Speaking out a year ago against the idea of holding civilian trials for terrorism suspects, Liz Cheney captured the paranoid arrogance of the past decade with stunning efficiency:Amen.
"This demonstrates conclusively that we are going back to a pre-9/11 mentality," she said.
Oh the horror! Fair trials, rule of law, habeas corpus, Miranda rights, blah, blah, blah - remember what a nuisance our justice system used to be before Liz's father and the rest of the neocon High Nooniacs made us safe by hustling us off to a police state and perpetual war?
I can't help but think about the younger Cheney's comment - and the fear it implies, not of terrorists but of liberals -
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And when I do, the first words that come to my mind are those that Martin Niemoller, a conservative German Lutheran minister, famously uttered at the end of World War II [...]A fear- and vengeance-driven post-9/11 mentality could yet become the done deal it is in Liz Cheney's mind. She and other war-on-terror promoters still have enormous political and financial power. They also have an outsize media forum from which to bloviate and intimidate, despite all the harm they have wrought this past decade, not just to millions of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the American troops who served their ends, but to the financial and moral integrity of their own country.
And a wishy-washy Obama administration, unable to break publicly from the worst policies of its predecessor, mostly serves the agenda it was elected to stop. In this political void, lawsuits such as the one brought by Abdul Razak al Janko are our stand-in for the truth commission, or the war crimes investigation, that should be convened to begin reversing the Bush era.
I started to read the Times coverage of the wikileaks dump, and this was just too depressing to continue:
The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.
They hate us for our freedoms. How could I have been so foolish?
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"If you're elected to the Senate, Ms. Angle, will you 'woman up' by burning your Social Security card, by refusing to accept $174,000 a year in taxpayer-funded salary, by rejecting government health benefits, and by declining to be enrolled in the Federal Employees' Retirement System?"
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...despite what Rummy once told us.
If nothing else, the new Wikileaks release, while it may not contain any revelations that would be shocking to those of us in the reality-based community, at least tells us that the real story is actually, hold on to your hats, worse than we've been told. As has always been the case, if you want a sense of what's going on in Iraq, all you have to do is use "Iraqi bodies" as a Google image search.
If you index your wikileaks search to just murder, you'll get almost 25,000 incident reports filed by both Iraqi and American forces. With each page containing ten entries, you'll have to wade through dozens of pages using a general search just to get past January 1, 2004.
These 391,000+ incident reports, which often make for dry reading (and about half of the particulars are obvious, such as GSW [gunshot wound] to the ___. Virtually all execution-style murders are gunshots to the head), still provide a more comprehensive overview of what the Pentagon and the press have not been telling us.
It shows that not only are we guilty of killing innocent Iraqis but that so is the Shi'ite government that we'd installed in the wake of de-Baathification. The newest Wikileaks disclosures show that we'd relied on private "security contractors" such as Blackwater far more than had been previously admitted. No matter who did the killings, the blood eventually spatters on us because we put that bloody sham of a puppet government in power and we're the ones who'd invaded Iraq on blatantly false pretenses. You have to wonder how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive today had we not.
And, above all, even a cursory reading of all the documents shows that far more Iraqi civilians have been killed overall than had been previously admitted by the Pentagon, which claimed years ago to not bother itself doing body counts.
The Pentagon has, indeed, been keeping track and Wikileaks' latest coup shows us why they had not released this information to us.
Plus, you have to laugh and shake your head that the NY Times, with their super-serious-sounding War Logs series, is following the lead of a guy who isn't even a journalist. This is part and parcel to the problem, to begin with: If Judith Miller and the rest of the Times had just chosen to do its fucking job for a change instead of helping the Bush administration beat the war drum, then perhaps Julian Assange wouldn't have had to make this massive revelation and perhaps, just perhaps, we would've left Iraq already if we'd known way back then just how bad the situation really was on the ground.
Also, the security contractors in Iraq were a trigger-happy undisciplined lot of goons.
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Uh, Nouri? Nobody gives a flying fuck what you think. Not even the prosecutors in The Hague that are drawing up the war crimes charges against you. "Iraq's prime minister has criticised the timing of the release by Wikileaks of almost 400,000 secret US military documents about the conflict there. Nouri Maliki's office accused it of trying to sabotage his bid to form a new government by stoking up anger "against national parties and leaders, especially the prime minister". Mr Maliki is struggling to keep his job after inconclusive elections in March. Wikileaks said the disclosure was aimed at revealing the truth about the war. Its founder, Julian Assange, said the records showed there had been "a bloodbath on every corner" and provided evidence of war crimes."
"Don't forget, America! I kept you safe for eight years and led the Texas Rangers into the World Series!"
What is an Afghan "rebel?" Rebel against what? The U.S. invasion? Karzai? The Taliban? Pakistan? The place is a ludicrous clusterfuck and a giant steaming shitpile of failure. Get out now. "Afghan security forces have killed four militants who attacked a UN compound in the western city of Herat, officials say. A fifth attacker blew himself up at the gates, before the others, wearing suicide vests got inside, triggering a gun battle with police. A UN guard and a policeman were lightly hurt. The assault is reminiscent of an attack on a USAID office in July in Kunduz province, which left four people dead. In the latest incident, the four attackers, dressed in burkas worn by women, ambushed the compound just before midday."
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Repugs want impeachment? Ok, let's impeach Corporate Justice Roberts.
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Taibbi: More Tea Party Hilarity
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Democracy threatened without church-state separation
You'd think that after more than 4,400 US military deaths, along with untold thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, and largely because Sunnis, Shias and Kurds cannot get past their religious differences to form a stable and peaceful country, that patience in this country would have long since expired for buffoons like Christine O'Donnell who continue to insist that the constitutional separation of church and state is a myth. http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com/diary/6843/democracy-threatened-without-churchstate-separation
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The Times-Picayune discovered massive seas of oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
It's about time the administration and the press wise up and stop condescending to us as if the crisis were over.
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"In terms of accomplishments, my biggest accomplishment is that I kept the country safe amid a real danger," George W. Bush in Chicago yesterday
Nicely done, Bushie. Except for, you know, the biggest terrorist attack on American soil EVER!
The shameless revisionism marches on.
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