Category: War

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Blue Like Putin

For all of the lovely, lovely speeches about liberty and democracy and freedom and all those great American values those unreasonable Iraqi’s simply refuse to thank us for, George Bush stands by, completely oblivious or ignorant or just plain complicit as Russia slides back into dictatorship.

Under Putin, the Kremlin has steadily been increasing its ownership or control of television, radio, and internet news outlets. It just took over the Russian News Service (through proxy), and called a meeting with the journalists employed there. From now on, they were told, no coverage of the opposition. No bad news about the economy or politics within Russia. The United States is our enemy. And at least 50% of the newscast will be devoted to “happy news”.

And George Bush stands by and smiles and appears completely uninterested.

How on earth can Bush continue to declare that the goal of the war on Iraq is to bring freedom and democracy to that nation, while clearly conveying utter indifference to the state of democracy within Russia, or Egypt, or Libya, or Saudi Arabia?

Well, that’s not difficult at all to understand, unless you ever really believed the statements about democracy.

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John McCain Takes a Leisurely Walk Through Peaceful Downtown Baghdad on a Bright Sunny Day in Iraq

According to the New York Times, John McCain and other members of a congressional delegation recently took a walk through a Baghdad Market, browsing, drinking tea, haggling with the merchants, and getting their shopping done. Afterwards, all smiles, they reported that great progress was being made in Iraq. It was now safe to shop.

Mike Pence, a Republican from that centre of cosmopolitan diversity, Indiana, reported that it was just like taking a walk through a market down home. Of course, in Republican America, eventually he will be right.

What they did not report to the media was that they were accompanied by 100 American soldiers in Humvees, sharpshooters, attack helicopters, and bullet-proof vests. They didn’t report that traffic had been diverted away from the area for their visit, and access to the delegation by Iraqi citizens restricted.

The merchants themselves, after hearing McCain’s comments, were incredulous. They thought he was out of his mind. They reported that they were being driven out of business by the failure of the Americans to provide security.

This is more than just an interesting anecdote. Bush accuses congress of sabotaging the Iraq project by linking funding to a time-line for American withdrawal. Congress says, we don’t see that there is any progress. Rather than stay for another five or ten years and another 3,000 American lives, let’s get out now.

McCain supports Bush on this issue. It is rather striking that, in his search for some symbolic act of confidence, to show that there is real progress in Iraq, the only thing he could hit upon was this– a exercise in fakery and deception. This is a supporter of the war, remember. He wants us to believe things are getting better– there is progress.

McCain has also announced that he will copy George Bush’s campaign fund-raising strategy of lavishing side-splittingly hilarious adolescent nicknames upon donors of especially large amounts of cash. They will be called-…. wait for it… the McCain 100’s or McCain 200’s.

Doesn’t quite have the pizzazz of “ranger” or “most honored and lavishly-sucked-up-to-crony now, does it?” No wonder he is beginning to trail… wait for it… Mitt Romney! Yes, the only Republican candidate who has never cheated on his wife! The Mormon! Could it be that the fundamentalist wing of the party, that cohort that still thinks, given enough time, Iraqi’s will be lining up for macjobs at local fast-food outlets, has finally spoken?

It is very, very sad to see a man like McCain, who once seemed like such a promising alternative to all of the sold-out, compromised politicians of both parties, go down in flames.

Like Colin Powell, he has learned that it almost impossible to be honorable and a Republican.

Sooner or later, you’re going to have to get down on your knees behind someone like Dick Cheney and in front of someone like Jerry Falwell or James Dobson– those apostles of intolerance.

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The Supposed Alleged Possible Canadian Terror Plot: Entrapment

And there it is, near the bottom, almost as an aside:

He was paid.
He was paid more than $300,000.

That’s near the bottom of the article linked to in the left column, which describes, with great earnestness, the authentic, real, god-awful truth about Islamic terrorists operating in Toronto: that they really mean it, that they are serious, that they are a real threat.

Frontline and the CBC, which collaborated on the report, have a lot of credibility. Unlike Fox, or even CBS or NBC or ABC, they tend to take a more measured and less sensationalistic approach to stories about terrorist cells operating in North America. (Though even CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently ran a rather odd piece on how terrorists are using the internet to train young jihadists.) But there it is, a long, detailed, well-researched program (and website), detailing how the 17 young men were seriously plotting to storm the Parliament buildings, take MPs hostage, and behead them one by one until Canada withdrew it’s armed forces from Afghanistan.

