June 17, 2008 archive

About that “September 10 mindset”

Since this bullshit line is being trotted out again in an attempt to scare people into who-knows-what, let’s look at what a September 10 mindset really means and relates to.

Bill Clinton’s transition team warned the Bush administration about al Qaeda in 2000: Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act.

They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush’s national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice’s deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

Four at Four

  1. The Taliban is gaining in Afghanistan. There has been a massive offensive by the Taliban that seized seven villages. According to the Washington Post, “an estimated 500 Taliban fighters swept into several villages in the Arghandab district… The Taliban’s seizure of the villages comes three days after an audacious prison break at a Kandahar jail, in which an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 prisoners, many of them Taliban fighters, escaped.”

    The Associated Press reports that in preparation for their offensive, the Taliban mined villages and destroyed bridges. “More than 700 families — meaning perhaps 4,000 people or more — had fled the Arghandab district 10 miles northwest of Kandahar city”, according to Afghan police. The Arghandab district is “a lush region filled with grape and pomegranate groves that the Soviet army could never conquer”. The NY Times notes that “control of Arghandab is considered critical to control of the city of Kandahar and has been the source of forces that have seized the city in the past.”

    Over the past year, NATO commanders on the ground in Afghanistan have pleaded for additional troops, but with the U.S. tied up in Iraq the occupation is still undermanned to counter the Taliban and hold territorial gains. Additional NATO forces are being shifted from Kabul to Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, because, according to the Canwest News Service, Taliban forces massing on Kandahar doorstep.

  2. In Militants found recruits among Guantanamo’s wrongly detained, Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers reports that the Bush administration has fueled Islamic jihad.

    Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

    U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however – after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers – he’d made connections to high-level militants.

    In fact, he’d become a Taliban leader.

    In the McClatchy investigation, they “found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam – thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them – and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.”

Four at Four continues with evidence that Rumsfeld planned for the use of torture and the CIA advised the military how to torture, Iqbal v Ashcroft is now before the Supreme Court, and a bonus story about the Mundaneum. Oh, in case you missed this over at Daily Kos, Kagro X writes:

There will be no accounting for this “administration.” Not now, not in the 111th Congress, and not under President Obama.

What Ever Became of Democracy?

In looking back at the Bush debacle, one thing stands out.  It would never have happened, at least not so blatantly and egregiously, had there been a healthy opposition party in America.  Up until 2000 there was at least the illusion of the Democrats as a party in opposition to the Republicans, however ineffective.  And the Republicans, though always venal, have never been so nakedly predatory, never so in-your-face ‘I’m going to take your shit and you’re going to like it’, never so openly disdainful of the Constitution and the law.  Somewhere along the line, the notion of the Democrats as the voice of sanity counter-balancing Republican lunacy has become just so much political vaporware.  What happened?    

Rotting-Corpse-of-the-Democratic-Party

How Much Change Can America Take?

Over the last eight years America has experienced a revolutionary change. To overstate it only slightly, a change from relatively free and democratic society to a proto-fascist state. A state where the government can search your home without telling you, can seize your medical and financial records at will, spy on every communication you have without a warrant…etc. etc. etc. All of the changes under the new “reality” after 9/11. Americas by and large have accepted these incredibly harmful changes without much fuss, relatively speaking. Of course, no one  really told them what was happening behind their backs. 9/11 plunged them into shock, the Bushco Homeland Security State was established while they were still in shock and The Bush Propaganda of Fear Machine took over from there. Passive “patriotic” acceptance of whatever “our government” wanted to do was the order of the day….no matter how heinous. Change was forced upon them and (other than the “looney left”) they complied and adjusted and accepted it.

Will they now be able to accept well publicized, positive change, the kind of change that Obama is promising with equal equanimity? Especially with the fearmongers whispering in their ears?

Obama today

The Dream of the Proud

The Dream of the Proud.  It’s the belief in American exceptionalism, it’s the conviction that America possesses inherent moral superiority, it’s the assurance that we are a special nation blessed by God and are thus above reproach.  The Dream of the Proud has been expressed in many ways and has had many names.  It’s been called Manifest Destiny, it’s been called the American Way, it’s been called the Project for the New American Century.  

The Dream of the Proud is a deadly and dangerous Dream.  It’s generated American aggression for more than two centuries.  It triggered America’s invasion of Canada in 1813, it triggered America’s attack on Mexico in 1845, it triggered America’s genocidal conquest of Naïve Americans, it triggered our seizure of Cuba and the Philippines from Spain in 1898, it triggered murderous American alliances with tyrants whose names are synonymous with evil-Batista, Somoza, Suharto, Pinochet, Marcos, the Shah of Iran.

The Dream of the Proud has inflicted misery and suffering on the poor and the powerless from Nicaragua to Najaf, but most Americans still haven’t awakened from that depraved Dream.  John McCain sure as hell hasn’t, neither have most Republicans.  

The Dream of the Proud is deadlier and more dangerous than ever, it’s been incorporated and privatized, marketed and militarized, it pervades American society and culture, it’s the foundation of foreign and domestic policy in Washington, so we’re trapped in it.  The Dream of the Proud has yet to end, it may never end, it’s manifested in NAFTA, in CAFTA, in SOFA.  It’s pervasive in the programming of NBC, CBS, and ABC, it’s the soma of the corporate oligarchy’s Brave New World, Americans cannot escape from it, our politics is immersed in it, our politicians live and breathe it.  

For decades, too many Americans have turned away from reality, they won’t listen to the pleas for justice of the Third World victims our corporations exploit, most Americans still believe we are morally superior to other nations, despite the brazen conquest of Iraq by war criminals who are still in power five years later, despite the damning evidence of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, despite the systematic ethnic cleansing of New Orleans, despite a nationwide orgy of crime and corruption throughout our political, economic, and defense establishments unsurpassed in depravity since the days of Nero and Caligula.    

Meet the Governor of the 51st State, my Nephew Nick Messenger

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Lots of good news from Ohio lately.  Several polls now show Obama in the lead.  I think this is largely attributable to the “Youth Vote”.  Obama has gotten those pesky kids interested in politics and I’m very proud to say that my nephew (actually grand-nephew) is one.

Every year since 1936, 1,400 Ohio High School Seniors travel to Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio to participate in Buckeye Boys State, a nine-day hands-on experience in the operation of the democratic form of government, the organization of political parties, and the relationship of one to the other in shaping Ohio government.

For the first time ever, Bowling Green can officially claim one of its own as Governor of Buckeye Boys State.

Nicholas Messenger, a rising senior at Bowling Green High School and a representative of the Federalist party for BBS, is set to be inaugurated at this evening’s ceremony at Anderson Arena.

 

Pony Party w/poll

Howdy!  

Please take the poll…

BREAKING: ‘Disposable Heroes’:

Look I’m so F**KING PISSED OFF AGAIN, I really can’t wrap my mind around the words to describe this BULLS**T!!

I may, or may not, add more, or just let comments take charge.

Taking A Stand: Sergeant Matthis Chiroux

Warning: Run on sentence ahead

Do you know how much courage it takes to join the military after the events of September 11, 2001 have affected you and your patriotic feelings to HELP any way you can the country you love, then ship out to Iraq, work your way to the rank of Sergeant, find out that both yourself and your comrades in arms come to learn that this war you are fighting with your life on the line to be nothing more than contrived BullShit, then come home (thankfully not in a coffin that Americans can’t see on TV) and then be told you have to go back?

I sure as hell don’t!  I have absolutely NO Friggin’ Idea what that would be like.

Docudharma Times Tuesday June 17



666 The Number of The Beast

668 The Neighbor of The Beast




Tuesday’s Headlines:

Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir

Police out as torch hits Xinjiang  

Taliban Seizes Seven Afghan Villages

Simon Mann, coup plotter, gets his day in court

He’s black, and he’s back! Private enterprise saves southern Africa’s rhino from extinction

Amsterdam coffee shops say tobacco ban is blow to business

The brutal biography of Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov

‘Historic meeting’ planned for Israeli and Syrian leaders

Iran to continue uranium enrichment work

Mexican farmers angry over FDA salmonella probe

Booming, China Faults U.S. Policy on the Economy

By EDWARD WONG

Published: June 17, 2008


BEIJING – Not long ago, Chinese officials sat across conference tables from American officials and got an earful.

The Americans scolded the Chinese on mismanaging their economy, from state subsidies to foreign investment regulations to the valuation of their currency. Your economic system, the Americans strongly implied, should look a lot more like ours.

But in recent weeks, the fingers have been wagging in the other direction. Senior Chinese officials are publicly and loudly rebuking the Americans on their handling of the economy and defending their own more assertive style of regulation.

USA

Report Questions Pentagon Accounts

Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On


By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, June 17, 2008; Page A01  


A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

Detainees recruited for jihad

Third of five parts GARDEZ, Afghanistan – Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping.

By Tom Lasseter

McClatchy Newspapers

Third of five parts


GARDEZ, Afghanistan – Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al-Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the next year, however – after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers – he’d made connections to high-level militants.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

State of the Onion IX

Ultimately, being invisible doesn’t help anybody, especially not yourself.  Visibility comes back when one develops one’s voice.  If you speak up, people stare.  While they stare, it helps to have something to say.

If people are going to give you a podium, you should put it to use.

Art Link

Colors

People

I don’t know

exactly when

I became one of us

if I first decided

I was

or maybe it was when

someone called me

one of “those people”

but I can’t deny

I have a people

I belong to

We all do

whether we deny it

or not

As one of my people

I can not sit idly by

while my people

are disparaged

degraded

humiliated

dismissed

We are not jokes

Our lives are not jokes

What we have

to put up with

from other people

vicious other people

is no joke

My people

are teachers

are artists

are thinkers

are lesbians

are writers

are gender-variant

and so much

ever so much

so god damned much

more

my people

all my people

I cannot

be divided

against myself

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–February 15, 2006

Please join us on the inside to celebrate, venerate, regenerate and/or motivate our muses.  Currently mine is a little constipated when I would prefer it be syncopated.

WaPo: Pentagon Blamed Military for Own Torture Policy

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.  

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