‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’
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This past weekend the North Koreans tossed the old middle finger once again at the world and tested a nuclear device:
“Was it another fizzle?” asked Hans M. Kristensen, a nuclear expert at the Federation of American Scientists.
“We’ll have to wait for more analysis of the seismic data, but so far the early news media reports about a ‘Hiroshima-size’ nuclear explosion seem to be overblown.”
(Illustration found here).
This relationship on the Korean peninsula is real peculiar.
Two physical countries: North and South.
And these two countries have been in a constant state of crisis, or near-crisis with each other for now-near 60 years.
Nothing real odd about the set-up on its face, down through human history there’s been a shitload of similar situations — bunch of peoples/nations antagonistic and bickering for long periods of time — but the strange lies in the lay of the land and a bad, bad doohickey/weapon.
In the South, the landscape is one of an highly-developed nation, a place teeming with iPods and laptops: South Korea is classified as a high-income economy by the World Bank and an advanced economy by the IMF and CIA. Its capital, Seoul, is a major global city and a leading international financial centre in Asia. South Koreans enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world and have a high life expectancy and a high level of economic freedom.
Despite that, or maybe because of that, South Korea has a national mental illness: Honor via suicide.
The suicide of former president Roh Moo-Hyun last week hightlighted the problem — The country has one of the highest suicide rates among economically-advanced countries, with rates of suicide doubling to 21.9 deaths per 100,000 people between 1996 and 2006.
These South Korean suicides, Roh included, are nothing but pantywaists — How would these guys react if instead they were citizens of a nation a few miles north of Seoul, that major global city, in a place seemingly which could exist only if Phillip K. Dick and George Orwell had collaborated on a horror tale.
In the North, the landscape is blighted by the blinding light reflecting off the face of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, though dead for 15 years.
When he died, his number-one son, Kim Jong-il, took over with the daddy still the real head honcho, being the “Eternal President” forever — North Korea, officially called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is the most secretive society on earth, no one knows what really is going on in there as only about 2,000 Westerners a year are allowed inside.
And although the Great Leader instituted “juche” ideology, or national self-reliance in being “a revolutionary ideology with a people-centred view of the world that aims to realise the independence of the masses, the guiding principle of its actions,” the entire country is a hell-hole:
Aid agencies have estimated that up to two million people have died since the mid-1990s because of acute food shortages caused by natural disasters and economic mismanagement.
The country relies on foreign aid to feed millions of its people.
The totalitarian state also stands accused of systematic human rights abuses.
Reports of torture, public executions, slave labour, and forced abortions and infanticides in prison camps have emerged.
A US-based rights group has estimated that there are up to 200,000 political prisoners in North Korea.
North Korea is the most militarized country in the world having the fourth-largest with an estimated 1.1 million armed personnel and operates an enormous network of military facilities scattered around the country, a large weapons production basis and an extremely dense air defence system.
And along with uniformed military, the country also has what’s called the Worker-Peasant Red Guard, a reserve force comprising of between 3.5 and 4.7 million troops. (Source: Wikipedia).
North Korea is a late bloomer in the nuclear field — After George Jr. proclaimed the DPRK a member of the “Axis of Evil” in 2002, Kim II started a route that would take the country to its first nuclear test four years later.
All this despite some encouraging non-nuclear news in the 1990s, but all to no avail.
Which brings us to the DPRK’s nuclear and missle testing the past few days, a situation which has everybody ringing the alarm bells — especially Japan, a country living under the shadow of not only a possible missile strike from North Korea, but the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nightmare.
And recent events could bring about a re-arming of Japan — a first-strike ability using the old chestnut of a “pre-emptive strike” to take out a supposed danger.
Talk in Japan considers just that:
“North Korea poses a serious and realistic threat to Japan,” former defense chief Gen Nakatani said today in Tokyo at a meeting of Liberal Democratic Party officials.
“We must look at active missile defense such as attacking an enemy’s territory and bases.”
Reports of North Korea’s test last weekend generally claimed the firepower produced was at or about that equal to the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — an all-US event.
As Justin Raimondo mused at antiwar.com: “It is certainly not lost on the North Koreans that the U.S. could just as easily rationalize a similar attack on yet another nation of yellow-skinned people.”