And then, way down the page, there is that one little, embarrassing detail: the informant, Mubin Shaikh, whose revelations to CSIS (the Canadian Security Service) led to the arrests, was paid more than $300,000 for the information.

When the trial is held, Mubin Shaikh will be the star witness. Undoubtedly, he will have to reveal the fact that he was a paid informant to the court. Then the court will have to decide whether $300,000 is an incentive to exaggerate or distort his information. They should also decide whether $300,000 is an incentive for someone to incite. They should also consider the question of “entrapment”.

The question is, would Mr. Shaikh have been paid if he had not provided the RCMP with suspects?

No, he would not.

It is possible that CSIS has additional proof. We won’t know until the trial, of course. It is possible that the additional proof wouldn’t mean much if it wasn’t put into “context” by $300,000 worth of testimony. It is possible, if not likely– I say it is likely– that the additional evidence CSIS will offer will have been produced as a result of the activities and encouragement of Mubin Shaikh.

The question that should be asked is, would these young men have committed a crime if they had never met Mubin Shaikh?

Perhaps you believe that the police are willing to pay large sums of money to informants if their information clears suspects of suspicion. Perhaps you live in Disneyland.

Mubin Shaikh was paid an initial $68,000 U.S. So, suppose he reported back to CSIS that nothing was up. No reason to be concerned. There’s a couple of hot-heads, but they are just shooting off their mouths. They are kids who, not unreasonably, are against the war on Iraq because they believe it is motivated by the U.S. desire to control oil supplies and support Zionism. They believe the U.S. invaded Iraq. Oh yeah… Well, they believe the U.S. lied about weapons of mass destruction so they could invade Iraq to steal its oil. Okay– it it illegal to believe that? It is if you are an Arab living in North America or Europe.

Do you suppose Shaikh had any reason to believe he would receive an additional $300,000 if he continued to report that there was no serious terrorist plot?

I suspect that among the 17 youths that were arrested, were a small number of relatively serious-minded extremists, who genuinely hated decadent western culture, and dreamed of seeking revenge for the perceived humiliation of the Moslem world at the hands of the Israelis and Americans. (Shaikh is not going to propose the ridiculous to CSIS.) But I suspect that for every ten youths like that, maybe one or two ever actually end up doing something. Of that number, a smaller percentage acquire the means and determination to actually do something effective.

I wonder if the infamous 3 tons of ammonia nitrate will turn out to have been Shaikh’s suggestion.

Apparently, the RCMP ended up “providing” the (fake) material.

Stunningly– I say– the RCMP provided them with fake ammonia nitrate, in order to provide evidence for the crime they allege.

There are several American cases that sound alarmingly similar: a paid informant infiltrates a local youth group, encourages the boys to talk “jihad”, then reports on their conversations to Homeland Security and they sweep them up. In most of those cases, there is no evidence that any of the suspects ever took any steps to actually commit any terrorist acts. In some cases, there was bravado and bragging and macho posturing. The victims of this scam are threatened with years in prison for very serious charges, but then agree to plead guilty to a relatively minor charge, and then the government holds a parade and awards medals to everyone.  The plea, the result of bullying, becomes the proof that there really was a threat.

The boys went up north and took training… from Mr. Shaikh. They used paintball guns and pellet guns and, Mr. Shaikh claims, some live ammunition.

Why does this all look so pathetic?

Why is it so offensive to me that reporter Linden McIntyre of the CBC seemed to spend an inordinate proportion of his report on Mr. Shaikh’s civic-mindedness, and his concern for the Moslem community, and his own spiritual journey from misspent youth to respected leader of the Moslem community in Toronto… before telling us about the $300,000?

Mr. McIntyre knows a good story and how to package it.  A real journalist is more skeptical than he is.

If Mr. Shaikh really was a man of integrity, why would he even have accepted the money, knowing, as he must have, that a reasonable person would question how much honesty $300,000 can buy?

Frontline (PBS) on the Canadian Terror Plot Informant

Imagine, if you will, an Arab power that “takes possession” of a number of American citizens, declares them enemy combatants, and locks them away in solitary confinement in a horrible prison somewhere.  Suppose the U.S. protests, and demands their release.  Suppose this Arab state says, “these men are terrorists”.  And then the U.S. says, they are not.  We can prove they are not.  And the Arab state says, you can make those arguments at the trials.  Right now, the world is too dangerous for us to release these men.  What if they invade our country after we release them?  And the U.S. says, okay, when are the trials?  And the Arab state says, never.

