“The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants.”
That quote from Cheney staff director David Addington, as reported in a new book detailing administration terrorism policies. The WaPo also says:
The classified CIA report described by Mayer was prepared in the summer of 2002 by a senior CIA analyst who was invited to the prison camp in Cuba to help Defense Department officials grapple with a major problem: They were gleaning very little useful information from the roughly 600 detainees in custody at the time. After a study involving dozens of detainees, the analyst came up with an answer: A large fraction of them “had no connection with terrorism whatsoever,” Mayer writes, citing officials familiar with the report. Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the U.S. military by bounty hunters.
And that’s one of the conservative estimates.
Guantanamo is a carefully crafted loophole in the constitutional limits on presidential power, and a carefully crafted exercise in managing public perception. It is a national dungeon, where the President’s determination of guilt is the only rule. The law upholds it because it must, the congress accepts it because it’s too politically easy to ignore it, and the public accepts it because it seems just far enough away to be less important than the numbers on the gas station marquee.
July 21st, 2008 at 7:19 am
The law does not uphold it. It’s the government that is failing to uphold the law. No matter what excuses they come up with for the legality of these actions the court keeps swatting them down.
The situation might get better or it might get worse, but many of us are putting our money towards things getting better. I’m putting a wad of money into the Accountability Now coalition, and I’m thinking of finally becoming a card carrying member of the ACLU.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
“Military intelligence” about Iran and Bush’s plans for bombing Iran… see new post at http://www.lies.com/wp/2008/07/10/more-photoshop-phun/
July 21st, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Well, the courts have knocked down the assertion that detainees have no right to see a lawyer. But I believe they’ve upheld that Guantanamo as a military prison. We do have legal provisions for such prisons, but we need some clearer laws regarding who can be placed in such prisons, under what circumstances of “war” they can be held, and how they should be treated and their cases heard. I was infuriated anew today listening to the author of a new book, a Guantanamo lawyer, describe how haphazardly men are held often on no more evidence than rumor or hearsay of bounty-seekers. And even worse how she described that Guantanamo hasn’t been taking new prisoners in years now — ever since the court ruled that lawyers had to be provided, all new prisoners are shipped off to CIA camps in other countries where these requirements don’t apply. Disgusting.
By the way, when did we all accept that we should call it a “detainment camp” instead of a “prison” and call them “detainees” instead of “prisoners”. It struck me today now completely successful that language shift has been, even among critics of Guantanamo.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:17 am
Welcome to semantic infiltration.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:18 am
Yeah, you’re right about the successful language shift. It’s just such transparent bullshit, and yet it worked.
Ymatt, even you keep using the wrong language. The requirements -do- apply in the CIA camps in other countries, it’s just that those requirements aren’t being enforced.
Speeding is still illegal, even if the cop lets you off with a warning.
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:25 am
Oh certainly Geneva protections *should* apply in these other camps, it’s just not happening. I think the spirit of the law dictates that Geneva be observed, but I think there’s some serpentine legal logic being used that these CIA camps are not really POW camps, don’t contain US citizens, and are run by non-military personnel for “intelligence” purposes, so none of the legal restrictions apply. I just think we need to make the law very clear so the courts aren’t having to make judgment calls (or worse upholding this stuff for lack of clear law).
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
The problem is that the Geneva conferences were not only written to protect combatants but civilians as well. So what do you do with combatants that don’t follow the rules designed to protect civilians to a certain degree. Of course civilians can’t be protected entirely. The conventions were specific about what combatants had to do to be protected; wear a uniform, carry weapons openly, that sort of thing. But I haven’t seen it is very specific as what should be done with combatants that don’t follow those rules. It seems that was left open to persuade combatants to follow the rules of engagement of civilized warfare, there’s an oxymoron. Maybe it is time to have a fifth Geneva Convention to decide how to handle this new warfare. Personally I’m for a ban on any kind of mistreatment with mandatory execution, but that is fraught with obvious problems as well.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:21 am
Well until we do have a new Geneva Accord we should function under the current set of rules. We don’t ‘win’ against trrrrrsm by abandoning our laws and morals. We win by upholding them even in the face of savagery and stupidity.
Secret concentration camps are so, I dunno, mid 20th century…
July 22nd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Then there’s Omar Khadar, a child soldier (15 years old) that has been held in that shit hole for over 6 years without trial… acused of throwing a grenade at a US soldier in Afghanistan and killing him. War, go figure.
So does this mean that the next time a US soldier kills a child in the middle-east, the soldier can be taken by a government over there and thrown into a jail to rot, and Bush/Cheney would have no problem?
I mean the poor kid (Khadar) was probably forced to fight or die at the hands of his superiors.
Boggles my mind.
