You Can Never Be Ordinary Again

“We did what we could but it was not enough because I found you here. All of you are not just names on the wall, you are alive. Your blood’s on my hands, your screams in my ears, your eyes in my soul. I told you you’d be alright but I lied. Please forgive me. I see your face in my son. I can’t bear the thought. You told me about your wife, your kids, your girl, your mother. Then you died. I should have done more. Your pain is ours. Please, God. I’ll never forget your faces. I can’t, you’re still alive.”

President Obama is right: of Major Hasan we should not “jump to conclusions.” But there is one thing we can know for certain: the horrors of war are not cabined to those who fight in them.

The centrality of war is the intentional killing of human beings: the healer is charged with preserving life, to “abstain from doing harm.” When these worlds collide, when a healer is tasked with applying the healing arts to those deliberately damaged by war, then, as one nurse learned, “you can never be ordinary again.”

The note quoted above, left by another nurse at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, speaks to that. Beyond the “furthur” are more such voices. Many more.

Squirters

Jane Mayer, our correspondent from The Dark Side, has filed a valuable piece with the New Yorker on the increased use of predator drones in the War on Terra. Mayer’s piece makes four important points:

—Drones are a weapon of targeted assassination. Though traditionally disfavored or actually prohibited in this country, targeted assassination has become, with little or no public debate, the primary means by which the US wages the War on Terra.

—Drones are ineffective. Sixteen separate drone strikes targeting one individual killed more than 300 other people before the targeted man was himself killed.

—Drones create enemies. “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

—Drones corrupt and debase our people. From 8000 miles away, Americans observe on video screens “little people scurrying”; they then push a button, and end those people’s lives. People now smugly derided, among those who kill them, as “squirters.”

A Long Way From Semper Fi

US Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North is emerging now as the Charles Manson figure in this hideous scandal that crawls like a plague of maggots on the White House.

Oliver North apparently moved into the White House basement about five years ago and turned himself into something worse than the mad Dr. Frankenstein . . . He was given control of everything he could reach, from the president of Israel and secret US Army bank accounts in Switzerland to the CIA and George Bush and the home phone number of the Chinese defense minister.

Gordon Liddy was the Bad Boy in the Watergate crowd—the meanest of the mean—but all he did was commit a few burglaries, shred some papers and shoot out a street light in front of McGovern for President headquarters on Capitol Hill.

That was in the good old days, when real men were still running the White House and the president roamed the hallways at night with a beaker of gin in his fist, raving and jabbering at huge oil portraits of Abe Lincoln and John Philip Sousa while Henry Kissinger followed him around and made notes.

Gordon Liddy was cruel, but he never did anything even remotely like running a neo-Nazi shadow government out of the White House basement, skimming millions of dollars off the top of illegal arms sales to hostile foreign governments or selling weapons to a hate-crazed international terrorist like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, who was paying North millions of dollars for TOW missiles with one hand while admittedly using the other to finance the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed nearly 300 of North’s people.

Not even Tex Colson sold bombs and rockets to crazed Persian maniacs who used them to kill his own kind—and not even Kissinger would have put his arm around him and said, “Well done.”

This is a long way from “Semper Fi,” and there is a steel bed with D-rings already reserved at Bethesda for the eventual presence of Ollie North.

—Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

All Hail Atlantis

A 5000-year-old sunken city off the southern Peloponnese is the latest candidate for the fabled city of Atlantis. Known as Pavlopetri, and straddling some 30,000 square meters of the ocean floor, it is the first submerged Greek city found that actually predates Plato’s 360 BCE-era references to Atlantis in Critias and Timaeus.

Meanwhile, in their continuing refusal to address climate change, the planet’s industrialized nations are proceeding to slip beneath the waves new cultures, new peoples, new civilizations, new Atlanti. The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, for instance, is expected to disappear into the Pacific Ocean in less than 50 years.

