A Christmas Message From Theresa May

Justice is it? Odd choice of word that, Home Secretary, particularly for someone who has overseen a £15,000,000 denial of justice for Madeleine McCann.

The Mail

USA and Global Mass Murder

Another fact that Americans can’t be proud* of is knowing that the most warring nation on earth just since World War II alone has murdered up to 30 million people around the globe with an estimated 90% of them being civilians.

Although I use the above sentence as a teaser, it is in fact one of the few points I might take exception to. Not I add, the figure of thirty million, but that Americans actually give a toss.

Understand as you read, Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer, so the article carries a little more weight for my money.

*Rhetoric only.

Says it all really don't it?

It’s Time to Stop “Supporting Our Troops”

By Joachim Hagopian
December 13, 2015

With the 115 year old tradition of the annual Army-Navy football classic on Saturday, the so called “America’s game” and “rivalry for the ages” is now once again upon us. This occasion never fails to pay reverent homage to America’s so called “cream of the crop” elitist military academies and always from the president to celebrities Americans give tribute to our armed forces. At this time we hear that familiar patriotic mantra “support our troops” mindlessly repeated. So it seems appropriate now to take a cold hard look to examine what it actually means to “support our troops.”
As both a West Point graduate and critic of the American Empire, to me the “support our troops” sentiment has long outworn its propagandized welcome. US Empire has been using that contrite expression to brainwash Americans and justify its wars and violence for far too long. It sprang up during this last decade’s protracted war losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never was it ever heard during the Vietnam War when our combat veterans returned home feeling defeated and suffering from untreated PTSD symptoms, shunned by a nation that had bitterly turned against them and their war, particularly by their own peer group. Fast forward to four decades and three war defeats later, and our government is still sending Americans off to fight and die in Afghanistan (9800 currently) and Iraq (3500 with another 100 on the way), and now in Syria (50 just proposed with more on the way while war-hawk Bobbsy twins McCain and Graham are calling for 20,000 more troops in Syria). But this century's wars we keep hearing red, white and blue, flag waving Americans urging us to “support our troops.”

Over the long haul, supporting our troops has resulted in the United States being the most warring, aggressive nation on earth, bar none. As we’re about to enter 2016, our ultraviolent country will be killing other human beings somewhere on this planet for 223 out of the last 240 total years the US has been in existence. That’s 93% of our time as a nation-turned-Empire we’ve been destroying human life. That’s certainly nothing to be proud of. Yet it’s “our troops” who’ve been the murdering culprit. No compassionate, rational person could possibly place blindly obedient support behind such rampantly wanton disregard and contempt for fellow human life.

Another fact that Americans can’t be proud of is knowing that the most warring nation on earth just since World War II alone has murdered up to 30 million people around the globe with an estimated 90% of them being civilians. Having initiated 201 out of the total of 240 armed conflicts from the end of WWII to 2001, it then follows that between those years the US Empire of Chaos and Destruction has murdered 27 million innocent people whose lives have tragically been cut short through no fault of their own for simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time belonging to the wrong ethnic nationality targeted by America’s full spectrum dominance and global superpower hegemony. And that was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And what does it take to be targeted as a US foreign enemy? Any country whose leaders choose to support their own citizens’ well-being, independence and quality of life over US Empire’s fascist transnational corporate interests is attacked economically through sanctions and embargos, politically through propaganda lies and threats, or militarily though unnatural disasters/weather warfare, occupied invasions involving long term bloody conflict or acts of terrorism, coups and assassinations. Just ask Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Panama, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Congo North Korea, Donbas, Palestine or Russia just to name more than a dozen.

People around the world have been victimized for well over a century by American Empire’s willful rape and pillage of their lands in the name of stolen natural resources and inhumane forced slave labor, and those are the nations whose puppet dictators willingly succumbed and acquiesced to US demands and pressures. In fact in the tradition of the British Empire, North America’s entire domestic and foreign history has been made of genocidal killing, enslaving, stealing and subjugating other darker-skinned races into death and submission. Given this context with the bigger picture perspective, “supporting our troops” is really supporting mass murder around the world. So bearing that sobering, grim reality in mind, it’s time for Americans to cease and desist with their jingoistic rah-rah that only adds insult to injury to the rest of the victimized world.

In 2008 the US spent more money every 5 seconds to wage an immoral, unlawful war in Iraq than the average working American earned all year long. 80% of America’s taxes are earmarked towards funding the annual Pentagon budget to wage war around the world. When that kind of war investment misappropriating US citizenry’s hard-earned tax dollars places such lopsided priority over the well-being of its own people, with over a decade of wearing down an overextended military forced into fighting three, four and even five consecutive combat tours on two simultaneous warfronts, it also overburdened and decimated America’s middle class. And now for the first time in nearly a half century, the US middle class is no longer a majority in the United States. A large chunk of it died when sinking into an expanding lower class of impoverished, poverty-stricken Americans barely making ends meet. Half the respondents in a recent survey say they either break even or make less than their cost of living expenses. As an oligarchy the US federal government no longer acts in the best interests of its citizens.

But considering the costs of war to victim nations where since 2003 the US has killed over a million people in Iraq alone, this figure released from a study earlier this year is admittedly a conservative estimate. The study concludes that up to two million in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been killed by America’s wars. These colossal crimes against humanity constitute supporting the US federal government as well as its military troops a moral crime. America’s complete and utter destruction of the world’s second and third largest oil producers in Iraq and Libya, turning them into failed states because their one time US allied leaders moved away from the US petrodollar is unconscionable, yet that’s the tragic outcome of blindly supporting our troops. More than any other single country, the US today is responsible for allowing ISIS to make billions in profit from stolen oil from Iraq and Syria financing the biggest terrorist group on the planet. And US partners-in-crime Turkey and Israel are the two biggest buyers of terrorist oil. So in effect supporting our troops is also supporting both crimes against humanity as well as worldwide terrorism.

Supporting our troops has contributed to the world becoming far more armed and dangerous today than at any prior time in our recorded human history. Our nation is also responsible for spearheading the biggest arms race in history where it’s not just the US Empire spending so many billions on weapons of mass destruction but due to Empire aggression it has forced Russia and China to answer by also significantly increasing their military spending. A dozen years ago the US defense budget nearly equaled the rest of the world combined. But during this century’s two protracted US wars plus smaller secret ones around the world, America’s military expenditures have soared to $682 billion in 2012 from $417.4 in 2003. The exponential rise of American aggression likewise has pressured the unilaterally declared US enemies Russia and China to significantly increase their military spending as well. The US has gone from spending near half (46%) of the world’s military amount in 2003 to just 35% in 2014 due to Russia and China dramatically expanding their military budgets. In fact following America’s lead, both the world’s annual arms sales as well as its military budgets have exponentially skyrocketed amongst dozens of countries all seemingly gearing up for “the big one.” Not surprisingly, at 31% the US is also the biggest arms dealer on the planet followed by Russia’s 27% with China accounting for 5% during the period from 2010-2014 that totaled a 16% increase from arms sold from 2005-2009.