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:10 am
NL, not according to Geneva conventions because the kid throwing the grenade wasn’t eligible for protection, the soldier is. If the kid was acting unilaterally then he isn’t eligible. The rules are there to protect civilians, the uniform makes a target out of the soldier, but it also goes the other way, the soldier is protected from civilians. Read the third Convention I think it is section 4 paragraph 2. It’s been a while since I read it.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:54 am
shcb,
Thanks for keeping us in line on what the Geneva conventions say. I’m taking your word on this, I figure if you stray from what Geneva says someone else will pull you back.
I think NL was speaking also about the other aspect of Omar, that he was 15 at the time he witnessed his compatriots killed, was critically wounded and captured. Here is some background:
Taken from: http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/06/24/usint19183.htm (which has links that do not carry over into the paste above.)
And this sets the historical context of the issue but relates more to African and Latin America:
http://www..findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_40_35/ai_55881944
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 am
This is a problem that this type of warfare with this kind of enemy presents. Our morals and sensitivities dictate these kids are too young and yet they can kill. Let’s suppose this kid, or any other, try and not get caught up in this particular case, let’s suppose this kid is a full fledged terrorist at the age of 14 or 15, they have been totally indoctrinated into the hatred of the west by their instructors at their Saudi school and have been accepted into the ranks of a terrorist group. As the presidential liaison under Obama you, Mr. K.N. Knight have been sent to the 5th Geneva convention, what would you do with underage fighters captured on the field of battle?
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
Lets see, how about we put them in Guantanamo and subject them to sleep deprivation for 14 days (note: the usual period is 4 days) prior to harsh “interrogation” sessions in sadistic efforts to determine what they know and to make them admit to all their sins and try to make them implicate as many others as possible (it worked for Stalin!), then hold them in a prison for about 5 years with virtually no contact with the outside world. Then put them before a military tribunal using the evidence collect during periods of extreme duress that virtually any other civilized court in the world would throw out with howls of derision and scorn for the prosecutors? No wait, your *brilliant* guys already tried that.
Look shcb, I’m not here to solve your problems for you. Smarter, more qualified people than I have been working on this problem of child soldiers (in wwnj language “little f’ing trrrst kids!”) for years and there are many success stories in turning around completely indoctrinated teens / youths in other conflicts. Even UNESCO in Kabul has a facility for the kids that UN forces remove from combat, so there are structures in place now. Unfortunately most Afghan kids caught in conflict are first “processed” through the an Afghani police agency with a record of cruelty, which seems to me to be something that undermines the whole process.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:46 am
Keep going, the last half of the last paragraph was the beginning of you making a stand and it sounded like it might be reasonable. Don’t tell me what you wouldn’t do, tell me what you would do. Sure others know more about this issue or any other than you or I, but we read, we have opinions. You’re in charge, make a decision. Telling your men what not to do will just confuse them, you neet to tell them what to do.
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
You treat them as civilians. That’s what you do.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Thanks Steve, that’s much the answer I sought.
You treat them as traumatized young civilians, in need of special care and attention.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Please read this, shcb…
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/06/03/khadr.html
The guards at that shit hole seem to think he is “salvagable” and a “good kid”. But hey, if you say he’s a worthless piece of crap, then it must be so.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:30 pm
And you might have to explain to your men that, unlike back home in Arkansas where they could beat their kid brother whenever Ma ain’t looking, they can’t ever beat on these kids (or throw their puppies off a cliff.)
Or do you think will that be too confusing for your men to understand?
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Fair enough, but treating them as citizens is kind of open ended;
Question 1: Now that there is something of a functioning government in Iraq would you turn them over to the Iraqi court system? This is assuming there is an Iraqi law that forbids killing American soldiers. Or would you simply let them go. Add another option if you don’t like either of these. I don’t want any strawman accusations.
Question 2: One of you stated that they may have been forced to fight. What would you do if they were caught again?
My answer is I would hold them as POWs as any other POW but not in the same camp and I would try and reeducate them, and I mean that in a good way, schools heavy on history etc and try and repatriate them after maybe 4 or 5 years. Based on their progress.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I was writing my last post as NL and Knarly were posting their’s so it doesn’t those last two posts. to be continued
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Whole bunch of respect for our soldiers in that 2:30 post Knarly. That is the “I support the troops not the mission” mentality.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
shcb,
I think your answer is close to the mark, except rather than special POW camps I think the UN has establsihed that certain NGO’s will etablish locations where these kids/little trrrsts/wannabe soldiers/scared souls can be removed from combat, removed from the stigma of being a POW, and receive the kind of education you suggest (historical) plus a whole lot of cultural sensitivy and empathy development type of psycho- counselling babble until it sinks in and they seem to have recovered from their trauma.
Not sure if they are held in these retraining places against their will, or if once removed from all the killing and hate they want to stay. I think most find that being alowed to be a kid, playing games and learning stuff around nice people feels like a better way to grow up than does dealing with crap like helping your buddy Syed choose between death from the 10 kilo screw and glass or the 15 kilo ball-bearing suicide belt.
