Just Plain Gall vs Unmitigated Gall
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, history, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In the last few years there’s been a momentous outburst of gall — the audacity of some people to bullshit despite incredible evidence to the contrary — which has touched just about every aspect of US life, especially in politics.
Two such unrelated examples occurred this past weekend, one involved GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry and the other concerned the former US vice president, The Dick.
(Illustration found here).
Due to a tilted MSM, this gall bullshit is allowed to be played out on the media wires without so much as a ‘Hey, wait a minute,” and certainly no saying ‘that’s a lie.’
A public lambasted by continuous crap comes to believe the crap is real — this caused by some like the Tea Party nit-twits who just don’t give a shit.
In the Perry case, the story is race.
Born and raised in the US Deep South (don’t hold that against me), I understand the culture of racism as a normal byproduct of ordinary life — I got outta there as soon as I could.
And with my own children’s upbringing (a single parent, I raised five kids near-about alone), there were two words that were never heard or spoken in my household on threat of great bodily harm — one was the combination of god and damn together, and the other, the “n” word for African-Americans.
The kids would sometimes blurt out the first one in anger (much to my consternation, and to their credit, they’d apologize, or at least look sheepish), but never, ever used the second.
Of course, all other words were fair game — we could make the late George Carlin blush.
Anyway, the thing on Perry arrived Sunday via a story in the Washington Post:
In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.
“Niggerhead,” it read.
Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s.
There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property.
In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country.
Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.
But the name of this particular parcel did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor.
Some locals still call it that. As recently as this summer, the slablike rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp.
When asked last week, Perry said the word on the rock is an “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”
Perry claims the rock was painted over near immediately.
Others differ:
“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”
…
Another local who visited the property with Perry and the legislators in those years recalled seeing the rock with the name clearly visible.
“I thought, ‘This is going to embarrass Rick some day,’ ” said this person, who did not want to be named, fearing negative consequences from speaking on the subject.
The Perry camp pushed back: “A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous, including the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible. The one consistent fact in the story is that the word on a rock was painted over and obscured many years ago.”
Right, and a minor example of gall as explained by this from the Post story:
Mae Lou Yeldell, who is black and has lived in Haskell County for 70 years, recalled a gas station refusing to sell her father fuel when he drove the family through Throckmorton in the 1950s. She said it was not uncommon in the 1950s and ’60s for whites to greet blacks with, “Morning, nigger!”
“I heard that so much it’s like a broken record,” said Yeldell, who had never heard of the hunting spot by the river.
Even in my red-neck of the Alabama woods I never heard such ugly racial shit as the above.
Hence use of simple gall in repudiating the whole thing.
However, unmitigated gall was displayed this weekend by The Dick.
On CNN yesterday (via Raw Story), The Dick offered praise for President Obama in the war on terror, but then demanded an apology from Obama not using the old bullshit phrase, “war on terror” and the old boy is still stung by Obama’s 2009 Cario speech.
“It matters a lot,” Cheney said. “In terms of the signals that are sent by the commander-in-chief with respect to the kind of efforts that are going to be used, what we expect our people to be doing.
He needs to be clear with what he’s doing, and he clearly is fighting a war.
I agree with the attacks.
But don’t get wrapped up in your underwear then trying to go back and validate the foolish things said in their campaign.”
…
“They need to call it what it is,” he said.
“When he goes to Cairo and in-effect says we walked away from ideals, we forgot our core principles and values on our (the Bush Administration’s) watch, that’s a big mistake.”
When (CNN moderator Candy) Crowley asked if he wanted an apology from Obama, Cheney said, “I would. Not for me, but I think for the Bush Administration and that he misspoke when he gave that speech two years ago.”
Cheney’s aughter Liz added: “I think he (Obama) did tremendous damage. I think he slandered the nation and I think he owes an apology to the American people.”
One almost has to do a double-take on that huge pile of bullshit.
