Prey tell, why the need for prosecutions “with this level of secrecy”? The Gulag system in Stalin’s era certainly needed this kind of secrecy–mostly because the accusations were exaggerated if not entirely fabricated–but the prosecution of criminals and prisoners of war is neither necessitates nor is facilitated by secrecy; if anything, we, the public, need to understand what is being done in our names and by whom; what threat it represents, and how much progress is being made. This is a fundamental necessity of a representative republic run along democratic principles. If we don’t know what is being done, we can’t make an informed decision as to whether or not to continue supporting it.
And far from it being a transient oversight–a “mistake” as you put it (one that destroys lives)–it is part of the continued and avowed policy of this Administration to distort, deny, conceal, and obfuscate any evidence of what goes on in these facilities, often to the point of denying they exist (prisons and interrogation facilities in Eastern Europe), and classifying prisoners in the extra-legal (and Orwellian unperson) category of “enemy combatants”, and use the label to justify recognizing the basic rights of both accused criminals and POWs. As for Gitmo, the Administration has had five years to “sort it out”, and has responded by stonewalling and moving prisoners to other unknown facilities, denying they have done so and then backtracking to the standard (and unconscionable) arguments when faced with inarguable evidence.
When you break your neighbor’s window with a misthrown ball once, it’s an accident. Do it again and it’s negligence. Continue doing it, every day, after it has been repeatedly explained to you how what you are doing is dangerous, destructive, and inappropriate is blatant malfeasance.
Neocon yes. Not freemasons or reptiles. Wolfowitz, Rumsfield, Rove, Pearl ,Kristol all had Tail removal surgery. It was in Germany . Germans can keep the truth for generations.But they do profess remaking the world into what they deem is better.
BEST POST EVER!!! (I wish I was that smart to articulate it in such a fashion)
I wish that major newpapers would run a front page on PNAC. It would all make sense to everyone…at least in retrospect. Anyone who defends this shit as a natural response to a credible threat is a fucker. No better way to say it.
Ignorance of this magnitude over matters this important is simply inexcusable. Countless experts on the Middle East were warning of the high possibility of sectarian violence and possible civil war before the invasion, and were completely ignored. When you kick a hornet’s nest on a playground, it doesn’t matter that it’s the hornets who are stinging the children and not you – it’s still your fault. The fact that you ignored all the advice of bystanders because you hoped that maybe candy would come out doesn’t change anything.
Motivations don’t trump easily foreseeable consequences. Our nation has started a shitstorm that has already claimed roughly 45,000 innocent civilian lives, and could well claim hundreds of thousands more if civil war breaks out. That’s fifteen 9/11’s we’ve inflicted on another country. Does it really make a difference if it was done out of incompetence instead of malice? Would you be able to dismiss so many deaths so easily if the shoe were on the other foot?
I’ve wondered the same…scary, isn’t it? At least one way or another, we have sanity, whether democrat or republican, converative or liberal, take office in 2008. I don’t think either side sees sanity in the approach this adminstration has taken.
I only wish there were a more centrist party (and overall view)…Washington is owned, by and large, by the politicos on the fringes, whereas the typical American is well within the center of the bell curve - we just want someone smart and honest. Who, among our founding fathers, would have though it would be so hard?
I am. I see very little difference between the cartoon and the legions of handwavers that come out from under their rocks whenever the Bushites screw another pooch and then try to justify it by screaming “911! 911! 911!”
I’m angry. I’m a very angry American. And yesterdays orgy of public breastbeating just focused my anger to a white hot point. I’m angry that my country has been hijacked by a group of people with a well-documented pre-existing agenda. I’m angry that Al Qaeda gave them an excuse to put that agenda into play. I’m not one of the conspiracy nuts who thinks that the Bushites planned and executed the 9/11 attacks, but I’m angry as hell that this administration took a national tragedy and used it to justify behavior that, had it been performed by another nation, we as Americans would have roundly vilified. I’m angry that the American people lapped up the lukewarm pus of justification that this White House has been diligently tapping from the wound of 9/11.
Everything that this administration has done after running the Taliban out of Kabul is built on the blood and grief of its supposed constituents, and we’re complicit in our own exploitation! I find it so hard to believe that the American people can’t see the truth of this that I have to believe that the apologists know the way of it and STILL decide they’re going to suck onto the corpses of the 9/11 dead like a horde of necrophagic leeches.
So yes, I am serious. I’m as serious as a heart attack. Or as serious as two planes being flown into the WTC, if you prefer.
I TAKE IT BACK!!!
We are fucked, especially by people like you…who seem to think its our right to lead (OWN, as that what it comes down to, isn’t it) the world, that Guantanifuckimo is a moral pillar, and we can’t possibly do anything wrong.
I find it encouraging that the apologists have nothing but transparent distracting maneuvers left. I’m not seeing any real defending going on, just a lot of gyrations and hyperventilating.
Still, I live in Brooklyn so I have no idea what is on the minds of those who voted for Bush the second time around. It seemed obvious to everybody here where this administration was heading. Being smackdab in the middle of blue, it is hard to judge what makes others so red.
Yes, but we brought it to them. It’s got our name on it. We chose to take an action which had fairly predictable consequences. That bad things might have happened in the future doesn’t absolve us of what we did.
I’m often a bit stunned by how dismissive Iraq war defenders are about the civilian casualties. Did you see the CBS 9/11 documentary? Remember the part where people’s bodies are hitting the ground outside? There’s nothing that brings home the horror of that day to me more than that image, because people who should have just been working a boring office job were suddenly in the position of burning to death or jumping. I don’t want to be even a tiny bit responsible for people dying like that. And we are.
He did not make any post war plans. The guy who works for him threatened to fire anyone who did. What kind of education leads a man to make that much of a stupid of decision?