Your question about what to do with a repeat capture of a child fighter shows you just don’t get it. First, the issue is probably moot because the kid will have grown up by the time he/she is released so upon capture the second time they’ll be treated as an adult; second, if the kid is still a child then you redouble your efforts with this kid and be grateful that you had a second opportunity to try and direct him/her to leading a more positive and fulfilling life before it was squandered in violence.
By the way, any lack of respect you perceive in my 2:30 post is prompted by your prior 11:36 post that acknowledged that the soldiers will not know how to act (i.e. in a decent manner) unless told specifically what to do. Also, many of them have earned various levels of contempt through myriad reports coming back about their conduct in treating the Iraqi’s and Afghan’s like shit, essentially taking revenge over 9/11 indiscriminately and letting out their frustration over being sent for extended tours of duties on innocent or not so innocent people. See for yourself, there’s plenty of soldiers posting “trophy” videos of crude acts against the people who live in the lands now occupied, or visit the winter soldier reports, or here’s a radical idea for you: try reading some of the first hand reports from Iraqi’s about how they are treated.
July 24th, 2008 at 4:30 am
The kid would only be a couple years from being an adult so yes if he were re-brainwashed to our liking he would be an adult. I was anticipating Steve’s follow up to his treat them like citizens remark being we should just let them go because we have no right being there bla bla bla bla. You’re more kind than I am.
When I was egging you on about making a decision. It has nothing to do with your men not being able to make a decision or not being intelligent it is just that leaders need to make firm decisions so the rest of the team can progress in one unified direction instead of fragmenting into many. My little exercise is meant to get you to put yourself in that position so you will realize how difficult some of these decisions are. It is easy to gripe about what should not be done but it is harder to say what should be done. It forces us to realize many times there isn’t a perfect solution just the best of possible solutions.
July 24th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Yea I understood that about making decision, and I agree in general (see next paragraph for disagreement in specific.) It’s a luxury on this site to be able to criticize ad nauseum without offering solutions. At work, I stop listening to people who always criticise and complain but have little or no constructive suggestions that make sense in the longer run (i.e. they tend also to fixate on band-aid solutions.)
In this specific case I took the “your men not intelligent” angle because, in this case there are basically two options for the men (treat them decently and recognize their human dignity or abuse them as they are documented to have been been doing so far.) Seems to me that soldiers who couldn’t decide for themselves between these two approaches are not worthy of much respect. Then again, I learned from you that their main training is in killing people and blowing things up and so I suppose they have to eliminate a lot of their own humanity in order to be in the military, so an order to pretend they are people with some empathy and humanity might not be as unreasonable as I thought before.
July 24th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
At the risk of denigrating our men in uniform, historically the men charged with guarding prisoners have not been the cream of the crop. They have, again historically, been the thugs and under achievers of the military. Now I have no evidence that thas is the case here, although Abu Grabe(sp) would seem to make a case for it. Also it seems the Arabs in these camps are pigs too, whether the Arabs or the US soldiers are the chicken or the egg I don’t know. This was the main cause for the brutality of the Bataan death march. The Japanese soldiers who were known for brutality in the first place were the worst of the lot guarding the American POWs because they were too lazy and unruly to fight on the front lines. Just a thought.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:43 am
way to support the troops wwnj!
and the comparison to the Bataan death march?
priceless
July 25th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Naah, give shcb the benefit of the doubt here Enky. It’s in all the old movies. The heroes go off to fight the really bad guys, the losers & misfits get stuck behind guarding prisoners & protecting the farmyard animals. If it’s in the movies, it’s in the wwnj version of reality too.
Matter of fact, it makes sense to me. I mean, given the choice of driving around in an air-conditioned (yet under armoured hummer) and seeing the sights vs. staying back in the most disgusting smelling pigsty hellhole that one could imagine, day after day after stinking fucked up day with the same jerks & the occasional visits from arrogant geestapo-like CIA “experts” telling you that you aren’t doing a good enuf job “softening up” the god damn terrorists before their interrogations… well, which would you choose? You’d have to be a freakin psychopath to choose the shithole cesspit, no matter how under armoured the muvees might be. Those assigning the duties know that and it’s doubtful they’d assign the best and the brightest to guard duty at a prison, except as punishment.
The guards know why they are there too, or have a really bad feeling about why they are assigned to such a lowly crap job, and that just adds to the downward spiral of low self esteem leading to more egregious abuse.
July 25th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Enk, actually the comparison to the death march is priceless.
July 26th, 2008 at 5:56 am
On an unrelated note, it went pretty much unnoticed in the dominate liberal media, CBS, NBC, etc (busy packing their bags for their round the world tour with the chosen one I guess) but Obama, speaking at UCCS a couple weeks ago to a crowd of a few hundred invitation only guests said that we need a “public service” corps with the power and budget of the military. Not sure what that means, but he did go on to say that it would include tying federal funding of high schools to requiring a certain amount of volunteer hours. I think it is precious that a black man wants to force people to work without pay.
This didn’t make the news and wasn’t in the transcript so presumably he got caught up in the moment of being amongst his adoring fans and made these remarks off the cuff.
July 26th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Actually, in Canada you cannot gradutate High School unless you volunteer 20 hours to the community druing the course of your four years in school (5 hours per year, OMG!). I think it’s a fabulous idea.
And the reason the media is covering Obama more is, well, because he is fresh, interesting, articulate and just plain cool. Your side has an old fart that can’t even speak properly and looks like he’s about to keel over. I know it doesn’t seem fair, but it is what it is.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:49 am
But the media didn’t cover this major policy proposal, for a candidate that is a little shy about giving specifics this should have been big news. Obama is pledging something like 6 percent of our GDP to fund volunteering (think about that one for a while) , or he is proposing cutting the military by half and funding volunteering (I can’t get enough of that phrase) by 3 percent. That’s nice you do whatever it is you do in Canada, but we fought the most costly war in our history to abolish slavery, it would be a shame to bring it back.
The media is covering the puff of Obama, not the substance. Maybe there isn’t any substance to cover?
July 26th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Teaching kids about the value of volunteering and community involvement = bringing back slavery. You have a fucked up view of things dude. Very fucked.
July 26th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I would rather they be taught they get an honest days wage for an honest days work. let their church teach them to voluteer if the want to belong to a church going to school is mandatroy, granted graduating isn’t. But by definition volunteering isn’t volunteering if it is mandatory. If that isn’t sevitude it’s a first cousin.
July 26th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Nl,
Even if forced child labor were a good idea, and lets face it you are saying 20 hours in a high school career, so 5 hours a year? They spend more time than that texting each week, but why does that take an investment the size of the military budget. I don’t think he meant any of it. He just got caught up in the moment. Which is scary in and of itself. That he would be so emotionally caught up in a moment that he would promise something this ridiculous. If he or his advisors had given this any thought it would have been in the transcript.
July 26th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Do you realize that on this single posting you have advocated keeping children in illegal prisons, but are completly against having a little bit of mandatory community service for today’s youth, because it’s “slavery” and “forced labour”?
Do you even think before you speak?
July 26th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
This is so freakin’ funny I have to share it with you all…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5qU4qudJYk&NR=1
July 26th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
The “children” I advocate being kept in prisons are soldiers, young soldiers, but soldiers. As a matter of principal I don’t believe in mandating labor for anyone. For one thing it just doesn’t work. I was forced to “volunteer” when my daughter was in a charter school. As a condition of your kid attending the school you had to “volunteer” a certain number of hours each year. We had meetings to discuss meetings that could be used as “volunteer” hours. People were doing jobs they were absolutely unqualified to do, which meant the people that knew what they were doing ended up fixing the screw ups, not very efficient, but boy we were racking up the hours.
I was on the budget committee, I took it to heart, going to the district and getting the district budget, it was a document the size of a phone book, I studied it and made my proposal only to find out the budget committee had control of $20,000 of a $2.5 million budget. For this we held meetings once a week for several months, all evening meetings. What a crock. It took me a few weeks to realize we were attending meeting so our “volunteer” hours would be more than required, even though nothing was accomplished. It took me a couple months more to decide peer pressure be damned, this was stupid. T
The flip side of that was my middle daughter who volunteered at a nursing home in high school, because she wanted to, I’m not exaggerating when I say it was a life changing experience for her.
Mandatory volunteerism, a concept only a liberal could dream up
But why a multi billion dollar budget? And the power of the military? Is he going to change the constitution?
July 26th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
LOL. wwnj psychopath, that’s O’reilly all right.
shcb,
Sorry you had such a bad experience volunteering. Community service was not part of my H.S. (old school I guess) but it works great. Gets kids to connect with groups or others less fortunate or whatever & it is of their own choosing, so it’s not exactly like slavery. LOL, what a crock equating the two, stretching an argument beyond reason into abnormal thinking and behaviour. Like the Bill O’Reilly video. Psycho.
Excuse me, but volunteering at an old folks home is sweet. Shows she’s got a good heart. So whatthe fuck is was life changing about it then??? Did she come back hating old farts and wishing they would just hurry up and die already? Did the old guys keep pinching her bum and asking for sponge baths?
Community service that I envision is the borderline kids not really connected with community and maybe into drugs a bit, not in trouble with the law just at risk of wasting a good portion of their life/potential. Having to take their community service hours for school maybe riding with the cops, or helping keep company accident victims recovering from drunk driving accident, stuff like that is life changing.
