14 Years of Hysteria, Stupidity and Waste for No Good Reason

Some of us even predicted it back then.

Reader JB at TPM:

To me the most notable thing looking back on 9/11 13 years later is how crystal clear it is now that it was an anomalous event and not, contrary to all the rhetoric of the time, the dawn of a new era of domestic terrorism. The fact that basically nothing analogous – meaning a domestic terror attack planned and executed by foreigners or local cells funded by Al Queda or like groups -- has happened in the 13 years since is pretty incredible and unexpected. Perhaps more surprising still is that the only viable explanation for the dearth of attacks is that terrorists motivated to carry out attacks inside the United States do not exist.

We know this because, if they did exist, at least in any remotely capable form, they would have succeeded in carrying out dozens or hundreds of attacks by now because it is simply impossible to completely stop motivated terrorists from carrying out attacks in a free and open society with endless targets and no-questions-asked access to automatic firearm.

Could an attack happen tomorrow? Of course. But once every 13 years would still be an anomalous event, not a systemic threat. Remember the talk as the rubble smoldered of hundreds, maybe thousands, of “sleeper cells” lurking out there, waiting to strike? Well, we now know there were none at the time, and apparently none were formed even after we have fought two wars and killed thousands of innocent civilians since 9/11. One would think our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etcetera would spawn at least a few motivated and effective enemies bent on revenge through domestic attacks. Apparently not.

So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights. I’m not saying this was obvious when 9/11 happened. Far from it. I was just as freaked out as anyone else at the time and I think it would have been foolish to ignore the threat. But the fact is if we had we would have been far better off, because as it turns out there were not hundreds of other Mohammed Attas out there in the wings. In fact, there were none, at least not with any meaningful capabilities (which would exclude folks like the shoe bomber and the Tsarnaev brothers). We know this to be the case because if such people did exist we would have been hit 100 times over by now. It is too damn easy to sow terror and chaos with motivation and even a below average IQ. Think Newtown or D.C. sniper.

A few sad teenagers have committed far, far more domestic terror attacks than all the Islamic militants in the world over the past decade, and that is an outcome I think very few would have predicted, myself included, in the aftermath of 9/11. I’m sure the Rudy Guiliani set would love to take credit for the lack of attacks, but I think any serious expert on stopping domestic terrorism attacks would agree that the only way to bat as close to 1000 as we have is if your enemy is fictional.

Rich White People Are Evil in So Many Ways

Think about it.  Every single terrible thing that has happened in this country has been perpetrated by rich white people, from slavery and native genocide through 9/11 (yes, bin Laden is the spawn of an obscenely rich white family), the Iraq Catastrophe and the Great Wall Street Economic Fuckery.

Chris Hedges at TruthDig:

Michael Kraus, Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, social scientists at the University of California, did research that led them to conclude that the poor have more empathy than the rich. The poor, they argued, do not have the ability to dominate their environments. They must build relationships with others to survive. This requires that they be able to read the emotions of those around them and respond. It demands that they look after each other. And this makes them more empathetic. The rich, who can control their environments, do not need to bother with the concerns or emotions of others. They are in charge. What they want gets done. And the longer they live at the center of their own universe, the more callous, insensitive and cruel they become.

The rich white family has an unrivaled aptitude for crime. Members of rich white families run corporations into the ground (think Lehman Brothers), defraud stockholders and investors, sell toxic mortgages as gold-plated investments to pension funds, communities and schools, and then loot the U.S. Treasury when the whole thing implodes. They steal hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street through fraud and theft, pay little or no taxes, almost never go to jail, write laws and regulations that legalize their crimes and then are asked to become trustees at elite universities and sit on corporate boards. They set up foundations and are admired as philanthropists. And if they get into legal trouble, they have high-priced lawyers and connections among the political elites to get them out.

