I'm sure you could build a hut somewhere in the everglades where you could withdraw from society and its taxes.

Shitting in a swamp has its drawbacks, not the least of which being mosquitos the size of small aircraft carriers, but you ought to be able to come up with enough clean water sources to survive nonetheless. I hear that gators taste just like chicken, though they're difficult to dispatch using sharpened sticks.

And when the malarial fever overwhelms you, maybe you'll be able to convince the hallucinatory Bill Gates to cough up a net or two, funded by charity of course.

What's holding you back?

God damn, that's it.

Glenn is often applying the golden rule which you state as thinking of things as if you were on the receiving end. Yes, he does that all the time. He often says it differently, like "by your logic, then XYZ" but that is what he is doing.

Hmmmm. Well put.

Nah, the Mongols will be doing it because they hate our freedom, our scantily clad women-folk, and our primary election process.

Something like that. A familiar tune.

America, love it or leave it. (but from the left this time)

What a &%%^^$% you are.

But I stated that the poor should not be taxed. You give me one good reason to run this country on the backs of the poor.

Another Reuters story on the Italy kidnapping and more on Rumsfeld, Yoo and military lawyers.

U.S. spy says just followed orders in Italy kidnap,

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE55T3H420090630

John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and the Systematic Torture of Prisoners. (see sig)

http://www.truthout.org/070109A?n

if you go live in a swap and have no clean water, do-gooder Pedinksa will use the coercive power of the Federal Government (it's only power) to fix everything for you.

Because that is what the US Constitution is all about, taking money from American taxpayers to provide clean water and "aid" to people who live on the other side of the world and don't pay taxes. Such power was enumerated in there somewhere. If not, just throw it somewhere under "defense" or "national security".

Besides, if the benevolent Feds weren't meddling in the affairs of others and do-gooding, who else would do it? The people themselves? Other regional powers? China? None of them are as smart, wise, rich, or as well armed as we are. And of course none of them have the "stellar" record and commitment to "civil liberties" and "human rights" that the US and its allies (e.g. Egypt and Israel) have.

Okay, number one, I am not on any Ir-Af-Pak bandwagon.

I have never supported the war in Iraq. I was protesting against it before it started. I had lengthy disagreements here with people about it that can be summed up as follows: 1) I did not agree that David Petraeus was a Bush/Cheney puppet. David Petraeus, I contended at the time, and still do, works politically to further the interests of one person only, that person being David Petraeus. 2) I did not believe that it would be possible to get an immediate withdrawal from Iraq without a solution to the bloodbath question. That means, when you ask for immediate pullout, and the other side says there will be a bloodbath, you need a solution better than the one some war opponents (Glenn included) were arguing, namely, so what if there's a bloodbath, there will be a bloodbath no matter when we pull out. I was actually quite right that there would be no immediate pullout based on such an answer, there wasn't. Those positions frequently led to people accusing me of supporting the war there, but I didn't and don't and never have. I did point out frequently that since we occupied Iraq (formally and in every other sense) we had obligations there under international law. You can look those up, they're in the 4th Geneva Convention.

Next off, Afghanistan. I've spent a lot of time coming up with my opinions on Afghanistan, I have concentrated on the prisoners there as the worst of the problems for some time now. For quite a while, I accepted the general point of view promulgated on this board and elsewhere, that the U.S. was conducting an occupation there. For quite a while, even longer, actually until fairly recently, I accepted the notion that the U.S. invaded there and defeated the Taliban government, even though, like everybody else here, I lived through all these events.

The first time I had information to the contrary on either of these, it came from Barbara Olshansky (she's with the International Justice Network and in the past has been with CCR, and in fact, argued the Bagram detainees case in front of Judge Bates), more than a year and a half ago. She claimed that the war ended in 2001. I was pretty stunned at the time, but I have since heard the same claim from people who have been over there, in various capacities, and since read the same in articles on the subject from area experts in Pakistan and India as well. While I had compiled information about the prisoners there going on years, I started really investigating that claim intensively about 10 months ago, and the claim that the U.S. was occupying Afghanistan about 6 months ago. She, and all the others, were right.

It turned out that when you investigate that, you will find that a lot of things said all the time about Afghanistan aren't true. The first is that the U.S. defeated anyone in Afghanistan, as heru-ur offered as an option a little while ago. The U.S. did not defeat the Taliban. The Northern Alliance did. The second is that the war really did end with a treaty that was signed December 5th, 2001, one further battle in Kandahar after that, and the installment of a new (provisional) government on December 22, 2001. The mission really was and is peacekeeping and nation building, as authorized by the Bonn Agreement initially, and other treaties and Security Council resolutions followed. That has huge implications for any detentions for the "duration of conflict", but I'm well aware you don't care about such things.

The next find is that the Pakistanis actively helped evacuate and resettle the Taliban, and created programs to maintain them as a fighting force with the goal of retaking Afghanistan. And that they looked the other way while al Qaeda set up shop in FATA, and went back into the business of training terrorists, something they had done under the Taliban government.

The next find is that the peacekeeping and nation building fuck up has been a multinational effort. The U.S. bears huge blame for how it has gone, and for the fact that the Taliban were able to launch an insurgency in Afghanistan and gain traction, but the U.S. didn't do it all by themselves, and the U.S. does not occupy Afghanistan in any sense of the word under international law. As I said in a previous comment, it does occupy Bagram, for instance, since the term 'occupation' under international law applies to territory not just to countries.

I have, for some time, believed that the nation building -- the humanitarian effort -- in Afghanistan is justified and necessary. I've believed that straight through since the U.S. action in 2001. There are very few humanitarian entities, be they government bodies or NGO's who feel otherwise, you and your friends on the total non-intervention track really have an uphill battle on that one. I have repeatedly stated that I didn't think the effort should be controlled by the military, I still think that. I have said more than once that the situation is worse than an occupation in Afghanistan. I have repeatedly stated that I don't think the September 18th AUMF is justification there. I don't see how it could be otherwise, the people referred to in the AUMF have been in Pakistan for a long time now.

I don't really care if you think this has something to do with President Obama's election, it doesn't. On that one, you're grasping at straws and not even close. But you can think what you want, you usually do, regardless of what anyone says. You might just want to look at all the stuff available about Afghanistan before you sneer at anyone else. You really don't know much, and it really is complicated.