The Dick and George Jr. are war criminals, no doubt and no amount of unmitigated gall will change that cold-hard fact.
No Time for Time
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Everything | Leave a Comment
(Illustration of Francisco Goya’s ‘Disaster of War‘ found here).
US peoples — and for the final matter — all the world’s peoples stand not-so-nimbly on the edge of a strange and nefarious, swiftly-shifting, era in time, where all these multi-layered gushers filled with historical debris are coming swiftly from all directions, inundating all aspects of modern life.
And it’s not just these continuing confounding natural disasters, currently taking the form of Hurricane Irene, which already has caused 11 deaths in four states, and just after 9 a.m. Pacific time Sunday is knock-knocking at the Big Apple’s door, or those horrible string of tornadoes this past spring.
Or even that 5.8 shaker pulsating out of Virginia last Tuesday.
Anxiety — WTF.
An Ipsos poll in early August indicated not only are US peoples in a record majority think the country is ‘off on the wrong track,’ but the future looks like shit — almost half (47 percent) now say that ‘the worst is yet to come,’ an increase of 13 points from last summer when this question was last asked.
Uncertainty is manifested throughout a most-shoddily built, Ponzi-schemed structure that’s modern civilization.
As such is nowadays can be summed — from The Big Picture this morning on financial insanity, though, it could applied to a shitload of stuff: Banks are increasingly following Tennessee Williams’ advice for survival: “We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.”
And in the adage, ‘timing is everything,’ contain some bits of truth.
A capture I found is these words from Emily Dickinson:
Departed to the judgment,
A mighty afternoon;
Great clouds like ushers leaning,
Creation looking on.The flesh surrendered, cancelled,
The bodiless begun;
Two worlds, like audiences, disperse
And leave the soul alone.
Every man/woman to their own tent and be ready.
Big Bro, Indeed
Filed Under Bullshit, Lying | Leave a Comment
“Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.”
– John Lennon (The FBI assembled around 300 pages of files on John Lennon in 1971-72, part of President Nixon’s effort to deport Lennon to silence him as a critic of the war in Vietnam).
(Illustration found here).
Yesterday, I posted about the nefarious undercover operations of the FBI into US Muslim communities and how these investigations are dumb-ass bogus while overlooking one case staring me straight in the face — the FBI investigated/continues to investigate antiwar.com for activities which constitute a threat to National Security on behalf of a foreign power.
Another coughed-up pile of bullshit.
And from all indications, the FBI were including antiwar.com in investigations because of either a jab at a search for Israeli spies, or another jab at finding out who had posted terrorist watch lists online — either way, the whole thing smells of shit.
Along with the site itself, writer/editor Justin Raimondo, along with the site’s Webmaster, Eric Garris, where under the FBI spotlight.
One of the best investigative journalists around, Marcy Wheeler, checks out the situation at emptywheel.
Wheeler wonders at this from the FBI file:
There are several unanswered questions regarding antiwar.com.
It describes itself as a non-profit group that survives on generous donations from its readers.
Who are these contributors and what are the funds used for?
[two lines redacted] on www.antiwar.com.
If this is so, then what is his true name?
Two facts have been established by this assessment.
Many individuals worldwide do view this website including individuals who are currently under investigation and [one line redacted].
And concludes:
Now, it’s bad enough the FBI doesn’t consider Antiwar.com a journalistic site at all.
It’s also pretty appalling that they used pretty unnecessary questions to justify further investigation.
And remember, the bar for the FBI to use First Amendment “protected” reasons to investigate someone have been lowered since 2004.
Apparently, for the FBI, advocating for peace and making a publicly available PDF available constitutes sufficient threat to conduct a counterintelligence investigation.
Raimondo explained the problem in a column yesterday and reports the FBI files were posted out of the blue.
He says the content of those files can only be called ‘bizarre.’
According to a memo stamped “Secret,” marked as “routine,” and dated April 30, 2004, we apparently drew the attention of the feds when we posted a copy of a “terrorist suspect list” [.pdf] which had been supplied by the US government to various corporate and governmental agencies, both here and abroad.
