hee hee hee

and now the 'checks and balances' are reduced to literal 'checks' and 'balances'...

ho ho ho

circling again to the fundamental question: does the state exist to serve us li'l peeps, or do we exist to serve The State (tm) ? ? ? (better not answer that...)

ha ha ha

just *WHO* is going to 'investigate', 'prosecute', and 'punish' ANY of the neo (nazi) con (artistes) and other domestic evildoers from the bush klavern, etc ? ? ?

NO-FUCKING-ONE

ak ak ak

...and ? ? ?

(*crickets*)

art guerrilla

aka ann archy

eof

The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn't confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs,

Total bull. I'm afraid Raja Shehadeh is talking out the back of her shameesh. The hearts of everyone of any race I met totally went out to the people of New York over this one without any reservations at all. No one I ever met said the Americans deserved it.

Now as it happens I have a curious little tale to tell about the effects of 9/11 that I only found out the other night from the telly.
In July of 2000 the plane Concorde crashed at Orly. All Concordes were taken out of service and over the next 12 months went through an extensive refit. As part of a post refit pre renewed service a flight of one of them was organised. The plane was loaded with British Airways executives and engineers. The plan was to fly towards New York as per usual service and turn around in the mid Atlantic and fly back to London.

The flight went ahead and returned without any problems. It would have been front page news here in Britain but wasn't because it just so happened that the flight took place on 9/11.

Flying Concorde was always for a small and exclusive group of people. The repugnant Kissinger told us viewers how he liked flying Concorde but could never do any work because of both shortage of space and the amount of equally important people who wanted to talk to him during the flight.

Anyway, as the weeks went by it emerged that 40 of Concordes most important fliers had got killed on 9/11. Not only did some of these American business fliers fly themselves but they also had the authorisation to allow others in their companies to fly Concorde as well. With this small but crucial group gone, the Concorde service became untenable and closed down forever some months later. Two jets hit the towers and because of that the big daddy jet Concorde doesn't fly any more.

Just goes to show as that mad old cow Margaret Thatcher once said, "It's a funny old world isn't it?"

So now if you have got a mate that's coming over all dithery whotsit you can say, "get a bloody grip you wuzzy big girl's blouse before you go totally pear shaped."

-- LondonLad

----------------------------------------

Mind if I use it on my fellow citizens of Vancouver, frequently and daily? Would a Bill the Cat bullhorn be a tad bit excessive? And I'm just talking about the men!

(sorry, just woke up, groggy. Happy Canada Day, former imperialist master!)

Four years ago I set myself the task of reading the 58 dossiers from Guantanamo captives' Combatant Status Review Tribunals that had been published. And, when more were published, I read them too. I've read them all.

What has not received any attention in the MSM is that those documents records American forces committing war crimes.

In January 2002 American forces raided a small village in Khost Province, looking for a man named Abib Sarajudin. In November they had received an intelligence report that important Taliban leader Jalaludin Haqqani had stayed overnight as his guest, while fleeing Afghanistan. So, they bombed his Abib Sarajudin's house, killing his wife and many members of his extended family.

Had Haqqani been Sarajudin's guest? Doubtful. If military intelligence thought he had been his guest at the time of the bombing they could make an argument the house was a legitimate military target. However they didn't think he was there at the time of the bombing. They had only been told he had been there -- past tense.

Retaliating against civilians because you suspect they are sympathetic to your enemy is a war crime. The Nazis retaliated against a few French villages, to punish them for sympathizing with the local resistance underground. And Americans regarded it as a serious war crime. So it is a war crime when American do exactly the same thing.

Two months later American ground forces show up, to try to learn if Haqqani actually stayed there. They take away Sarajudin, his brother, a nephew, and a neighbor.

The really crazy thing is that Sarajudin had been one of the Afghans who answered the US call to rise up and throw out the Taliban. At the request of one of his tribal elders he had recruited military age men from his village and four neighboring villages, to serve under one of the militia leaders who rose up to threw out the Taliban.

become one in deed when granted excessive power over the bound human.

The objectives of prisoner abuse are the antithesis of 'good'. Obligation-based ethics are a cancer on the vector of evolving civilizations.

The road map should be crystal clear on how prisoners are to be treated. Only minds obfuscated with confusion and irrationality will lack the foresight to grasp what defines a superior culture.

Before you catcall humanitarianism, it might do for you to actually sit yourself down and give us an account of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan since 2001. And the involvement of all the other countries there, and the involvement of the U.N., and the involvement of all the NGO's. Tell us who did what, tell us what the U.S. did right or wrong, tell us what all the others did right or wrong, tell us what the Afghans thought of the whole thing, what they themselves did right or wrong, what anybody else did. Because I don't think you have any idea, you just have this vague notion of conquering imperial troops engaged in a devastating war, but you'd be very hard put to corroborate that with facts.

When you're done doing that, maybe you could address Amity's excellent comment.

Instead of yelling 'warmonger' and catcalling humanitarianism, maybe you should actually look at the facts and show us you can really deal with reality. Reality out there in the world is complicated. As is real, honest to god wei wu wei.