You have to hand it to rich white families. They steal with greater finesse than anyone else. If you are a poor black teenager and sprint out of a CVS with a few looted bottles of shampoo, you are likely to be shot in the back or sent to jail for years. If there were an Olympiad for crime, rich white families would sweep up all the medals; blacks would be lucky to come within a mile of the first elimination trial. I don’t know why black people even try to compete in this area. They are, by comparison, utter failures as criminals. The monarchs of crime are rich white people, who wallow in their pilfered wealth while locking away in prisons a huge percentage of poor men of color.

Rich white families are also the most efficient killers on the planet. This has been true for five centuries, starting with the conquest of the Americas and the genocide against Native Americans, and continuing through today’s wars in the Middle East. Rich white families themselves don’t actually kill. They are not about to risk their necks on city streets or in Iraq. They hire people, often poor, to kill for them. Rich white families wanted the petroleum of Iraq and, by waving the flag and spewing patriotic slogans, got a lot of poor kids to join the military and take the oil fields for them. Rich white people wanted endless war for the benefit of their arms industry and got it by calling for a war on terror. Rich white people wanted police to use lethal force against the poor with impunity and to arrest them, swelling U.S. prisons with 25 percent of the world’s prison population, so they set up a system of drug laws and militarized police departments to make it happen.

 Read the whole amazing thing.

AynRandy is a "disgusting piece of work"

You could come to that conclusion about the Tribble-Toupeed One from any number of directions, but this time Digby nails him for abandoning simple human decency.

Oh this is clever. Rand Paul isn't trusted by the GOP base because of his alleged (and I do mean alleged) isolationism. But he's one of them. And he can prove it:

While speaking with Iowa-based radio host Jan Mickelson yesterday, Paul criticized efforts by the U.S. and the United Nations to settle Iraqi refugees in the country.

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That goes straight to the diseased moral center of the right wing. Sure, these Iraqis may have helped the US when it illegally invaded their country and turned themselves into pariahs among their own people but fuck 'em. They're Mooslims, amirite?  And anyway, we always knew all that stuff about Saddam and the rape rooms and "let freedom reign" was a pile of crapola, right? We never gave a damn about any of those people. Let 'em rot over there.

If you didn't know that Rand Paul was a disgusting piece of work before, it's surely clear by now.

QOTD

Josh Marshall:

But the truth is painful and clear: Iraq wasn't a good faith mistake. It was a calamity based on lies and willful deceptions. Much of that was clear at the time. It's all clear now.

QOTD: War and Patriotism

Juan Cole at The Nation:

People who actually love the United States want to rescue it from foreign adventurism and improve the health and welfare of its people. They would want to discourage bigotry and black-and-white thinking, which makes war so much more thinkable. And they would eschew wars of aggression, a daisy chain that brings more wars in its wake.

American Sucker

We'll be rid of racism before we're rid of jingoism.

Rude Pundit:

American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.

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So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.

It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.

And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.

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We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us.  We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.

"But the end of a war is just the beginning of our obligations to those who serve in our name"

The best thing we can do for veterans is to get out of the warmaking business, Mr. President.



Full transcript here.

Fourth of July Songs

Peter Rothberg at The Nation:

Not enough Americans are aware that much of what the country considers our patriotic culture, especially our iconic music, was created by artists and writers of decidedly left-wing sympathies. Three years ago, I posted a list of what I called the Top Twelve Most Patriotic Songs Ever. I’ve rethought those selections, consulted with experts and can now present my heavily revised and highly debatable list of Top Ten July 4th Songs, presented in random order. To me, these songs, taken together, help distill the American experience and make clear both what’s great about the US and what still needs critical attention.

As President Obama sinks us back into the Iraq quagmire, here's a reminder of the last time we got into a 58,000-dead-Americans catastrophe 300 "advisors" at a time.

Who Stands With the Real Nelson Mandela?

Aviva Shen has a great piece at Think Progress on the real Nelson Mandela, but first, Wonkette brings us a fact about Mandela that manages to do the impossible: make him even more incredible in our eyes.

Seriously, go read the whole thing right now, but then come back here because you will definitely want to know about this other thing he did in 1996.

South Africa’s new abortion law passed its final legislative hurdle today, clearing the way for President Nelson Mandela to replace one of the world’s toughest abortion laws with one of the most liberal. [...]

