1. “McKeown says, “There’s a huge leap of faith required to lead someone from asking questions about engineering and structural design to making the argument that elements of the government played a role in the murder of thousands of people, just to provide an excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s something in that leap I don’t quite comprehend.”
it always boils down to the same frame of mind that forms their position going into these things… “they wouldn’t do that”
I think even if they were shown the evidence they claim would confirm our position, they would still deny it because “they wouldn’t do that”
…wasn’t there an article or book chapter written specifically to deal with this lame claim? we need to hammer home the question “what makes the world leaders different now to the point where they could never be like other world leaders in the past?”
these anti-truthers….no wait, let’s call it what it is. pro-liar… these pro-liars are so off the wall, in order to believe the official story they have to take the position that politicians don’t lie anymore… I say come back at them with that… “oh…so your position is that politicians don’t lie anymore”
…
What I always answer is: They wouldn’t kill 3000 of their citizens but they have no trouble sleeping at night while more than a million innocent iraqi civilians have died and more than 4000 american soldiers were sacrificed for an illegal war in Irak?
Why would the lies and the death be unthinkable in one scenario, but in the other, tolerable?
And anyways, since when do we need to know exactly how a crime took place in the most minute details BEFORE investigating the inconsistencies and evidence proving the official version can’t be true?
I can imagine how ridiculous criminal investigations would be if detectives would have to guest exactly who did it, why, and how before having the right to open the investigation and look at the evidence!”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21973
2. “The last thing a government unable to avoid an inquiry once the troops had left Iraq wanted was a proper public one that would answer the hard questions on the legality and responsibility for this defining episode of the country’s recent history. What it wants is a report that goes into endless detail, examines a great string of witnesses, gathers “a mountain range of documents” (in Sir John’s words), uncovers some interesting material to keep the journalists happy and then ends up with a final report which says that, yes, there were lapses in the presentation of the case for war and there were serious deficiencies in the planning of the occupation (as we know from recently leaked government documents) but, no, there was no dishonesty in the intent, no lying to the House, no final illegality. Officials and ministers made mistakes but there was nothing dishonourable about the whole exercise or the individuals involved.
…
The inquiry, said Sir John Chilcot, wanted only members “with experience of the workings of government from the inside”. That rather gives the game away. It is the outsider who has always pursued truth most vigorously, particularly the judge trained to pursue lines of inquiry and catch out dissembling, as the Scott, Scarman and Macpherson reports all testify. What Sir John means is that he only wanted people who would share the assumptions of those questioned, as the ever so polite examination of officials in the first two days of hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday amply testified..
Sir John is also guilty of two other deceits (or “Blairisms” if that is too harsh a word). One is that the committee members are “completely independent” and come to the investigation from “different perspectives.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/adrian-hamilton/adrian-hamilton-the-one-thing-chilcot-wont-reveal-is-the-truth-1827469.html
3. Too bad American war criminals never admit what they did and resign:
“German Army Chief Resigns Over Afghan Civilian Killings
German Army chief General Wolfgang Schneiderhan has formally asked to be relieved of duty today following the release of images from the US warplane involved in the September Kunduz air strike showed that German officials were lying about situation leading up to the attack.
The photographs, released by the nation’s Bild newspaper, show large numbers of civilians at the site of the German-ordered attacked and disproved repeated claims from officials as high ranking as former Defense Minister Franz Jung that there was no evidence of civilian deaths.”
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/11/26/german-army-chief-resigns-over-afghan-civilian-killings/
4. “Declassified records show US military officers were present at massacres and at least one formally sanctioned a mass political execution. Some have suggested the overall toll of the massacres could exceed 100,000 when all is said and done.”
5. “It’s interesting how what was once lambasted as “Constitution-shredding” under George Bush is now nothing more than: Obama’s “civil liberties record hasn’t been exactly what I would have wanted.” Also, the premise implicitly embedded in Matt’s argument is the standard Beltway dogma that there would be serious political costs from reversing the Bush/Cheney abuses of the Constitution and civil liberties. The success of Obama’s campaign — which emphatically and repeatedly vowed to do exactly that — ought to have permanently retired that excuse.