In Dubai recently opened the $1.5 billion, 113-acre Atlantis Hotel, located on the world’s largest artificial island, offering rooms for $26,000 per night. This when roughly 1 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry every night.

Welcome to our world.

The Return Of Frank James

Having been pronounced dead by Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik and various assorted Western intelligence agents, diplomats, and spokespeaks, Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud convened a press conference Sunday to reveal his resurrection and promise a new campaign of mayhem.

Mehsud’s brother, Baitullah, was killed by cowardly back-shooters on August 4, blown in half by a missile directed from the United States, as he lay abed on a rooftop in Pakistan, receiving a drip infusion for a kidney ailment. Pakistani and US officials immediately, jubilantly announced that “fierce infighting” had commenced among Baitullah’s mates over who should succeed him. Hakimullah was several times declared dead in this alleged fighting.

Sunday Hakimullah appeared with his chief deputy, also several times described as dead, numerous top Taliban commanders, the head of the Taliban’s suicide-bomb cell, a prominent Taliban press agent, and an Al Qaeda figure with a $5 million US bounty on his head.

So much for “infighting.”

It Is Happening Again

Not knowing the language, they did not know the people. They did not know what the people loved or respected or feared or hated. They did not recognize hostility unless it was patent, unless it came in a form other than language; the complexities of tone and language were beyond them. Not knowing the language, the men did not know whom to trust. Trust was lethal. They did not know false smiles from true smiles, or if a smile here had the same meaning it had in the States. Not knowing the people, they did not know friends from enemies. They did not know if it was a popular war, or, if popular, in what sense. They did not know if the people viewed the war stoically, as it sometimes seemed, or with grief, as it seemed other times, or with bewilderment or greed or partisan fury. It was impossible to know.

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing the dead, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the myths about the place—tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.

—Going After Cacciato, Tim O’Brien

Obama vs. Osama

In recent news of Al Qaeda and associates:

—The Obama administration claims to have killed on Monday in Somalia an Al Qaeda “ringleader” out of Kenya. In contrast to the George II administration, which preferred to, Bobby Ford-like, strike at its “number two men in Al Qaedas” from afar, with cruise missiles and long-range gunships, this latest miscreant was dispatched by actual human beings who identified him visually.

—In an audio recording, Osama bin Laden, in what appears to be a textbook case of projection, dismissed Obama as “a weakened man,” and then renewed his recent shameless attempt to yoke his free-lance banditry to the Palestinian pursuit of a free and independent state.

—Reports emerging out of Pakistan indicate that the price of goosing the Pakistani military to chase Taliban fighters out of the Swat Valley includes hundreds of civilians murdered by Army troops and dumped like cordwood in the streets. Meanwhile, in neighboring Afghanistan, violence has spiked to levels not seen since the doomed legions of George II first stumbled into that country, nearly eight full years ago.

Obama Takes Mistake To The US Supreme Court

“Open the second shutter, so that more light can come in.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, last words

The United States Supreme Court will decide in October whether to hear the Obama administration’s ill-advised plea that it not be required to comply with a court order mandating the release of photographs documenting torture and abuse inflicted on prisoners in the War on Terra.

The Justice Department had initially declined to pursue the BushCo-era appeal, with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs publicly describing the case as “unwinnable.” However, after intense lobbying from military officials and BushCo holdovers, Obama in May declared “that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.”

Replied Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, the plaintiff in the case: “It’s an awful idea to give violent extremists veto power over the Freedom of Information Act.”

As the linked New York Times report points out, the case turns on one of the very principles behind the establishing of this nation, memorably expressed by William O. Douglas in his dissent in Environmental Protection Agency v. Mink (1973) 410 US 73: “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.”

Looney Tubes

Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has concluded that former Vice President Dick Cheney is no longer in his right mind.

In an interview with Andy Worthington of The Public Record, Wilkerson says: “I’ve come to the conclusion that the man truly is—whether he was that way when I knew him before, when he was Secretary of Defense, I don’t know, that’s not at issue with me any more—the man now is just crazy.”