The bill will cancel an existing law allowing abortion only in the case of rape, incest or immediate danger to the mother’s mental or physical health. Under the new law, women and girls will be entitled to a state-financed abortion on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy if they have no private medical insurance, and, subject to widely defined conditions, for a further eight weeks.

We don’t really have any jokes to make about this because we are basically just in awe of his awesomeness. While the whole world (okay, except for wingnut commenters, but what can you expect from them?) is being mostly gracious and humble about Mandela’s passing and saying — rightly — that he was a great role model and an inspiration, we hope that’s actually true and that what he actually did and believed and said might serve as an actual example for other leaders to actually follow. Just a thought.

That's just the first of the reasons very few American politicians - and absolutely not a single repug - has the right to claim to be an admirer of the real Mandela: 

In the desire to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s life — an iconic figure who triumphed over South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime — it’s tempting to homogenize his views into something everyone can support. This is not, however, an accurate representation of the man.

Mandela was a political activist and agitator. He did not shy away from controversy and he did not seek — or obtain — universal approval. Before and after his release from prison, he embraced an unabashedly progressive and provocative platform. As one commentator put it shortly after the announcement of the freedom fighter’s death, “Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Over the next few days you will try so, so hard to make him something he was not, and you will fail. You will try to smooth him, to sandblast him, to take away his Malcolm X. You will try to hide his anger from view.”

As the world remembers Mandela, here are some of the things he believed that many will gloss over.

1. Mandela blasted the Iraq War and American imperialism.

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2. Mandela called freedom from poverty a “fundamental human right.”

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3. Mandela criticized the “War on Terror” and the labeling of individuals as terrorists, even Osama Bin Laden, without due process.

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4. Mandela called out racism in America.

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5. Mandela embraced some of America’s biggest political enemies.

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6. Mandela was a die-hard supporter of labor unions.

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With the possible exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, there's not a member of Congress who would stand up and say, in reference to these seven issues, "I stand with Mandela." 

Alison Lundergan Grimes sure as fuck would not.

QOTD

Charles Pierce:

And there you have it. We are going to kill people in Syria out of pure imperial dick-waving. These people will have fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and fifth-cousins-once-removed, and every one of those people will hate us until the day we die, and they will teach their children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and fifth-cousins-once-removed to hate us, too, forever. This is not "therapeutic." This is Vietnam, 1962. And to set such things in motion just to prove we still have sufficient national penis to do it is the dumbest reason for making war since the last one devised by anyone who worked for George W. Bush, the ungelded fool.

When Do the War Criminals Manning Exposed Go on Trial?

 The crime isn't the crime; exposing the crime is the crime.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I don’t object to Manning being charged with a crime. I certainly strongly object to the way he was treated in prison. And I think the idea that his leaks merit a 35-year sentence is absurd. And as I said before, it’s particularly appalling when you consider the Obama administration’s “look forward not back” approach on torture. It’s hard to square this life-ruining sentence with the fact that no torturer was even considered worthy of being charged. I’d also say that at this point that it’s pretty hard to the American government to complain when other countries refuse to extradite whistleblowers.

Charles Pierce cuts to the heart of it.

The Man Who Might Have Made A Difference

I don't subscribe to the "Great Man" theory of history. Without Columbus, some other European would have established the principle of "massacre the natives and steal their land" in the Americas. Without Washington, the colonists would still have beaten the redcoats.  Without Lincoln, the Union would have ended slavery. Without Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would still have lost.

But.

Ten years ago, one man might have stopped the Iraq clusterfuck before it got out of control. He was killed before he got the chance.

On August 19, 2003, Sergio Veira de Mello died - slowly and painfully - in the rubble of bomb in Bagdad.

A lot of powerful groups wanted to stop de Mello: al Qaeda, for cooperating with the U.S.;  Dick Cheney's neocon cabal, for trying to cut short their Excellent Iraq Adventure; Big Oil, for interfering with their Iraq oil fields takeover; Blackwater, for almost denying them hundreds of billions in security contracts.

al-Qaeda got the blame, justly or not. But of all the ironies and tragedies inherent in de Mello's death, the one that cut deepest and got me screaming in rage at the television was part of the heroic attempt to rescue him.

Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2010, on the HBO documentary "Sergio.":

As Sergio Vieira de Mello lay dying under the bombed rubble of the United Nations compound in Baghdad almost seven years ago, two U.S. soldiers worked to dig him out.

One admired the selfless way Vieira de Mello kept asking if everyone else was okay -- several U.N. staffers had been killed; dozens injured. The other soldier was disturbed by Vieira de Mello's steadfast refusal to accept his offer to pray with him. "I don't want to pray," Vieira de Mello reportedly told the reservist, Andre Valentine. "[Expletive] God. Please, just get me out."

"He really failed me," Valentine says in the new documentary "Sergio." "God sent two angels . . . and [Vieira de Mello] didn't believe in me. He didn't believe in the miracle."

Listening to the two soldiers talk about their attempt to save Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative in Iraq, is what helps lift "Sergio" from straightforward hagiography into a more gauzy and artful rumination on the miscommunications and opposite worldviews that culminated in the American war in Iraq. "Sergio," former war correspondent Greg Barker's film based on Samantha Power's biography ("Chasing the Flame"), airs Thursday night on HBO.

The soldiers who squeezed themselves into that hole did not (could not) know the complexity of the man they spent hours trying to rescue. Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian, was worldly in a style the movie celebrates -- son of a diplomat, Marxist in college, participant in the 1968 Paris riots; a multilingual, lifelong U.N. employee with a brilliant resume; a dashing philanderer; a man distrustful of religions, dictators and foreign policies that give off a whiff of imperialism.

"Sergio" takes care of all that, embroidering upon the now legendary narrative of Vieira de Mello as a serious and heroic man; a handsome and coolly charismatic peacekeeper (there are several references to Vieira de Mello as a cross between RFK and 007) who, if he'd not been tragically killed, might have made a real difference in rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq.

Motherfucking freakazoid wasted precious, irretrievable minutes trying to force mythology down de Mello's throat instead of saving his life. And the motherfucker brags about it. Blames and attacks de Mello, a man who, if he had lived, might have prevented the deaths in combat of thousands of Valentine's fellow soldiers.

Why are we atheists so angry?  Because of shit like this.

The Crime of What We Did to PFC Manniing

First, Gary Younge nailed it

Gary YoungeVerified account @garyyounge

 

Exposing war crimes gets you 130 years. http://bit.ly/13w4610 
Committing them gets you a library. http://bit.ly/Mp2ljA  #Manning
6:41 PM - 30 Jul 13

Chase Madar at The Nation explains it:

Many intellectuals have labored to draw casuistic distinctions between what they see as Manning’s irresponsible leaking and Daniel Ellsberg’s virtuous leaking of the Pentagon Papers some forty years ago. These exercises zealously avoid the main legal difference: the thousands of documents leaked by Ellsberg were uniformly classified as “top secret,” whereas nothing released by Manning is of that high status. Meanwhile, Ellsberg himself has been a tireless defender of the young soldier, and on a weekly basis has had to reprise Marshall McLuhan’s famous scene in Annie Hall against Manning’s smug detractors. 

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After all, the transgression of this soldier is far greater than being a freethinking queer in the military. Private Manning actually believed that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be about Iraqi freedom. He thought he should be a well-informed citizen soldier, and he thought civilians should know the truth about the war that was being fought in their name.

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But Private Manning broke the law—and the law is the law! This folk tautology ought to be airtight, but it carries a whiff of desperation, of depleted authority on the verge of meltdown. It turns out that selective enforcement of military law is pervasive. Sexual assault is rarely punished. Laws against killing foreign civilians are worth even less: just ask the Marine unit that killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians in Haditha, some of them execution style, without any of the soldiers serving time in prison (the leader of the unit suffered only a reduction in rank and a pay cut). The law in these instances may be many things, but it is not a prescriptive rule enforced evenly and impartially. And yet the request for clemency in the case of Bradley Manning is treated as an outrageous and whiny exception, which if granted would bring about the collapse of all military discipline. 
The laws against releasing classified material are just as elastic. Barely a week goes by without The New York Times or The Washington Post spilling government secrets. This complaisant nonenforcement of leaks is nothing to complain about: after all, it’s how we learned the truth about—to name just a few salient examples from recent history—Vietnam, Watergate, warrantless wiretapping and the cyberwar against Iran.