Imagine the outrage.  How dare they?

I wonder how many people just assume that the government would never do such a thing — buy evidence. They couldn’t get away with it, could they? They can and they do, on a surprisingly regular basis. Sometimes our judges slap them down for it, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, like the rest of us, they seem to believe that a higher good is served by abridging the most precious rights we have in a democracy.

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America Shoots Down a Passenger Jet: Medals for Everyone!

On July 3, 1988, the United States shot down an Iranian jetliner killing 290 innocent passengers.  A missile was fired from the Vincennes, a U.S. navy destroyer patrolling the gulf.  Sea of Lies – What Really Happened?

The Americans have maintained that this was all a very innocent mistake, or, more likely, the result of provocative, confusing actions by Iranians. I can’t see how a reasonable person would accept that explanation, when the U.S. government itself acknowledged that it had lied about several critical elements of the story, including the alleged location of the Vincennes when it fired the missile: it was inside Iranian territorial waters.

What you had was some trigger-happy ugly American captain, William Rogers, who thought it would be just splendiferous to shoot down something, anything, please! There were other Americans involved, including the captain of an aircraft carrier who made it clear that he thought Rogers was being willfully reckless and provocative and stupid.

Rogers was never punished. By golly, they gave him and his crew a medal. I’m not kidding.

Now, if you were a reasonable person, and not emotionally vested in America the Great and George Bush the magnificent, wouldn’t you think, well, the Arabs might have a reason to be suspicious of our intentions in the Middle East.

Add to that a couple of other pertinent facts.. Egypt is not a democracy. They are America’s friend, however, and more than happy to torture people for George Bush. Jordan is not a democracy. Libya is not a democracy. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy.

The Palestinian Authority was elected fair and square, but America won’t talk to their leaders because— well, they elected the wrong leaders.

It is very hard to explain why, if America wants to bring democracy to the middle east, it doesn’t urge Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Libya to hold fair elections. Are fair elections too much to ask? About simply taking a mild step or two towards democracy by, say, not locking up and torturing your political opponents?

We know why.

We know the real reason why.

And that’s why we know the real reason why America is now trapped in Iraq. It was never about freedom or democracy or Saddam. Never.

But — let’s be fair– I’m not sure that Bush knows it was never about democracy.

But Dick Cheney knows.

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13 Old White Men

Someone recently observed that the people whose assumptions and dispositions got you into a mess are very unlikely to get you out. I can’t remember who said it. Maybe lots of people. But it’s true.

[According to BrainyQuote, Albert Einstein said it:  “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”]

But they’ll never stop trying, or insisting that they are the only ones who can get you out, because if what they tried at first didn’t work, they need to try the same thing harder, or more often, or faster. Or admit that they didn’t know what they were doing in the first place. When they come up with a “new” idea, it’s usually actually one of those variations: more, faster, bigger. Then you blame the messengers. Then you blame your own staff or soldiers or followers. Then you blame the people who never believed in your ideas. Then you blame the victims.

They will try again because they cannot admit they failed. They cannot admit that they failed because, given their inflexible mind-set, they cannot imagine that the mechanics of reality are different from the stopwatch in their pockets.

And so it is that George Bush proposes more troops for Iraq. More. Bigger. Faster. That will solve this intractable problem of Arabs hating our guts. That will keep every Arab male youth between 18 and 24 around the world from dreaming about killing an American.

Here’s a picture of the Iraq Study Group. Even the token black (Vernon Jordan) and token woman (Sandra O’Conner) are clearly actually old white men. Look at Time Magazine’s summary of their “qualifications”– they might just as well have announced, each is a veritable old fart of certifiable fossilization in corporate groupthink, and completely immune to new modes of thought, startling ideas, or innovative approaches. These are exactly the kind of people who got the U.S. into this mess. They’re “new approach” can only get the U.S. deeper into the mess.

Okay. So we have a group of old white men, mostly lawyers or businessmen, and they are going to look at the Iraq situation because it is a disaster for the U.S. and they are supposed to come up with some new approach that the current administration, including those mind-blowing non-conformists Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsveld, Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley, etc. hasn’t already thought of. And this is going to solve the problem.

I can look into my crystal ball right now and tell you what is going to happen. This Study Group will not be able to even imagine any solution that is not based rigorously on 19th century ideals about “American interests” and “global strategic importance” and democracy and free enterprise and stability and authority and rule of law and so on and so on, and they will recommend more of the same, faster, bigger, better.

