Letters to the Editor
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"Let us move on...."
I have!
To the Hip-Hop LaRouchies!
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@ GC! went overboard this time
What is it about army posts, golf courses, moonlight and girls? I wouldn't tell if I knew. Happily for us, gratitude doesn't require knowledge.
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Enhanced Interrogations
ABC says that Condi, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet, etc. all had detailed talks about what kind of treatment Al Queda suspects should get, down to the details of how many slaps, when to waterboard, etc.
Charming.
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4583256
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But William...
The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction:
Risking Judicial Tryanny
By Henry Kissinger*
Foreign Affairs
http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/general/2001/07kiss.htm
Strip away the veneer of The Academy and Seriousness and what's the difference?
It's the same substance underneath. Some of it just has more coats of finer varnish. Okay, some of it is just partiicle board with a vinyl veneer.
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I'm wondering who gave this info
BTW, I have to wonder who turned and gave all the info on the "Principal's Committee".
While Yoo is still no prize, this kind of takes the heat of of him for a bit, doesn't it?
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Name This Terrorist!
“The hypocrisy is deeper than this. By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism- in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.”
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Is there no such thing as a just war?
No, there is no such thing as a just war. There are wars which we have no alternative but to fight; and these are just in the sense that we have not committed wrong in fighting them.
In response to some earlier discussion on this thread : Whatever Osama bin Laden's point of view or Bush's point of view of the justness of their respective causes, they cannot demonstrate the necessity of what they did, and therefore the "collateral damage is a part of a just war" is not an argument that either of them can make.
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Why Does Amazon Compare Your Book to Coulter ?!
From the page on Amazon -
Publishers Weekly:
...
Shouldering much of the blame are the press and the media, including Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, Chris Matthews and even Maureen Dowd, all of whom propagate popular attitudes about virile Republicans and effeminate Democrats. Despite the antipathy the author feels for Coulter, his writing is much like hers. More a partisan screed than a reasoned argument meant to persuade undecided readers, this repetitive text frequently devolves into personal attacks and vast generalizations. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307408027/104-5779746-9579942?ie=UTF8&tag=unclaimedterr-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307408027
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The Iraqi Insurgency
The Iraqi insurgency is not a war of necessity; after all, Gandhian methods have not been tried and cannot be judged a failure against the US occupation. The US may still be a country whose (collective) conscience can be appealed to.
In contrast, one of Mahatma Gandhi's mistakes of judgement was to believe that his satyagraha could work with Hitler.
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W.T. I remember. hush. @ 7:15.
William Timberman. No bawl about it. Have no bile or hate.
At our age, what does it matter? No one will believe you anyway.
I say, just grow to be skinny, or happy as obese. Who cares if you lose hair?
Lose teeth, a leg, a lover? Forget the one on a golf course, or the bowl-ally.
You may be a grey head-geezer? Wow. Wear proudly a bright orange mesh T-shirt.
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Legal Precedent for a Yoo Indictment
Josef Altstoetter was charged and convicted of war crimes at the Nuernberg Tribunals. His offense was the authoring of legal memos that facilitated the construction and operation of the extermination camps.
The crimes charged in the Altstoetter case also included participation in the sterilization of so-called "racially impure" persons through special hereditary courts. Large numbers of these "racially impure" persons or persons suffering from hereditary diseases were sterilized. On others, classified as "useless eaters," euthanasia was practiced. The German judicial process was perverted to protect perpetrators of these crimes and brutalities, which took place in concentration camps and elsewhere, by granting immunities, pardons, and amnesties. This favorable treatment was thus in
stark contrast to the discriminatory measures taken against Jews, Poles, gypsies, and other designated asocials. The crimes charged in the Altstoetter case pertained to the
deteriorating administration of justice in the Third Reich. In collusion with organizations such as the SS and SD, members of the Justice Ministry aided and gave effect to statutes, decrees,and orders intended to deny due process of law to individuals
in Germany and in areas controlled by Germany.
RECORDS OF THE UNITED STATES NUERNBERG WAR CRIMES TRIALS
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. JOSEF ALTSTOETTER ET AL.
(CASE III) FEBRUARY 17, 1947-DECEMBER 4, 1947
The opening statement of the prosecutor could be used, almost word for word, in the opening statement at Yoo's trial in the Hague.
But a court is far more than a courtroom; it is a process and a spirit. It is a house of law. This the defendants know, or must have known in times past. I doubt that they ever forgot it. Indeed, the root of the accusation here is that those men, leaders of the German judicial system, consciously and deliberately suppressed the law, engaged in an unholy masquerade of brutish tyranny disguised as justice, and converted the German judicial system to an engine of despotism, conquest, pillage, and slaughter.
Deputy Chief Counsel Charles M. LaFollette
Link to the transcripts: http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/03/NMT03-T0027.htm
People like the loathsome Yoo and Alstoetter, are and were; necessary cogs in the machinery of totalitarianism.
* Alstoetter got 5 years, including time served.
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Oh, Those Functionaries . . .
Poor Megan pens: "Obviously, I know who John Yoo was, and what he did. From the point of view of the American public, however, he is a minor government functionary, much like--oh, say, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development."
A minor government functionary??
She sticks her foot in a bit deeper: "To the great American public, these are, yes, minor government functionaries--minor functionaries whose rounding errors probably result in more lives saved or lost than could ever plausibly be attributed to John Yoo. I do not like this fact, but I do acknowledge it."
Ah, the banality.
Wikipedia: "Little Eichmanns is a phrase coined by anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan to describe the complicity of those who participate in destructive and immoral systems in a way that, although on an individual scale may seem indirect, when taken collectively have an effect comparable to Nazi official Adolf Eichmann's role in The Holocaust. Zerzan used the phrase in his essay Whose Unabomber? in 1995.
Ward Churchill used the phrase in his essay Some People Push Back to describe the technocrats working in the Twin Towers on the morning of the September 11th attacks, because in his opinion their status as drivers of the American empire, participating in sweatshop exploitation, the devastating Iraq sanctions, US support for dictators and attacks against other countries etc. shared similarities with Adolf Eichmann's bureaucratic participation in the Nazi system.
Eichmann as a stand-in comes from Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil. Arendt wrote in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil that aside from a desire for improving his career, Eichmann showed no trace of anti-Semitism or psychological damage. She called him the embodiment of the "banality of evil" as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality and displayed neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and fundamentally different from ordinary people.Little Eichmanns is a phrase coined by anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan[1] to describe the complicity of those who participate in destructive and immoral systems in a way that, although on an individual scale may seem indirect, when taken collectively have an effect comparable to Nazi official Adolf Eichmann's role in The Holocaust. Zerzan used the phrase in his essay Whose Unabomber? in 1995.
Ward Churchill used the phrase in his essay Some People Push Back to describe the technocrats working in the Twin Towers on the morning of the September 11th attacks, because in his opinion their status as drivers of the American empire, participating in sweatshop exploitation, the devastating Iraq sanctions, US support for dictators and attacks against other countries etc. shared similarities with Adolf Eichmann's bureaucratic participation in the Nazi system.
Eichmann as a stand-in comes from Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil. Arendt wrote in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil that aside from a desire for improving his career, Eichmann showed no trace of anti-Semitism or psychological damage. She called him the embodiment of the "banality of evil" as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality and displayed neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and fundamentally different from ordinary people."
Poor old Ward, he got canned. Megan just got exasperated . . .