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But it is Bradley Manning we have put on trial, not the impresarios of war, not the CIA torturers or their lawyers. The Iraq War, which began with a lurid overture of secrecy and lies, is now getting its dissonant coda: a private court-martialed for telling the truth, a trial unfolding behind a thick wall of official secrecy, in which the court’s media center was, on the day of the prosecution’s closing statement, patrolled by armed soldiers peering over the shoulders of typing reporters. “Pfc. Manning was not a humanist. He was a hacker,” said prosecutor Maj. Ashden Fein. “He was not a whistleblower. He was a traitor.” The past decade has witnessed the carnage unleashed by militarized cluelessness. In the story of Bradley Manning, who has been the ethical citizen and who the rampaging criminals?

Selling The Lie: Marginalizing Critics Worked for Iraq, And Now It's Working for the Deficit

Beware of people who shut down debate and attack critics.  They're almost certainly lying and working a con job.

Remember this? And this?

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

To truly learn the lesson of Iraq is to ask oneself what critical policy issue of the day carries the same force of conventional wisdom and marginalization of contrarian voices. What issue of the day is incredibly divisive among normal American people, but has nearly unanimous consensus in the Beltway? What contrarian belief on a matter of major policy earns the same quiet, amused contempt from centrists and conservative Democrats? What policy disagreement earns the outraged ire of conservatives normally designated for enemies of the state? On what subject is it allowed for straight journalists to unequivocally state support for a policy position without the need for a credible opinion from the opposing side? On what topic would a Nobel-prize-winning expert on the subject in question be mocked in person on television by a panel of low-rent pseudo-journalists and failed former Congressmembers as if he had called the moon landing a hoax? On what public policy does the widely accepted conventional wisdom in Washington also very neatly align with the interests of influential corporations and the world's wealthiest individuals?
I speak, of course, of the bipartisan march toward deficit reduction and the bizarre exclusion of Keynesian or countercyclical solutions from acceptable discourse on the economy. It's not the only issue of its kind, but it's the most important.
Make no mistake: find the major issue that creates this uncomfortable dynamic, and you will find the new Iraq. In 2003 it was foreign intervention. In 2013, the issue on which conventional wisdom is so neatly aligned against all reason is deficit reduction. In 2023 it will likely be something else.
But the real lesson of 2003 has far less to do with the rush to war in the Middle East, and far more to do with the rush to exclusionary conventional wisdom among the Very Serious People in Washington.

From Lawyers, Guns and Money:

A very useful compilation of the vicious attacks people who were right about the war were consistently subjected to.

Prosecuting War Criminals Years Later

Let's all hope Smirky and Darth and their minions lives very very long lives - so they can spend many years in prison after they are convicted of Iraq war crimes.

From Firedoglake:

As the Rios Montt genocide and crimes against humanity trial illustrates, Guatemalan “prosecutors are taking long-dormant human rights cases to court, armed with evidence that victims and their advocates have painstakingly compiled over more than a decade”.

Opposing the Bushes is Always Right

You're not going to read me trying to rationalize my initial support for Smirky/Darth's Iraq Clusterfuck 10 years ago.

That's because I never supported it.

I can't prove it, because I didn't start blogging until 2007, but I hated that lying little shit from the moment he took the Texas governorship away from Ann Richards.  I read Molly Ivins and trusted her. And I knew that whatever Smirky did in response to 9/11 was going to be a catastrophe.

And I was right.

Think Progress:

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago. 

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

“Nearly every government that goes to war underestimates its duration, neglects to tally all the costs, and overestimates the political objectives that will be accomplished by war’s violence,” said Boston University professor of political science and project co-director Neta C. Crawford.