Hiroshima is another word for infamy — ironic is FDR’s Pearl Harbor quote — and in the years since August 6, 1945, the city has been a focal point of anti-nuclear war.
A nation’s guilt, a world’s guilt of not only nuclear weapons, the terrors of war itself is epitomized by the dream/nightmare that is Hiroshima.
Into this dream/nightmare is a love affair wrapped around the horror of Hiroshima and the guilt of life in war — Frenchman Alain Resnais‘ “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” a 1959 film which gathers together war and memory in a stream-of-consciousness montage backgrounded by the city itself.
The opening sequence of shots — a series of naked shoulders and arms, upon which what at first appears as sweat, but is actually fine-grained radioactive dust — forces one to wonder at the true nightmares the bomb actually brought to the city’s population in August 1945.
From Marguerite Duras, the noted French writer who scripted the Resnais film:
“Thus the initial exchange is allegorical. In short, an operatic exchange. Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima.”
(Illustration found here).
North Korea and Hiroshima: An impossibility to fathom.
Memory
Filed Under Just Plain War, Musings | Leave a Comment
Despite all the posturing, the US is a war-like nation.
(Illustration found here).
War has always been in the vital interests of the US — starting from day one, but officially most-likely from the Pequot War in 1637 with 11 wars fought before the so-called Revolutionary War and 30 even prior to the Civil War, a shitload of dying in such a small space.
The US has wasted 653,708 lives in wars prior to the modern era and the Global War on Terror, which has been rebranded as the Overseas Contingency Operation (to soften up the phrase, I guess) has currently produced two quagmired conflicts without an end in sight, both immoral and illegal.
Although Iraq supposedly has an end, it’s going to be bloody until then.
So here we are on Memorial Day 2009 to honor all those war dead.
Originally called Decoration Day in 1868 for the mass of US peoples slaughted in the Civil War and was “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
And what better time than to recite a few words of Mark Twain’s sarcastic, horrifing-but-true anti-war ode/poem, The War Prayer:
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.
Amen.
War, yes, war!
‘Change’ = ? = WTF!
Filed Under Mad as Hell, Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Change out my wizened, ancient ass!
Yesterday from CREW – Citizens for Responsibility And Ethics In Washington — on the so-called Valerie Plame Wilson episode:
CREW learned today that the Obama administration is opposing our request that the Supreme Court reconsider the dismissal of the lawsuit, Wilson v. Libby, et al.
In that case, the district court had dismissed the claims of Joe and Valerie Wilson against former Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Richard Armitage for their gross violations of the Wilsons’ constitutional rights.
Agreeing with the Bush administration, the Obama Justice Department argues the Wilsons have no legitimate grounds to sue.
It is surprising that the first time the Obama administration has been required to take a public position on this matter, the administration is so closely aligning itself with the Bush administration’s views.
(Illustration found here).
When Obama was elected last November, the whole affair was akin to a daydream.
After eighth years of a living nightmare, this was the kind of change the US could put its grip on and feel good about.
Alas, now nearly four months into his administration, Obama’s curtain has been parted and the wizard is exposed — Nothing really has changed.
Starting with his “business as usual” slection of his financial inner circle to continuing the foreign policy operations from up the ass of Dick Cheney, Obama has already proven he’s not the man of the vast-throngs that voted for him, but instead for the powermongers in DC.
Even in explaining his decision to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay was softened by his speech this morning:
After September 11, “faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions,” he said.
“I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often, our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.”
Is he shitting us — ‘motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people’ — ?
Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were so removed from any kind of sincerity the very thought makes one want to blow chunks.
Paul Craig Roberts via antiwar.com ties the whole bullshit together:
America has lost her soul, and so has her president.
A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony.
The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.
The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms.
But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.
The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies.
Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.
…
Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that “sovereign immunity” protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens.
Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.
In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.
…
Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington’s insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the U.S. military/security complex. The steeply rising U.S. unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama’s expanding wars.
Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language.
He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric.
The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words that now drape Dick Cheney’s policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and U.S. hegemony.
No shit, Sherlock!