It ain’t “mandatory volunteerism” obviously that makes no sense obviously you jerk. In high school it is mandatory community service, and it is mandatory just like writing those 2000 word essays is mandatory- you can choose not to do them if you are willing to pay the price of not getting a passing grade.
I was involved in a volunteer program at my daughter’s school too, it worked great other than some were waaay tooo keen but it all balanced out and fostered an amazing sense of community. It was nothing like a meeting once a week, time was minimized for what what NEEDED to be done and it all turned out to be fun and built a great sense of community.
Obama’s program I got no idea about, hadn’t heard it except from you so of course it makes no sense. Horse’s mouth and all.
At this point Obama could say, “Eat borsch save trees so whales are free!” and he’ll be hailed as a messiah compared to the idiotic slogans we’ve suffered under for eight years!
July 26th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Would you be for mandatory religious classes? Or mandatory involvement in DECA or Junior Achievement? All these programs make better citizens just like volunteering. I would rather see all kids learn entrepreneurship in school than picking up trash on the roadside. But you see I don’t want any of these things mandatory, they should all be credited electives. But many people don’t want to volunteer so it is naturally the instinct of liberals to make people do what they don’t want to do, and when people are forced to do what they don’t want to do they don’t do it very well.
July 27th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Ok, so I dug into this speech a little more. Read the transcript actually, I am shocked the liberally dominated mass media didn’t pick up on this (just kidding, they don’t want an agenda like this getting out there before the election).
So here a few of the particulars, not in the transcript was his remark that he wants to spent the equivalent of the military budget on these programs, this gives us a scope. Now I couldn’t figure out what he was going to spend the money on, so I read… he is going to socialize large sections of the free market! Wow! Should have seen that one coming! Then there is the mandatory volunteerism, he wants 50 hours per year for high school students and 100 for college kids that is what 10 times the amount you guys in Canada require? For the college kids they will be paid $4,000 per year for their 100 hours of forced labor, if my math is right that is $40 an hour for a philosophy major to clean up toxic waste sites (it’s in there) seems efficient to me. Now of course the cost of going to college will magically and immediately rise by $3000 or so, so the cost of “volunteering” and being paid $40 per hour to clean up a highway will be passed onto the students loan and paid by the student at 8% interest over the next 15 years. Brilliant! So let’s see, that one program alone will use up about 15% of the military budget (63 billion), about the same as the GDP of the Dominican Republic.
Let’s see, what did I leave out, oh yea, he wants to increase the size of the military by 7% to continue to fight the war in the Mid East, in his words
If he feels the need for almost a hundred thousand new ground troops (plus support folks) he must plan on being there quite a while.
Shocking the press didn’t cover this more, I wonder if the McCain people will use it later in the campaign?
July 27th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Gee, shcb that sounds like Obama is crazy. In fact, it makes just a teensy weensy bit more sense than what we’ve heard uttered from Bush the last 8 years. So you are electing another dooofus??? LOL.
Two things:
1) do your politicians usually keep elaborate non-practical promises made in the months leading up to an election? Didn’t think so.
2) you say “not in the transcript was his remark that he…” So, it wasn’t in the transcript, eh? I am assuming that, if it was not in the transcript of his remarks then anything you say following that disclaimer is simply more of your hallucinations – or perhaps it was something that was mis-spoken and therefore nothing will become if it. In other words it sounds like again you are making a big deal about nothing.
In any event, Obama will be hard pressed to do worse in his term year than McSame.
July 27th, 2008 at 8:50 am
*first term year than McSame.
July 27th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Need coffeee. We’ll DO IT LIVE GODAMMIT*…
In any event, Obama will be hard pressed to do worse in his first term than McSame [did/would do].
Thanks O’Reilly!
July 27th, 2008 at 10:08 am
There is a recording of the speech, little machine with two reels of magnetic tape, cutting edge technology, someone probably snuck it into the event in a hollowed out bible with a microphone disguised as a daisy pinned to his lapel. The transcript was presumably put out before the speech. Saying he was going to spend as much on these programs as we spend on the military was on the tape not the transcript as I said earlier, you don’t listen. So we shouldn’t believe he is going to withdraw troops in 16 months? He keeps saying he is going to. Surely The Chosen One wouldn’t lie. But now you are saying he is just another crooked politician from Chicago? Matt’s not going to like you talking about his guy that way.
July 27th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
shcb,
You’re right, I don’t listen to you very closely most of the time, because all your crazy stuff sounds the same after a while:
“blah blah blah kill ’em before they kill us! blah blah blah lazy liberals blah blah Bush didn’t lie, he just repeated statements – sort of propogated the propaganda in his word – that he should hve known were false! blah blah tight with tax dollars except MILITARY gets trillions and trillions! blah blah damn liberals wasting money on helping people blah blah Muslims might bomb Reno damn left wing media blah blah them poor people should just go and help themselves damn it… lazy liberals… blah blah blah…
It’s a little hard to pay attention to all the crap.