Wilkerson further refers to former BushCo factotum Alberto Gonzales as “that idiot,” and describes Cheney’s principal War on Terra aide, David Addington, as “a strange person,” known in “the uniformed military [] as ‘Weird David,’” but who was nonetheless allowed to serve as “both the Zawahiri and the bin Laden” of BushCo. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is portrayed as an arrogant and obstreperous power-grabber intent on “CIA-izing” the military, and the entirety of BushCo is damned thusly: “his wasn’t a normal administration.”

Wilkerson notes that although Cheney is now deranged, the media continues to enable him: “Our media loves to keep it going. They love to throw him out there and, you know, stoke the fires.” And that Democratic leaders, terrified of being branded as “soft” on national security, have also capitulated to this man who is, in fact, mad:

They don’t believe they can show another square centimeter of ankle on national security, because the Republicans will eat their lunch, and every time I’m told this I die laughing. I say, your guys are captured by the Sith Lord, Dick Cheney, you’re captured by Rush Limbaugh, whose real radio audience is about 2.2 million, and whose employer, Clear Channel, lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter of this year. I said, when are you gonna wake up? These are kooks. And Cheney is the kook leader. But [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid are such feckless leaders they haven’t got any spine. We have no leadership in the legislative branch on either side of the aisle.

Among The Christians

ABC News is reporting that Lithuania supplied the CIA with facilities for a secret prison in which eight War on Terra prisoners were interned, interrogated, and tortured.

The black site was located on the outskirts of Vilnius, the nation’s capital. Lithuanian officials are said to have agreed to host the facility as part of a campaign to improve relations with the United States. CIA black—or secret—prisons have previously been identified in Thailand, Poland, Afghanistan, Romania, and Morocco. Like the black sites in Romania and Poland, the Lithuanian facility was shut down in 2005, after the Washington Post reported that War on Terra prisoners were suffering in secret confinement in Eastern European prisons.

The Lithuanian government denies the report, while the CIA has blasted it as “irresponsible.”

“The CIA does not publicly discuss where facilities associated with its past detention program may or may not have been located,” said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. “The dangers of airing such allegations are plain. These kinds of assertions could, at least potentially, expose millions of people to direct threat. That is irresponsible.”

The CIA apparently still doesn’t get that it is the serial abuses of George II’s War on Terra, and not the public airing of those abuses, that “expose millions of people to direct threat.”

Bobby Ford Nation

In American history and mythology, the name Robert Ford is covered in infamy. Because, like a coward, he waited until the bandit Jesse James had diverted his attention elsewhere, and then shot him in the back. Even those who had urged and appreciated James’ death found Ford’s act unpalatable. Americans then did not have much use for cowardly back-shooters. Shooting unawares an unarmed man in the back, no matter who he might be, did not comport with the image of who we thought ourselves to be.

Times change, and so, I guess, have we. On August 4, some Bobby Ford sitting in an air-conditioned aerie on some military base somewhere in the United States pushed a button, and, thousands of miles away in Pakistan, another black-bearded bandit, Baitullah Mehsud, was blown in half, as he lay abed receiving a drip infusion for a kidney ailment. Nobody in the States seems to be in much of a ferment over this: how easily we have become accustomed to these aerial predators, though they seem most adept at transforming weddings into abattoirs. Killing a person as he receives medical treatment, that was also once considered, here in the Western world, “not cricket,” but I guess that’s over too. Besides Mehsud, the drone strike also snuffed out the lives of one of Mehsud’s wives, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, and eight other people. But those sorts of folks we just write off, these days, with the Orwellian term “collateral damage.” Give the original Bobby Ford some credit: at least James knew Ford was in his house, and Ford didn’t compound his crime by reducing the rest of the people in the place to bits of bones and bloody jelly.