Events and developments have escalated tensions and confrontations between the US and Russia and China in recent weeks. With the US backing NATO member Turkey recklessly shooting down a Russian fighter jet resulting in a Russian rescue helicopter also brought down last month, in addition to the probable ISIS bomb taking down the Russian airliner killing all 224 onboard a month and a half ago, the US Navy destroyer skirting inside the twelve nautical mile range of built up Chinese islands in the South China Sea, the United States and the West appear to be baiting Putin and the East into World War III. And with nuclear powers going directly head-to-head in Syria, Ukraine and Asia, self-annihilation of the human race becomes a very real and grave risk culminating after a quarter century of US Empire belligerently operating as the sole global superpower and "global village" bully.

Out of nearly 200 countries no other nation on earth has more than a few military bases outside its own country except the United States. In contrast to the rest of the world, the US sends 1.5 million military occupiers on active duty to over a thousand military installations on every continent throughout the globe. Just this week the Pentagon announced a worldwide expansion of military bases without specifying a total number under the auspices of secrecy. West Africa, East Africa and Afghanistan are slotted for full scale bases. Meanwhile US Special Forces that covertly operate by stealth surprise often at night in guerilla-type, fast strike operations are busily secretly committing acts of terror in over 135 nations globally, that’s about 75% of the all world’s nations.

Let’s look at the way our federal government supports our troops. After sending over 6800 US soldiers (along with 7000 civilian contractors) to their early graves fighting in America’s two longest running wars in the nation’s history, leaving one million wounded personnel filing VA claims ranging from life threatening physical injuries to emotionally crippling PTSD traumas and scars, the feds have betrayed our patriots serving our country by treasonously targeting all returning combat veterans as the biggest enemy threat on American soil. Indeed veterans, gun owners and dissidents are deemed to pose a greater danger than even the feds' own created terrorist monster ISIS that Obama's open border policy facilitates easy access to establishing terrorist cells inside America.

Those veterans seeking help are customarily snowed under by lethal Big Pharma poison, fast becoming addicted and even more unstable. Many are haplessly waiting and dying on lists for medical services that often don’t come soon enough. Exposing forty veterans who died awaiting services on invisible lists at the Phoenix VA hospital alone triggered a major scandal last year. For several years running on average twenty-two veterans have been killing themselves each and every day in the United States. The overloaded Veterans Administration has been caught grossly ill-prepared to adequately deal with the sheer enormity of the problem with so many severely damaged ex-soldiers in dire need of long term assistance and care. One study predicts that up to nearly a half million veterans will end up with criminal cases in the court system.

With nearly half (44%) of Congress millionaires and so few (19%) ever serving in uniform now, the DC warmongers are ever-at-the-ready to send young men and women from America’s lower class into harm’s way fighting Obama’s dirty little secret wars in multiple combat zones around the world that the public never even hears about. Yet you’ll see next to none of their own sons or daughters fighting in some far off war. The way our own government has used, abused and not supported our troops is despicable.

And then a sizeable percentage of those Americans who are so vocal in their claims of “supporting our troops,” are too frequently disingenuous. Often hypocrites merely mouth the same banal platitudes year after year from their ivory-towered, pretend world, living so far removed and disaffected from actual war conditions or even knowing anyone who wears a military uniform. Never fathoming the tragic insanity or bloody lifelong consequences that US wars ravage on millions worldwide, permanently damaging all involved, Americans who haven’t a clue will glibly pay lip service, “We owe so much to our soldiers who fight to keep us safe and free.” What bubble, planet or century are they living on or in?

Since the inside coup of 9/11 was perpetrated, US citizens have become the murderous neocons’ war on terror victims as well, terrorized by their own international crime cabal government and militarized police state that’s effectively stolen their freedom and civil liberties while the guilty treasonously continue violating sworn oaths to uphold and protect both the Constitution and American people. Yet too many brainwashed, dumbed down and clueless in America don’t seem to get it. Maybe it’s because they’re bombarded 24/7 by MSM lies and disinformation that never expose the ugliness of war as it really is. The ruling elite controls all aspects of mass media, engaging in widespread censorship of films, television and video games where violence and war are only glorified. Military, CIA and FBI liaisons control every aspect of what comes out of Hollywood these days.

But over four decades of a volunteer army comprised of less than half of one percent of the total US population also contributes greatly to the widening disconnect between the 99+% civilian population and the less than 1% Americans in uniform. The atrocities and horror that the imperialistic Empire’s killing machine has inflicted on Third World nations half a world away may as well be billions of miles away on another planet or galaxy. Out of sight, out of mind goes many civilians’ insulated, tunnel version reality.

Those currently in uniform need to be reminded that they have a sworn duty to protect America from domestic and foreign enemies. As citizens who no longer live in a democratic republic but now a totalitarian police state, they need to recognize that their federal government has a diabolical agenda to enslave and eliminate fellow Americans. Instead of criminalizing dissent, the real domestic enemy has become the federal government and all Americans need to accept this tragic development. Therefore, both those already in uniform as well as those ready to sign up and allow themselves to become their crime cabal’s latest cannon fodder in the elite’s wars need to stand up and be counted as patriots loyal to their nation and fellow citizens rather than adhere to blind obedience to their psychopathic masters. It’s no longer okay to support the troops when they’re misdirected into committing treason against their own citizenry. Military personnel need to take responsibility for their actions and do what’s right by both their Constitution as well as humanity.

2015 has been a tumultuous year when by globalist design terrorism has expanded to all corners of the earth, spreading death, war and destruction in its wake. Meanwhile, feeling its economic prowess slipping away in the face of the emerging power of Eastern rivals China and Russia, the United States government has already conceded losing its war to retain the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The DC crime syndicate knows its days in power are numbered. Since the psychopaths ruling the planet are unwilling to relinquish their ruthless power of absolute control, they realize that using their Manchurian puppet president and his overstretched US Empire to recklessly do their dirty planetary bidding to successfully destroy the world’s most powerful nation sending Empire into rapid freefall decline on the way to one world government can only be achieved by igniting World War III against the Eastern powers just as their Ponzi-rigged, house of cards, debt-based global economy implodes on itself. So this late in the power elite’s endgame when we’re still hearing “support the troops,” in actuality it’s time to fight for our lives in support of humanity’s struggle for survival and good ultimately triumphing over evil.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/.

God Gaol and Kate McCann

Prompted by this tweet, a re-up for the relevant parts of this 2010 post.

Philip Prince OBE ‏@PhilipIndigo: Can't think what's going to be worst for McCann's, prison or public humiliation?

My thoughts below, after the usual sycophantic drivel of, Tracey Kandohla.

Kate McCann: About as Far Away From God as You Can Get

Kate McCann: I pray for the people who have kidnapped Madeleine

by Tracey Kandohla

Kate McCann has admitted that she will try to find it in her heart to forgive whoever kidnapped her daughter Madeleine.

In a moving interview Kate, 42, a devout Catholic, says: 'It is hard to say but I would like to hope I could forgive. It would be a bit difficult. I just want to know why they have taken her.

'I always pray for the family. Most of the prayers are centred on Madeleine. But I pray for the people who have taken her and the people who know what has happened to her.'

Kate and her husband Gerry, 41, were among 450 people taking part in a fun run in London's Hyde Park yesterday to raise funds for the charity Missing People.

During the 10km run the couple wore tops bearing a picture of their daughter smiling and the words 'Don't give up on me'.

