- EverVigilant.net - "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." - John Philpot Curran
The Financial Times is reporting on Germany's military expansion:
Germany will on Wednesday adopt the most radical restructuring of its military since 1945, turning the Bundeswehr into an international intervention force, according to an internal cabinet strategy paper obtained by the Financial Times.
The paper, which will be endorsed at a special cabinet meeting in the defence ministry, is the product of a review – the first of its kind since 1994 – begun by Angela Merkel, chancellor, after she won office last November. It will see Germany's military officially abandon its primary postwar task of defending the country's borders in favour of a more robust role for German troops on international missions.
"There are some who feel like - that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
The Constitution of the United States must hate America. After all, it was only put in place to limit the power of government, and according to the Bush administration - and pretty much every other administration - government must be free to protect the American people.
Now, I'm no fan of the mainstream media. The smarmy, know-it-all anchors who try to pass themselves off as journalists are every bit as corrupt as the politicians they pretend to hate. But, as the saying goes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.
Case in point: Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and his commentaries on the passage of the Military Commissions Act:
Now THIS is what the press is supposed to be doing: serving as a mouthpiece for "We the people" as a check on government power.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Tamil Tiger rebels rammed a truck loaded with explosives into a naval convoy in central Sri Lanka on Monday, killing at least 92 sailors and wounding more than 150, in what the military described as a cold-blooded massacre.
"All these people were without weapons and were going on leave," military spokesman Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe said.
Samarasinghe said the attack happened near the town of Dambulla, about 90 miles northeast of the capital Colombo, when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rammed a small truck loaded with explosives into a convoy of military buses. The blast killed 92 sailors, while more than 150 were wounded and evacuated to nearby hospitals.
He said the buses were carrying sailors from the port town of Trincomalee.
President Mahinda Rajapakse's office said in a statement that the attack "was further proof of the LTTE's unmitigated commitment to violence to achieve its ends and was in total disregard of international demands for it to abandon violence and seek peaceful means to achieve its goals."
The military called the attack, one of the deadliest since a Norwegian-brokered 2002 cease-fire, a "cold-blooded massacre."
"This inhuman act is a clear revenge by the terrorists on the navy who inflicted successive defeats for LTTE against their attempts of smuggling arms and explosives," a military statement said. ...
... Fighting has left about 2,000 people dead this year, according to the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, set up to oversee the cease-fire.
The Tigers have been fighting since 1983 for a separate homeland for the Tamil minority in the north and east, citing decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese. About 65,000 people were killed before the 2002 cease-fire.
You can read the full story if you want, but even in this excerpt, two things should jump out at you. First of all, the report refers to the Tamil Tigers as "rebels," not terrorists. The only reference to terrorism at all is in a quote from the Sri Lankan military. On one hand, this isn't surprising because we have been conditioned to think that only Islamic radicals are capable of committing terrorist acts. On the other hand, if this had happened in Iraq, it would have been considered the work of terrorists. But since the suicide bombers weren't Muslim, they are merely rebels.
The second thing you should have noticed was how long this conflict in Sri Lanka has been going on: 23 years. The Sri Lankan government hasn't been able to suppress the rebellion within its own country in almost a quarter of a century. What makes us think that we, as outsiders, can do any better in Iraq?
There is a long history of sex scandals among Washington's ruling elite. Whenever the subject arises, most people readily recall those involving Democrats: Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, etc.
But "conservatives" seem to gloss over those involving Republicans. Eric Stewart, blogging over at Big Medicine, has compiled of list of Republican politicians and supporters caught up in sex scandals, many of which involve kids. Check it out here.
And in case you suffer from selective amnesia, here's a blast from the past:
As long as we keep voting these perverts into office, nothing is going to change. Enough of this "lesser of two evils" crap. Let's get 'em all out of there and start over.
LRC columnist Gene Callahan would like to say, " Welcome to Fascist America!" His latest essay breaks it down for you:
Secret prisons - they're back!
Torture - we're doing it.
Spying on all citizens.
Arrests and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
Rampant militarism.
Secret detention.
Enforced disappearance.
Denial and restriction of habeas corpus.
Prolonged incommunicado detention.
Unfair trial procedures.
Are these the marks of a free society? Hardly.
As Callahan points out, "We've now gotten to the point where Nazi Germany was, say, in 1934. Remember, at that time, if you had told a typical German what his government would do over the next ten years, he would have looked at you as a madman."
For an even simpler explanation - complete with pictures - check out the cartoon version of F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdomhere.
Boys and girls, it is because torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren't really any, or aren't very many, or aren't enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget.
On why we're in the Middle East:
[Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray] explained what is really behind the new "lily pad" doctrine of US bases, whereby the US is seeking to encompass the "Greater Middle East" with small bases, each with 1,000 to 3,000 personnel. In emergencies, these bases could quickly swell to 40,000. Like a lily pad, they can "open up" and accommodate a landing frog. Murray said that the US documents are quite open as to why they are seeking the network of lily pad bases around the Middle East. It is because that is where the oil and gas are. If you include the Caspian region, Tengiz, and the gas reserves in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan along with what is in the Persian Gulf, the vast majority of proven oil and gas reserves are in this circle of crisis.
With the economic rise of China and India, such that both giants (over a billion in population each) are now using more and more gas and oil, there is going to be increasing pressure on fuel supplies and prices in the next decades. Europe also lacks much energy of its own and is a major importer. The US fields are rapidly declining. Washington wants access to that fuel, and wants to be able to protect its access militarily.
In essence, I understand Murray to argue that the Bush administration hyped the al-Qaeda threat in order to have a pretext for the lily pad strategy of oil security. Murray did not say so, but this strategy would then logically underlie the conquest and military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well.
On the presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq:
I kept thinking about the thousands of Iraqis that the US military rounded up and imprisoned for months without charge. Some proportion of them were tortured. And then the US military in Iraq and the Bush administration in Washington kept coming out and saying that the guerrilla war there from 2003 forward was being fought by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That clearly was not true for the most part. The US military recently killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposed leader of "al-Qaeda" in Iraq, but that has made no difference to the war. But why did they think it was true? Were they just lying? Or was that what their torture victims were telling them because it was what they thought they wanted to hear? Was the torture at Abu Ghraib about "finding" an "al-Qaeda" at the center of the Iraqi insurgency, when there was actually no such thing?
On the global threat of terrorism:
The Bush administration needs the Terror/al-Qaeda bogeyman to justify the military occupation of strategic countries that have or are near to major oil and gas reserves. It needs al-Qaeda to justify the lily pad bases in Kyrgyzstan etc.
But the problem is that we now know that serious al-Qaeda is probably only a few hundred men now, and at most a few thousand. Look at who exactly did the London subway bombing. A few guys in a gym in Leeds. That magnitude of threat just would not keep a "War on Terror" in business. The embassy bombings, the Cole, and September 11 itself were done by tiny poorly funded cells that functioned as terror boutiques to accomplish a specific spectacular operation. They don't prove a worldwide, large organization. They prove tiny effective cells. Most of what the Pentagon does and can do is irrelevant to that kind of threat. You'd be better off with some good FBI agents.
So how do you prove to yourself and others a big terror threat that requires a National Security State and turn toward a praetorian society? You torture people into alleging it.
Folks, we've been sold a lie, and we bought it because we're a proud people. We have a hard time admitting when we're wrong, and doing so now would mean that thousands of U.S. troops and tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died as a result of our own selfishness and greed.
It requires no stretch of the imagination to think that our involvement in the Middle East is simply about economic gain. Leading government apologist Rush Limbaugh has said repeatedly over the years that our 1991 war against Iraq was about nothing more than maintaining "the free flow of oil at market prices." In other words, the cost of oil is more important than the cost of American and foreign lives.
Sometimes the best explanations are the most simple and obvious. Only our own stubbornness and stupidity keep us from admitting the truth.