“His Mischief Shall Return Upon His Own Head”

Behold, he travaileth with iniquity, and hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood. He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.
                                                                                                  —Psalm 7:14-16

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

“Bomb” is the wrong word to use for this new weapon. It is not a bomb. It is not an explosive. It is a poisonous thing that kills people by its deadly radioactive reaction, more than by the explosive force it develops.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. Employment of the atomic bomb in war will take us back in cruelty toward noncombatants to the days of Genghis Khan.

We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will develop it in the future and that atomic bombs will some time be used against us.

One of the professors associated with the Manhattan Project told me that he had hoped the bomb wouldn’t work. I wish that he had been right.
                                           —Fleet Admiral William Leahy, I Was There 

Noisemakers

“There are no places left on earth that are free of human caused-noise 100 percent of the time,” says acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. “That’s history. What we now use as a measure of quiet is the noise-free interval: how long is it quiet without an intrusion?”

Not long. In 1984 Hempton identified 21 areas in the state of Washington where the “noise-free interval” was 15 minutes or more. Today there are but three: one in Olympia National Park; “the other two,” says Hempton, “are protected only by their anonymity.”

Hempton believes there remain but a dozen such places in the entire United States. In Europe there are none.

Together with John Grossman, Hempton has written One Square Inch of Silence; he also maintains a blog. Some are calling his book “the next Silent Spring.” After traveling coast-to-coast across the US, Hempton in his tome concludes that “the extinction rate for quiet places vastly exceeds the rate of species extinction.”

History Lesson

“Can you remember the name of any one of the soldiers who were killed in the Hundred Years’ War? Have you ever tried to find out one single name among them all? No, you can’t; you’ve never tried, have you? To you they’re all anonymous, unknown and less important than the least atom in this paperweight on the table in front of you, less important than the food your bowels digested yesterday. You can see that they died for nothing. For nothing at all. I swear that’s true; you can see that it is. Only life itself is of any importance. Ten thousand years hence I’ll bet youthat this war, all-important as it seems to us now, will be completely forgotten. Possibly a dozen or so learned men may wrangle about it occasionally, and about the dates of the chief hecatombs for which it was famous. Up to the present time that is all that Humanity has ever succeeded in finding memorable about itself . . .” 

—Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey To The End Of The Night 

Man Without A Country

The foghorns of the right expended a considerable amount of time and energy bellowing about the four innocent Uighurs recently released from the Guantanamo gulag and relocated to Bermuda. But somehow they have emitted not a sound about Mohammed el-Gharani, another innocent man lately freed from Guantanamo.

Born in Saudi Arabia of Chadian parents, Gharani spent seven of his 21 years at Guantanamo; he was interned there when only 14. Released from Guantanamo in early June, Gharani is currently marooned in Chad, where he was dumped by the US government. He does not speak the language, had never before set foot in Chad, has been told by government officials that they’re not sure they consider him Chadian, and has not been able to obtain a Chadian ID card. Yet he describes himself as “happy.” 

“Walking around with no guards, with no shackles, it’s beautiful,” he says.

“If you’ve been in shackles for seven years every day, you will go to Chad. You will go anywhere.”

No Fear

The New York Times this week dispatched a reporter to Hawaii to determine whether the fear merchants of North Korea and the American right had succeeded in scarifying the islanders.

Seems a Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri, reported on June 17 that, according to an “analysis” by the Japanese Defense Ministry, “it is believed” North Korea “might” fire a long-range ballistic missile “toward” Hawaii, “maybe” around July 4.

The shadowy, assumption-riddled Yomiuri piece seems primarily geared towards instilling fear in the Japanese people, spinning scenarios of the missile landing near the Japanese island of Okinawa, or dumping a first-stage booster over the Chugoku or Shikoku regions of Japan. But it was the Hawaiian speculation that was immediately latched onto by US-oriented fear limpets—despite the fact that the article explicitly states that any missile must land at least 500 kilometers short of the main Hawaiian islands.