Change we can’t even believe in and there’s now nothing to do but watch.
Where Is We?
Filed Under Media, Musings, Technology | Leave a Comment
Talk about being lost after eight years of failure on so many different levels!
It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption.
If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected.
– GAO Report on GPS status
(Illustration found here).
One of the most-used modern marvels is the GPS navigational system.
The operation touches so many areas in so many different way, its break-down could cause more than just pain-in-the-ass problems, but could be dangerous.
And it could start to crash in a few months — in 2010, which to my reckoning is next year.
From PC World this morning:
Considered by the GAO to be “essential to national security” the GPS is also widely used by business and consumers and is a driver for next-generation location-based mobile applications used with smartphones and other devices.
And, too, this flip:
It is hard to imagine the U.S. government could allow this to happen.
Actually, that’s a lie, it’s easy to imagine, but there is also time for corrective action to be taken.
The first replacement satellite is expected to be launched this November, some three years after the original launch date.
Speeding up future launches can solve the problem, but is likely to come at a high price.
Just another problem linked to the asshole, incompentence of George Jr.’s eight year as head honcho.
The first replacement GPS satellite was due to launch at the beginning of 2007, but has been delayed several times and is now scheduled to go into orbit in November this year — almost three years late.
The impact on ordinary users could be significant, with millions of satnav users potential victims of bad directions or failed services.
There would also be similar side effects on the military, which uses GPS for mapping, reconnaissance and for tracking hostile targets.
Some suggest that it could also have an impact on the proliferation of so-called location applications on mobile handsets — just as applications on the iPhone and other GPS-enabled smartphones are starting to get more popular.
When one is throwing huge chunks of cash at waging never-ending war, torturing people and invading countries some project might slide through the old cracks in the foundation, and, not being too smart, also allow valuable operations to fade, fade away.
‘IRF-ed’ — Biblically Speaking
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Mad as Hell, Media, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
The terror/shame of America.
(Illustration found here).
Similar to peeling the layers off one rotten-assed onion, the horrors of the last presidential administration continues to strike nausea and shame into the very hearts of any US peoples who have any heart left to smell the shit — in the last few weeks bad odorous news has spewed forth from DC about just how corrupt and vile were the years 2001 to 2009.
If the current trend continues, George Jr. and Dick Cheney will be viewed as monsters.
Via antiwar.com on the inquiry by Spain into US “enhanced” techniques:
The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. Military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force.
Despite President Barack Obama’s publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture — and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces’ actions illegal — IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.
…
So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: “IRF-ing” prisoners or to be “IRF-ed.”
Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described “the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke.”
Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners’ “private areas” and Korans to “rile the detainees,” saying it “seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it.
“Those who did were always IRFed.”
The above-mentioned James Yee is the same guy who was harassed out of the military on all sorts of trumped-up bullshit because of his concern for the well-being of other human beings at Guantánamo.
All the charges were eventually dropped.
And while all these “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding… was going on, US defense chief at the time, the dastardedly Don Rumsfeld was dispatching daily the ultra-top secret Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update to George Jr. with Bibical quotes smeared on them.
See some of this creepy, weird and hypocritical shit here at GQ.
Rumsfeld might a backstabbing criminal, but he knew George Jr.
Some background on this craziness can be found at Think Progress.
This particular aspect of the Rumsfeld/Cheney era will be a hot topic right now — there seems to be no end to the uncovering of the workings of the most-corrupt adminstration in this nation’s history.
Frank Rich, once again in the New York Times this morning nails it.
President Obama has to open the can of worms to clean-up US history.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch.
If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
Amen, brother!
A Brief History Of A Dick
Filed Under Media, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
“If two cars come up next to you, one with a stranger and one with Dick Cheney, you get in the car with the stranger.”
– Wanda Sykes, advice to her children regarding really scary, dangerous people.
Nearly 35 years ago a swarmy, ovulating Dick Cheney became the youngest chief of staff in White House history after his then-boss, Don Rumsfeld, orchestrated the ‘Halloween Massacre‘ in November 1975, which most likely doomed Gerald Ford’s run for the presidency the following year.