In the interview broadcast on Radio 2's Good Morning Sunday this weekend, Kate, from Rothley, Leicestershire, tells how she takes sanctuary alone in the village's Sacred Heart church.

She says: 'I've got the key to the church. It's kindly been given to me. It's a bit of a sanctuary - a refuge - and I can go and speak out, when no one else is there, and get it all off my chest really.'

She believes God is looking after and protecting six-year-old Maddie, who vanished from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007 just days before her fourth birthday.

She adds: 'There are times I have got angry with God but my faith has sustained me and it has got stronger.'

She said having a child snatched was 'the worst thing that could ever happen to a parent. The pain is just incredible and I cannot help but worry about her.

'The wounds are less raw now and the pain doesn't go away but I am a lot stronger than I was a year ago.'

She says enduring her third Mother's Day without her eldest child is painful and 'a constant reminder that one of my babies isn't with me'.

But she vows to 'get through it like any other day'. She adds: 'I am still Madeleine's mum and always will be.

'I just want to bring her back into the warmth and love of our family.'

Kate was expected to attend a church service in the village to mark Mothering Sunday. She is due to be given a bunch of daffodils there by her five-year-old twins Sean and Amelie.

She adds: 'The twins are really positive and keep us going. I have a lot of hope that Madeleine is still alive but the difficult task is trying to find her.'

She describes Maddie as 'an amazing little character' who has 'loads of energy, is really funny and quite knowing. I want everyone to meet her'.

Asked if she had a message for mothers who are facing similar heartache, she says: 'Dig deep and just keep hoping. Surround yourself with positive people and don't give up.'

Daily Mail

You just couldn't make it up could you, Kate McCann is possessed of piety, I wonder if she exchanged it for her daughter's body?

I've no intention of crawling in the sewer to parse this hackneyed drivel, but just let me pick up on this:

"I've got the key to the church. It's kindly been given to me. It's a bit of a sanctuary - a refuge -"

I should consider it training if I were you, get yourself acclimatised to being alone behind a locked door. For when this house of cards comes tumbling down, that's just the kind of place you're going to find yourself, only this time it will be someone else that will be in charge of the key.

They are going to put you in a little hole all by yourself, what else will they be able to do with the world's most hated and reviled woman? For that is just what you are going to be, that tag is yours, it has your name on it.

They are going to lock you in hole madam, so deep, they will have to pump air to you. Lock you in a hole out of fear that someone will get to you.  But they will get you, there's always a way, be assured of that.

Think about that one madam, think about that one when next you are telling us all about your prayers and your anger that you direct towards your God.

Try giving it a little more thought before you utter obscenities like this:

She describes Maddie as 'an amazing little character' who has 'loads of energy, is really funny and quite knowing. I want everyone to meet her'.

I want everyone to meet her.

Madeleine McCann is dead. She died in the "care" of her parents.

There was no abductor, there was only her parents.

Chris Hedges Looks at Nick Turse's Book "Kill Anything That Moves" American War Crimes in Vietnam

It was after watching a Democracy Now piece, back in January of this year, "Kill Anything That Moves": New Book Exposes Hidden Crimes of the War Kerry, Hagel Fought in Vietnam that I tried to write a follow up article. But for reasons I mention here,* it never got off the ground. However, not all is lost, for Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has taken up the challenge and produced a much better and far more comprehensive report than I could ever hope to achieve.

Firstly, and before moving on to horrors and inhumanity that are describe in the article, let me offer up in Hedges' quite polite words, his observations of the American psyche. I say polite, because in normal circumstances, if it is I that writes about such things, I can't get much further than employing such words as Cant and Hypocrisy, not to mention the  total indifference Americans have to the suffering of others. And not least, wrapping the whole thing in sugar-coated religious piety that I, and many Europeans alike, find truly nauseating; it is after all, the American way.

Turse’s book (Kill Anything That Moves) obliterates the image we have of ourselves as a good and virtuous nation. It mocks the popular belief that we have a right to impose our “virtues” on others by force. It exposes the soul of our military, which has achieved, through relentless propaganda and effective censorship, a level of public adulation that is terrifying. Turse reminds us who we are. And in an age of expanding wars in the Middle East, routine torture, murderous air and drone strikes and targeted assassinations, his book is not so much about the past as about the present. We have worked, consciously and unconsciously, to erase the terrible truth about Vietnam and ultimately about ourselves. This is a tragedy. For if we were able to remember who we were, if we knew what we were capable of doing to others, then we might be less prone to replicating the industrial slaughter of Vietnam in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Should you wish, you can meet the author Nick Turse, "Kill Anything That Moves" in this Democracy Now clip, about fifteen minutes.

Don't Look Away: We Must Confront the Horrific Industrial Violence the American Military Is Capable of

Nick Turse's Vietnam War book, 'Kill Anything That Moves,' shows how the trauma that plagues most veterans is tied to the horrors they inflicted.
by Chris Hedges
March 14, 2013

Nick Turse’s “ Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare. It captures, as few books on war do, the utter depravity of industrial violence—what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar.” It exposes the sickness of the hyper-masculine military culture, the intoxicating rush and addiction of violence, and the massive government spin machine that lies daily to a gullible public and uses tactics of intimidation, threats and smear campaigns to silence dissenters. Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did. This trauma, shame, guilt and self-revulsion push many combat veterans—whether from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan—to escape into narcotic and alcoholic fogs or commit suicide. By the end of Turse’s book, you understand why.

This is not the book Turse set out to write. He was, when his research began in June 2001, a graduate student looking at post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans. An archivist at the U.S. National Archives asked Turse whether he thought witnessing war crimes could cause PTSD. He steered Turse to yellowing reports amassed by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The group, set up in the wake of the My Lai massacre, was designed to investigate the hundreds of reports of torture, rape, kidnapping, forced displacement, beatings, arson, mutilation, executions and massacres carried out by U.S. troops. But the object of the group was not to discipline or to halt the abuses. It was, as Turse writes, “to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” War crimes, for army investigators, were “an image management” problem. Those charged with war crimes were rarely punished. The numerous reports of atrocities collected by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group were kept secret, and the eyewitnesses who reported war crimes were usually ignored, discredited or cowed into silence.

Turse used the secret Pentagon reports and documents to track down more than 100 veterans—including those who had reported witnessing atrocities to their superiors and others charged with carrying out atrocities—and traveled to Vietnam to interview survivors. A decade later he produced a masterpiece. Case after case in his book makes it painfully clear that soldiers and Marines deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded or killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children, with impunity. Troops engaged in routine acts of sadistic violence usually associated with demented Nazi concentration camp guards. And what Turse describes is a woefully incomplete portrait, since he found that “an astonishing number of marine court-martial records of the era have apparently been destroyed or gone missing,” and “most air force and navy criminal investigation files that may have existed seem to have met the same fate.”

The few incidents of wanton killing in Vietnam—and this is also true for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—that did become public, such as My Lai, were dismissed as an aberration, the result of a few soldiers or Marines gone bad. But, as Turse makes clear, such massacres were and are, in our current imperial adventures, commonplace. The slaughters “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military,” he writes. They were carried out because the dominant tactic of the war, as conceived by our politicians and generals, was centered on the concept of “overkill.” And when troops on the ground could not kill fast enough, the gunships, helicopters, fighter jets and bombers came to their assistance. The U.S. Air Force contributed to the demented quest for “overkill”—eradicating so many of the enemy that recuperation was theoretically impossible—by dropping the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. And planes didn’t just drop bombs. They unloaded more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, 3 million white phosphorus rockets—white phosphorous will burn its way entirely through a body—and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm. “Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Turse writes, “died within fifteen to twenty minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for U.S. troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper,” Turse writes.

