Safeguarding ‘The Long War’
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As Decider George and his miserable band of legal cutthroats get ready for a much-anticipated kick out the door, the blood lust must remain first and foremost.
As the rest of the US swirls around Jackboot John McCain’s VP pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the White House is attempting to blindside a provision through Congress to keep the so-called Global War on Terror terrifying the entire freakin’ planet.
In the New York Times this morning is a simple story of how a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at Guantánamo Bay has some nasty verbiage deep in its bowels.
Decider George wants to keep his war going:
- Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.
…
Mr. Bush “is trying to stir up again the politics of fear by reminding people of something they haven’t really forgotten: that we are engaged in serious armed conflict with Al Qaeda,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard and legal adviser to Mr. Obama. “But the question is, Where is that conflict to be waged, and by what means.”
…
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he wanted to make sure the Bush administration — or a future president — did not use that declaration as “another far-fetched interpretation” to evade the law, the way he believes Mr. Bush and aides like Alberto R. Gonzales, the former attorney general, did in using the wiretapping program to avoid the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“I don’t want to face another situation where we had the Sept. 14 resolution and then Attorney General Gonzales claimed that that was authorization to violate FISA,” Mr. Specter said.
For Bush critics like Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, the answer is simple: do not give the administration the wartime language it seeks.
“I do not believe that we are in a state of war whatsoever,” Mr. Fein said. “We have an odious opponent that the criminal justice system is able to identify and indict and convict. They’re not a goliath. Don’t treat them that way.”
Ah, the old “politics of fear” bullshit that has been the theme of Decider George’s failed Wide World of War on Terror the past near-eight years.
The wording in the proposal in the Times piece is part-n-parcel from the Sept. 14, 2001, Congressional resolution, “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” which allowed Decider George to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent such things from happening in the future.
Most people viewed the invasion of Afghanistan in going after Osama and his boys was justified under that resolution, but what happened during the ensuing seven years has been a total page from some obscure George Orwell novel.
And the ludicrous Global War on Terror?
Worse than a total failure — the scheme just made the world a much more dangerous place.
And should the US be this involved?
SourceWatch cites a October 16, 2003, memo from Dumb-ass, cold-hearted Don Rumsfeld:
- “Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.
Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”
The memo turned the corner from war against a physical enemy to one against a mind-set.
A war against an idea.
Against something floating out in the ether.
Anyone and anybody and anywhere.
Even in the good, old US.
Also from the Times story:
- The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning months, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its “long war” against terrorism.
From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intelligence procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics.
“This seems like a final push by the administration before they go out the door,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a former lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency and an expert on national security law. The cumulative effect of the actions, Ms. Spaulding said, is to “put the onus on the next administration” — particularly a Barack Obama administration — to justify undoing what Mr. Bush has done.
Decider George and his ass-crack VP, Dufus Dick Cheney, are turds til the end.
And is Sarah Palin able to fill Dufus Dick’s big, security-tight, vault-like office?
The very answer fills one with terror.
Cheney & Company’s Most-Excellent Caucasus Adventure
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In all indications, the skirmish in the Caucasus has developed into a long-running, hard-line situation.
The US rigged a plan to pull at scabs, scratch open old sores and have accomplished the feat.
Decider George will launch his vice president, Dufus Dick Cheney, to a few countries next week (within minutes of giving the lead-off speech at the RNC next Monday — Labor Day, who would want to see that sonofabitch on TV instead of outside at the BBQ — Dufus Dick will depart eastbound to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine with a small sidebar in Italy) to rub salt in a wound and ratchet up the already increasingly ominous chatter between Russia and the US.
After Russian President Dimitri Medvedev granted Czar-reality status to Azerbaijan and South Ossetia earlier this week, he tried a little blowback on the US and cited how the Russkies would stand up to the West.
Especially throwing the ‘Hearts and Minds’ catastrophe in Afghanistan.
The Russians are after the US at the UN.
This from Reuters via Wire Dispatch:
- The Russian delegation has drafted a statement, seen by Reuters, that would say the council’s 15 member states are “seriously concerned” about the U.S.-led coalition attacks Aug. 22, which the U.N. mission in Afghanistan says it believes left 90 civilians dead, most of them children.
Russia and the United States are permanent members of the council with veto power, along with France, Britain and China.
The draft statement, which several diplomats said had no chance of getting the unanimous backing it would need for approval, also says council members “deplore” the fact that this has happened before in Afghanistan.
“I think the Russians want to divert attention from Georgia and annoy the Americans,” said one diplomat on the sidelines of a council session on unrelated matters.
The US disputes the report that 90 civilians — two-thirds of them children — were killed in US-led air strikes Friday in the western Afghan province of Herat.
Twenty-five militants and five civilians were killed, the US says.
No matter — the incident brings forth finger pointing by the Russians at the UN.
Also at that august body on Thursday, UN reps from the US and Russia exchanged Cold War-like insults against each other.
- U.S. Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff told the meeting it was a violation of the U.N. charter for member states to use force against others, or threaten to use it, and suggested that Moscow’s claims to be protecting Russian citizens in Georgia’s South Ossetia region were a sham.