Ford later said: “It was the biggest political mistake of my life. And it was one of the few cowardly things I did in my life.”
The ironic understatement for the ages.
(Illustration found here).
Ford, of course, was probably waxing pity about shoving his-then vice president Nelson Rockefeller off the ticket and snagging Bob Dole as VP for the 1976 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter — a fatal move.
A nothing, historical footnote compared to giving Rumsfeld and Cheney daydreams of power which would come back and haunt the nation decades later.
Nearly six months prior to the above-mentioned ‘Halloween Massacre,” young Darth Vader Mr. Cheney revealed his inner, tortured self.
The New York Times had published a story by Seymour M. Hersh about an espionage program and Rumsfeld, then Ford’s chief of staff, was demanding action from his trusted aide, big Dick — The ball started to roll.
From the New York Times, in February 2007:
Out came the yellow legal pad, and in his distinctively neat, deliberate hand, Mr. Cheney laid out the “problem,” “goals” while addressing it, and “options.” These last included “Start FBI investigation — with or w/o public announcement.
As targets include NYT, Sy Hersh, potential gov’t sources.”
…
Fast forward three decades and that same handwriting appears on a copy of the Op-Ed article in The Times that set in motion events that led to the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff.
…
“He’s had the same idea for the past 30 years,” said Kathryn S. Olmsted, a history professor at the University of California at Davis, who wrote about the Cheney file in her 1996 book, “Challenging the Secret Government.”
“His philosophy is that the president and the vice president and the people around the president decide what’s secret and what’s not,” she said. “They thought they had to aggressively go after the press and Congress to reclaim the powers the president lost in Watergate.”
And now, here in the modern era, the Dick is on the road trying to drum up confusion on the really neat idea of torturing anyone who needs to be tortured.
Charles Blow in a NYT op-ed piece this morning nailed it.
Cheney’s got a bomb strapped to his innards:
My theory: Cheney isn’t simply going out in a blaze of vainglory.
He felt the stiff winds of change and accountability blow across his coffin.
It roused and enraged him.
Now, he’s on a political suicide mission.
And if his own party is collateral damage, so be it.
He would rather break it than see it bend anyway.
The Dick might be dying, but he’s still a snarled, dangerous animal — Do as Wanda says, get in the other car, fast!
Children’s Future Past
Filed Under Environment, Media, Politics | Leave a Comment
An understated environmental report today from the UK, calling climate change the biggest global-health threat of the 21st century.
Lead author of the report Professor Anthony Costello:
“The big message of this report is that climate change is a health issue affecting billions of people, not just an environmental issue about polar bears and deforestation.
The impacts will be felt not just in the UK, but all around the world — and not just in some distant future but in our lifetimes and those of our children.”
(Illustration found here).
The report, ‘Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change,’ was commissioned by The Lancet medical journal and the University College London (UCL) Institute for Global Health, and although it’s math is based on “medium-risk scenarios,” the future ain’t so bright if something ain’t done real quick.
Costello, a pediatrician and director of UCL Institute for Global Health, also said he “had not realised the full ramifications of climate change on health until 18 months ago.”
Read a good, detailed and knowledgeable analysis of the report at Climate Progress.
Also today, The National Science Foundation released a special report on climate change via global warming, and once again, the future ain’t pretty.
A few highpoints off the NSF report from LiveScience:
Ecologists have noted marked changes in the habitats of the species they study — changes in the places where they find a particular species, changes in the dates plants first sprout and bloom, changes in plant growth rates and even signs of evolutionary adaptation brought on by a warming climate.
In some cases, species extinctions appear linked to climate change.
Ocean scientists have recorded higher temperatures and higher ocean acidity, which alter the characteristics of the most fundamental organisms of the ocean food chain.
…
Polar scientists have watched vast tracts of Arctic sea ice melt away, leaving behind more open water than anyone can remember seeing during any previous Northern Hemisphere summer.
…
Social scientists have recorded the bewilderment of indigenous people. Their cultural knowledge, which stretches back in time through numerous generations, holds no record of the kinds of environmental conditions they are encountering today.
Paleoclimatologists have discovered — through tree ring data, ice cores and other corroborating records — that the concentration of carbon dioxide, and the Earth’s average temperature, are nearing levels that haven’t been reached for hundreds of thousands of years.