Indeed, the war devastated the Iraqi health care system and allowed militants to hone their skills and export them to neighboring conflicts:

Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.

Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Meanwhile, the AP reported this afternoon that “a string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by what appeared to be a coordinated assault by gunmen who battled security forces in the Iraqi capital.” The AP said the attack — which reportedly killed 12 people — “bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’s Iraq arm.”

 We need some kind of public shaming device to ensure that the people who supported the Iraq clusterfuck - especially the motherfuckers who still defend it - are instantly identifiable and their opinions on any matter of public policy immediately and permanently ignored.

What We Dare Call Treason

From Divine Irony:

The Snuff Film the NRA Ignores

Funny how all the gun-fetishists clutching their pearls over violent movies and video games have nothing to say about a movie that really does glorify  and normalize extra-legal violence.

 

JoAnn Wypijewski at The Nation: 

I readily suspend disbelief for a visionary or even skillful artist. 

 

Zero Dark Thirty is the work of neither. It functions less as art than as a snuff film. Its torture sequences, and the photographs or videos of nameless prisoners that reappear throughout the film’s long lead-up, stoke the viewer for the climactic killing that everyone knows is coming. They do not excuse or glorify torture; they do something worse: they draw the audience into accommodating it.

If there be genius in this film, it is a counterfeit. The state inures the people to violence and tolerates enough dissent to convince most that barbarism doesn’t disqualify their nation from being on the side of right. It is an exquisitely calibrated system. So, assassination, of course; drones and bombing, sure; mass incarceration and death row, OK; torture, maybe… The film mimics this, while distilling conflict in the power battles of its CIA heroine, Maya, played by the otherwise inert Jessica Chastain.

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It seems almost quaint now to recall that in 2004, when the first photographs from Abu Ghraib appeared in the press, the body in pain—stripped naked by our soldiers, shackled to cell bars or bunks, hooded and made to hold a pose for hours, stacked in a pyramid, forced to masturbate—shocked the conscience.

America’s torture policy was already being debated by then, and Jack Bauer was already brutalizing his way toward America’s salvation every week in 24. Almost nothing that was done to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib had not already been done to the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, or to prisoners held at black sites, forward operating bases or Guantánamo. Harvard’s Law School and Kennedy School of Government had already embarked on a project, underwritten by the Department of Homeland Security, to assess the efficacy of “coercive interrogation,” targeted killings, indefinite detention, etc. (Later all but one of those assessors would conclude that a little torture was sometimes necessary, provided it was accompanied by the proper oversight.)

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As Zero Dark Thirty dramatizes with such devotion, a corpse is America’s singular achievement in the war on terror. 

 

Colin Powell is a Warmongering Coward and Always WIll Be

He knew. He has admitted that he knew he was lying and he knew what the consequences would be. Motherfucker. No, he does not get an iota of respect from me ever.


mugsy at Crooks and Liars:

Ten years ago today (February 5, 2003) then Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his infamous PowerPoint Presentation before a full session of the U.N., detailing "evidence" of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development along with the development of advanced delivery systems.

(GlobalSecurity has the entire 45 slide presentation, plus videos, here.)

With a bit of Googling, I was able to find out just what became of each site/item depicted in these slides. Not a single item shown that day turned out to be true. While reviewing these slides, keep in mind that the United States went to war, and over 4,000 American troops (not to mention and untold number of Iraqi civilians) died based on the claims made in these slides.

(Author's Note: I suppose I have to tell insane Right-Wingers that this post should IN NO WAY be misconstrued as a "defense" of Saddam Hussein. The dictator of Iraq was a monster and earned his place in hell, but the world is FULL of evil dictators and the U.S. cannot be responsible for deposing all of them. Likewise, thousands of U.S. and coalition troops gave their lives fighting a war based on the "evidence" presented in this slideshow, and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians died. In fact, arguably, more Iraqis died in our 8-year war than under the 24-year reign of Saddam Hussein.)

(Additional videos below the fold.)

