1. “The phrase “global war on terror” is finished, at least as far as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is concerned.
The top U.S. diplomat told reporters Tuesday that the Obama administration has quit using that line to describe the effort to fight terrorism around the world.
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It doesn’t matter what they “call it”, does it?
As CIA drones kill Afghan civilians, does it matter if it’s called “assassination”, “murder”, “destabilization” or whatever?
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Yeah, they’re surging troops in Afghanistan looking for Osama… still hiding out in a big ol’ cave with his dialysis machine makin’ videos! Osama bin Laden, the magical man who can make steel and concrete buildings turn to powder with kerosene, right before your eyes.
Hillary Clinton: Same pig, different lipstick…. literally.“
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19733
2. “It’s really too bad that the coffee cartels are causing mayhem in Mexico and even on the streets of American cities. Those bloodthirsty profiteers in the illegal market for coffee who are killing their competitors must be stopped. What? You haven’t heard about the coffee cartels? Actually, neither have I. Why do you think that is, whereas there is a violent war between sellers of illegal drugs. Is it that coffee isn’t addictive? For many people, it is. So what is the difference?
The key difference is that coffee isn’t illegal (yet), whereas marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are. And what’s happening in the illegal drug markets is happening not because the goods exchanged are drugs, but because they’re illegal.
Because drugs are illegal and the penalties for being in the “industry” are very high, the illegal-drug industry attracts criminals. In the wars between rival drug “firms,” competition is often cutthroat – literally – and many innocent people are killed. If drugs were legal, competition would be just as it is on legal goods – based on price, quality, and convenience. When Prohibition ended in 1933, organized crime left the liquor industry – and so did violence.
Notice that I use the term “firm,” not “cartel,” to refer to organizations that produce drugs. The reason is that they are not cartels. A cartel is an organization of firms that colludes to keep prices high and output low. It is unlikely that the drug firms are cartels. The very fact that they are engaged in violent conflict means that they are unlikely to have a collusive agreement. Calling them cartels reflects the same kind of sloppy thinking that favors the drug war.
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It may be a hard pill to swallow, so to speak, but it is true, nevertheless, that the vast majority of harm attributed to drugs is, in fact, due to the drug war. End the drug war, and it’s true that some people will consume things that others don’t want them to; but it’s also true that the amount of violence in that market would decline to the amount seen in the legal alcohol market. That is, there would be almost no violence. Keep that in mind when you see politicians advocating stemming the violence by escalating violence against sellers of illegal drugs.“
http://original.antiwar.com/henderson/2009/03/30/reduce-violence-end-the-drug-war/
3. What a surprise:
Military Dismisses Reported Killings as “Hearsay”
The Israeli military announced today that they are abandoning the investigation stemming from public testimony by several veterans of the Gaza invasion who reported the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians by military personnel and extremely lax rules of engagement.
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The investigation came after growing international outrage over the military’s conduct of the war, which killed nearly 1,000 civilians in 22 days. Pressure increased considerably after troops said some of the actions amounted to “cold blooded murder.”
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/03/30/israel-abandons-gaza-probe/
4. Let the Patriot Act expire:
“One of the nation’s leading legal rights groups is calling on the U.S. Congress to make major changes in the USA PATRIOT Act to reverse parts of the hurriedly passed law that have been found unconstitutional or have been abused to collect information on innocent people.
On Dec. 31, 2009, three provisions of the PATRIOT Act will expire unless reenacted. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says this provides lawmakers with “the perfect opportunity for Congress to examine all of our surveillance laws.”
http://original.antiwar.com/fisher/2009/03/30/aclu-let-spy-laws-fade-into-the-sunset/
5. “Useful Idiots in Modern America
Idiots were not just useful for the USSR.
Today, in modern America, there are useful idiots on the right who blindly support anyone who attacks Obama because Obama is a so-called “liberal”.
Equally, there are useful idiots on the left who blindly support Obama and try to defend his bailouts of the financial giants, his escalation of the Afghanistan war, his defense of Bush administration torturers and war criminals, and other indefensible acts because they think he is the great liberal savior.
Stalin’s useful idiots – like Robeson – were blind to the reality of what the communist tyrants were actually doing. They were too caught up in ideas about what was happening, instead of looking at the effect of the actual policies being carried out.
Those on both the left and the right who fall for the rhetoric of the Democratic and Republican party leaders are useful idiots who are failing to look at the effect that those parties’ policies are actually having.
Indeed, the Republican and Democratic parties have been promoting virtuall identical economic policies, which is why economists from the left and the right have slammed both Bush/Paulson and Obama/Geithner’s actions.
Failing to see that the financial elite are controlling the agenda of both parties is a form of useful idiocy.“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/03/useful-idiots-on-left-and-right.html
6.
“Obama’s Domino Theory
President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting “al-Qaida” in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories.
Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble.
He acknowledged that we deserve a “straightforward answer” as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. “So let me be clear,” he said, “Al-Qaida and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. “And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban,” he said, “or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”
Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, “The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan,” and warned, “Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.”
This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the “Taliban” is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded “Taliban” only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or “killing” it.
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As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they “kill” it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public.
Obama’s dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the “killing” of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an “al-Qaida” victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president’s views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington’s justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.”
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22321.htm