Russia’s U.N. envoy, Vitaly Churkin, suggested Wolff’s statement was hypocritical and referred to the U.S.-led March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Moscow strongly opposed.
“I would like to ask the distinguished representative of the United States — weapons of mass destruction. Have you found them yet in Iraq or are you still looking for them?”
And where in the Wide World War On Terror is Dufus Dick?
In the Caucasus, of course, stirring the coals.
Just prior to Georgia’s onslaught earlier this month against South Ossetia, Dufus Dick’s gopher, Joe Wood, visited the country, and although the White House denied it, must have soften up pulp President Mikhail Saakashvili.
This pseudo-good/smart guy Saakashvili leered out his Tbilisi window, ordered South Ossetia shit bombed into ruin — in the middle of the night, mind you — and then was freaked at Russia’s hard-driving response.
All part of the program: Sorry, Mikhail, see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.
Piotr Dutkiewicz, former director of the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, wrote a seemingly-right-on commentary in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail touching the real heartbeat of what happened in Georgia — an ugly game against the Russian bear — which in turn has made the world much-more pants-shitting scary.
A couple snippets:
- Some critics have pointed to the conflict in Georgia as another example of botched Bush administration foreign policy.
But, in fact, America’s real strategy was brilliantly executed, and it achieved exactly the intended outcome. Unfortunately, it’s not an outcome that makes the world a safer place.
…
This was a carefully developed and magnificently executed strategy.
But it fails to recognize how important it is to have Russia inside the community of nations.
Russia has more neighbours than any other country in the world, and many of those neighbours are nations we need to engage.
The world is not a safer place without Russian involvement in the containment of nuclear proliferation. In fact, Russia plays a critical role in maintaining a dialogue with countries such as Iran that have nuclear ambitions.
And Russia is an essential energy supplier to Europe, even if Europe’s long-term desire is to diminish its dependency.
Russia’s help also is essential in the war on terror.
The U.S. simply cannot go it alone. But now Washington says Russian ships are no longer welcome to take part in the counterterrorism and non-proliferation operation in the Mediterranean.
That helps no one.
Incisive military/political writer (and ex-military guy) Jeff Huber also came up with a similar view of the clouded, nastiness in Georgia.
- It’s so hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in these post-modern times, isn’t it?
Here, one second, you’re thinking Russia is being a bully to Georgia until you stop and think that Georgia was being a bully to South Ossetia and Abkhazia until the Russians stepped in and set things right, kind of like we did for Kuwait in Gulf War I.
And don’t you just wonder who told Georgia Peach Mikhail Saakashvili that we’d back him if he goaded Russian into invading him?
According to the BBC, a couple of days after ‘Georgia Peach’ (We like that name) Mikhail’s invasion started to backtrack, Dufus Dick telephoned him with a message that Russia’s so-called “disproportionate” counter-attack (Decider George’s rejoinder) “must not go unanswered.”
Included in the story:
- The BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington says Dick Cheney’s telephone call appears to have been an effort to send a message not just of solidarity but also of readiness for action.
And then Vladimir Putin, the Russian version of Dufus Dick, slapped at the US Thursday, claiming Decider George fashioned the Georgian war to help Jackboot John McCain in his ‘tarded run for the White House.
From the New York Times:
- “The suspicion would arise that someone in the United States created this conflict on purpose to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one of the candidates in the competitive race for the presidency in the United States,” Mr. Putin said in an interview with CNN.
He added, “They needed a small victorious war.”
…
“Even during the cold war, during the time of tough confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we have always avoided direct clashes between our civilians, let alone our servicemen,” Mr. Putin said. “We have serious reasons to believe that directly, in the combat zone, citizens of the United States were present.”
“If the facts are confirmed,” he added, “that United States citizens were present in the combat zone, that means only one thing — that they could be there only on the direct instruction of their leadership. And if this is so, then it means that American citizens are in the combat zone, performing their duties, and they can only do that following a direct order from their leader, and not on their own initiative.”
And the White House responded:
- In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, dismissed Mr. Putin’s remarks.
“To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate just sounds not rational,” she said.
She added, “It also sounds like his defense officials who said they believe this to be true are giving him really bad advice.”
Dana don’t or won’t comprehend “not rational” also includes her boss and all the underlings gushing with near-eight-years worth of “really bad advice.”
And the Times story continues:
- A senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, said at a news conference in Moscow on Thursday that Russian forces had found a United States passport in a ruined building near Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia.
The position, he said, had been occupied by Georgian Interior Ministry forces.
…
General Nogovitsyn said the passport was in the name of Michael Lee White of Texas, but gave no information on whether Russians believed that he was a member of the United States military.
The United States Embassy in Georgia told The Associated Press that it had no information on the matter.
And the sign post up ahead: The Twilight Zone.
Nukes vs nukes vs nukes.
McCain as Honcho
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As we bask in the happy-rhetoric of the DNC, just consider a Jackboot John McCain presidency — maybe one shouldn’t willingly do such a thing.