Just under 4,500 U.S. troops, 300+ coalition troops, and over 110,000 confirmed Iraqi civilians were killed (with some estimates topping 1million) in a war based on this misinformation. To this day, not a single Bush Administration official has been prosecuted for their role in drumming up this case for war (not to mention the crimes that followed. See : Abu Ghraib.)

Bradley Manning and American Injustice

No wonder if you haven't been keeping up with the latest in the Bradley Manning case. Manning has been thoroughly ignored by the legacy media and even by most of the left blogosphere, with the conspicuous exceptions of Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald.

It's dismaying and depressing to read supposedly liberal bloggers condemning Manning in spittle-flecked hysteria because he dared to expose wrongdoing by the American military.

For the U.S. Army is committing a grave injustice against one of its own - an injustice with far-reaching implications for democracy in this country.

Last week, The Nation published a remarkable statement from three Nobel Peace Prize recipients on Bradley Manning and American Injustice.

As people who have worked for decades against the increased militarization of societies and for international cooperation to end war, we are deeply dismayed by the treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning.
 
We have dedicated our lives to working for peace because we have seen the many faces of armed conflict and violence, and we understand that no matter the cause of war, civilians always bear the brunt of the cost. With today’s advanced military technology and the continued ability of business and political elites to filter what information is made public, there exists a great barrier to many citizens being fully aware of the realities and consequences of conflicts in which their country is engaged.

Responsible governance requires fully informed citizens who can question their leadership. For those citizens worldwide who do not have direct, intimate knowledge of war, yet are still affected by rising international tensions and failing economies, the WikiLeaks releases attributed to Manning have provided unparalleled access to important facts.

Revealing covert crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, this window into the realities of modern international relations has changed the world for the better. While some of these documents may demonstrate how much work lies ahead in terms of securing international peace and justice, they also highlight the potential of the Internet as a forum for citizens to participate more directly in civic discussion and creative government accountability projects.

Questioning authority, as a soldier, is not easy.  But it can at times be honorable. The words attributed to Manning reveal that he went through a profound moral struggle between the time he enlisted and when he became a whistleblower. Through his experience in Iraq, he became disturbed by top-level policy that undervalued human life and caused the suffering of innocent civilians and soldiers. Like other courageous whistleblowers, he was driven foremost by a desire to reveal the truth.

Private Manning said in chat logs that he hoped the releases would bring “discussion, debates and reforms” and condemned the ways the “first world exploits the third.” Much of the world regards him as a hero for these efforts toward peace and transparency, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a result. However, much as when high-ranking officials in the United States and Britain misled the public in 2003 by saying there was an imminent need to invade Iraq to stop it from using weapons of mass destruction, the world’s most powerful elites have again insulted international opinion and the intelligence of many citizens by withholding facts regarding Manning and WikiLeaks.

The military prosecution has not presented evidence that Private Manning injured anyone by releasing secret documents, and it has asserted in court that the charge of “aiding the enemy through indirect means” does not require it to do so. Nor has the prosecution denied that his motivations were conscientious; it has simply argued they are irrelevant. In ignoring this context and recommending a much more severe punishment for Bradley Manning than is given to US soldiers guilty of murdering civilians, military leadership is sending a chilling warning to other soldiers who might feel compelled by conscience to reveal misdeeds. It is our belief that leaders who use fear to govern, rather than sharing wisdom born from facts, cannot be just.

We Nobel Peace Prize laureates condemn the persecution Bradley Manning has suffered, including imprisonment in conditions declared “cruel, inhuman and degrading” by the United Nations, and call upon Americans to stand up in support of this whistleblower who defended their democratic rights. In the conflict in Iraq alone, more than 110,000 people have died since 2003, millions have been displaced and nearly 4,500 American soldiers have been killed. If someone needs to be held accountable for endangering Americans and civilians, let’s first take the time to examine the evidence regarding high-level crimes already committed, and what lessons can be learned. If Bradley Manning released the documents, as the prosecution contends, we should express to him our gratitude for his efforts toward accountability in government, informed democracy and peace.

To learn more about Bradley Manning’s case or to get involved, visit the Bradley Manning Support Network website.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel