How many of these scenarios have there ever actually been?

Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Al Swearengen, History at 5:45 PM MDT

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Senator Voinovich A big moment…

Posted by Al Swearengen as Video, Politics, History, Military at 10:55 PM MDT

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One of the best speeches in my lifetime:

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics, History at 4:47 PM MDT

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“…Dwarf thieves had infested Swedish buses,⁹ Lithuania was pondering changing its name,¹⁰ and a plot by retired Turkish Army officers to kill Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was foiled. ¹¹ Police in Malda, India, were battling avian flu by conducting a poultry massacre. “We have planned to collect ‘backyard chickens’ from the houses in the evening and kill all of them late at night,” said the district’s deputy director of animal-resources development, N. K. Shit.¹² George Piro, the FBI field agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, recalled his last meeting with the Iraqi dictator, when the two smoked cigars and Saddam kissed Piro on the cheek three times. “It made me feel,” he said, “somewhat awkward.” (by Christian Lorentzen)

Scott Horton is without a doubt my favorite writer at the moment. Harper’s online has his work up for free on the site’s front page. You can find out why John Yoo hasn’t come over for dinner lately. Keynesian economics, Leo Strauss, J$hn Ashcr$ft, Afghanistan, “Blitzwasser” or hot-water incident (so named for the kettles of boiling water that the citizens threw at federal tax collectors), Don Siegelman…

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Justice, Politics, Economics, History, Military at 11:25 PM MST

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by Sebastian Junger, published in Vanity Fair - February 2002

Afghanistan’s master guerrilla commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated by suspected al-Qaeda suicide bombers just two days before September 11. But his Northern Alliance coalition became the U.S.’s most important weapon against the Taliban in a war that combined 19th-century slaughter and 21st-century technology. As alliance soldiers marched on Kabul—with a massed-infantry assault amid the deadly shadows of B-52 bombers—the author saw Massoud’s legacy revealed, in the Afghans’ hatred of foreigners fighting for the Taliban, in their readiness to die for freedom, and even, poignantly, in one man’s act of mercy.

~~~

An unnatural fluttering of the plastic over our windows woke me. It sucked in and snapped back three times, as if the whole world were out of breath, and then it lay quiet.

A gray light leaked into the room. Dogs were barking somewhere across the fields. I got up and pulled on my clothes and climbed onto the mud roof of the house we were staying in. The moon was midway in the sky, waning toward Ramadan, and the east was shot with red. A single B-52 bomber was making its way silently across the sky at 30,000 feet, laying four thin contrails out behind. It continued past me and then made a perfect arc far to the south, where the front lines were.

I couldn’t hear the bombs—they were 20 miles away—but I could feel them: four distinct pressure waves in the air that bumped past me and on up the valley. A few days earlier I’d talked to a mujahid who had fought the Russians in the 1980s. He described a Russian rocket hitting the mouth of a cave he was hiding in. The explosion itself didn’t touch him, he said, but the concussion had made his ears and eyes bleed for days. That was just a Russian rocket; these were 2,000-pound bombs.

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Posted by Al Swearengen as History, Military at 3:50 PM MST

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This is one of my own creations, cliped out of what I consider to be far and away the best episode of Real Time w/ Bill Maher this season.  Rahm Emanuel was also scheduled, but he didn’t show up.  What a blessing! As the result was was honest, brilliant, alive and often hillarious.  The video is all of the panel discussion, without any of the interviews or Bill’s solo segments at the beginning or end.  Enjoy!

Posted by Al Swearengen as Video, Politics, History, Religion at 2:23 AM MST

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A Special Comment on torture:

Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Video, Politics, History at 2:40 PM MST

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Check this out. In 8 minutes, Dodd runs through just about everything. No meandering. This man needs to be the senate majority leader. What I saw and heard here had ‘Profiles in Courage’ potential.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Video, Politics, History at 1:56 AM MDT

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He was a Spainard who made the voyage to North America in the 1500s. The following work is a portion of his ‘Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies’, published in 1542. The first reading of this a while back was shocking, but the reason it came to mind recently was the “phony soldiers” episode. Casas had written this and sent it back to Spain for the kingdom’s own purposes, but it was leaked, translated and used by other countries to point out his country’s sins in America. Especially Protestant nations like England and The Netherlands, whose Spanish adversaries were Catholic (along those lines, if anyone hasn’t studied The Hundred Years War, you’re missing out). So Casas was accused of treason and heresy for telling the truth. Patriotism warranted such charges, as those who subscribe to the “phony soldiers” mantra today believe also. You’ve got to read below the fold to get even a taste of what Casas exposed:

“The Indies were discovered in the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-two. In the following year a great many Spaniards went there with the intention of settling the land. Thus, forty-nine years have passed since the first settlers penetrated the land, the first so claimed being the large and most happy isle called Hispaniola, which is six hundred leagues in circumference. Around it in all directions are many other islands, some very big, others very small, and all of them were, as we saw with our own eyes, densely populated with native peoples called Indians. This large island was perhaps the most densely populated place in the world. There must be close to two hundred leagues of land on this island, and the seacoast has been explored for more than ten thousand leagues, and each day more of it is being explored. And all the land so far discovered is a beehive of people; it is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind.
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Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics, History, Religion at 11:56 PM MDT

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By Robin Fox, from an essay in the September/October issue of Society. Fox is a professor of social theory at Rutgers and the author, most recently, of Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life. His “Human Nature and Human Rights” appeared in the April 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Since Laocoon’s warning to his fellow Trojans went so tragically unheeded, the course of history has been strewn with the corpses of ungrateful nations which, despite the misery that stemmed from their inability to govern their own affairs, bitterly resented and actively resisted the firm and forceful help of others. The stranger’s gift of peace, order, and prosperity is lesswelcome to us than the death, chaos, and poverty that are our own doing. For in the end they are our own, and that is what matters to us. Like truculent adolescents, we do not want to be told how to do things or have them done for us; we want to make our own, even fatal, mistakes. We will take what we can use from what is offered, but we want, at last, to do it ourselves: to manage our own lives, however badly. The main thing about the stranger, after all, is that he is strange. He is not like us; he will never understand us. Our greatest fear, perhaps because the possibility is often so seductive, is that we will become like him and lose our selves. The stranger’s gift never comes without strings, and we do not want to be tied.

We of the post-Enlightenment Anglophone West are among the most earnest of the givers. We are not, like our medieval Catholic ancestors, really proponents of the Crusade and the holy war against the heathen. Weare at heart Protestant missionaries: We want to bring the good news and the benefits of civilization to the benighted of the earth. And if they don’t want it, then like Protestant parents, and entirely for their own good of course, we must sternly make them accept it. Certainly, we hoped to make profits and attain political power in the process, but these were small prices the benighted had to pay for the incomparable gifts we had to offer. Critics of colonialism miss the point if all they see is the profits and the power. Our civilizing mission was, and still is, as dear to us as the jihad is to Muslims. Even when it is not Protestantism per se that we are offering, it is the children of the Protestant Ethic that we know as democracy, liberty, equality, and the free market. Our learned men tell us we are the foreordained bearers of a truth so fundamental that with its triumph history will come to an end, there being nothing left for mankind to achieve. If this is so, how can the benighted so stubbornly, and even violently, refuse our gift of a free leg up onto the stage of world history? Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as Politics, History at 2:00 PM MDT

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This one is perfect. A lot of it is hillarious, especially the early parts when they’re interviewing the people who worked on the most notorious porn film ever made.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Video, History at 4:49 PM MDT

