratic deal in Iraq was that we got to pipe into Iraqi ears pro-American propaganda interspersed with J. Lo’s caterwauling and Jay-Z’s gutter grunts. The idea was to make them both love us and want to be like us.

Why don’t we do the same for the Afghans? We could buy them all little radio transistors, and pipe “Radio Sawa” type propaganda into their long-suffering ears.

But first, let them get high on opium. Where I do agree with the think tank is in its proposal “that Afghanistan license the growing of opium.”

In December 24, 2001 I advocated, “Freedom and choice – not prohibition, incarcerations and coerced treatment – are the best salve for a people that has been infantalized and brutalized for too long. In a country with a poor infrastructure, the ‘relatively stable value of opium and its nonperishability means that it can also serve as an important source of savings and investment among traders and cultivators.'”

UPDATE: For those of you who are new to my opinion on America’s foreign policy, please read up on the term “Reeducation.” After you have searched my Articles Archive under the relevant categories, of course.

Debt Commission Dross

Debt, Economy, Military, Politics, Regulation, Ron Paul, Taxation, The State, War, Welfare

As has been said over these pixelated pages, “government commissions are where accountability goes to die.” You get my meaning. For example: Some major cost-cutting measures suggested by Obama’s deficit commission’s preliminary report only kick-in in 2050 and 2075.

Like his father, Rand Paul promises to be a beacon for liberty. Intuitively, Rand cleaves to free-market principles. Here are some salient points Rand has made in response to some silly questions, concerning the deficit commission’s preliminary report, fielded from Face The Nation moderator Bob Schieffer:

“… if you’re serious about the budget, you have to look at the entire budget–military and domestic, if you want to make a dent in the debt.

“…I don’t think I want to raise taxes right now. I think government
is too big and so I think we need to cut spending. The way I see it is, is that you want the private sector to have more money. I want to expand the private sector because we have a– a serious recession so I want to leave more money in the private sector. I want to shrink the ineffective sector of the economy which is the government.”

“… I want to be on the side of reducing spending. So I think really the compromise is where you find the reductions in spending. But I don’t think the compromise is in raising taxes. I mean here, you have to put things in perspective. We now consume at the federal level twenty-five percent of the Gross Domestic Product. [Actually, it is more like 40%, as a lot of spending is off budget] Historically, we were at twenty percent. So we’ve taken five percent away from the private sector. And the private sector is the engine that creates all these jobs. I want to send that five percent back to the private sector.”

“…you should shrink the federal work force and you should make their pay more comparable. Right now the total compensation for government workers versus private workers is almost two to one.”

“…make the tax cuts permanent.”

MORE…

UPDATE III: The Daily Detritus (“You Lie… Lots, W”)

Bush, Iraq, War

Today it’s “W.” I knew George Bush was one sick son of … Mommy Dearest. Barbara Bush, made Genghis B., then a teenage boy, drive her to the hospital after she had miscarried. On her lap this awful woman carried the remains of the expelled fetus, which she showed to boy George.

Did we really need to know this? And why oh why has this dreadful man come out of hiding!

I have no wish to re-litigate his murderous reign. But the idea that Bush was justified in waging war on Iraq is preposterous. The fact that “W” has come out with His Truth to loud applause reflects very badly on his base, which includes very many American historians.

“BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE”:

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.

But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for “the degeneracy of manner and morals” which James Madison warned war would bring—the same “bring ’em on” grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

Hold the CIA responsible for giving in to the War Party’s pressure, if you will. But recognize that the CIA was only obeying the wishes of its masters. The CIA had attempted to resist. Witness the early statements by Vince Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief, who scoffed at the concoction of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. Having come under fire after September 11, the agency gave in to White House pressure to politicize and shape the lackluster information.

Unforgivable? Yes. But consider who the intelligence community takes its corrupt cues from. Perhaps New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka had a point when he wondered, “Who know [sic] what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza.” The National Security Adviser has since September 11 been rocking the intelligence community with her antipathy to the truth. As if her Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter forecasts were not bad enough, on September 8, 2002, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” “That’s just a lie,” an appalled David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security told The New Republic.

In her latest damage control interview with Blitzer, Rice continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was threatening his neighbors when the president pounced, and, as justification for the war, she still makes reference to Saddam’s effort to pursue a nuclear program in … 1991, and to the burying of old centrifuge parts prior to the first Gulf War. Rice, of course, continues to deny the Niger forgery.

Clearly, Whitehall and Washington will not willingly give up their dark secrets. With few exceptions, such as U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich; John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee; and Bob Graham of Florida, the utterly disposable and detestable Democrats have been only too pleased to aid and abet this (heritable) executive dictatorship.

And the media will continue to do what their collective intelligence permits: focus only on the one lie, thus making the lattice more impenetrable.

UPDATE I (Nov. 9): LOOTER. Genghis Bush is now openly exhibiting the pistol his invading army looted off Saddam Hussein. At the very least, this is tacky. Primitive.

UPDATE II (Nov. 10): YOU LIE, W. SPIEGEL ONLINE: “Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has said that ex-US President George W. Bush is not telling the truth in his memoirs, released on Tuesday. Schröder said he never offered his unconditional support for Bush’s aggressive policy against Iraq.

In his memoirs, called “Decision Points” and released on Tuesday, Bush writes that Schröder told him in January 2002 that the US president had his full support when it came to his aggressive Iraq policy. Bush wrote that Schröder indicated he would even stand behind Bush should the US go to war against the country.
On Tuesday evening in Berlin, Schröder denied that he ever made such a promise. “The former American president is not telling the truth,” he said. He said the meeting in question focused on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and whether those responsible were supported by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
“Just as I did during my subsequent meetings with the American president, I made it clear that, should Iraq … prove to have provided protection and hospitality to al-Qaida fighters, Germany would reliably stand beside the US,” Shröder said. “This connection, however, as it became clear during 2002, was false and constructed.”

UPDATE III: LOTS OF LYING. SPIEGEL ONLINE: “With its invasion of Iraq, the United States rid the Iraqi people of a tyrant. But it also broke the law and destroyed tens of thousands of lives. With the release of close to 400,000 Iraq logs by WikiLeaks and the coming publication of George W. Bush’s memoir, it is time to take stock of a war that was catastrophic for Iraq and America’s standing in the world.”

“In early October, there were 500 unidentified bodies in the Baghdad city morgues. According to one doctor, just as many bodies are being delivered to morgues today as in 2007. At least 630 people were shot to death with silenced pistols in the last three months alone. Although most were guards at checkpoints, the victims also included politicians and their relatives, as well as a television reporter who suddenly collapsed in the middle of a broadcast, in broad daylight. The source of the fatal shot could not be located. The atmosphere is eerie.”

“‘I have friends who returned from their self-imposed exile in Damascus last year. Now they’re packing their bags again,’ says Ahmed, a young attorney who is sitting under a ceiling fan in the Shah Bandar Café in downtown Baghdad”