And talking about being between a rock and a hard place.
Again today another damn report.
From the New York Times:
Efforts by countries worldwide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase energy security are in trouble if nothing is done to check the energy gobbled by both information and communication technologies and consumer electronics.
This warning came in a report published yesterday in Paris by the International Energy Agency. The study warns that energy used by computers and consumer electronics will not only double by 2022, but increase threefold by 2030.
…
The study found that the number of people using personal computers will exceed 1 billion over the next seven months and notes that nearly 2 billion television sets are already in use worldwide, averaging more than 1.3 sets in each home with access to electricity. The agency also projects that the world will count more than 3.5 billion mobile phone subscribers by 2010.
…
“In fact, if you compare how much electricity is used by the most common electronic devices with traditional large appliances, you’ll find that actually the electronic gadgets use more — not in every house, but in many households in OECD countries,” the report states, adding: “Not only is this surprising, but it is the major reason why residential electricity consumption is increasing in most countries.”
Another climate study/report also today, on unusual movement of animal life.
From UPI:
A study conducted by three U.S. universities suggests some Michigan mammals are moving northward, apparently in response to climate change.
…
“What we can say is that the potential is there for serious changes to happen, and it would be really smart of us to figure it out, but that will require a lot of detailed, focused ecological research,” said the study’s lead author, University of Michigan Professor Philip Myers.
Apparently, the earth is just responding to the rough treatment the last 200 years.
Iraq’s Jabberwocky Nightmare
Filed Under Just Plain War, Media, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
– Lewis Carroll
(Illustration found here).
A surreal snapshot of a horrifying, nonsensical moment in time: The Iraqi invasion just might end up being the greatest man-made disaster in all of human history.
Lewis Carroll created some wild shit with his wacked-crazy use of disambiguation — meaning of words within a sentence — and he sometimes just made the shit up, right off his Alice-in-the-hat head — that was all pure absurd, but carried a delightful flavor of whimsy.
Iraq indeed is also pure absurd, but with a scorched and a definite anti-whimsy flavor: Coal-fired, oil-slick-aflame, nerve-chilling and terrifying.
One could, in reality, call the Iraqi misadventure a tortured war, creating a quagmare of tortured souls.
On Monday, an indication of the torture:
An American soldier opened fire at a counseling center on a military base Monday, killing five fellow soldiers before being taken into custody, the U.S. command and Pentagon officials said.
Although it was unclear what prompted the shooting, the incident draws attention to the issue of combat stress and morale after six years of war as the mission of the 130,000-strong force transforms to one of training and mentoring the Iraqis.
And then yesterday:
Tuesday the army identified the American soldier who went on a deadly rampage at an Army base in Iraq and charged him with the murder of five other U.S. service members.
Sgt. John Russell, a 44-year-old Texan, has been in the military 20 years.
Russell was on his third tour of duty in Iraq and, as CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports, there were signs he was in trouble.
His commanders feared Russell was on the edge.
So, they took away his weapon and ordered him to counseling at a combat stress clinic in Baghdad.
…
The incident is the deadliest involving soldier on soldier violence in the six-year Iraq war.
In response, the Army has launched an investigation to determine if it needs more people and facilities in war zones to deal with combat stress and soldiers on the brink.
“These are the canaries in the mine,” said Patrick Campbell of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Of America.
“If we don’t start addressing these issues people are get more and more injured and it’s going to get harder to treat them.”
‘Canaries in the mine…’
Yes, indeed.
One of the GIs shot down on Monday called home on Mother’s Day — the day before — and warned about tortured souls and the crux of the problem.
From the NY Daily News:
Pfc. Michael Edward Yates Jr., 19, of Maryland told his mother about Sgt. John Russell just hours before the career military man went on a killing spree.
“He said, ‘Man, this guy’s got issues,’” a grieving Shawna Machlinski said of the last conversation she had with her son.
While Yates told his mother he got along with Russell, 44, he described the troubled sergeant as being angry at the military after serving three tours of duty in Iraq.