Page 2

Murder is an integral part of war. And the most disturbing form of murder, because it is so intimate, is carried out by infantry troops. The god-like power that comes with the ability to destroy anything, including other human beings, along with the intoxicating firepower of industrial weapons, rapidly turns those who wield these weapons into beasts. Human beings are reduced to objects, toys to satiate a perverse desire to dominate, humiliate, control and kill. Corpses are trophies. Many of the Vietnamese who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse, gang rape, torture and savage beatings. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’ ” Or they “were chained with their hands over their heads, arms fully extended, so their feet could barely touch the ground—a version of an age-old torture called the strappado. Untold numbers were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” Turse found that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the Central Intelligence Agency “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”

“All that suffering,” Turse, writes, “was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.”

Turse, in one of many accounts, describes a string of atrocities committed in the Duc Pho/Mo Duc border region in spring 1967 by Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry under the command of Capt. James Lanning. A wounded detainee, Turse writes, was dumped into a boat and pushed into a rice paddy where he was riddled with bullets and finished off with a grenade. A wounded woman was covered with a straw mat and set on fire. Paul Halverson, a soldier and military combat correspondent who accompanied the unit, when asked about the total number of civilians killed by Lanning’s force, stated in the book: “The entire time I was over there—just by Charlie Company—I’d say it would be in the hundreds.”

Maj. Gordon Livingston, a regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in 1971 testified before Congress that he witnessed “a helicopter pilot who swooped down on two Vietnamese women riding bicycles and killed them with the helicopter skids.” The pilot, after being grounded briefly and investigated, was soon exonerated and allowed back in the air.

Soldiers and Marines, as is common in all wars, collected body parts of dead Vietnamese—heads, noses, scalps, breasts, teeth, ears, fingers, genitals—and displayed them or wore them in necklaces. “There was people in all the platoons with ears on cords,” Jimmie Busby, a member of the 75th Rangers during 1970-1971, told an Army criminal investigator. Corpses were dressed up and twisted into comic poses for photographs or gruesomely mutilated. Severed heads of Vietnamese were mounted on pikes or poles in Army camps. The dead were lashed onto Army vehicles—which at times ran over Vietnamese civilians for sport—and driven through villages.

Go to page 3

* Were you to follow the link, a series of John Pilger "Outsider" interviews will be revealed. Interviewees include: Jessica Mitford, Wilfred Burchett, Martha Gellhorn and Costa-Gavras. Recommended.

Welcome To The Shammies - Quintessential John Pilger

Drive straight on.

Welcome To The Shammies, The Media Awards That Recognize Truly Unsung Talent

By John Pilger
January 16, 2013

There are awards for everyone. There are the Logies, the Commies, the Tonys, the Theas, the Millies (“They cried with pride”) and now the Shammies.

The Shammies celebrate the finest sham media. “Competition for the 2013 Gold Shammy,” said the panel of judges, “has been cutthroat.” The Shammies are not for the tabloid lower orders. Rupert Murdoch has been honoured enough. Shammies distinguish respectable journalism that guards the limits of what the best and brightest like to call the “national conversation”.

The Shammy judges were especially impressed by a spirited campaign to rehabilitate Tony Blair. The winner will receive the coveted Jeremy Paxman Hoodwink Prize, in honour of the famous BBC broadcaster who says he was “hoodwinked” over Iraq – regardless of the multiple opportunities he had to challenge Blair and expose the truth and carnage of the illegal invasion.

Short-listed for Hoodwink is Michael White, the Guardian’s political editor, whose lament for Blair’s “wasted talent” is distinguished by his defence of Blair as the victim of a “very unholy alliance between a familiar chorus of America-bashers and Blair bait[ers]”. (I am included).

On 19 December, another contender, White’s colleague, Jane Martinson, was granted a “rare” interview with Cherie Blair in her “stately private office” with its “gorgeous views over Hyde Park” and “imposing mahogany furniture”. In such splendour does Mrs. Blair (she prefers her married name for its “profile”) run her “foundation for women” in Africa, India and the Middle East. Her political collusion in her husband’s career and support for adventures that destroyed the lives of countless women was not mentioned. A PR triumph and odds-on for a Shammy.

Also nominated: the brains behind the Guardian’s front page of 8 November: “The best is yet to come”, dominated by a half-page picture of the happy-huggy-droney Obama family. And who could fail to appreciate the assurance from the BBC’s Mark Mardell that, in personally selecting people to murder with his drones, “the care taken by the president is significant”?

Matt Frei, formerly of the BBC now of Channel 4 News, drew commendation for his reporting of Obama as a “warrior president” and Hugo Chavez as a “chubby-faced strongman”. A study by the University of the West of England found that, of the 304 BBC reports on Venezuela published in a decade, only three mentioned the Chavez government’s extraordinary record in promoting human rights and reducing poverty.

In the Gold Shammy category, the judges were struck by the outstanding work of the Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead. “Everywhere we went, before my eyes people fell in love with him … no one seemed to be immune.” This was her memorable encounter with Peter Mandelson in 2009. She described his “effortless allure … the intensity of his theatre is electrifying to behold … His skin is dewey, as if fresh from a spa facial, and his grooming so flawless he looks almost hyper-real, the cuff links and tie delicately co-ordinated, with their detail inversely echoed in his socks … His whole body seems weirdly untroubled by the passage of time …”

Aitkenhead had previously “profiled” Alistair Darling, the Chancellor who presided over the worst financial collapse in memory. Greeted as “old friends” by Darling and his “gregarious” wife Maggie “who cooks and makes tea and supper while Darling lights the fire”, Aitkenhead effused over “a highly effective minister …he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare.”

The judges were asked to compare and contrast such moments of journalistic ecstasy with the same writer’s profile of Julian Assange on 7 December. Assange answered her questions methodically, providing her with a lot of information about the state’s abuse of technology and mass surveillance. “There is no debate that Assange knows more about this subject than almost anyone alive,” she wrote. No matter. Rather than someone who had exposed more state criminality than any journalist, he was described as “someone convalescing after a breakdown”: a mentally ill figure she likened to “Miss Havisham”. Unlike the alluring, electrifying, twice disgraced Mandelson, and the high-minded, disastrous Chancellor, Assange had a “messianic grandiosity”. No evidence was offered. The Gold Shammy was within her grasp.

Then, on Christmas Eve, the BBC News magazine published an article marking the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi. The bombing, wrote Rebecca Kesby,“was President Richard Nixon’s attempt to hasten the end of the Vietnam war, as the growing strength of the Viet Cong caused heavy casualties among US ground troops”.

In fact, Nixon promised “an honourable end to the war” four years earlier. His 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi in the north was as much concerned with peace as Hitler’s bombing of Poland: a cynical, vengeful act of barbarism that changed nothing in the stalled Paris talks. Kesby cites Henry Kissinger’s absurd claim that the North Vietnamese “were on their knees”. Far from hastening “the end of the Vietnam war”, America’s savagery ensured the war went on for another two a half years, during which more Vietnamese were killed than during the previous decade.