These documents — including one posted on the web site of an Italian banking association — contained the names of those on a “watch list,” the product of an FBI operation dubbed “Operation Lookout.”
The memo acknowledges the list “was posted on the internet” in “different versions,” but says the FBI “assessment was conducted on the findings discovered on www.antiwar.com.”
These guys are using us a resource — so why haven’t they contributed to our fund drive?
Yes, indeed.
In a somewhat related piece at Mother Jones is an examination of FBI informants.
A collection of more bullshit.
Read the whole post (a long one but worth the time).
A money bit:
The bureau’s strategy has changed significantly from the days when officials feared another coordinated, internationally financed attack from an Al Qaeda sleeper cell.
Today, counterterrorism experts believe groups like Al Qaeda, battered by the war in Afghanistan and the efforts of the global intelligence community, have shifted to a franchise model, using the internet to encourage sympathizers to carry out attacks in their name.
The main domestic threat, as the FBI sees it, is a lone wolf.
The bureau’s answer has been a strategy known variously as “preemption,” “prevention,” and “disruption”—identifying and neutralizing potential lone wolves before they move toward action.
To that end, FBI agents and informants target not just active jihadists, but tens of thousands of law-abiding people, seeking to identify those disgruntled few who might participate in a plot given the means and the opportunity.
And then, in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.
Another sense of leaving keys in the car and walking away.
And in the Mother Jones/Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley look into this scheme found this:
Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants.
Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur — an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.
Where does the crime start?
Terror of terror.
And by the way, all the stories above can be found at the antiwar.com site — will the FBI now know when my bowels will move next?
War Criminals
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In the annals of US armed conflict, George Jr. and his gang is way-unique — they’re obvious war criminals.
If their actions had taken place in another country, the whole bunch would have been hunted down by now and shipped to The Hague for trial — instead, they write books, blubber nonsensical bullshit and lounge in good health and wealth.
George Jr. knows it too.
Last February, the little shit abruptly cancelled a Geneva, Switzerland, speaking engagement after reports of the possible filing of an official criminal complaint against him about torture of U.S.-held detainees.
(Illustration found here).
Katherine Gallagher, an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights: “Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he cancelled his trip to avoid our case,” said Gallagher. “The message from civil society is clear — if you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans.”
Except within the safe confines of the US of A.
And this in spite of war-crime-related charges being there, in plain sight, and even from within the US government.
In June 2008, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report on intelligence slapped together for Iraq, a country which seemingly required invasion.
From the committee’s press release and chairman of the group, Jay Rockefeller:
“Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced.
Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said.
“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.
Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence.
But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”
Based on that shit alone, some kind of legal action should have been taken by now, or at the bare-ass minimum, at the least some low-level public inquiry on the validity of the committee’s press release.
Enter Mr. Barack Obama.
If one has been paying even somewhat close to attention to detail, the release in mid-July by the group, Human Rights Watch, of its 107-page report,, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” wasn’t a bell-sounding news event in terms of actual life.
Pretty much the same story over the past couple of years, maybe longer — double-standards and violations of actual international accords and treaties signed by the US, and yes, even public statements by some of these assholes to the effect of, ‘Yeah, I tortured, so fuck off!‘
In this particular case, I believe to shame, that nothing will ever be done.
Although HRW’s report of “overwhelming evidence” and presentations of “substantial information warranting criminal investigations,” looks and sounds good, the real-time reality of any of those clowns ever ending up anywhere-near a jail cell is so way-down-the-road it’s never going to happen.
And the reason?
Nat Hentoff explains in a piece at The Star Democrat on the HRW report that it’s a vital requirement for future generations of US peoples that the current US peoples hold account those who ordered torture, and get rid of the nefarious US double-standard, a tool for al-Qaeda recruitment.
