Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
people in Afghanistan, um, you know, ATTACKED US.
The difference between "attacked us" and "didn't attack us" seems so basic, but I guess when you just want somebody to suck on something, it doesn't matter...
Unfortunately, the only thing that ever has stopped imperial overstretch. The impending bankruptcy of the USA, for which Obama is only too happy to accelerate the timetable.
Greenwald seems to belong to an intellectual sub-phylum intent - at any cost - on denying any possibility of civil evolution in Iraq. Friedman's past blunders, while notable, do not negate the fact that something positive occasionally happens there. Greenwald's small minded consistency is at least as bad, perhaps worse, than the revisionism about which he complains.
Ah, like darkness follows daylight, one-hit wonder trolls appear to defend the illustrious Tom Friedman..... I'm surprised it took so long this time.
Gee Shooter, I dunno, maybe because people in Afghanistan, um, you know, ATTACKED US.
I question this phrasing. According to conventional wisdom, 19 guys (?) from Saudi Arabia were responsible. Even acknowledging bin Laden's role as strategerist, I think it's too much to paint with so broad a brush as to indict an entire nation--which is what we're currently doing, what with the bombings, etc.
OT Another outrage that could use your/our attention that was in WaPo today
I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq (see sig)
I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.
Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi's forces (members of Iraq's Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material -- including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242.html?referrer=emailarticle
Friedman's past blunders, while notable, do not negate the fact that something positive occasionally happens there.
What part of this don't you get? Friedman has behaved as a craven pundit (mutually inclusive terms, I think) and tries to skate from his role as cheerleader. What has that to do with your statement, regarding Iraq, "that something occasionally happens there"?
I find it noteworthy, by the way, that Friedman is using words like "progressive" in his columns.
Final add: Cocktailhag is right--like darkness follows daylight, one-hit wonder trolls appear to defend the illustrious Tom Friedman.
The narrative Americans and surely Tom Friedman as an American who does punditry and writes cleverly titled books trade on is what Americans do is the work of the 'good guys'.
Americans have put December 7,1941 in high reverence because it was so clear who had mounted a dastardly "sneak attack" on the USN. Any and all revenge and payback Americans could conjure was always that of the "good guys vs. wicked,nefarious Japs" and that directly led to Imperial Japan getting two atomic bombs in August 1945.
Decades later Vietnam got a taste of this after the trumped up and since proven to have been quite likely false 'Gulf of Tonkin' attack on USN opened a long rain of American militarism on Vietnam. All the napalm,summary killings and inflicted death dealing and social rip apart done always because Americans were the 'good guys' who just wanted to do good for the Vietnamese.
Perhaps if on a weekly or monthly basis American political media had given the Vietnamese voice and word to how they felt and thought about American "do goodism" in Vietnam it would have been a very valuable balancing of narrative. That did not happen.
Iraq surely has now fallen to this American preference for decidinig who needs our help and who is going to get the chop while Americans deliver all the goodness we so piously claim is our sole intention for unleashing American Militarism on hapless lands in no position to resist us very well.
Iraq,a land of 26 million,got the full Shock and Awe we Americans like to watch like a video game. The first night of attacks on Baghdad having this surreal quality of explosions and billowing smoke from American attack while street lights still worked and cars traversed streets. How many innocent Iraqis died that first night? Did Americans care to consider this?
Americans have awarded themselves a national history that for Native Americans,Native Hawaiians and Filipinos is a shaped and molded distortion or simple telling of lies. For the many Vietnamese who ended up on deathdealing end of American weaponry and aerial attacks Americans brought death.
Tom Friedman surely has a comfortable berth as an American who likely is well paid to write opinions and books and appear on American television and accord himself relevance or have other Americans bestow relevance on him. What a clever guy is Tom Friedman that he could pronounce six month intervals for Iraq.
Americans perhaps may one day stumble upon a more insightful self-view. Sadly the current American President,G.W.Bush, does not get it. Just the other day I read G.W.Bush claimed he was a good American being he had liberated Iraq and the Iraqi people.
There were no Iraqis given rebuttal opportunity to G.W.Bush and his selfview of the 'good' he brought to Iraq.
Tom Friedman perhaps would have had a different POV if he and his loved ones had been in Baghdad for the first month of the Bush/Cheney 'Shock and Awe' presentation in Iraq.
Tom Friedman has the luxury of observing from afar. The luxury of being bellicose and then revising that record of bellicosity as it suits him later on down the road.
Tom Friedman is a lucky guy. And so American.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