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This is its genesis right here - text of an amendment to the defense authorization bill (note that paragraphs 3 and 4 were removed from the final version, and 5 remained):

(1) that the manner in which the United States transitions and structures its military presence in Iraq will have critical long-term consequences for the future of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, in particular with regard to the capability of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to pose a threat to the security of the region, the prospects for democracy for the people of the region, and the health of the global economy;

(2) that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran from turning Shi’a militia extremists in Iraq into a Hezbollah-like force that could serve its interests inside Iraq, including by overwhelming, subverting, or co-opting institutions of the legitimate Government of Iraq;

(3) that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies;

(4) to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies;

(5) that the United States should designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and initiated under Executive Order 13224; and

(6) that the Department of the Treasury should act with all possible expediency to complete the listing of those entities targeted under United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747 adopted unanimously on December 23, 2006 and March 24, 2007, respectively.

Paragraph number 5 cracked the door open, and far too many Senators remain naive as to what this President can and will do with an inch. If Iran’s national military is a terrorist organization, then they’ll reason an attack is authorized based on the President’s war powers in fighting the global war on terror. If Iran’s military is a terrorist organization according to the US Congress, then there’s nothing left to discuss. There doesn’t need to be WMDs. The nuke reasons aren’t necessary once this thing passes.

Cute little buggers that they are, the Democrats attached the Hate Crimes bill to this defense authorization, and so, the blood of foreigners will be traded in exchange for legislation that has no business being a part of it, ala the minimum wage increase tacked onto the last war spending bill this past spring. I could go on forever on this, but one example of why I’ve been depressed this week is Dick Durbin, who speaks harshly about the amendment and then 12 hours later votes in favor of it. Is he on drugs? Are any of these fucks paying attention? I suppose I have less to complain about than others, as Kerry and Kennedy both voted against the amendment, though it does seem silly for a Lieberman/Kyl amendment on Iran to get an up or down vote on the floor, yet Webb’s amendment couldn’t break the filibuster. How does that make sense? Republicans get their votes on this and the bullshit MoveOn amendment, but an amendment to give troops equal time home as time deployed can’t make it to the floor? Will it ever be time to say enough’s enough and shut the place down?

Harry Reid is a chump, Dianne Feinstein is a disgrace and Hillary Clinton just lost my vote forever. Carl Levin…he can be talked into anything. “My good friend, you say you want to work on a bipartisan amendment to outlaw breathing…hmm, Bi-Partisan ey?” Click here to see the roll call, 76-22.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics, History, Military at 1:13 AM MDT

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h/t to Blue Gal over at Crooks and Liars

Posted by Al Swearengen as History, Military at 10:57 PM MDT

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Liberal Oasis - Bill Scher’s radio program - Part 1

Part 2

Posted by Al Swearengen as Video, Politics, History at 2:51 PM MDT

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by Andrew Cockburn - published in The Nation magazine (excerpts):

In September 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell descended on the town to inaugurate a newly completed museum commemorating the 5,000 victims, making emotional reference to the “choking mothers [who] died holding their choking babies to their chests.” Inside, tasteful displays featured dioramas of huddled corpses and other evocative memorabilia, including the empty casings of mustard and nerve gas bombs now painted up in bright colors…Saddam never lacked for partners. He had launched his original ill-fated attack on Iran in September 1980 after garnering an indirect endorsement from Washington via the Saudis. The best the UN Security Council could do in the face of this act of unprovoked aggression was to issue a statement appealing to both parties to “desist from all armed activity.” Two years later, US official complacency was jarred by the unexpected revival of Iranian military fortunes and consequent Iraqi retreats. As a result, for the rest of the war US policy was geared toward preventing an Iraqi defeat by any means necessary.

Iraq first resorted to chemical weapons in the mountains of the Kurdish north. In July 1983, the Iranians attacked at Haj Omran, a strategic mountain pass in the far northeast of Iraq. In a telling example of the ethnic and political complexities of that part of the world, the attacking force included elements of the Badr Corps, Iraqi Shiite prisoners recruited from POW camps, along with anti-Saddam Kurds from the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Masoud Barzani. Opposing this force were units of other Iraqi Kurds from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by Jalal Talabani, who between 1983 and 1984 was allied with Saddam against the Iranians. The attackers were initially successful, until Iraqi planes swooped overhead and dropped bombs. Fighters in the area suddenly smelled garlic and soon afterward developed breathing problems and skin lesions, symptoms that inexorably spread to those lower on the mountain as the gas–sulphur mustard developed during World War I–drifted downhill…

To convince the Iraqi leader that we really were his friends, the Administration dispatched the President’s Special Middle East Envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, bearing a gift for Saddam from Reagan: a pair of golden spurs. In much of the Middle East, Rumsfeld was an unpopular figure–the US Ambassador in Damascus would leave town, after locking up the liquor cabinet in the residence, whenever he heard the envoy was on his way. But Rummy was popular in Baghdad, where Saddam’s men enthused that they regarded him as “a good listener” and “liked him as a person.” Rumsfeld did not spoil the party by giving chemical weapons more than a passing mention; instead he spent much of his private time with Saddam trying to sell his host on the idea of an Iraqi oil pipeline to Israel.

The following March, when news of Iraq’s revival of poison gas as a weapon finally surfaced in the press, the State Department condemned “the prohibited use of chemical weapons wherever it occurs,” while Rumsfeld was sent back to Baghdad to pass the word that the condemnation had been essentially pro forma and that the American desire to improve relations “at a pace of Iraq’s choosing remain[s] undiminished.” Meanwhile, US diplomats worked to quash discussion of the issue at international forums. No wonder Saddam exulted later that year over what he called “the beautiful atmosphere between us.” The “beautiful atmosphere” soured for a period when it emerged that the United States had been simultaneously selling arms to Iran…

The memorial inaugurated by Powell six months after the invasion was a priority project for Kurdish officials, built, so locals concluded, for the benefit of visiting dignitaries who came to view the exhibit and grieve accordingly. Halabjans, chafing at their neglect by their supposed representatives, were not impressed. On March 16, 2006, the eighteenth anniversary of the attack, they marched to the building and torched it. “Many delegations went to that monument,” one of the locals was quoted as saying. “They were paying a visit to the dead people, but neglecting the living.”

Posted by Al Swearengen as History, Military at 8:58 PM MDT

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