Kesby claimed that previous US targets had been “fuel depots and munitions stores”. On my wall is a photograph I took of a hamlet in the north obliterated by F-105 and Phantom fighters flying at 200 feet in order to pick off “soft targets” – human beings. In the town of Hongai, I stood in the debris of churches, hospitals, schools. A new type of “dart bomb” was used; the darts were made from a plastic that did not show in X-rays, and the victims, mostly children, suffered until they died. Filmed by Malcolm Aird and James Cameron, a news report on this type of terror bombing was suppressed by the BBC.

Today our memory of all of this is sanitised. America and its allies, using even more diabolical weapons, continue to “hasten to the end of war”. Such has been the BBC’s unerring theme since Vietnam. The Gold Shammy is richly deserved. www.johnpilger.com

Steubenville Ohio - The Steubenville Files

Link below updated.

I don't think I have read anything that quite justifies my loathing for America as does this catalogue, nay, this cesspit of corruption in that worst of all places, small town America.

The Steubenville Files
localleaks.blogs.ru/
January 1, 2013

On August 27, 2012 two members of the Big Red High School football team in Steubenville, Ohio – USA were arrested and charged with the rape and kidnapping of an out of town 16 year old girl that took place on August 11th. At the time of this gang rape, the girl was intoxicated and unconscious. The victim had been intentionally drugged with a “date rape” intoxicant. She was photographed and video was taken of her in this condition, and there is evidence that she was hauled in a comatose state to multiple parties – and almost certainly raped by more members of the local high school football team than just the two players who currently stand charged. There is even evidence that she was urinated upon during this hideous assault.


Despite all this, it looked as though a town rife with corruption, cronyism, illegal gambling and fixated upon their star high school football team (a major economic revenue engine) were prepared to orchestrate a major cover-up in order to sweep the entire affair under the rug. As this disclosure will document, this cover-up was perpetrated by people in the high school administration, local government and law enforcement.

– Enter Anonymous –

On December 23, 2012 a cell within Anonymous called “Knight Sec” took up the cause of giving a voice to the victim of this horrible crime, and began unraveling this conspiracy of silence designed to protect a group of these high school football players who had become well known to their fellow students as “The Rape Crew”. Fueled by intelligence they had received from many students at Big Red High School, they launched Operation RollRedRoll by releasing this video. Take careful note of the various screen capture images of pictures taken by these monsters of this poor defenseless girl, and note their many comments made in tweets and Facebook posts regarding their crime (now since deleted). More

"The Steubenville Files" UPDATE: We've just updated the info on what happened at Coach Belerdine's house. http://localleaks.blogs.ru/

Illegal Everything in the US, by John Stossel: A Review

On the same day that I published the post below this one, Mayor Bloomberg Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, a post where I had this to say: I don't think I know of any other country in the world that legislates about every aspect that governs citizens lives. I later stumbled upon the featured video, which I can only describe as the perfect foil for the post.

But after having watched the thing, and in spite of it being a Fox News presentation, and in spite even more, it being presented in a typical American, whiny voiced, hi-lo manner more suited to addressing children or fucking idiots, it still has a certain, must watch, appeal about it.

I suppose the three most recognisable areas of this forty five minute film, are three traits or characteristics that go hand-in-glove with each other, an interdependent little eco-system, so typically American, they being of course, hypocrisy, the abuse of power and moral crusading.

The hypocrisy becomes immediately apparent as the program gets under way. The time money and resources expended on protecting people from kids selling lemonade, folk selling unpasteurised milk, or lobster tails in plastic bags as opposed to 40Lb boxes, (guns drawn in both the later cases and eight years in the slammer for the lobsterman) would be all very well if only half of those resources went into protecting people from fracking or mountain-top removal. (See below) Both activities constituting a crime against nature, let alone the poor schmucks whose lives are effectively destroyed by such goings on. But as you are probably aware, the only protection going on around these activities, is that of protecting Big Energy by modern day Pinkertons, the cops.

The second item on the agenda, that of police, not just abusing their power, but of being totally out of control, is dealt with quite adequately in the program. Let's face it, we have become almost blasé about cops abusing their power. Blasé I suppose, as long as your not on the receiving end of such activities. As one housewife described a cop; 'high on his own power' or as we would describe it in this country, 'pissed with power.' It rolling off the tongue somewhat easier. As long as you understand that is, that 'pissed' is more commonly used to describe someone who is drunk, rather than pissed, as in pissed off.

Ever America, ever the moral crusader, who, just like the cops protecting the world from kids selling lemonade, want to protect everybody from drugs, soft or hard, and to protect (legal) sex workers from themselves by locking them all up. In fact as you watch two such crusaders, prosecutors in fact, you can almost feel them bristling with (their own) morality.

Incidentally, and I know it will be of interest to some, but Portugal got a few minutes mention over their recent and successful decision to legalise all drugs, soft or hard.

Illegal Everything in the US, by John Stossel

This Fox News documentary shows how crazy the law system in the US became and how police is abusing its’ power. Kids are not allowed to sell lemonade, Taxi drivers get kicked out of the market by regulations implemented through the help of lobbyists, small stores selling natural raw milk get invaded by police squads, hunters can not shoot a dear and sell the meat to their neighbours, housewives get arrested for filming policemen from their own backyard and many more silly laws exist and make it difficult for people in the USA to be really living legal or living their live as freely at is was written down in the constitution many years ago. Now prisons in the US are full of people who broke silly laws, with politicians like Obama in power, that smoked marijuana themselves and didn’t got punished for it at all.

In actual fact, these two short clips are of far more import than the above.

East Timor: A Lesson In Why The Poorest Threaten The Powerful + Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy

East Timor: A Lesson In Why The Poorest Threaten The Powerful
By John Pilger
April 06, 2012

Milan Kundera's truism, "the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting", described East Timor. The day before I set out to film clandestinely there in 1993, I went to Stanfords map shop in London's Covent Garden. "Timor?" said a hesitant sales assistant. We stood staring at shelves marked South East Asia. "Forgive me, where exactly is it?"

After a search he came up with an old aeronautical map with blank areas stamped, "Relief Data Incomplete." He had never been asked for East Timor, which is just north of Australia. Such was the silence that enveloped the Portuguese colony following its invasion and occupation by Indonesia in 1975. Yet, not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as the Indonesian dictator Suharto killed or starved in East Timor.

In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is an historically unique moment," babbles one of them, "that is truly uniquely historical." This is Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a piratical treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor. Beneath them are valleys etched with black crosses where British and American-supplied fighter aircraft have blown people to bits. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that "at least 200,000", a third of the population, had perished under Suharto. Thanks largely to Evans, Australia was the only western country formally to recognise Suharto's genocidal conquest. The murderous Indonesian special forces known as Kopassus were trained in Australia. The prize, said Evans, was "zillions" of dollars.

Unlike Muammar al-Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, Suharto died peacefully in 2008 surrounded by the best medical help his billions could buy. He was never at risk of prosecution by the "international community". Margaret Thatcher told him, "You are one of our very best and most valuable friends." The Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating regarded him as a father figure. A group of Australian newspaper editors, led by Rupert Murdoch's veteran retainer, Paul Kelly, flew to Jakarta to pay their tribute to the dictator; there is a picture of one of them bowing.

In 1991, Evans described the massacre of more than 200 people by Indonesian troops in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor's capital, as an "aberration". When protesters planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, Evans ordered them torn up.

On 17 March, Evans was in Melbourne to address a seminar on the Middle East and the Arab Spring. Now immersed in the busy world of "think tanks", he expounds on great power strategies, notably the fashionable "Responsibility to Protect", which Nato uses to attack or threaten uppity or out-of-favour dictators on the false pretext of liberating their people. Libya is a recent example. Also attending the seminar was Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at San Francisco University, who reminded the audience of Evans's long and critical support for Suharto.

As the session ended, Evans, a man of limited fuse, stormed over to Zumes and yelled, "Who the fuck are you? Where the fuck are you from?" Zumes was told, Evans later confirmed, that such critical remarks deserved "a smack on the nose". The episode was timely. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of an independence Evans once denied, East Timor is in the throes of electing a new president; the second round of voting is on 21 April, followed by parliamentary elections.

For many Timorese, their children malnourished and stunted, the democracy is notional. Years of bloody occupation, backed by Australia, Britain and the US, were followed by a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government to manoeuvre the tiny new nation out of its proper share of the seabed's oil and gas revenue. Having refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea, Australia unilaterally changed the maritime boundary.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, largely on Australia's terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra and opposed foreign interference and indebtedness to the World Bank, was effectively deposed in what he called an "attempted coup" by "outsiders". Australia has "peace-keeping" troops based in East Timor and had trained his opponents. According to a leaked Australian Defence Department document, Australia's "first objective" in East Timor is for its military to "seek access" so that it can exercise "influence over East Timor's decision-making". Of the two current presidential candidates is Taur Matan Rauk, a general and Canberra's man who helped see off the troublesome Alkitiri.

One independent little country astride lucrative natural resources and strategic sea lanes is of serious concern to the United States and its "deputy sheriff" in Canberra. (President George W. Bush actually promoted Australia to full sheriff). That largely explains why the Suharto regime required such devotion from its western sponsors. Washington's enduring obsession in Asia is China, which today offers developing countries investment, skills and infrastructure in return for resources.

Visiting Australia last November, President Barack Obama issued another of his veiled threats to China and announced the establishment of a US Marines' base in Darwin, just across the water from East Timor. He understands that small, impoverished countries can often present the greatest threat to predatory power, because if they cannot be intimidated and controlled, who can? www.johnpilger.com

~ ~ ~

A decent quality copy below, of Pilger's Death of a Nation.

Update: Well, I suppose the first thing I have to say having just watched Death of a Nation is; John Pilger; has he ever made a bad documentary?

The second thing to utter is, mans' inhumanity to man, is I think, without bounds. But it is not my intention to catalogue the horrors depicted in Pilger's report, suffice is to say, the horrors that befell the people of East Timor, was done with the connivance and support of the three powers of the true axis of evil, America, Britain and Australia.

Special mention I suppose, goes to Henry Kissinger and Alan Clark, but in truth, there were few, if any who were involved, actively or passively, in the invasion (genocide) of East Timor, whose hands aren't covered in blood. And it is no small list believe me.

I have updated the post below, with the documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger, credible viewing if you haven't before watched it. Because like every other genocidal jolly at that period, Kissinger's involvement was at the fore.

But prior to Kissinger, I have upped a <s>three minute compilation</s> (now one minute) clip of Alan Clark's contribution to Pilger's film. Obviously Clark's hubris, and one has to say, Clark's honesty, hadn't gone unnoticed <s>by whoever cobbled the three minutes together. The clip is out of sync, it couldn't be otherwise by its nature; but as I say it's just three minutes.</s>

For whatever reason, the original three minute clip is now "private." And I'm biting my tongue.

Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy


Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy from John Pilger on Vimeo.

Trials of Henry Kissinger

Toward The Sound of Bullshit US Marines Latest Propaganda Clip

I can see it now, this will be the number one clip playing at every NASCAR race this year.

Where do we sign up solja boy? Fuck me! you couldn't make this shit up.

And even though I'm in danger of wearing it out, what better vehicle could there be for upping my 'America in one picture' graphic.

Don't be fooled by Afghanistan massacre: US Marines are saints says new army video

After the massacre of 16 civilians in Afghanistan, the US Army has released a new video to restore the true image of US marines as dedicated servants of humanity opposing tyranny and injustice.
By Robin Beste
Stop the War Coalition
17 March 2012

Within days of a US marine massacring 16 civilians in Afghanistan, the United States Marine Corps released this sensitive 60-second video, titled Toward the Sound of Chaos, to help remove any misunderstanding about the mission of US marines in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

In the words of the film's commentary:

"Where chaos looms, the Few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair—with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can't help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time."

To which Marine Staff Sgt. Kody Lindsey adds:

"When you show this video in towns where marines aren't stationed, it puts a positive image of the Marine Corps. Not only do we protect and defend the nation, we also protect and defend those who can't defend themselves."

Of course, the dead Afghans who were filmed in January 2012 urinating on the bodies of Afghans they had just killed, aren't around to appreciate the humanitarian principles of the US Marines.

But the video will help the Afghan people avoid getting the wrong impression from the pictures in February 2012 of US marines posing in front of a flag displaying the logo of the notorious Nazi SS.

And seeing the video will correct any negative views there are of the night raids, often carried out by marines, that terrorise on average 40 families each night -- countering, it is hoped, a NATO report which concluded, “The escalation in raids has taken the battlefield more directly into Afghan homes, sparking tremendous backlash among the Afghan population.”

The video won't only be welcome in Afghanistan, but also by the people of Iraq, many of whom may have a completely false image of the US Marines and their mission "to help those who can't help themselves".

Like the people of Fallujah, where in April 2004 US marines -- no doubt implementing their commitment to "ending conflict, instilling order" -- participated in the slaughter of 2000 Iraqis, including hundreds of women and children, the injuring of thousands more and the driving of hundreds of thousands from their homes.

Or like the survivors of the 24 civilians slaughtered in Haditha in November 2005 -- once again many of them women and children. The video will help clear up the reasons why only one of the marines responsible for this atrocity was ever brought to trial and he was only found guilty of "negligent dereliction of duty", receiving a rank reduction and pay cut but avoiding jail time.

Toward the Sound of Chaos is a welcome antidote to the rash of articles and comments suggesting that US soldiers are systematically savage who bring nothing but mass murder and destruction everywhere they are deployed across the globe.

It will restore the true image of US marines as dedicated servants of humanity "moving toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair—with the courage and resolve to silence them".

However, if you're an Iraqi, Afghan, Yemeni, Somali, or Pakistani civilian who is not convinced by this message, your answer to the question which ends the film, "Which way would you run?", will be -- the other way, and quickly. www.stopwar.org.uk/

Good eh? I prefer Bill Hicks' version myself.

The Afghan Village Massacre

No story, just a graphic.

Santorum Hypocrisy Writ Large: Church Paedophilia a 'Basic Homosexual Relationship'

And it was that, disingenuous, dripping with hypocrisy, statement that caught my eye. And before you ask, the answer is no, I'm not getting a fixation with Icky Ricky Santorum. It was due to me following a visitor path back to its source that I ended up at Ricky's 2003 man on dog interview.

