Letters to the Editor
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To the person who raised the issue of OBL's alleged death
To the person who raised the issue of Bhutto and OBL's alleged death, it is clear from the context of that video that Bhutto misspoke. OBL is still alive as far as we know. Bhutto was referring to some other terrorist who was involved in the Daniel Pearl incident.
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zeitgeister
For a "known", there is no problem obtaining a warrant for monitoring communication within the US. Outside the US requires no warrant, of course. The FISA "kerfluffle" is primarily about extending the "no warrant" case to fiber optic system controllers located in the US that carry much foreign-to-foreign and foreign-to-domestic calls as well as purely domestic. The problem is that there is no known way to really prevent the domestic from being collected if the other is. It is not really that simple, of course. But that is pretty much the problem.
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Dirigo.
The Nation article.
Thanks. Now, I'll go see and check,
if a ace of hearts is in the mailbox.
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Mike S
Thanx for explaining, I almost get it. But does that still mean that with a warrant, specifically for Qaida traffic, their communication couldn't still be tracked regardless? Or is this an all or nothing endeavor?
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Re: Turnout totals by party.
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/02/super_tuesday_the_most_interes.html
For grand totals, vastly more Democrats than Republicans voted yesterday;
Democratic votes for Clinton and Obama: 14,622,822 (63.6%)
Republican votes for McCain, Romney and Huckabee: 8,370,022 (36.4%)
Put another way, the Clinton/Obama race drew 76% more voters than the McCain/Romney/Huckabee race.
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@zeitgeister
Warrants require specific targets. I have no legal expertise, but my layman view is that the FISA court can and does allow just that kind of monitoring. Perhaps one of the lawyers here could answer that more accurately.
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Been there, done that
"The funding has just been awful, the worst I've ever seen in my twenty years in the military," says Dr. Katherine Scheirman, a retired Air Force colonel who served as chief of medical operations in the Air Force's Europe headquarters from July 2004 to September 2006. Scheirman says the current political environment has made it "impossible" to give wounded soldiers proper care. "It's all about money," she says. "Every kid that gets kicked out with PTSD is gonna be a lifetime of disability payments for the government. Every kid who gives up and kills himself, nothing."
As I was telling Kitt the other day, the real trouble is yet to come. Whether it's blue suicide or suicide by cop, mass murders of family members or complete strangers, political violence from returning ex-felons, gang members, extremists and white supremacists that were taken into the military when troop shortages required it, we ain't seen nothing yet. I'd be willing to wager that a disillusioned American is behind the next major terrorist attack in this country, not a Muslim. One only hopes they don't get their hands on something like Anthrax again.
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bystander & Dirigo...
Thanks for the link and the excerpt...
Coincidentally, I was reading that very story last night before the returns started coming, but I hadn't finished it yet.
Makes the "Great Santini" seem like "Winnie the Pooh."
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Zeitgeister.
I don't have enough brains to know when it's the best time to
fold or shuffle the card-deck.
I like your back-letters reads.
Ace of hearts? Sleight of hand?
Paul Cezanne ~ held some cards.
A political statement is Good.
A queen was a 'scepter' @ bedpost?
It was Ace of Hearts that trumped?
A Ace of Spades? A omen death-card?
A King of Hearts had a lip moustache.
It's safer to only play solitaire games.
Let's hope. O, if YKW is at the Black,
Jack~Table, we in macho big-time-trouble!
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Anon:
As I was telling Kitt the other day,...
--Anonymous
As I think we have already established, we were speaking past each other, or something. It still doesn't seem to me that "civil war" would be the way to title what you're speaking about, but I certainly agree with you, and have recognized for a long time, that trouble is on the way due to the flagrantly awful treatment that veterans returning from a war zone have and will be afforded.
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Invisible War
The Bush administration's strategy for conversion to empire becomes clearer.
1) The Pottery Barn Principle is "If you break it, you own it." The classified interpretation of this is that we broke Afghanistan, we broke Iraq, and we can say definitively that this principle is sound. Regardless of what naysayers in the U.S. might think, all we have to do to own a whole empire is break the countries we want to own. The naysayers will never be able to figure out how to get us out. Two more had been planned, Syria and Iran, but they need to wait until there is more public degradation of morals and a new listless languor and thrall is found for the citizen psyche.
2) The degradation effect. The vice-president of marketing for Kodak once said, about the lower image quality of digital photographs compared to their film counterparts, that all that was needed was to keep pushing the digital photographs until a generation was born that could not remember the quality of the film photos. The classified interpretation is, if you keep feeding the public images of rule breaking, lawlessness and torture in the context of winning the day on TV shows, eventually they will compromise their own morals the next time you feed them fear.
3) The wartime footing. Occupying countries, if putting down insurgencies and rebellions is construed as fighting wars against terror, puts the country constantly at war. The classified interpretation of this is that we can use an obscure legal quote about the president's powers being at their zenith to claim that the other two branches of government have no right to oversight, no right to equal power, no right to govern at all.
4) Anything is legal if it is secret. If torture can be accomplished without leaving a physical scar, if emails can be destroyed without leaving a trace, if surveillance can be done without any oversight, if meetings can be held without a record or log, they are legal. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, act like a corporation and plead guilty without admitting wrongdoing. Yes we tortured that prisoner, no we do not torture. If your mind cannot rectify the garbled sentences we speak, you have a weak mind.
Obviously a country which distrusts and reviles empire can be gradually led away from representative government and toward its "inevitable destiny" as an imperial power if only war can be permanent. Which leads to the real mission for the wars in progress and those which are planned:
Invisible War. All the designs of empire can be accomplished if an invisible form of war is created. The dead are shipped home in secrecy, the reporting is carefully controlled and monitored, the wounded are carefully construed as having injured themselves. For one whole month around Christmas 2007, the major newspapers in the U.S. did not carry the Iraq or Afghanistan wars on their frontpages. The goal of the surge was to get the war off the TV. Not to win it. Not to vanquish al-Qaeda. As the marketing VP at a company I worked at once said, "If you see our product on TV, it means it isn't doing well." Nobody knows the mission of this war, nobody knows what it is accomplishing. Nobody knows how many people have died, nobody knows how much it has cost. Nobody has seen any corpses, nobody is supposed to have PTSD. The war exists only to define presidential power, and as a byproduct of deliberately breaking countries so we can own them. Our government withers, our world destabilizes, our troops come home to descend into lonely individual perdition, with the hope from the powers that be that they will perish quickly and not leave any mess. This is how we could have won in Vietnam. We've won the War at Home.
Arrest, impeachment, prison, and an international tribunal for these absolutely evil corporate demons. Where once they left their morals outside the boardroom door, now they don't remember where they left them. Crocodile tears for a photo opportunity with a dead soldier's mother. Long knives for those who would help a live soldier go home. George W. Bush is a beast from hell. There is no derangement syndrome, you'd be deranged if you didn't recoil in horror from the legacy of this man.
[sorry for the rant, thanks Dirigo for the article]