If your son is serving in the U.S. army, be prepared to go into denial, for when he dies in the coming year you will be one of the ones who will know that it was for nothing, that it was for Bush’s vanity and Cheney’s megalomania or Powell’s indecisiveness. Your son or daughter will die in vain.

So we will endure until we can blame the Iraqis and get out.

But it is clear now to any sensible person that the U.S. cannot win any more in Iraq and the only reason they don’t leave immediately is because that would make a resounding statement to everyone about just how stupid this whole idea was in the first place.

Who was not in the Iraq Study Group?

1. an Iraqi
2. a non-American
3. a Brit or Canadian or German
4. anyone under 60 years of age.
5. any women. (O’Conner doesn’t count: she hasn’t been a woman in 20 years).
6. non-Christians.
7.  liberals.
8.  scientists
9.  journalists
10.  political scientists
11.  soldiers
12. Iraqis
13. Israelis…

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Viet Nam 20 Years After Indifference

George Bush is about to travel to Viet Nam with a contingent of 200 business leaders, on the occasion of Viet Nam’s probable admission to the World Trade Organization. He will be attending the Asia Pacific Economic forum. Viet Nam hopes to showcase it’s emerging economy at this meeting: we’re ready to join the Asian tigers.

Bush has already met with Viet Namese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai.

It is 2006. In 1973, the U.S.-backed government of South Viet Nam collapsed and the U.S. army fled. Millions of refugees got into boats and ended up in refugee camps. Many were admitted to the U.S. The communist government of North Viet Nam unified the country and established a dictatorship. The U.S. went on it’s way to try to mess up Central America as much as possible, before watching the communist government of Russia implode (thanks largely to their disastrous attempt to foist a communist government on Afghanistan, leading to the triumph of the Taliban).

An objective person could be excused for wondering if there are lessons to be learned. In both cases, Afghanistan and Viet Nam, attempts to impose a friendly government (friendly to Russia, France or the U.S.) on a foreign nation conflicted with the nation’s own sense of identity and independence, and hostile political groups were able to take advantage and establish themselves as the representative of nationalist aspirations. The determination of the occupied to expel the occupiers was beyond the wildest imagination of the invader. Both Russia and the U.S. thought that superior technology and military might would, in the end, triumph.

What if the U.S. had decided, in 1963, to just leave Viet Nam alone?

What if the Soviet Union had decided, in 1979, to just leave Afghanistan alone?

Well, what if the Americans, who were funding the Mujahideen, who later became the Taliban, who later became Osama Bin Laden, had just minded their own business in Afghanistan as well?

And what if America had just stayed out of Iraq?

I think some generals already have come to the conclusion that as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq, they will be the focal point of opposition, and the opposition is always going to be led by the people most hostile to U.S. values and policies.

George Bush and his Republican apologists have been fond of saying that you couldn’t just leave Saddam in power. Well, you couldn’t just leave Viet Nam. And you couldn’t just not invade Cuba. And you couldn’t just not give military aid to the opponents of the Sandinistas. And so on, and so on. Time and time again, history shown that these kinds of grand schemes almost never work out.

Time and time again, the militarists are proven wrong by history, and proven right by their own delusions: they are always ready to enter a new quagmire.

 

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Drop that Bass! I Mean it! Don’t Make me use This!

Life gets more and more like Dr. Strangelove, the movie.

Read About Your New  Well-Armed Coast Guard Here.

The U.S. Coast Guard now, having carefully and rationally considered the threat of Al Qaeda storming Duluth from across Lake Superior, are going to arm their cutters with 7.62 mm machine guns capable of firing up to 600 rounds per minute.

Yes, the U.S. Coast Guard, having carefully and thoughtfully considered the threat of Al Qaeda infiltrating Port Burwell and Port Dover, Ontario, Canada, and hijacking high-speed fiberglass sail boats or diesel powered fishing vessels, or a kayak, and stealthily crossing the deceptively placid waters of Lake Erie, to launch a major anthrax or fertilizer assault on Erie or Toledo…. we will not let it happen!

The U.S. Coast Guard, armed, and tested, and resolute, and disciplined, will stand up with courage and determination, and give their lives, if necessary, to stop them… God bless you, U.S. Coast Guard.

I’ll bet you think I’m joking. Or maybe you think, well, doesn’t seem likely, but I’ll bet the Department of Homeland Security knows a lot more than I do about the threat from Al Qaeda and about exactly how rigid those screening programs for refugees coming to in Canada. My God! It’s another 9/11 just waiting to happen.

Or maybe not. Maybe you will vote for someone else in five weeks or so.

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How Dare You Not Stop Everything When I Tell You Too

When construction crews at the site of the World Trade Centre found some human remains in an abandoned manhole last week, some of the families of the victims were “outraged”. They demanded a stop to all construction. They demanded that the world stop turning and the winds stop blowing, until their grief has been adequately recognized by a monument 1150 miles high, made of pure titanium, and costing more than a billion, trillion, zillion dollars.

And all of the other suffering people in the world– your suffering is not important or significant or worthy of memorials or cash awards because, you are not me.

Nobody will publicly take on the families of victims of 9/11 because their shrieking outrage will be deafening and the media is terrified of displeasing them in any way, so they get to make demands like this with impunity, without blowback, without anybody calling them out.

And one thing the media would not dare to do is raise the question of why other victims of government malfeasance or neglect, like black families living in poor neighborhoods because of red-lining,  polluted by lead factories or dumps of asphalt shingles or leaky refineries, suffering outrageously increased rates of cancer and lung disease, — why do these families never receive even a penny of compensation for their suffering?

Yes, we do know.  And it is an outrage.

 

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“Al Qaeda a bigger Threat to the World Than Hitler Ever Was” – Manchester Union Leader

The Manchester Union Leader is a newspaper. This is a newspaper that might like to regard it self as sober and rational and intelligent. This newspaper insists that the “war” on terror is “the most difficult and challenging war we have ever faced”.

Okay. The other wars include World War I, World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, and the Cold War. Small potatoes compared to a 2-bit Arab millionaire hiding in the hills of Tora Bora.

The editorial went on to question whether the nation could afford to have a president (McCain) who isn’t willing to torture people. We want a torturer. Can you torture? I will vote for you. Because I want a torturer.

[Note: now that the so-called compromise Senate bill has been revealed, it turns out to be more of a cover-your-ass bill than a genuine concession to the Geneva Accords. No real protections, legal or otherwise, are extended to the prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay or anywhere the U.S. may have renditioned any person any 2-bit bureaucrat might have decided is a terror suspect.]

This is ridiculous. The U.S. has faced more than a few military opponents over the years, nearly all of which have actually carried out a war against the U.S. All of them were genuine threats in one form or another.

Well, now that I think about it, Viet Nam obviously was never the threat it was sold to us as– it did collapse and the world continued to spin as it did before. No dominos.

Panama.  Oh.  No dice.

In the five years since the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, there has not been a single terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Not one. Not a single one. Not one. None. Zero. If you believe the government– and you know how conservatives just automatically trust the government– they have nipped several conspiracies in the bud. I happen to believe that not a single one of those conspiracies was anywhere near the stage of realization.

Yet the Manchester Union Leader believes that the U.S. is more threatened now by Al Qaeda than it was by Germany or Japan or even the Communist Block at the height of the cold war, with their thousands of missiles pointed right at us.

Remember the communists? Remember the thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at us, and ours at them? Remember the Cuban missile crisis? Not as scary as the “Lackawanna 5”, I guess.

It is a dire threat indeed that does not manifest itself in five years. The Bush administration gingerly tested the idea, recently, that the reason for this is because of Bush’s brilliant successes at rooting out terror. Right. Just as, if the police doing their job well, a large city could expect to have no murders or thefts or break-ins. Seriously.

The real agenda is the oil and the tax cuts and deregulation and running up a deficit so the progressives won’t be able to afford any new programs when they finally do take office.

But since most people eventually become dimly aware of how bad Bush’s other policies are, the only way to sell them on this government is to convince them that there is this horrible war going on out there and if you don’t vote for Bush, they’ll be coming to get you, right there, in Duluth and Peoria and Gary and Orange County and Iowa City.

What they are doing seems contrary to all reason and common sense. It is contrary to all reason and common sense. And it doesn’t seem to matter. We want our government torturers. We believe they are out to get us. We have lost our minds.

When does Bush cross over into “big lie” theory? At a meeting with conservative columnists last week (why mess things up with someone who might ask hard questions), Bush insisted he had absolutely no doubts about the rightness of his decision to invade Iraq. Surely no matter how conservative you are or how loyal to Dick Cheney, you would have a doubt or two when your actions now result in the deaths of 3,000 people a month, and torture, and mayhem, in a nation you thought you could rebuild into a Western-style democracy in a “cake walk”. No regrets?

The theory of the big lie is that if you pretend to have not the slightest doubt that what you are saying is true, a large number of people will assume that it must be true, because it would be inconceivable that someone would lie on such a grand scale. How could they get away with it?

And from the ‘what is, “is” ‘ department, this gem also from the Union Leader:

Let us be clear that we do not advocate torture. We advocate that the law be written to protect CIA officers from criminal prosecution if they use certain techniques that could be interpreted as forbidden under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

“Certain techniques”. “Play rough”?

Just how many more euphemisms do we need before Americans can advocate torture with a clear conscience?  This is a shitty little dodge by the Union Leader to avoid using the more accurate word: torture.

More detail: The Bush administration has authorized six “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” to be used by the CIA on only a dozen al-Qaida members. The techniques include grabbing a prisoner’s shirt and shaking him, slapping, slapping the stomach (punches are not allowed), extended standing (which might include sleep deprivation), containment in a cold cell, and water-boarding.

Water-boarding? By golly, sounds like surfing! Slapping– no punching– someone might get hurt there, boys. “Extended standing”? That’s easy. You just tell him to stand there. And stand. And if he stops standing, you make him surf, or slap his face, or grab his shirt. Oh, the horror!

Manchester Union Leader Advocates Torture

On September 17, the same newspaper said this: If playing rough with a captured terrorist can save lives — and there is strong evidence that it can* and has — Congress must not forbid it, no matter what the Supreme Court has said.

How nice. Another euphemism for “torture”. They are not torturing anybody– they’re just “playing” rough. Like little boys, wrestling around in the den.

If these editorialists had any guts and any integrity and any morality, they would use the word they do, without any doubt, mean. They want to allow the CIA and the military to torture people. Torture, torture, torture. They want our men to be brutal and violent and absolutely diabolical, because they think that will help us win war on terror.

The editorial writer should publish his name so we all know who is willing to torture.

Aside from the enormous, insurmountable question of morality, history seems to suggest that the long term damage to the west’s credibility and respect will far exceed the benefits of obtaining information that won’t be trustworthy anyway.

An Oddity

I’m not advocating this– torture is wrong under any circumstance, at any time, and any place, and no matter what you call it. But it is curious that the Bush administration wants the cover of law. Why not do as has always been done: leave the law alone, but know that your men in the field will occasionally take liberties– as they did at Abu Ghraib prison? As they did when they trained torturers for Pinochet in Chile? Those men will understand that if exposed, the government will not protect them. They are on their own. In the meantime, they understand– too well, so it appears– what their superiors really want.

The fact that the Bush administration won’t go this route is compelling evidence that our leadership now consists of true vampires.

In fact, the best evidence is to the contrary.  Firstly, people will say anything to make the torture stop, so you cannot know if what they are telling you is accurate or not.  Secondly, some prisoners become more stubborn and more determined to not cooperate if treated badly.  Thirdly, the pertinent issue is that you will inevitably torture by mistake someone who is innocent and who really doesn’t know anything.  Fourthly, you will have innocent victims because when you torture other people they will volunteer any name they can think of if they think it will stop the torture.  Fifthly, you have no legal defense against any nation that decides to torture American prisoners of war.  Sixthly, your boys will deny that they gave any information away at all under torture.

Well, number 2 and number 6 cannot both be true.

 

 

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Torturing the Pharisees and Scribes

Church Groups Getting Ready for the Election:

Evangelical Christians in the United States, by an overwhelming margin, support George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this election which means they support their policies which include torture.  They can’t hide from this: evangelical Christians support the use of torture to deal with terrorism.

I think every conservative, evangelical, Hillary-bashing congregation should dedicate at least one Sunday this fall to an in depth discussion of how Jesus would torture the Pharisees if he really, really needed some information from them. Suppose they were holding Mary and Peter hostage somewhere.  Or or the Holy Grail.

So, how would Jesus torture?  Cattle prods? Water-boarding? Sleep-deprivation and beatings? What would Jesus do? The results could be collected into a position paper and presented to George Bush at one of those frequent prayer breakfasts or other meetings

Conservatives love emergencies. That’s when they get to take control. If you let them. They thrive on fear– because they assume that others are prepared to do to us what they are prepared to do to others.

The question Al Qaeda has to ask itself is, “where is America’s oil”.

The answer: right below your feet.