I liked your tape recorder sarcasm, that was a nice touch.
Obama is not going to be withdrawing the troops in 16 months unless Iraqi Government with Iran’s backing literally kicks the troops out. At most, what he’ll do is draw down the forces, by as much as half, and focus the remaining troops efforts oin protecting oil infrastructure. That’s it, period. Everything else will be smoke and mirrors.
Obama has about the same number of scruples as most of the other politicians in Washington, especially when one considers his recent voting record.
Once elected he will continue to play the game, as he too has unstated obligations and favours to repay to campaign contributors. Mainly now I am concerned about his choice of foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Here is a crazy (and I mean crazy, let’s not debate its merits here or the author’s reputation) article that gives a flavor of what’s wrong with Obama other than what you hear from your right wing radio hacks.
http://www.rense.com/general82/grand.htm
I’m not concerned about Matt, he and Enk will be disillusioned soon enough. My cynicism of Obama is being put out there now, far before its time.
July 27th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Hmmm…. That was intriguing, well we’ll just say dido to your 911 stuff and my lazy liberal bla bla bla and move on (I admit I get carried away sometimes, but I do believe it just as you believe the 911 crap, sorry) some people would be pleased if we would spend half of the Canadian GDP on a bunch of new social programs. Not me. That’s why we all get one vote. I haven’t heard of the chap you refer to, I will investigate. Have a good evening my friend, when you tuck your children in this evening tell ‘en hi from a crotchety old man in Colorado.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
shcb,
I understand your wish to believe everything in America is basically right and when things go wrong it is a result of a few bad apples, the application of misguided left-wing policies, or (insert excuse of the day here.)
If you read the article below you might want to understand more about why things go wrong than to simply blame such handy scapegoats.
The article is not a 9/11 related article, although the first paragraph seems as if it is. It is about the state department, written by a former senior(?) staffer employed from about 1979 to 2000ish with some obvious sour grapes over how his concerns concerning the granting of visa’s to non-qualified applicants was dealt with (i.e. by his dismissal).
The second comment that follows the article (Mark Smith’s) provides a different opinion than the author’s, and is more compelling yet not any more verifiable.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/The-Mistake-Department-by-Michael-Springmann-080725-269.html
July 28th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Welcome to the real world.
We always make deals with the devil, we were allies with Stalin, Truman called him uncle Joe even as he was killing millions of his own people. If you want a conspiracy to sink your teeth into, there are many who think Patton was murdered because he wanted to attach Russia. Yes we trained some of the people we are fighting now and we are training people now we will be fighting in the future. You see this in business where a company trains one of their guys for years only to have him start his own company in direct competition with the company that gave him all his knowledge. It sucks but what are you going to do? You get as much benefit out of the guy as you can while he works for you and then destroy him if he turns on you in both cases. Sometimes you win in this endeavor, sometimes you lose.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:51 am
In the past or so I week I have witnessed John McCain:
-Refer to the border between Iraq and Afghanistan.
-Refer to Czeckeslovakia, twice. A country that has not existed since 1993.
-Decline to answer at least 2 different questions because “he didn’t know enough about it”.
-Admit that he can’t use a computer and doesn’t know how to email.
-Criticize Obama for going on a fact-finding trip, after he repeatedly bitched about him having not been on one for a couple of years.
These are all signs of being senile. He is too old to be an effective leader. I urge all Americans to vote for Obama, for the sake of your country.
As for the “liberal-dominated” media theory… imagine if Obama made any of those gaffes. He would have been attacked as “inexperienced” and not up for the job. Hehe, McGaffe is getting treated pretty nicely by the media if you ask me. They could be destroying him right now if they wanted to.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:04 am
NL,
Right, if it were a Dem they would have destroyed him by now.
But destroying McGaffe is against their own interests as it would take all the glamour out of the presidential race and in the end would hurt their ratings.
The network execs are hoping McSame isn’t going to sink so far into his cesspools of dementia that they’ll have to run TV Specials such as “McCain – War Hero is Washington’s Maverick!” or “B.O. – Is Obama a Muslim or a Mulatto?” to bring McGaffe back from oblivion.
I agree with you NL, voting for Obama seems like an indictment of the Republican tyranny / Neo-Con stupidity.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:17 am
And yet you heard of all these gaffs where? In the media. McCain has made three trips to Iraq without an anchor from ABC, NBC of CBS joining him, Obama goes and they all follow him. There is a bias. The editor for the New Yorker magazine at the time couldn’t believe Nixon won the election because no one she knew voted for him. Even back that far the press was dominated by liberals. With the exception of talk radio and Fox News it still is.
Why do you think Obama would get nailed for these gaffs? This speech I cited has some pretty outlandish statements and they didn’t get picked up on.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
FYI, I didn’t see all these gaffes in the msm, they were on websites. So again, your theory doesn’t hold water.
And maybe when McGaffe draws hundreds of thousands of cheering people, the msm will follow him. What’s the point of sending your top news anchors to cover an old, uninteresting person who offers nothing new by way of policy/substance to a crowd of 10 people? Doesn’t sound like it would be worth the investment.
July 28th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
typical wwnj
takes advantage of a liberal program like food stamps and when he can’t get a job, he blames liberals (and gays)… the gunmint has to cut back on liberal social programs and then comes the rampage with his beloved boomstick in a gol dang liberal church
hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CHURCH_SHOOTING?SITE=ALANN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
typical
July 29th, 2008 at 4:37 am
NL,
The point is that your top news anchors should follow either or neither if you want to have any credibility of being objective journalists, you know the old saying they have taught in journalism school since the beginning of time “we report, you decide”. Judging by the last few elections and the polls about half the people would like to see the D and half the R. Although almost all patriotic Americans would have liked to see Obama visit wounded soldiers while he was there.
Back to the Perky One. If Katie and the other two Musketeers want to throw their support behind the liberal that is fine, there is no law that says a news organization has to be fair (unless the D’s have their way) we’re only talking credibility here and lets face it, the media hasn’t had much credibility since Uncle Walt decided to stop a war instead of reporting it. I’m sure the Perky One would rather spend an eight hour transatlantic flight with The Chosen One than an old war hero from the baby killer war her ilk worked so hard to lose. And that’s fine, my only point is they have chosen sides.
So the scuttle butt is Brit Hume is not renewing his contract and Katie has taken her show from last place to turning the starting blocks around and running the wrong direction. Could we see a conservative anchor on a major network after the election? There certainly is a market for it. Of course the whole news room would have t be gutted for it to be a success.
July 29th, 2008 at 4:44 am
Inky, don’t know what you’re talking about, if it’s about the church shootings here last year, did the article mention the church members had armed some of the members and that is why there were fewer deaths? The woman that killed him was quite courageous in her assault, aided by a wounded armed parishioner that was putting down covering fire. It was a model every school should emulate.
July 29th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I don’t suppose you bothered to visit that link
A wwnj opened up on a liberal church because he dang well hates him sum libruls n blacks and queers n stuff. Angry wwnj = shotgun rampage (typical)
The unarmed parishoners charged him and disarmed him.
Doesn’t sound like the meek unarmed sheeple you love to portray liberals as… sounds like brave Americans risking life and limb to stop a wwnj on a killing spree. So wwnj churches give out guns now? That is why I stay well away: too many unstable wwnj psychos with guns.
and your wwnj bullshit about Obama and his visit to our dear ‘troops’: the military cancelled it. You are a pathetic partisan tool. You should stop ingesting that hate radio crap. The media is overwhelmingly pro-McDouchbag. Of course you won’t take my word for it, so:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,712999.story
Of course the study was done by treehugging anti-war hippies living in a commune under a highway overpass. ;-)
July 29th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Aww, poor wittel shcb seems bitter. I guess you’re equally disgusted – and have been for years – with Fox News’ bias againts D’s, right?
What’s the matter? The right can do it, but the left can’t?
And like I said, the news is a busniess, they go where the action is. Clearly Obama is a much, much more interesting and charasmatic candidate than McCain is and people WANT to see him.
McCain is a walking corpse. War hero? Nah, if he was that great of a soldier, how come he got caught by the enemy?
July 29th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Enk,
Interesting comments from the LA Times on the anti-Liberal media bias [against Obama / for McCain].
Church shooting – I think you and shcb have both got it wrong, at this point everyone is just throwing Right / Left Wing labels around to disparage their opponents – whoever that happens to be. (Reading Eckardt Tolle’s latest now, it’s damn good.)
Anyway, about that “rwnj” in the Church, the following take on it seems far closer to the truth than either yours or shcb, take a look and see if you’d agree…
http://www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/07/unitarian-shooter-was-right-wing-but.html
July 30th, 2008 at 3:59 am
inky and I were talking about different events, the link he gave didn’t work and the search options were for a shooting in Colorado Springs this year, my mistake.
People naturally think their guy, or their team gets the shaft in the media. I’m always complaining that my NASCAR driver doesn’t get enough press, but he gets as much as the other guys that aren’t winning, it’s just that I want them to have an article on him every day and there are fans of 42 other drivers that want the same thing.
But there is a liberal bias, it is pretty obvious to everyone but the far left because their notion of where the center is is so skewed, they think Obama isn’t liberal enough but he has the highest liberal voting record in the senate, even to the left of Teddy.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Well, since enkidu provided facts to the contrary of liberal bias, I’m going to have to side with him.