The last couple of lines of Hentoff’s story, though, cops the deal: Not one of the aspiring Republican candidates for the presidency next year has said a word about this. And Obama cherishes their silence.
On a lot of stuff, especially with foreign policy, Obama’s been a frickin’ turncoat.
Although in those most-wonderous (and more dreamy than then realized) just after Obama’s election — November 2008 — there were news stories on reported rumors that then-president George Jr. might issue a blanket pardon for everybody involved, including his-own-self, but the guy shouldn’t have worried.
From the UK’s The Independent in April 2009:
Only last weekend Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, was re-iterating what his boss was saying even before he was inaugurated.
A new administration meant a new beginning.
It was time to “move on” and, Mr Emanuel indicated, the former White House and Justice Department officials who formulated the policy, as well as the CIA operatives who had carried them out, should not be prosecuted.
And in spite of an occasional legal side-glance/lip service at the issue, Obama has stood by “move on” and its implication that all those war criminals should not be prosecuted.
In being such a set of unique war criminals, George Jr.’s little group is also responsible — beyond torture — for mass death and great, horrible suffering.
Iraq greatly suffered/and is still suffering from the dubious US invasion — according to Iraq Body Count through July 24, 2011, an estimated more than 102,000 to near 112,000 Iraq civilians have been killed (other estimates are much higher — the Lancet study claimed the deaths caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq rivaled the death toll of the 1994 Rwandan genocide).
And Iraq, along with Afghanistan, are now just one long fire fight — yesterday in Iraq, a day of what’s considered “very light violence,” five Iraqis died, including this incident: In Hadid, a sticky bomb placed on an education department employee’s car exploded and killed three family members.
An so it goes…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
George Jr.’s escapades have cost a generation of young people most dearly.
Not only have 4,474 US GIs have died, along with more than 32,172 wounded, more than 300,000 troops suffer from all kinds of PTSDs (18 to 20 percent of the whole force) and more are killing themselves — 32 US Army soldiers committed suicide last month (a record) and even veterans in college now have a much higher risk of suicide than a regular, non-veteran student.
What a horrible mess.
And back to that Senate Select Committee and a most-poignant story in yesterday’s Stars and Stripes on the death of a US GI in August 2003, just just four days after his 20th birthday.
Some snips:
Army Spc. Justin W. Hebert’s story is sad and sadly unremarkable, a tragedy bound up in the tale of a grinding war that took young lives with grievous regularity.
Nearly one-third of U.S. troops killed in Iraq were age 18 to 21.
Well over half were in the lowest enlisted ranks.
For Hebert, the Army was an adventure. But it didn’t last long.
…
It was Aug. 1, 2003.
The war, according to the Pentagon’s plan, was supposed to be over.
Baghdad had fallen swiftly.
But a new, more menacing phase of conflict was just beginning.
An insurgency was in the making, and in its formative months it perplexed U.S. commanders and cost Hebert his life.
In the years since, the U.S. effort in Iraq has veered from the brink of calamity to the threshold of surprising success.
With the remaining U.S. troops now packing to leave, possibly for good, casualties and costs will be tallied one last time.
…
The sacrifice of so many lives like Hebert’s helped turn U.S. public opinion firmly against the war by the time Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008.
Three years later, young Americans still die in Iraq even though the war is widely seen as over.
It is also widely seen as a mistake, and by some as a waste.
And a crime that cries for justice.
Torture is a side-issue when it comes to real-shit horror on a mass scale and those who perpetrated it should be held accountable — Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
Prosecute the lie, but, alas Obama’s not so much for change, but for ‘move on.’
To the utter shame of all Us peoples.
Drone On
Filed Under Bullshit, Lying, Technology, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In a horrid news cycle where events fill the airwaves no matter the content — i.e., currently Casey Anthony and the US debt ceiling debate/debacle — blanket everything else, including the ongoing wars all over the place.
And especially lost in the bullshit is the horror of US killing of civilians under the righteous banner of stopping terrorism.
(Illustration found here).
The US military’s use of unmanned drones in the vast war on terrorists appears to be extremely similar to a Mafia operation, complete with the mob’s ‘rub out’ analogy, and like the Mafia, planning those attacks from thousands of miles away is so-near comparable to murder.
An interview last February in Newsweek with John A. Rizzo, former CIA acting general counsel, who on occasion in fact described the process of what he did as ‘murder’ and indicated the whole thing might be illegal:
“It’s basically a hit list,” he said. Then he pointed a finger at my forehead and pretended to pull a trigger.
“The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.”
Rizzo, now retired, says there was a battery of lawyers always present — there were roughly 10 of them — who would write a cable asserting an individual poses a grave threat to the United States. The CIA cables are legalistic and carefully argued, often running up to five pages.
Everything was on the straight and narrow, all legal:
When NEWSWEEK asked the administration for comment, a U.S. official who declined to be identified addressing such a sensitive subject said: “These CT [counterterrorism] operations are conducted in strict accordance with American law and are governed by legal guidance provided by the Department of Justice.”
Beyond the ethical and moral concerns, what’s the legal rules?
Not some more of that John Yoo bullshit, I hope.
Yet, not so fast, there Perry Mason.
Right now, an arrest warrant is being sought in the UK for Rizzo in connection with those legal drone attacks.
From Aljazeera English on Sunday:
“There has clearly been a crime committed here,” Clive Stafford Smith, a British human rights lawyer who is leading the effort to seek a warrant for Rizzo, told Al Jazeera.
“The issue here is whether the United States is willing to flaunt international law.
“One of the purposes of doing this is because there is no sense in the United States of how catastrophic this whole process is.”
US government lawyers argue that drone strikes are conducted on a “solid legal basis,” however, Stafford Smith said there has to be a war going on in order for any of these strikes to be legal.
“Outside a combat zone the US has no possible, plausible legal basis to conduct these drone strikes. They think they can get away with it.
This process is meant to make sure that they can’t,” Stafford Smith said.
“I challenge anyone to go to the families of those innocent victims in the [Afghanistan-Pakistan] border regions and say: ‘It’s legal to bomb your homes and kill your children.’
It is not, obviously.”
And in that respect, what happens to those under those drone attacks?
In answer comes from a piece in the UK’s The Guardian also on Sunday about Pakistani Noor Behram, who photographs and documents the aftermath of the drones, not only in the killing and maiming, but the impact on local society.
Couple of noteworthy snippets:
Sometimes arriving on the scene just minutes after the explosion, he first has to put his camera aside and start digging through the debris to see if there are any survivors.
It’s dangerous, unpleasant work.
The drones frequently hit the same place again, a few minutes after the first strike, so looking for the injured is risky.
There are other dangers too: militants and locals are suspicious of anyone with a camera.
After all, it is a local network of spies working for the CIA that are directing the drone strikes.
But Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important — and unreported — truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit.
The world’s media quickly reports on how many militants were killed in each strike.
But reporters don’t go to the spot, relying on unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials.
Noor Behram believes you have to go to the spot to figure out whether those killed were really extremists or ordinary people living in Waziristan.
And he’s in no doubt.
“For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” he said.
“I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed.
I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed.”
…
According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalise the population.
“There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike.
You can’t find bodies.
So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America.
They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.
“The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed.
Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack.
The Americans think it is working, but the damage they’re doing is far greater.”
A horror complacent US peoples either aren’t aware of, or just don’t give a shit.
And President Obama has further expanded the drone wars beyond what even George Jr. had commissioned — 118 in 2010 and reportedly 45 so far this year, with the operation widening further still in Somalia and Yemen.
And the future?
In some insane words from Slate: To top it off, we put the former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, in charge of the military. And we put our top general, David Petraeus, in charge of the CIA. The CIA and the drones are the team of the future. They’re the new face of a faceless war.
Drone on, Garth.