In addition to our regulars, Justin Raimondo and Gordon Prather, we have two special treats for Monday. Ran HaCohen returns with his analysis of this unbelievable story from Ha’aretz. Hint: read the 5th and final paragraphs. And read Ran HaCohen.
Our spotlight is by first-time contributor Thérèse Taylor, author of Bernadette of Lourdes: Her Life, Death and Visions. Hint: Rigoberta Menchu, Norma Khouri … Souad? You don’t want to miss this one.
I had to laugh at Andrew Card’s preposterous reaction to the news that North Korea has test-fired a missile which may or may not one day be armed with some sort of nuclear warhead. Card was actually heard to say “I think they’re looking to kind of be bullies in the world. And they’re causing others to stand up and take notice.”
Wait. Was Andy talking about Pyongyang or Washington D.C.? What do you call it when the bullies accuse the bullies?
To put this in perspective, the United States government, of which Card is a high ranking official (White House Chief of Staff), has a rather more impressive nuclear arsenal. According to a story in Newsweek on June 25, 2001:
The U.S. nuclear arsenal today includes 5,400 warheads loaded on intercontinental ballistic missiles at land and sea; an additional 1,750 nuclear bombs and cruise missiles ready to be launched from B-2 and B-52 bombers; a further 1,670 nuclear weapons classified as “tactical.” And just in case, an additional 10,000 or so nuclear warheads held in bunkers around the United States as a “hedge” against future surprises.
In case you were wondering, the total of those figures is 18820. The same Newsweek story quotes George W. Bush, newly elected president at the time, as saying “I had no idea we had so many weapons.” If Mr. Card, who may or may not know how many weapons there are, but certainly doesn’t seem to care, is curious about why Pyongyang might (or might not) be developing nukes of its own, I have just provided 18,000 of them.
Tom Woods brings to attention an organization callled The Antiwar League, whose mission “is to promote the creation of a new Antiwar League that unites the left and the right in principled opposition to the plans of the Republicrat Warmonger Party for perpetual war.” Their “goal would be not to capture the highly centralized warmaking power of the federal government but to dismantle that power.”
This is just what is needed right now. Antiwar.com has been serving such a purpose since its existence, bringing together antiwar forces left and right, linking to The American Conservative as well as Counterpunch, publishing liberals, conservatives and libertarians with a common opposition to the warfare state.
War is liberty’s most dreaded enemy, to paraphrase James Madison, and the authoritarian State’s best friend. To defeat the perpetual war and imperialism that comprise the worst threat to American peace, civility and freedom, we must put our differences aside somewhat, and work with people across the spectrum on the central issue at hand. I urge you to check out the Antiwar League, and read some of the articles they link to –– in particular, “The Antiwar Movement Takes Shape” by Justin Raimondo, and “Recalling the Anti-Imperialist League” by Stephen Bender.
There are warmongers on both left and right, and both major political parties are simply factions of a single War Party, dominating America. To stop this madness we need a political realignment, with war, empire and the national-security state together constituting the principal line of demarcation.
This time it’s the US military wielding the black marker in the Sgrena shooting report. Fortunately for fans of complete, unredacted reports, it’s far less effective to black out text distributed on a PDF file than it is to black out faces of honor guard soldiers.
Kevin Drum explains how to read the whole report and shows how ridiculous the redactions were in the first place.
For example, the name of the third person in the car is Andrea Carpani. Was there any reason to keep this a secret? Beats me. But they didn’t do a very good job of it.
Another section describes the methods used by insurgents to place bombs along “Route Irish,” the road to the Baghdad airport, including: positioning explosives alongside guard rails, staging equipment in vehicles or near overpasses, wrapping explosives in brown paper bags, using timers, etc. I can’t imagine that this stuff is even remotely worth classifying, since these techniques are obvious to anyone who thinks about how to place explosives for more than a minute or two, but for some reason they were redacted.
I may go through the report later to see if anything more interesting was redacted, but for now I just wanted to let enterprising journalists know that the full report is available to anyone with a copy of Acrobat Reader. Go to it, guys!
In other news, the US admits there were “flaws” in the procedures that resulted in the shooting of Calipari that night. Though the Italians disagree with the report released by the US clearing the soldiers involved in the shooting incident, they’d likely agree with the “flawed procedures” admission.
From a row of silhouetted hearses on a rain-drenched tarmac to a convoy of olive-green trucks each bearing a casket, hundreds of images of flag-draped coffins of American service members killed at war were released by the Pentagon this week in response to a lawsuit.
The more than 700 photographs, taken by military photographers from 2001 to 2004, show coffins from Iraq and Afghanistan lining the mechanical silver interiors of Air Force C-17 jets. Many depict solemn honor guard ceremonies for the fallen troops at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and other U.S. military facilities.
[…]
“Individual judgments were made to black out some faces and identifying information to protect privacy information,” said James Turner, a Pentagon spokesman.Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, which assisted in the lawsuit, said it was “an outrage and an insult that they blacked out those faces of the honor guard, when today on . . . [the Pentagon Web site] you can see photos of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. I can only imagine they put those black boxes there to make the photos unusable.”
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The Pentagon blacked out the faces and identifying information in some photos showing honor guards for coffins lining the interiors of C-17 transports. Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive called the edited images “an outrage and an insult.” Photo Credit: Defense Department Photos Via Nsarchive.org |
UPDATE – Mithras, on the above photo: “Nothing more evocative of this war for me than the officially-anonymous living honoring the anonymous dead. “