Damn those facts, always getting in the way of soom good partisan whining!
Also, it’s good to see that McCain is finally coming around to supporting the 16 month timetable that the American people, Senator Obama and the Iraqi government have been calling for.
Better late than never!
July 30th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I can give you volumes of info supporting the bias in the media, you can start with Berrnie Golgberg’s “Bias” then work your way to Brent Bozell’s site.
well, let’s temper that McCain statement a bit
the big difference between the two is McCain stuck his neck out in support of the Surge before it happened, and Obama says he wouldn’t support it then even though now it has worked, 5 dead this month as opposed to 66 for July last year. Way to go America!!! Kick’n those Arab asses.
July 30th, 2008 at 9:29 am
how dumb are you wwnj? copy and paste the link – it works
knarls… bringing up the Unibomber as a lefty counterpoint to yesterday’s wwnj shotgun rampage?
No.
This false equivalency must stop. Should I bring up McVeigh or Rudolph or the many family planning clinic bombers?
wwnj hate merchants (Mike Savage, Rush Dimbulb, Hannity, man Coulter, Mike Rosen etc etc) have been feeding the intolerance, the anger, the bitterness of the very people who should be voting these cretins out of office and off the public square. I hope that wwnj gets the chair. Is that too librul for you wwnj?
The media is overwhelmingly pro-McSame. But of course if that doesn’t jibe with wwnj hate fantasies (you know, like wwnj’s desire to nuke 10 million A-rabs, so they ‘surrender’) then it must be another librul lie.
Funny how the Iraq War is suddenly ‘won’ just before our election. Nice timing. Did we find all those WMDz? Is a wave of Democracy spreading across the middle east? (other than Hamas being voted in… not so much)
July 30th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Enk—-
There’s probably more right wing than left wing loonies out there, the strangest thing is that if you go back into their histories most have had military backgrounds or have “strange” relations with FBI / etc. The stuff of conspiracies, the question is whether they had those nefarious connections with gov’t agencies because they were nut jobs being tracked by guvment or because they were being groomed / misled by dark forces. Whatever.
Electric chair for the shooter who killed unitarian church members? I have no problem with that, you kill people in your country (or other lands) for much less. It seems like he wants to die anyway. Norway would probably try (and be successful) in rehabilitating that wwnj, but at what cost and what’s the point? So he can become a loyal War Mart shopper again?
shcb ———-
Well duh, it was obvious from the git-go that you “missed” Enk’s story, hence your mistake. Just as it is obvious that your subsequent response about liberal bias was simply more of the same blather from you without any, nada, zip, no insights at all and no consideration whatsoever given to the comments on that very subject in the short link provided in the post above your subsequent continued blathering.
Yea, good work in Iraq – seems like everyone is hunkered down in their green zone bunkers until after the election. Just 16 months to go and they might still get home to their mothers’ alive & non-mutilated. How many are supposed to be coming home in 16 months, the whole 130 thousand plus the 60 thousand or so Blackwater and other mercenaries? Or just some of them? How many Iraqi’s are thankful America invaded, bombed the crap out of their infrastructure, allowed looting of their national treasures, fired and let the army loose with all their armaments, fomented civil war with idiotic policies, erected blockades all around cities and neighborhoods, institutionalized new forms of torture, etc. and now refuse to leave for another 16 months at least? Oh, you don’t konw because the situation there is still far too unstable to conduct even the most basic assessments or surveys. Hmmm. Sad. And pathetic that you would call that or anything resembling it a success.
From http://www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/07/top-advisor-to-us-military-confirms-war.html
“Liberal news bias”? My ass. Instead, the Rove / Cheney / Bush “White House” has a DIRECT FEED to major news networks:
http://www.thinkprogress.org/2008/07/26/mcclellan-fox-talking-points/
July 30th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
wwnjs need ienjs to justify their dismantling the Constitution, The New Deal, and their very existence.
We need to stop fighting a Gen3 war against a Gen4 opponent. Think Gen5. Deflating these criminals and creeps as whackos and criminal psychopaths (just like the wwnjs, huh) is much more effective than invading oil rich A-rab countries.
Unless you like oil at $135 a barrel and $4 to $5 gas.
question: instead of spending $3 to $6 trillion invading Iraq, how much middle eastern oil could we have not bought by developing our own resources and new tech like solar, wind, nuclear, algae biodiesel etc. Heck at $1,000,000 per human life x 4000 dead Iraq War victims = $4 trillion dollars.
ps – I am OK drilling in ANWAR, but the coastal drilling is not a good idea (technological advances my change my mind, but right now… no). We should also make the oil companies pay dearly for the drilling rights (and make them develop the leases they already hold – a huge amount of US land btw)