It’s the stuff of horror fiction.
A good comment/view on this affrightful apparition comes from investigative journalist Robert Perry over at consortiumnews.com.
Perry envisions rightly so a picture of some terrible times for the US and the world.
A couple of snippets on the consequence of Jackboot’s nut-case warmongering:
- The combined price tag for McCain’s military adventures, at a time when the federal government is already running about half a trillion dollars in debt, would mean that virtually every other national priority would have to be short-changed or neglected.
There will be little money left to address the energy crisis, global warming, retooling the auto industry, health care, Social Security, education, infrastructure repairs, etc., etc.
Perry’s piece can also be seen at (and hats off to) AlterNet.
Whether Barack Obama is the man of the hour is yet to be seen.
The alternative, however, is to welcome a nightmare.
Warmongers Across the Rubicon
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Poland’s prime minister shortly after inking a missile agreement with the US earlier this month:
- Speaking in an interview televised on news channel TVN24, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the United States had agreed to help augment Poland’s defenses with Patriot missiles in exchange for placing 10 missile defense interceptors in the eastern European country.
”We have crossed the Rubicon,” he said, referring to U.S. consent to meet Poland’s demands.
And today, the domino effect plattering the Caucasus tensed up a notch.
The Russian edition of Decider George, Dimitri Medvedev, talked the big, hot-air talk.
- President Medvedev set tensions soaring when he recognised the independence of two breakaway republics inside Georgia.
“We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” he said.
Hours earlier he had ordered his Foreign Ministry to start establishing diplomatic ties with the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The move brought instant condemnation from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other Western countries.
President Bush appealed to the Kremlin to “reconsider this irresponsible decision.
David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that it was “unjustifiable and unacceptable.”
Of course, Medvedev‘s Dick Cheney is Vladimir Putin, Russia’s primer minister.
Look here for an interesting discussion of Putin’s fingers playing the Georgia episode.
Dick Cheney, of course, is one Dufus Dick, a frightened-by-his-own-shadow warmonger.
And Decider George is the perfect companion.
Neither one served in the military — We won’t count Decider George’s Texas National Guard/partying in Montgomery time because we really couldn’t consider that shit ‘military’ service when US boys and girls were dying in Vietnam — yet both have started two badly-run wars and have a shitload of blood on their draft-dodging asses.
Vladimir and Dimitri playing hardball with Dufus Dick and Decider George — a horror/disaster movie in the making.
Just as it goes, it was reported today in the LA Times, Joseph R. Wood, Dufus Dick’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, was in Georgia just days before the ensuing conflict started, and most likely met with Western-lust-after-dumb-ass, Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president.
Despite doing the warfare math:
- It had nothing to do, the vice president’s office said, with a military operation that some have said suggests a renewal of the Cold War.
Yeah, right.
One person of all those on the earth not to be trusted: Dufus Dick Cheney.
One cold-ass sonofabitch.
In a speech at a journalism conference in early July, noted investigative journalist Seymour Hersh told of a meeting of White House officials, including Dufus Dick, to discuss how to get the US into a war with Iran.
From Think Progress:
- During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred.
Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them.
This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected.
And this from the Times in the UK on an opinion from Sergei Markov, Putin’s senior political scientist:
- “George Bush’s Administration is promoting interests of candidate John McCain,” said Dr Markov.
“Defeated by Barak Obama on all fronts, McCain has one last card to play yet – the creation of a virtual Cold War with Russia . . . Bush himself did not want a war in South Ossetia but his Republican Party did not leave him any choice.”
The Americans were now engineering an armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Dr Markov added.
Further down in the same Times piece is a mirror on how the outlook on world affairs has changed the past few years:
- “In the old days under Soviet rule we didn’t believe a word of our own propaganda but we thought that information was free in the West and we longed for it,” said Katya, a middle-aged Muscovite.
“But we have learnt since that the West has its own propaganda and in some ways it is more powerful because people believe it.”
Yes, and about that so-called missile deal with the Poles?
According to globalsecurity.org, the US will place up to 10 interceptor missiles in Poland by 2013, part of a broader missile shield that includes a radar facility in the Czech Republic, alongside facilities in place in the US, Greenland and Britain.
And what’s really, really bad: It’s all for nothing, other than to piss off the Russkies.
Phil Coyle, former top weapons tester at the Pentagon, told the most-excellent Danger Room blog the missile system is right now fairly worthless:
- “The system proposed for Poland and the Czech Republic doesn’t exist, has never been tested, and has no demonstrated effectiveness to defend Europe or the U.S. under realistic operational conditions.”
He says that even our existing missile defenses, installed in Alaska, couldn’t stop more than one or two rudimentary missiles from, say, Iran.
“For these reasons the U.S. BMD system proposed for Europe is causing strife with Russia for nothing.”
Nothing means a lot to warmonger Dufus Dick.
Funny, Funny and Creepy
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Funny and creepy, under-the-skin scary at the same time.
Decider George and Cute Condi Rice in a recreation of an arrogant moron frightfully in charge of all kinds of harmful shit in this YouTube video.