And so, people prone to flogging and/or feeling fear having been in a flap for nearly a week now, the Times set out to discover if the Hawaiians themselves were wringing their hands and running for shelter.

No.

Ce Pauvre Mort

While the governments and the ruling classes of Europe and the United States were ignoring, enabling, or supporting fascists, George Orwell was fighting them in Spain. There he took a fascist bullet in the throat. Later, back in England, and on the continent of Europe, Orwell lost family, friends, and property to fascist bombs and fascist bullets.

Yet after the war, Orwell wanted no part of the war-crimes tribunals convened to try and punish now-vanquished fascists. In a remarkable essay published November 9, 1945, Orwell concluded: “Revenge Is Sour.”

As people on the left continue to press for war-crimes tribunals to try and punish members of the now-vanquished Bush administration, Orwell’s essay, I think, deserves some attention.

The Feeling Begins

There is no foolproof way to identify potential serial killers. There do, however, exist certain indicators. One is a tendency, as a youth, to abuse, torture, kill small animals.

 

That’s certainly the way the serial killer who recently occupied the White House began. Long before he set the entire world aflame, long before he methodically, sometimes mockingly, put people to death in Texas, long before he blithely branded on the ass his Yale classmates, young George W. Bush liked to mosey on out to his backyard there in Midland, and while away an afternoon blowing up frogs.

 

“We were terrible to animals,” chortled boyhood Bush bud Terry Throckmorton in a 2000 piece in the New York Times. Seems a dip behind the Bush residence would turn into a small lake after a rain, filling with thousands of frogs. “Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Throckmorton recalled. “Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”

Guantanamo Guard: “The Stuff I Did And The Stuff I Saw Was Just Wrong”

Army Specialist Brandon Neely arrived in Guantanamo on January 7, 2002, “while the cages of Camp X-Ray were still being welded.”

For the next six months, Neely witnessed “the arrival of the detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, possible isolation regime of the first six children in GTMO, [and] utter lack of preparation for guarding individuals detained during the War on Terror.”

Neely has now provided detailed accountings of all of the above to both The Guantanamo Testimonials Project of the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, and to the Associated Press. Brandon Neely has become a one-man truth and reconciliation commission:

I would greatly encourage any other military members who spent time at Guantanamo at any time to tell their story of what they went through, good or bad. It’s important that our stories are told. It’s history, and the people have the right to know. It’s a hard decision to tell your side of the story when you’re not sure of how it will be received, but it’s the right thing to do.

BushCo’s Guantanamo Recordkeeping: Literally Kafkaesque

(A reality to keep in mind, when impatient for the Obama administration to fix all the freakeries of the War On Terra now, at once. Originally posted January 30, 2009, at Never In Our Names.)

“I fear your case will end badly. You are held to be guilty. Your case will perhaps never get beyond a lower Court. Your guilt is supposed, for the present, at least, to be proved.” 
                                                                                     –Franz Kafka, The Trial

Reading the report in Sunday’s Washington Post about the sloppy, negligent, even contemptuous record-keeping in the BushCo White House involving the cases of those interned in Guantanamo, I was struck by the feeling I had encountered such surreal legal dishevelment somewhere before. A quick trip to my library, I discovered I was right. The Post article bore an eerie resemblance to passages from Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

Find here juxtaposed excerpts from Kafka’s work with the reality of what officials in the Obama administration have found as they attempt to arrive at a reasoned determination of how to resolve the cases of those people BushCo imprisoned in his War on Terra.  

As you consider the Post report, and your mind gyres out to encompass all the other “legal” abuses that have for the past too-many years occupied human-rights blogs, I think you’ll see what’s clear to me: the people in BushCo did not regard The Trial as a warning, a plea, a proscription, even dark farce. They used it as a fucking blueprint.

The Graveyard Of Empires

General David Petraeus, the dude John McCain said during the 2008 presidential campaign we should all regard as a sure-as-shootin’ infallible oracle on all things military, has, according to the Washington Post, pronounced Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires,” and more or less counseled the Obama administration that it cannot hope to “win” in that region.

In addition to more combat troops, Petraeus called for “a surge in civilian capacity” to help rebuild villages, train local police forces, tackle corruption in the Afghan government and reduce the country’s thriving opium trade. He also suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,” he said. “We cannot take that history lightly.”

French, Germans Balk At Increasing Afghan Commitment; McGovern Warns “Military Power No Solution”

Vice President Joe Biden traveled this weekend to Munich to cajole Europeans into committing more troops to Afghanistan, while NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer Saturday complained: “I’m frankly concerned when I hear the United States is planning a major commitment for Afghanistan but other allies are already ruling out doing more.”

France and Germany, however, which, pace Russia, sacrificed in the 20th Century more of their citizens’ lives to military madness than any other Western countries, do not seem much inclined to dispatch more bodies to be shot and blown to shreds in a region that challenged even Genghis Khan, and in recent decades saw the British and Russians beaten like gongs.

Cheney: “We Don’t Need No Stinking Pardons”

Vice President Darth Cheney, in the latest stop on his “Everything I Did Was Right, Legal, And Just” tour, has  informed Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press that there exists no reason for George II to issue pre-emptive pardons to save the bacon of those who authorized and/or inflicted torture in the War on Terra.

Darth further opined that no one in the Central Intelligence Agency behaved unlawfully during any “interrogation” because all always proceeded according to the administration’s “legal” opinions.

Finally, Darth hallucinated that the “intelligence” his minions obtained via waterboarding proved reliable and valuable because the waterboarders acted with “great discrimination” and were “people who know what they’re doing.”

A New Zealand paper’s expanded treatment of daffy Darth’s AP chat notes that the soon-to-be-ex-VP believes all CIA personnel are in the clear because “I don’t have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal.” And if he says it, it must be true, right?

Darth defended both the George II decision to torture, and the unlawful warrantless spying program:

Cheney said the administration rightly used programs to intercept communications of suspected terrorists and used tough methods to interrogate high-value detainees.

Darth warned that the incoming Obama administration must not only continue to muck about in Iraq, but also get busy in Iran and North Korea; the latter nation, he decreed, is both busily producing nuclear material, and helping the Syrians do the same.

Darth praised Obama’s retention of Robert Gates as Defense Secretary, which indicates to me that the man should probably be fired at once.

Finally, Darth argued that George II should not be blamed for our current financial morass, lying that “I don’t think anybody saw it coming.”

With Government MIA, Pakistani Quake Victims Obtain Aid From “Terrorists”

With government aid sporadic or non-existent, survivors of the October 29 6.4-magnitude earthquake that rocked the impoverished Pakistani province of Baluchistan are receiving assistance from local Islamist groups, some of which the US has condemned as “terrorist organizations.” Within hours of the quake, people from Jamaat-ud-Dawa—condemned by the US as the political wing of the Kashmiri liberation outift Laskhar-e-Taiba—were distributing blankets, food, milk, and biscuits, promised to return soon with tents, and pledged to construct 1000 temporary homes.

“We do not believe in politics,” a local Jamaat-ud-Dawa official told AFP, “but to serve the people when they need it the most.”

Through 2007, the Bush administration had awarded Pakistan more than $10 billion in overt War-on-Terra military aid, and an estimated additional $5 billion in covert funds. To assist the tens of thousands
of Pakistanis injured and displaced by the October 29 quake, some of whom are now freezing to death or perishing of sickness in the frigid winter air, the Bush administration has pledged $1 million. This is approximately four times the suspected amount Sarah Palin recently spent on clothes, accessories, jewelry, luggage, and spray-on tans for herself, her husband, and her brood.

