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.
Another Rainy Night In Georgia
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Hoverin’ by my suitcase, tryin’ to find a warm place to spend the night
Heavy rain fallin’, seems I hear your voice callin’ “It’s all right”
A rainy night in Georgia, a rainy night in Georgia
It seems like it’s rainin’ all over the world
I feel like it’s rainin’ all over the world
– Tony Joe White, ‘Rainy Night in Georgia‘
Last night from the New York Times:
- Nerves frayed all day after a Russian tank battalion occupied the Georgian city of Gori, a move Georgia condemned as flagrant defiance of a Western-brokered agreement struck only hours earlier.
Gori is only 40 miles from Tbilisi, the capital, and rumors circulated all day of an attack on Tbilisi.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Russian soldiers poured over the border from Russia into the separatist enclave of South Ossetia, where attack helicopters and fuel trucks accompanied a long convoy of trucks.
This little, nasty skirmish in the Caucasus is another toxic flower in Decider George’s legacy-hat. Once again he’s proven to be just an empty-talking asshole.
There’s not much the US can do right now in the clean-up of this Georgia mess, but whatever action this crowd of DC clowns take will only worsen the situation.
A real-absolute factor, however, is the US gave expansive life to this shit-kicker affair, lending the apparent whip-blown Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, a pretentious sense of Decider George’s incompetent cool.
And Jackboot John McCain’s bluster facade.
In a bit of old-man, soft-asshole verbiage:
- “I told him that I know I speak for every American when I say to him, today, we are all Georgians,” said the Republican, a hardliner against Russia who wants the mighty nation expelled from the Group of Eight club.
McCain also told the crowd at a Tuesday campaign stop in Pennsylvania, that he had spoken by telephone earlier with Saakashvili, who he said wanted to thank the American people for their support.
Another telephone call two four months ago pretty much sums up Jackboot John:
- Sen. John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.
The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.
Read about big-time lobbyist-liar Scheunemann here and here.
And this Wednesday from Think Progress:
- But as Josh Marshall notes, “watching John McCain speak about the Georgian crisis […] should deeply worry anyone interested in a sane US foreign policy,” suggesting that a President McCain would have pushed the U.S. closer to war during this particular crisis: “People need to wake up and get a look of the preview he’s giving us of a McCain presidency.”
McCain’s big mouth has been running full-bellow since the conflict broke out last week.
And although Decider George was a little laid back on his blubbering at the outset, on Wednesday he cut loose with some of his time-proven bullshit.
From the New York Times:
- President Bush sent American troops to Georgia on Wednesday to oversee a “vigorous and ongoing” humanitarian mission, in a direct challenge to Russia’s display of military dominance over the region.
His action came after Russian soldiers moved into two strategic Georgian cities in what he and Georgian officials called a violation of the cease-fire Russia agreed to earlier in the day.
…
The decision to send the American military, even on a humanitarian mission, deepened the United States’ commitment to Georgia and America’s allies in the former Soviet sphere, just as Russia has been determined to reassert its control in the area.
On a day the White House evoked emotional memories of the cold war, a senior Pentagon official said the relief effort was intended “to show to Russia that we can come to the aid of a European ally, and that we can do it at will, whenever and wherever we want.”
Another blow-hole, bring ‘em on, fist-waving bluster.
Decider George and the US has screwed up again.
This from Aljazeera:
- Jon Sawyer, the director for the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting, said US politicians had encouraged their Georgian counterparts to think they had the backing of the US when Tbilisi decided to launch its attack on South Ossetia last week.
“The US has for several years now mishandled the situation in Georgia,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The way that Mikheil Saakashvili has approached this [has been by] thinking that he could be an extension of the west, a partner of the United States.”
“In many ways we have given him cause for thinking that, with the many visits to the United States, the talk of Georgia as a beacon for democracy.”
…
Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that US encouragement may have made Saakashvili “miscalculate” and send Georgian troops into South Ossetia.
“I think in many respects Saakashvili got too close to the United States and the United States got too close to Saakashvili,” Kupchan told the Reuters news agency.
“It made him overreach, it made him feel at the end of the day that the West would come to his assistance if he got into trouble.”
And from the LA Times:
- Saakashvili helped oust former Soviet Foreign Minister and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze in the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003 and became Europe’s youngest president the following January at the age of 36.
He has been jousting with Moscow ever since over control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two pro-Russian regions of his country.
…
A lover of Georgian wine and Western culture, Saakashvili is described as supremely confident and even autocratic.
He moved troops into disputed South Ossetia last week as a new Russian president presided in Moscow, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Bush visited Beijing, and much of the world’s attention was focused on the Summer Olympics.
Georgian forces came under overwhelming air and ground attack and were quickly repelled.
Saakashvili says his forces were provoked into action in South Ossetia; Russia accuses him of launching an offensive move against his nemesis. Either way, he has ended up in a more precarious position.
…
“It was a calculated gamble and he miscalculated,” said F. Stephen Larrabee, corporate chair in European Security at the Rand Corp. in Washington.
“He has been forced to withdraw. It’s a military blunder. It caused an international incident.”
Military blunders are part-n-parcel for Decider George, Jackboot John, and now, Miki Mis-step.
Ain’t these boys ever gonna do anythin’ right?
Another wet-splashed brick in the wall — rain is indeed falling, and that voice calling “It’s All Right” is just another tequila sunrise, just another frame, forcing echoes off hammering-down rain all over the world.
Happy Hiroshima Day!
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Sixty-three years ago today Sueko Hada was then seven-years-old:
- “I managed to claw my way out from under the rubble. By now, our house was on fire and the cries of my sisters were getting fainter.
I left to look for help. When I went outside I saw that everything had totally changed. Although it had been a beautiful morning, it looked like twilight now.
Everyone was injured, badly injured. No-one was helping other people, they just looked after themselves. I myself was bleeding from a neck wound. There was blood all over the white clothes I was wearing.
…
I didn’t recognize anyone, so all I could do was follow the others. I saw terrible things. There were people with their eyeballs hanging out of their sockets.
There were others whose cheeks had been ripped open from the corners of their mouths to their ears. I saw a young mother running with a headless baby on her back.
I saw someone else with his belly ripped open and intestines spilling out.
Most of these people looked like ghosts — it truly was a vision of Hell.
But pretty soon, I got used to seeing these things. Everyone did.”
The “hibakusha” account of then-14-year-old Akihiro Takahashi:
- “That was the moment when the blast came.
And then the tremendous noise came and we were left in the dark. I couldn’t see anything at the moment of explosion just like in this picture.
We had been blown by the blast. Of course, I couldn’t realize this until the darkness disappeared.
I was actually blown about 10 m.
My friends were all marked down on the ground by the blast just like this. Everything collapsed for as far as I could see.
I felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden.
Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the heat.
I was probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both legs. My skin was peeling and hanging like this.
Automatically I began to walk heading west because that was the direction of my home.
After a while, I noticed somebody calling my name. I looked around and found a friend of mine who lived in my town and was studying at the same school. His name was Yamamoto.
He was badly burnt just like myself. We walked toward the river.
And on the way we saw many victims. I saw a man whose skin was completely peeled off the upper half of his body and a woman whose eye balls were sticking out. Her whole baby was bleeding.
A mother and her baby were lying with a skin completely peeled off.
…
When we were resting because we were so exhausted, I found my grandfather’s brother and his wife, in other words, great uncle and great aunt, coming toward us.
That was quite coincidence.
As you know, we have a proverb about meeting Buddha in Hell. My encounter with my relatives at that time was just like that. They seem to be the Buddha to me wandering in the living hell.”
Watch a horrifying, though well-executed “hibakusha”/CGI YouTube film of Hiroshima here.
Mankind’s most-awful contraption off a luridly-long list of awful contraptions was the nuclear weapon, “the bomb.”
The Hiroshima bomb killed 200,000 people, although the count is most-likely much higher.
And a horror unleashed for no real military reason.
Ike Eisenhower knew it in his gut when Secretary of War Hank Stimson told him:
- “During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”
Ike was right — Stimson was most likely ‘deeply perturbed,’ he looked at the bomb as a way to shape history, not end the war.
A 2005 article from the science and technology news service, Newscientist.
- The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say.
And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.”
And speaking of a crime against humanity — just seven years ago today, according to Ron Suskind’s 2006 The One Percent Doctrine and a Washington Post review of the book:
- The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”
Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department’s counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney.
White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan’s army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him.
But Crumpton’s message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were “definitely not” up to the job, and “we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.”
Decider George has now created his own kind of Hiroshima, one that will flame for years.
The Group W Bench — Assault in the Military
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“And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W’s, where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there.
Mother rapers.
Father stabbers.
Father rapers!
Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!”
– Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, Arlo Guthrie
The 1969 film of Alice’s Restaurant was funny, touching and pricked a piss-angry mood of a nation bog-downed in Vietnam.
Arlo Guthrie’s lyrics nowadays, however, is more truth than a funny fable.
Decider George’s military adventures the past near-eight years has destroyed the US military as we once knew it, and the Group W bench was a forerunner to the asshole with the same middle initial.
This week, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings on such goings on in the military and the shit don’t smell good.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, spoke from the heart.
- She said she recently visited a Veterans Affairs hospital in the Los Angeles area, where women told her horror stories of being raped in the military.
“My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41 percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military,” said Harman, who has long sought better protection of women in the military.
“Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and downward spirals many of their lives have taken since.
“We have an epidemic here,” she said. “Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.”
As of July 24, 100 women had died in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.
In 2007, Harman said, only 181 out of 2,212 reports of military sexual assaults, or 8 percent, were referred to courts martial. By comparison, she said, 40 percent of those arrested in the civilian world on such charges are prosecuted.
Defense statistics show that military commanders took unspecified action, which can include anything from punishment to dismissal, in an additional 419 cases.
And what about the military’s response?
Just the same un-Constitutional, illegal shit for all of Decider George’s criminal minions.
From the CNN article above:
- But when it came time for the military to defend itself, the panel was told that the Pentagon’s top official on sexual abuse, Dr. Kaye Whitley, was ordered not to show up despite a subpoena.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to cover up here, but we’re not going to allow it,” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, said to the Defense official who relayed the news of Whitley’s no-show. “This is unacceptable.”
Rep. John Tierney, the panel’s chairman and a Democrat from Massachusetts, angrily responded, “these actions by the Defense Department are inexplicable.”
…
The Government Accountability Office released preliminary results from an investigation into sexual assaults in the military and the Coast Guard. The GAO found that the “occurrences of sexual assault may be exceeding the rates being reported.”
“At the 14 installations where GAO administered its survey, 103 service members indicated that they had been sexually assaulted within the preceding 12 months. Of these, 52 service members indicated that they did not report the sexual assault,” the GAO said.
The office found that the military and Coast Guard have established policies to address sexual assault but that the implementation of the programs is hampered by an array of factors, including that “most, but not all, commanders support the programs.”
“Left unchecked, these challenges can discourage or prevent some service members from using the programs when needed,” the GAO said.
One wonders at how all this came about, that women have to watch the asshole in the foxhole with her as much as she has to look out for the enemy.
Wars tear at the fabric of national society, especially illegal and immoral wars which go on and on and on and on…
From the New York Times last April:
- Strained by the demands of a long war, the Army and the Marine Corps recruited significantly more felons into their ranks in 2007 than in 2006, including people convicted of armed robbery, arson and burglary, according to data released Monday by a House committee.
…
The 2006 and 2007 Pentagon data released Monday show for the first time the number of dispensations issued for specific felonies.
The number of Army waivers for aggravated assaults with a dangerous weapon rose to 43 from 33. Waivers for burglaries increased to 106 from 36.
Waivers for possession of narcotics, excluding marijuana, rose to 130 from 71 and for larceny to 56 from 26.
In the Marine Corps, waivers for burglary convictions rose to 142 from 90, while those for aggravated assault increased to 44 from 35.
The Army also listed a handful of felony waivers granted for kidnapping, making terroristic threats, rape or sexual abuse, and indecent acts or liberties with a child.
…
Military analysts, though, say these are exactly the kinds of recruits who would never have been allowed into the Army before the war in Iraq.
To reach its recruiting targets, the Army has had to soften many of its requirements.
It now allows in more recruits who did not graduate from high school and who received lower test scores in their service entry exams.
Recruits are older and less physically fit.
And there are more people in the service with medical conditions that would have otherwise disqualified their enlistment.
“With the Iraq war being as controversial as it is and absent any higher level call to service, it’s a very difficult challenge to all the services, particularly the Army,” said Michele Flournoy, the president and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, a centrist research organization that focuses on national security and military policies.
“The fact that the use of waivers has increased dramatically is something that should be of concern and should be watched over time.”
And the horror of the military continues — The case of PFC Lavena Johnson, who despite all evidence to the contrary, her death in 2005 was ruled a suicide by US military investigators — they reported Johnson had somehow, someway, had beaten herself to death.
She’d been brutally raped then hideously murdered to cover up the crime.
Read about it here.
And here.
Decider George has created a monster military.
He’s far worse than any of those father rapers on the Group W bench.