Letters to the Editor
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Humanity Against Crimes
Many of you have probably noticed the absence lately of ondelette, an outstanding commenter on GG’s threads. Even though he has refrained from commenting, he is lurking and even more importantly, he has revived his site Humanity Against Crimes (http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com). I highly recommend that anyone who wants to understand the events that have led our country to endorse and use torture and then keep up with the latest developments, that they bookmark this site. Here are some excerpts from today’s posting:
The Roots of the Torture Memos
With the revelations that the NSC principals, top cabinet level members of the Bush administration, met repeatedly and went over techniques and torture scenarios in detail, and the subsequent revelation in an interview yesterday with ABC that President George W. Bush both knew of the meetings and approved of them, the origin of this apparatus, this systematization, this state sanctioning of torture need to be ferreted out.
The key events stressed by Ron Suskind in The One Percent Doctrine are the meeting around the campfire, and the anthrax mailings, both in late 2001. The anthrax mailings are well known and discussed, so the influence of the campfire meeting is key - key to the attitude in the government, key to the One Percent Doctrine, key to the ticking bomb theories, and interestingly, perhaps key to the NSA data collection methods: The placement of a single individual in two roles leads automatically to conflation of the roles. Whether or not that is a valid assumption, the doctrine led to processing the worst case scenario into a reality, and from there, most likely, into the Torture Council.
The CIA had learned that two people had met with bin Laden and Zawahri around a campfire in Kandahar province in Afghanistan in August 2001. They were Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid. They are two scientists from Abdul Qadeer Khan's Pakistani nuclear program, and were among the Islamic radicals around the Pakistani ISI chief Hamid Gul [Interestingly, the now retired Hamid Gul is a now a fervent supporter of the secular lawyer's movement in Pakistan]. These people were all supporters of the Taliban and of bin Laden, who had sworn an oath, with others, to protect the Taliban in January 2001, so their presence among the Taliban and with bin Laden should not have been surprising, but the CIA suspected the subject of the meeting to be discussions of nuclear weapons, and in that, one cannot fault them. The principals, and in particular Vice President Cheney, became aware of this meeting in early October 2001 (Ron Suskind's book, pp. 27, ff.).
From what I can glean in Suskind's book, and from the character of the memos, it appears that pulling out all the stops had meant extensive collaborations between the FBI and the CIA, and had probably meant either violating or planning to violate FISA almost immediately after September 11, but talk of torture started within the CIA after the people at the top had been informed of the campfire meeting, and during the anthrax scare, in late 2001. That all the forms of pulling out the stops were all conflated, and that the discussions had progressed to the point of denying Geneva Conventions and CATCIDT protections to prisoners by the end of 2001 at high level, then, is an interesting case study in how the placement of a single person in two organizations leads to the immediate assumption of the truth of the worst case scenario under the One Percent Doctrine. This all would imply that the first exposition of the ticking bomb theory at a high level meeting of the U.S. government was between October 17 and December 2, 2001, and that theory became a reality soon after: Virtually all of the justifications for any lawbreaking by the Bush Administration, and even the justifications for the Iraq War, are based on al Qaeda seeking weapons of mass destruction.
A link to the site is at my sig.
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Ignorance may be a choice, lack of "patriotism" isn't
Consent of the governed. People must want to believe these fantasies, because there is so much available information to the contrary. Ignorance, in this country with the availability of information resources that every person (except perhaps the most destitute or extremely rural), is a choice.
— omooexHistory — Lessons — Ignore — Repeat.
Have you been paying attention since 2001? Have you been listening to how the country's nominal 'leaders' have been exploiting the "threat" of "Islamofascism"? (Hint: It's called "fear-mongering"). Have you been listening to how those who claim that the threat is exaggerated have been characterized? If you don't want to page back through the editorial pages of the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, just look at the local version by reading the back posts of shooter or nabalnazi. How many people have had their patriotism questioned by the lapel-pin patriots? The amount of information to the contrary is irrelevant. Human nature doesn't change and there are always people willing to exploit that immutability.
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Frankly
"The amount of information to the contrary is irrelevant."
If you're saying that its understandable to be cowed by jingoism and to trust the government implicitly, then I don't know where you're coming from. The stakes are too high to expect so little from our people. And I would just add, that by any measure, the arguments put forth by our government and their journalist enablers have been absurd from the start. One could almost say that they require a "willing" suspension of disbelief. To call their rhetoric transparent and baseless would be a compliment. My original point: historians looking back will have no choice but to assume that we chose to do nothing. Nothing being, our (as a nation) insisting on ignorance.
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Aside from the fact that I disagree with your definition of the term.
ElDubyaEm: You know what they say about Libertarians
Libertarians = adolescent males (of any age/gender) who demand the liberty to impose their authority on... you.
Rimshot.
-- Ché Pasa
I really don't understand what you are trying to say because but I don't think you do either.
Would you like the link to Georges Palante's "Anarchism and Individualism"?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/palante/1909/individualism.htm
Assclowns on the right have been doing this since the Weimar Republic. Jonah tries it today essentially arguing that George Orwell was a fascist. The Nazis were no more socialists than Murray Rothbard or Ron Paul is a libertarian. A shoe is not a hat but you can wear one on your head like any of the above mentioned assclowns and look like an assclown. Join the assclowns if you want. You are becoming more like them everyday.
Cymbal crash.