“These Three Men Were Sacrificed To Show The United States That Canada Was Doing Something”

A Canadian inquiry has determined that false and inflammatory information passed by Canadian officials to the United States contributed to the detention and torture of three Canadian men in Syria.

Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati, and Muayyed Nureddin, Canadian citizens all, were arrested while visiting Syria, then imprisoned and tortured there as suspected “Islamic extremists,” “terrorists,” “Al Qaeda procurement officers,” and the like.

The Syrians acted upon information provided by the United States, some of it originating in Canada. The Canadian information, the inquiry concluded, was in the main unsupported by evidence; in some instances, the “evidence” concerned entirely different people.

Although the Canadian inquiry was not assigned to review the actions of the three men, the head of the inquiry, former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, announced at a press conference Tuesday that the three men were innocent of any wrongdoing.

James Kafieh, a lawyer involved in the inquiry, bluntly concluded that “these three men were sacrificed to show the United States that Canada was doing something.”

Operation Enduring Fiefdom “Doomed”; “We Have Assumed The Place Of The Soviets”

French officials mortified by President Nikolas Sarkozy’s suicidal embrace of Operation Enduring Fiefdom—George II’s adventure in Afghanistan—have leaked to the uppity French weekly Le Canard Enchaine a classified cable relating that the British envoy to Afghanistan has concluded that “American strategy is doomed to fail.”

Meanwhile, the former deputy chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center has admitted that a trio of Afghani “warlords,” formerly supported and supplied by the Reagan administration in the 1980s proxy war against the Soviet Union, today—again—control much of Afghanistan, and that we here in the US “have assumed the place of the Soviets.”

Water Music

The New York Times is reporting that Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft participated in meetings convened to discuss which methods of torture should be inflicted on Abu Zubaydah, the “insane, certifiable” Al Qaeda “gofer” who has, in our names, been imprisoned and abused for more than six years.

Senator Carl Levin provided the Times with documents containing Bush administration responses to a set of detailed questions submitted by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is belatedly examining the treatment of those imprisoned in the War On Terra.

The documents disclose that Rice, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft all met to discuss techniques of torture that were subsequently inflicted on Zubaydah. It appears that Zubaydah’s torture was “orally” approved at the highest levels, prior to the administration’s drafting of written, secret memos that purported to provide “legal” authorization for interrogation techniques that transgress domestic and international law.

Guerre Mener N’est Que Dampnacion

With two-thirds of his people opposing him, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is stubbornly increasing his commitment to George II’s War on Terra, dispatching additional French troops to Afghanistan to participate in Operation Enduring Fiefdom.

In late August, France buried ten paratroopers ambushed and killed in Kabul province. The two-day battle that resulted in their deaths seems to have been something of a fiasco. One soldier told Le Monde that his unit was equipped only with assault weapons and that he and his fellows exhausted their ammunition during the attack. NATO commanders seem to have neglected to send reinforcements or provide air support. Confronted with charges that the slain French troops were too young and inexperienced, the French defense minister responded only that a professional army is “inevitably” composed of young soldiers. The Taliban commander who devised the ambush stated that but for the arrival of night, his men would have “killed every one of the [French] soldiers.” Twenty-one French soldiers were wounded; eleven of the most gravely injured have been flown back to France.

The Afghan ambush was the costliest single military loss for France since 1983 . . . which also happens to be the last time the French rashly trotted at the heels of the US into an ill-advised Middle East conflict. On that occasion, 58 French soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber who drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a parking garage beneath the French barracks in West Beirut. Nearly simultaneously, 241 American Marines were killed in a similar suicide bombing at the American barracks at Beirut airport. Over the succeeding days, bodies had to be pulled out under sniper fire. Shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan turned tail and ran, withdrawing all US troops from Lebanon. A complete and total surrender conveniently forgotten whenever American righties commence their mendacious chants about US “retreats” in the face of “terrorism.”