SANTORUM: In this case, what we're talking about, basically, is priests who were having sexual relations with post-pubescent men. We're not talking about priests with 3-year-olds, or 5-year-olds. We're talking about a basic homosexual relationship.

So there you have it, straight from the (Catholic) horse's mouth. There is no Paedophilia in the Catholic church, only basic homosexual relationships.

A statement I find quite hard to reconcile, with an institution that is synonymous with child abuse and boy buggery.

But there's nothing unequivocal about Ricky's views on the right to privacy. The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. Whoa boy! the rights to limit individuals' wants and passions Now we are really getting into murky waters. And if any few words epitomise our Ricky, it has to be those.

I think Ricky has some very serious issues, don't you?

SANTORUM: And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society.

For 'AP' in the interview, read, Lara Jakes Jordan. Of her, more below.

Excerpt from Santorum interview
4/23/2003

An unedited section of the Associated Press interview, taped April 7, with Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. Words that couldn't be heard clearly on the tape are marked (unintelligible).

AP: If you're saying that liberalism is taking power away from the families, how is conservatism giving more power to the families?

SANTORUM: Putting more money in their pocketbook is one. The more money you take away from families is the less power that family has. And that's a basic power. The average American family in the 1950s paid (unintelligible)% in federal taxes. An average American family now pays about 25%.

The argument is, yes, we need to help other people. But one of the things we tried to do with welfare, and we're trying to do with other programs is, we're setting levels of expectation and responsibility, which the left never wanted to do. They don't want to judge. They say, Oh, you can't judge people. They should be able to do what they want to do. Well, not if you're taking my money and giving it to them. But it's this whole idea of moral equivalency. (unintelligible) My feeling is, well, if it's my money, I have a right to judge.

AP: Speaking of liberalism, there was a story in The Washington Post about six months ago, they'd pulled something off the Web, some article that you wrote blaming, according to The Washington Post, blaming in part the Catholic Church scandal on liberalism. Can you explain that?

SANTORUM: You have the problem within the church. Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it's in the privacy of your own home, this "right to privacy," then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it's private, as long as it's consensual, then don't be surprised what you get. You're going to get a lot of things that you're sending signals that as long as you do it privately and consensually, we don't really care what you do. And that leads to a culture that is not one that is nurturing and necessarily healthy. I would make the argument in areas where you have that as an accepted lifestyle, don't be surprised that you get more of it.

AP: The right to privacy lifestyle?

SANTORUM: The right to privacy lifestyle.

AP: What's the alternative?


SANTORUM: In this case, what we're talking about, basically, is priests who were having sexual relations with post-pubescent men. We're not talking about priests with 3-year-olds, or 5-year-olds. We're talking about a basic homosexual relationship. Which, again, according to the world view sense is a a perfectly fine relationship as long as it's consensual between people. If you view the world that way, and you say that's fine, you would assume that you would see more of it.

AP: Well, what would you do?

SANTORUM: What would I do with what?

AP: I mean, how would you remedy? What's the alternative?

SANTORUM: First off, I don't believe —

AP: I mean, should we outlaw homosexuality?

SANTORUM: I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it's not the person, it's the person's actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.

AP: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?

SANTORUM: We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality —

AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.

SANTORUM: And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society.

AP: Sorry, I just never expected to talk about that when I came over here to interview you. Would a President Santorum eliminate a right to privacy — you don't agree with it?

SANTORUM: I've been very clear about that. The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don't agree with that. So I would make the argument that with President, or Senator or Congressman or whoever Santorum, I would put it back to where it is, the democratic process. If New York doesn't want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn't agree with it, but that's their right. But I don't agree with the Supreme Court coming in. usatoday

Related: Poor little Ricky, nasty old Lara Jakes Jordan. Santorum is Right, where else but World Net Daily. Complete with Christian vitriol.

And what could be more fitting for a Santorum post than, Every Sperm is Sacred. Almost custom made as it were, for little Ricky.

Save Our Sperm Org

I found this quite clever chart on my Ricky Santorum travels this morning.

- - - - -

Rick Santorum's American Jihad
Linda Gibson
02/21/2012

Don't let the dorky sweater vest fool you. Beneath that benign-looking garment beats the heart of an extremist, a radical more akin to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban and the ultra-orthodox Jews of Israel than to mainstream Americans. If Rick Santorum and his fundamentalist fans ran this country, we'd have a Bible-based theocracy thrust upon us, a dictatorship of the most divisive, judgmental and intolerant among us.

If you believe that contraception is immoral and any sex except conjugal attempts to procreate is sinful, he's your guy.

If you think "abortionists" (that inflammatory, demonizing term for doctors who perform a legal operation) ought to be punished, he's your guy.

If you think our Constitutional rights ought to be limited to conform with Biblical precepts, he's your guy.

Already, a state legislator in North Carolina (who said on taking office he'd pray for the Lord's guidance) has suggested public hangings for doctors who do abortions, lumping them in with such criminals as rapists and kidnappers.

Already, fundamentalists in state legislatures are trying to give legal personhood status to the unborn "from the moment of conception," however that would be determined. This would enable birth control, abortion and even in vitro fertilization to be criminalized.

Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum wants single mothers and parents of adopted children punished with higher taxes as a way to promote "traditional" families, which she defines as married heterosexual couples raising their own children.

All this far religious right wing activity is happening under Obama. Imagine the impetus of having a kindred spirit in the White House.

Fundamentalism worldwide us a political phenomenon and is inherently totalitarian. Its goal is to realign all aspects of a nation's society and government according to rigidly defined and strictly enforced religious principles. There's nothing democratic or broadly representative about it.

Rick Santorum has a right to his views and is entitled to run for President. Should he win, however, we'll see a holy war against the right to live without religious interference. buzzflash

Don't let the dorky sweater vest fool you. Beneath that benign-looking garment beats the heart of an extremist, a radical more akin to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban and the ultra-orthodox Jews of Israel than to mainstream Americans. If Rick Santorum and his fundamentalist fans ran this country, we'd have a Bible-based theocracy thrust upon us, a dictatorship of the most divisive, judgmental and intolerant among us.

If you believe that contraception is immoral and any sex except conjugal attempts to procreate is sinful, he's your guy.

If you think "abortionists" (that inflammatory, demonizing term for doctors who perform a legal operation) ought to be punished, he's your guy.

If you think our Constitutional rights ought to be limited to conform with Biblical precepts, he's your guy.

Already, a state legislator in North Carolina (who said on taking office he'd pray for the Lord's guidance) has suggested public hangings for doctors who do abortions, lumping them in with such criminals as rapists and kidnappers.

Already, fundamentalists in state legislatures are trying to give legal personhood status to the unborn "from the moment of conception," however that would be determined. This would enable birth control, abortion and even in vitro fertilization to be criminalized.

Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum wants single mothers and parents of adopted children punished with higher taxes as a way to promote "traditional" families, which she defines as married heterosexual couples raising their own children.

All this far religious right wing activity is happening under Obama. Imagine the impetus of having a kindred spirit in the White House.

Fundamentalism worldwide us a political phenomenon and is inherently totalitarian. Its goal is to realign all aspects of a nation's society and government according to rigidly defined and strictly enforced religious principles. There's nothing democratic or broadly representative about it.