Even more important, Matt seems to be implying that he knew all along that Obama never really intended to fulfill his multiple campaign promises to restore civil liberties and dismantle the Bush/Cheney war on the Constitution. So all of those righteous speeches and commitments and campaign positions were nothing more than dishonest instruments for manipulating and placating the people who supported his campaign? I don’t necessarily disagree with that assessment. I neither believed nor disbelieved what Obama said during the campaign, but instead intended to wait for the evidence before deciding. And particularly once I watched Obama — once his party’s nomination was secure — flagrantly violate his pledge to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity, I had no expectations that he’d feel at all compelled to adhere to his other promises.
…
If Obama ran a campaign which purposely elevated the hopes of so many people — particularly younger and new voters — while secretly harboring the knowledge that he did not feel at all bound by what he was promising, isn’t that a fairly serious indictment of his character, as well as a dangerous game to play for the Democratic Party?
…
I agree with Matt’s explicit point that Congress has an important role to play in checking presidential abuses — a role they’ve clearly abdicated no matter which party was in control. He’s also right that Presidents don’t easily relinquish power. But it’s hardly unreasonable to object when someone runs for high political office based on clear and repeated promises that they have squarely violated. Whatever else is true, watching Obama embrace extremist policies can still be “disappointing” even if one isn’t surprised that he’s doing it. I could understand and accept a lot more easily this blithe acquiescence to Obama’s record if it weren’t for the fact that progressives and Democrats spent so many years screaming bloody murder over Bush’s use of indefinite detention, military commissions, state secrets, renditions, and extreme secrecy — policies Obama has largely and/or completely adopted as his own. One can’t help but wonder, at least in some cases, how genuine those objections were, as opposed to their just having been effective tools to discredit a Republican president for partisan and political gain.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
6. “Dana Perino: No Terror Attack on USA in Bush Era
Proving once again that there is nothing so untrue a GOP shill can say on Sean Hannity’s rightfest that will cause anyone to challenge it, former G.W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino criticizes the Obama Administration for not labelling the Ft. Hood massacre “terrorism.” Then she pronounces: “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”
And that, my friends, is how history gets re-written in the modern era.
Just. Like. That.”
http://firedoglake.com/2009/11/25/dana-perino-no-terror-attack-on-usa-in-bush-era/
7. “Deception Has Always Been The Name Of Zionism’s Game
The proof that Zionism’s founding father knew the substitution of “home” for “state” in the first mission statement was a deception is in his diary, which was not published (was kept secret) for 63 years. Herzl’s entry for 3 September 1897, as published in 1960, included this:
Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word – which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly – it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish state… Perhaps in five years, and certainly 50, everyone will know it… At Basel then, I created this abstraction which, as such, is invisible to the vast majority of people.
It wasn’t only the Arabs and the major powers Zionism didn’t want to scare by using the term state. All of its founding fathers were fully aware that most informed and thoughtful Jews everywhere were opposed to the idea of creating a sovereign Jewish state in the Arab heartland. They believed it to be morally wrong. They feared it would lead to unending conflict. And most of all they feared that if Zionism was allowed by the major powers to have its way, it would one day provoke anti-Semitism.
As it happened, that Jewish concern and those Jewish fears were washed away by the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, without which Zionism almost certainly would not have triumphed.
After its unilateral declaration of independence, the Zionist (not Jewish) state’s policy was to advance by creating facts on the ground. In effect its message to the world was, as it still is: “We know we should not have done this, but we’ve done it. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24072.htm
8. “What Is Totalitarianism?
If the United States came under the control of a totalitarian regime, would we recognize it? This question is of utmost importance today, when many of us harbor fears that some time in the near future ideas such as freedom, liberty, and privacy will be alien to our society. But as we witness the regular passage of legislation designed to restrict and regulate, and the tendency of the Federal government to increase rather than decrease its power (with a handful of exceptions), we are struck by the uninterrupted routine of life in the USA . As the central government brings more and more of private society under its control, we continue to watch cable TV, shop at supermarkets overflowing with products, and eat at our favorite restaurants. Could it be that we have already passed that dreaded threshold and missed it?
The trouble with diagnosing our condition is that most people are unaware of what totalitarianism actually is. Among even the most politically astute, there is little mental room for the possibility that a state in the process of becoming totalitarian might lack the most brutal and outward signs of oppressive regimes portrayed in popular culture. Because of our rather simplistic frame of reference—picture black and white images of National Socialist Germany or the Soviet Union —we recognize a country as either being in the advanced stages of totalitarianism or not at all. But just because a state maintains the structures and language of democracy and continues to have elections, for instance, that does not preclude it from being totalitarian. “
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
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