“I do have some sympathy and I do know that I can forgive him,” Shawna Machlinski said of Russell. “I kind of blame the Army for not protecting my son.”
Yes indeed, the Army…
And as warmonger, nit-wit Don Rumsfeld blurted, “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time…” more than four years ago, what did the powers-that-used-to-be expect from shoddy, shitty planning?
Along with the now 4,295 GIs killed since the war began, and the 35,000-plus wounded (estimates on wounded run as high as 100,000 troops), a study released in mid-2008 revealed nearly 20 percent of US forces — 300,000 — suffer from major depression or post traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 received brain injuries.
And with the sacrifice?
Aaron Glantz, a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center and author of the book, The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans, responds:
“This Columbine-style shooting in Iraq is shocking, but unfortunately is not surprising.
For eight years now, the Army has stood by silently as more and more American soldiers have taken their own lives under the strain of repeated deployments, an acute lack of mental health services, and a back-door draft.
It was only a matter of time before a stressed-out soldier pointed his gun at comrades rather than himself.
In January, the Army reported more active-duty soldiers had committed suicide than died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
The Army’s suicide rate for 2008 (128) was the highest in 28 years.”
Indeed again.
In the first four months of this year, 91 soldiers committed suicide, including suspected suicides still under investigation and if allowed to continue more than 270 soldiers will be dead by their own hands by December. The large majority of suicides are among enlisted soldiers, privates, specialists and sergeants.
According to the new data, among the active-duty troops who have committed suicide so far in 2009, 48 committed suicide after or during a deployment, while only 16 killed themselves without having gone to war. Two of the active-duty soldiers who killed themselves did so after deploying to war four times.
Among National Guard and Army Reserve troops, 11 died during or after deployments while 16 killed themselves having never deployed.
The figures for the National Guard and Army Reserve include an unexplained bubble of seven suicides among never-deployed troops that occurred in February.
Well, let’s explain that ‘unexplained bubble’ — fear incited by realistic barracks-gossip describing a living hell in Iraq.
First up came that little now-well-know military word to supplement cannon fodder for a war which went south near-about overnight: Stop Loss, which orders GIs to remain to the end of their overseas deployments and up to another 90 days, after their time of service is legally up.
Keeping those precious boots on the ground is the main, above-all factor, and it’s near-destroyed the US military.
Defense Honcho Bob Gates expressed “horror” when told of the shootings in Iraq on Monday, while Joint Chiefs chairman, Mike Mullen stammered that WTF, these guys were killed “in a place where individuals were seeking help,” and maybe, just maybe on the outside, it’s something bad wrong the DOD has been doing all along: “It does speak to me though about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress, dealing with whole issue of those kinds of things and it also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments, increasing dwell time, all those things that we’re focused on to try to improve to try to relieve that stress…”
A stress inside an inferno based upon a lie — a tortured lie, too.
And so comes the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, from whose tortured lips came word of a terrorist conspirarcy so horrible the US was forced to invade Iraq, then oops, later it was discovered the guy was just making up shit to stop torture.
Reports surfaced this past weekend of his death in a Libyan prison, an apparent suicide.
He’d been missing since 2006 when a bunch of high-value terrorists/prisoners were transferred to Guantanamo — It was then suspected he’d been shuffled off to Libya.
From the Washington Post on Tuesday:
Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration.
He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003.
…
In their book “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn said Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a “mock burial” by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours.
Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.
…
“I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch.
“He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war.”
‘Massive intelligence failure’ my ass!
Dick Cheney and his boys twisted and tortured until they heard what they wanted to hear — a clear-cut (Ha!) rationale for the Iraqi invasion:
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
…
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.
“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.
“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
Andrew Sullivan also has another good post on Cheney, torture and diving into Iraq.
And into Iraq the US went, head first without a apparent clue of what would really take place.
Cheney and his crowd figured the US military would take care of the whole shootin’ match.
Instead, the blunder has cost the country $12 billion a month (up to $3 trillion overall) and helped fuel the greatest worldwide financial disaster most-likely ever.
The human toll is much more immeasurable, not only with the US, but with Iraq itself — estimates in civilian deaths range from more than 110,000 to 1.5 million with 4 million displaced.