Rick Santorum has a right to his views and is entitled to run for President. Should he win, however, we'll see a holy war against the right to live without religious interference. buzzflash

Behold: The U.S. God Of War. A Brief Statement of Hate and Hypocrisy Writ Large

I don't watch them anymore, I just can't hack them, the videos of US atrocities around the world is what I'm talking about. And the reason I don't watch them? I don't really know, all I know is that they fuck with my head and invade my being for the rest of the day.

However, and for reasons unknown, I did watch this morning, the video under the header Behold: The U.S. God Of War. There was little accompanying the clip, other than a reference and a link to Mark Twain's, The War Prayer.

Given the fact I had featured the War Prayer myself, back in 2007, I decided to go back to those earlier years and re-up here, some of my earlier posts. Offered up again, although without the detraction of the many graphics used in the original posts, that which is posted below has as much, if not more significance today as it did then.

I have upped the War Prayer videos and text, but in truth, these are not essential reading or viewing in my opinion. The same can't be said however for Layla Anwar, Arab Woman Blues. What she has to say, is the essence of this post. As equally, and perhaps more meaningful, are the replies from the good Christian folk of America.

The first re-up really doesn't need an introduction, just as it does not need the highlights that I employed in the original. The whole nauseous, steeped in God and hypocrisy, piece, is a highlight in itself.

Save Your Prayers For Those That Need Them
July 03, 2007

Give thanks to God for the excellent work of the American military in the capture of Saddam Hussein. Praise Him for the diligence and attention to detail that led to this monumental event, and for the answered prayers of millions of Americans. Rejoice with President Bush and his team in the opportunity for freedom for the people of Iraq. Pray with the President for the ongoing efforts to build a hopeful and self-governing Iraq.

As reaction to Saddam’s capture has sparked uprisings and violence, pray for peace and calm in Iraq, and protection for our troops.

Pray for the President and Mrs. Bush as well as Barbara, Jenna and other family members as they gather at Camp David this week. Pray for their safety, enjoyment and for the blessing of God to be with them.

As Christmas nears, pray that the spirit of the holiday will spread throughout our nation—that compassion, hope, peace and generosity will characterize our national culture. Pray for those who are homeless, in poverty, addicted or lonely this Christmas, that the love of God will be shed on the neediest Americans. Pray that many will step up to serve their fellow citizens in need.

Pray for the troops who are spending Christmas away from home, friends and family in foreign cultures. Pray that they will remember the constants of the season—God’s love and plan for the world, the high calling of their service to America, and the responsibility they have to honor and serve their Commander-in-Chief with integrity and faithfulness.

Pray for the members of Congress and the Pentagon as they evaluate the necessity of increasing the number of active military held by each branch of the Armed Forces. As more and more troops are called on to serve in the Middle East, many feel there is a need for greater numbers of well-prepared military. Presidential Prayer Team Dec18 2003 (dead link)

America, complete in one graphic.

Us mega church.

"Free" & Ruined Lives.
Layla Anwar
July 1, 2007

I am "Free". He is "Free". She is "Free". They are "Free". And you are only a spectator...
Free, Freedom, Democracy. I shudder at these words.
I want to burn Plato's Republic and spit on your Constitution, on your Founding Fathers, on your Laws...

Free limbs, detached, solitary limbs, scattered to the four cardinal points and a bleeding heart in the middle, like a compass.
An arm to the West, a leg to the East, a head down South and a torso up North...And that damned bleeding heart in the Center.

Free, so free...
Free, free in Prisons. Free, so free in Detention centers...
Detention centers in the Mnistry of Interior, Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Justice!
Crammed, packed, jammed... The smell of blood, urine and feces...covering the infected wounds. Wounds of torture born on transparent skins covering rib cages...
Free, so free.
Tortured and Free in American camps. Sodomized and Free - American democracy flavor. Tortured and Free, whipped by sectarianism - Iranian flavor. Oh so Free.

Free to die. Free to cry. Free to mourn. Free to flee. Free to escape. Free at the borders...jammed, packed.

Two thousand "free souls" flee a day. They amass at frontiers, waiting for a stamp on that damned Green passport...that cursed passport.
The passport with a broken winged eagle as an emblem. Clipped wings of Freedom.
It reads "Republic of Iraq."
Republic of whom? Iraq? What Iraq?

Two thousand a day. Grave faces, desperate eyes, lost voices...
A forgotten, abandoned people. A despised, humiliated, tortured, stolen people.
A raped people.
Lost voices in the wilderness of your indifference. The Lost voices of Freedom and Democracy...

" I have 8 children. Look at how I am living. Has anyone asked me how I feed those kids. I have been without a job for 2 years. I tell you how I feed them...I can't feed them. I spit on the U.N. I spit on the thief Bush. If I ever return to Iraq it will be to free my country from those criminals. I will either kill or be killed by them. There is no other way " says this worn out father who looks 3 times his age.

" The Iraqi government helping us? Are you insulting me or what? The Iraqi government has not and will never do anything for us. These are the most corrupt people in power that Iraq has ever known. They are sectarians and thieves. I don't want this passport. Take it now. I don't want this nationality. I am even willing to go to Somalia. Just find me a solution. Take that passport. Take it." says another father of 32.

" The Americans bombed my house. My 9 year old son was inside. Look at his face. He is burnt all over. His eyes are stuck and he cannot open them. His tongue is stuck to his palate and he cannot talk or swallow. And his head was stuck to his shoulder.
He has already undergone 9 operations and he needs another 9... He is only 9 years old. Look at him. I, myself, have 3 bullets lodged in my body. I served the Iraqi Army for 24 years. One in my thigh. One below my ribs and one in my back. I need surgery too. But I am not important. My son is. How will I manage? On my way here, highway bandits took all my money. I sold the house to come here. Now I have nothing. The boy needs treatment. No school is willing to accept him. One school did but the other students rejected him. They said he frightened them with his looks."

The father wipes his tears and you can see the look of being stuck in "Freedom".
Ah the look of America on his and his son's face. The look of " Freedom ".

Another one plays the lute. A melodious tune that makes your heart quiver. A languorous tune of longing that fills the empty space like smoke. A smoke soon dissipated into that nothingness of " Freedom ."

A couple with a paralysed little girl who needs urgent treatment. They have been there, waiting since the crack of dawn, at the gates of some embassy or the UNHCR. Others take to the pavements. They sit and wait some more... Long hours of waiting in the space of " Freedom ".

Free, Freedom...
Free comments on a blog.
And the rats crawl from the gutters...Rats droppings, Albert Camus's "the Plague". The same kind of rats that rule Baghdad with their droppings...
Rats everywhere, crawling the streets, crawling on this page, leaving behind them a trail of excrements wherever they pass.

Rats on the go. Rats exiting. Rats entering again through a different door.
The rat with the grey steel eyes. The eyes of lies and deception has exited only to re-enter again after having ruined our lives with Freedom. Now another rat has taken up his place.
The fat rat of Baghdad. The rats of Iran. The rats of America...
The plague of Freedom.

Free, Freedom, Democracy and forever Ruined lives...
Forever Ruined. Layla Anwar

http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/

A Brief Hate statement...

by Layla Anwar
March 14, 2008

I really hate America, