1. “The Pentagon Papers Are Public This Time
If a new Daniel Ellsberg were to release a new pile of Pentagon Papers exposing the lies behind the Afghanistan War, or even the past few decades of misdeeds by our country in that one, the result would differ from what happened to Ellsberg in a number of stark ways. No newspaper would touch it. The whistleblower would go to prison. Little of substance would be added to what we already know and tolerate. Nobody would be impeached. And no war would end.
…
Congress let Bush walk away, and we are left with a president who claims the powers of illegal war, murder, lawless imprisonment, torture, warrantless spying, and unprecedented secrecy and legal immunity. What’s left to expose? We know the drones mostly kill innocent people, and that we are the illegal aggressor against all of those we kill. We know the night raids murder more people now than the drones. We know that the leading cause of death for U.S. troops is suicide. We know that we are going into financial debt and making ourselves less safe. Our paid assassins told the LA Times this week, in regard to moving their focus from Iraq to Afghanistan: “Hunting season is over in Iraq.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/23176
2. “
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander may well be harboring the thought attributed to prevaricator Oliver North upon being spared punishment — and instead getting rewarded handsomely — for lying about the Iran-Contra Affair: “Is this a great country or what!”
Gen. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency since August 2005, is about to become what the Army describes as “dual hatted.” The Senate is about to confirm him to another highly sensitive leadership position requiring the utmost integrity and fidelity to the Constitution when he has shown neither.
Despite that, after sizing up the enormous challenge of running the new U.S. cyber-warfare command, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, looked at Gen. Alexander and added, “And you’re the right person for it.”
Not for the first time, neither Inhofe nor his colleagues seem to have done their homework. Or maybe it is simply the case that Congress now accepts being lied to as part of the woodwork in the Capitol.
Alexander, you see, has a publicly established record of lying about NSA’s warrantless wiretapping. Call me naïve or obsolete, but when I was an Army officer it was understood that an officer did not lie — and especially not to Congress. Gen. Alexander seems to have missed that block of instruction.
And the same can be said for so many other very senior Army officers. It becomes easier to understand why Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba compared some of his colleagues during the Bush administration to the Mafia.”
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2010/04/16/lie-to-congress-get-fourth-star/
3. “Is It American Policy to Shoot the Wounded and Commit War Crimes?
According to Wikileaks, “U.S. military authorities concluded that the actions of soldiers and pilots were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and their Rules of Engagement.”
…
Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.” While it is possible the trigger-happy U.S. helicopter crews mistook the reporters’ cameras for AK-47s and RPGs (though they’d have to have the eyesight of Mr. Magoo to do so), the gunship crews without question deliberately shot down the wounded and the men who had come to care for them.
Shooting the wounded is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, and one of the more vicious of war crimes (and violations of the natural law).
Chatter among the flight crews in the video makes it clear that the crews knew with certainty that they were shooting unarmed wounded men.”
4. Of course they won’t. It was a false flag, and the Arab doctor didn’t do it:
“U.S. won’t share Ft Hood evidence with Senate”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100416/pl_nm/us_usa_security_forthood
Pretending they are headquartered in tax havens like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands or Panama, so that they can enjoy all of the benefits of actually being based in America (including the use of American law and the court system, listing on the Dow, etc.), with the tax benefits associated with having a principal address in a sunny tax haven.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/04/after-getting-bailed-out-by-american.html
6. “There Ain’t Gonna Be No Revolution
I don’t much feel like going back to raging and cussing and screaming at an empire so vast it can never feel anything I’d do to it anyway. It takes actual destruction and killing to get its attention, because all it understands and responds to is brutal force, despite the pretense of democracy and all — that is, manufactured consent. So if it could feel any effect from me as an individual, then I’d simply be branded a terrorist and disposed of, wouldn’t I?
I’m too old to be shitting in a can in Gitmo. I used to go to sleep at night contemplating just what sort of violence I could perform that would do any good. Believe me, like so many others with whom I’ve talked who felt the same, I seriously contemplated some horrific stuff. But when I looked at the sorts of company I’d be keeping in America by doing so, I did not like it at all. Perhaps if Trotsky’s ghost came one night to call me out, I’d get dressed and go. But as I see it, there is no “will of the people” mandate. Hell, the people want more cable channels, fried chicken buckets and someone to tell them there really is a free lunch. And that they can return to the same shameful waste and stupidity as before, through “a recovery.”
I’m rambling, I know it. But readers have asked me this before. So in the end all I can say is that I do what I do. I make my own choices each day, without any self-conscious concern for reader opinion. Or even the opinions of my own family much of the time, most of them being as they are, attached to the fictions of the empire — one of which is the power of the people. Another being that they can have security, and that if they just keep their heads down, be nice around people and work hard, America will not fuck them over.
Common sense eventually told me there ain’t gonna be no revolution, just things the empire will label revolutions as a distraction from the utterly remote possibility of one are — such as the “Tea Party Revolution.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25232.htm
7. “What Do We Get For Our US Tax Dollars?
We like to think of Europeans as poor overtaxed serfs but the benefits they receive show the shortcomings of the US system
Europe frequently plays the punching bag role during these moments because there is a perception that the poor Europeans are overtaxed serfs. But a closer look reveals that this is a myth that prevents Americans from understanding the vast shortcomings of our own system.
A few years ago, an American acquaintance of mine who lives in Sweden told me that, quite by chance, he and his Swedish wife were in New York City and ended up sharing a limousine to the theatre district with a southern US senator and his wife. This senator, a conservative, anti-tax Democrat, asked my acquaintance about Sweden and swaggeringly commented about “all those taxes the Swedes pay”. To which this American replied, “The problem with Americans and their taxes is that we get nothing for them.” He then went on to tell the senator about the comprehensive level of services and benefits that Swedes receive.
“If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot,” he told the senator. The rest of the ride to the theatre district was unsurprisingly quiet.
The fact is, in return for their taxes, Europeans are receiving a generous support system for families and individuals for which Americans must pay exorbitantly, out-of-pocket, if we are to receive it at all. That includes quality healthcare for every single person, the average cost of which is about half of what Americans pay, even as various studies show that Europeans achieve healthier results.
But that’s not all. In return for their taxes, Europeans also are receiving affordable childcare, a decent retirement pension, free or inexpensive university education, job retraining, paid sick leave, paid parental leave, ample vacations, affordable housing, senior care, efficient mass transportation and more. In order to receive the same level of benefits as Europeans, most Americans fork out a ton of money in out-of-pocket payments, in addition to our taxes.”