Iraqi life is daily torture.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
The Baghdad Jabberwock, however, is reportedly instead a mendacious Grue.
Relentless Unrepentant Dick
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Less than 20 percent of US peoples even like the guy, but Dick Cheney has nothing else to do but grimace in public, and apparently, will continue to grimace:
“For a while there was this talk out there that we ought to cut these guys some slack and that they shouldn’t be criticized in the early days of their administration,” he said.
“I haven’t, obviously, spent a lot of time operating according to that proposition.”
The man has some serious lip-snarl problems.
Cheney’s radio interview Thursday from Fargo, ND, also included the admission that waterboarding (torture) works, despite evidence to the contrary:
“Well, I don’t believe that’s true.
That assumes that we didn’t try other ways, and in fact we did.
We resorted, for example, to waterboarding, which is the source of much of the controversy…with only three individuals.
In those cases, it was only after we’d gone through all the other steps of the process.
The way the whole program was set up was very careful, to use other methods and only to resort to something like the enhanced techniques in those special circumstances.”
What about this Dick-face:
United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations.
In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands.
Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees — and as many as 12 — having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting.
The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.
A couple of torturing turds in 1975.
‘Walk That Back’
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I told him I was against [the atomic bomb] on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.
– Dwight Eisenhower, July, 1945
History has shown Harry Truman to be an asshole hard-head.
From Time magazine in September 1960:
1) The Japanese wanted to come to terms at least one month before the war’s end,
2) Truman was well aware of Japanese peace overtures, and
3) He rebuffed them.
(Illustration of Hiroshima mother and child four months later found here).
Time trip to last week: Jon Stewart had on his Daily Show program, Cliff May, a warmonger-pusherman located extreme-right of Dick Cheney — he would most-likely waterboard your mother.
Naturally, he and Stewart snipped-and-snapped with right/left words on torture, who’s to blame, etc., until May moved the conversation onto a more historical level:
Stewart: I try and draw the line where our country has drawn it for 200 years.
May: Do you think in World War II we did not inflict pain and suffering on suspects in the war in Japan?
Stewart: I would hope we didn’t waterboard people. I would hope we didn’t…
May: We did do Hiroshima. Do you think, do you think Truman is a war criminal for that?
Stewart: Yeah.
May: You do?
Stewart: Yeah.
May: Okay. This is a, this is a…
Stewart: Here’s what I think of the atom bombs. I think if you dropped an atom bomb fifteen miles offshore and you said, “The next one’s coming and hitting you,” then I would think it’s okay.
To drop it on a city, and kill a hundred thousand people.
Yeah. I think that’s criminal.
I’d not known about the above episode until this morning.
Due to some mysterious, irritating weirdness with my laptop, there’s no sound, and although I’d kept up with Stewart on a daily basis (hahaha) before the strange hit my computer, (I like Stewart, enjoyed the Cramer ’series’ — read my take here), the past few weeks I tended to ignored anything to do with the Daily Show clips spread daily (hahaha) across the blogosphere because I couldn’t enjoy them — no freakin’ sound.
Until this morning when I spied an opinion-column title mentioning a Stewart waffle, walk back.
Not-so-funny, and more than a bit shameful, when the grovel-shoe-in-the-ass is on the left foot.
Via HuffPost:
“The other night we had on Cliff May.
He was on, we were discussing torture, back and forth, very spirited discussion, very enjoyable. And I may have mentioned during the discussion we were having that Harry Truman was a war criminal.
And right after saying it, I thought to myself that was dumb.
And it was dumb. Stupid in fact.
So I shouldn’t have said that, and I did.
So I say right now, no, I don’t believe that to be the case.
The atomic bomb, a very complicated decision in the context of a horrific war, and I walk that back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say.
Which, by the way, as it was coming out of your mouth, you ever do that, where you’re saying something, and as it’s coming out you’re like, ‘What the f**k, nyah?’
And it just sat in there for a couple of days, just sitting going, ‘No, no, he wasn’t, and you should really say that out loud on the show.’ So I am, right now, and, man, ew.
Sorry. And, Warren G. Harding was a [bleeped, unintelligible].”
What a damn shame — Stewart performed like a corporate noodle — what a let down.
And he even tried to toss off a shit, un-funny joke at the end.
Truman knew what he was doing.
He even went so far as to holier-than-thou proclaim it was no big deal okaying the mass killing of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki — telling students at Columbia University in 1959, “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision.’ It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.”
Real history tells the tale.
Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic has posted a couple of good views of the Truman war-criminal question here and here.
And from libertarian-bent Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com an agreeable view of war crimes, torture, and why Stewart’s walk back was so showing in how the US narrative is so biased.
The title of Raimondo’s commentary, ‘Jon Stewart: Moral Coward‘ posted on antiwar.com’s homepage this morning was my original prick-point on the subject.
Eight years ago, the fairly-prestigious and realiable History News Network held an online mock trial of Truman on charges he violated Nuremberg war-conduct standards — “the wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”
Interesting debate — read about it starting here.
The ‘Very’ Mushroom
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All the worries about swine flu, the ecomony or even global warming could be put to rest with this little unsettling problem:
General James Jones said Pakistan’s army had repeatedly told him the stockpile was “under control”, but “this is very much an ongoing topic”.
…
“If Pakistan doesn’t continue in the direction that it presently is and we’re not successful there then, obviously, the nuclear question comes into view.”
…
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taleban would be “the very very worst case scenario,” said Gen Jones.
(Illustration found here).
President Obama’s national security advisor Jones and all the big-military brass are getting a bit anxious about security for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, even as the Taliban have advanced in recents days to within 60 miles of Islamabad, the capital.
The whole area in northwest Pakistan is in chaos.
Although the Pakistani army has supposedly been fighting militants tooth-and-nail, they are “just destroying stuff” without accomplishing much while the Taliban hide in the mountains.
Most military analysts believe the rag-tag-fierce Taliban are no match for the 620,000-man strong Pakistani army, but in the rub is the security of the infrastructure, even the nukes.
Pakistan has been working on nukes since 1972, and really got into high gear after India tested a a “nuclear device” two years later — Pakistan became part of the so-called nuclear community in May 1998.
Two days after Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan reportedly began relocating nuclear parts to six secret sites.
Hence the US is nervous about all those unshaved Taliban getting to a nuclear button.
Should we, therefore, have a certain right to all that anxiety?
From Wired’s Danger Room blog on Monday:
So, is it time to worry about the worst-case scenario?
For starters, it’s worth remembering that the United States has been keeping a watchful eye on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal for a while now, and the United States has provided money and equipment to improve Pakistan’s nuclear security.
As the New York Times first revealed in 2007, the Bush administration committed over $100 million to help secure Pakistan’s nuclear materials; that assistance included night vision equipment, helicopters and detection gear.
But it did not include Permissive Action Links, a sophisticated kind of tamper-proofing that’s considered the gold standard for preventing unauthorized nuclear detonations.
And the Times now says that “much of that [nuke-securing] effort has now petered out, and American officials have never been permitted to see how much of the money was spent, the facilities where the weapons are kept or even a tally of how many Pakistan has produced.”
The military, one hopes, is also thinking about the unthinkable.
When a reporter pressed Mullen (Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) about whether the United States could say with confidence where all of Pakistan’s nukes are, the admiral replied: “You’re starting to push on what is clearly a classified level of information … I wouldn’t say one way or the other.”
Condi Rice just might have her chance to witness that “mushroom cloud” she was blubbering about years ago, and she’d then really have trouble with them too-pesky fourth-graders.
Tartuffery
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Mad as Hell, Media | Leave a Comment
Why the US talks out the ass.
Churchgoing makes one a much-nicer person:
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified.
Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it.
People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.
Only four in 10 of them did.
(Illustration found here).
Who are these “white evangelical Protestants” you ask? — The GOP!
And George Jr. is right there.
In October 2005:
One of the delegates, Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said:
“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
Mr Bush went on: “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”
Mr Bush, who became a born-again Christian at 40, is one of the most overtly religious leaders to occupy the White House, a fact which brings him much support in middle America.
And I guess ‘God’ also told him that if he couldn’t get the right answers out of some people — just torture the shit out of them.
keep looking »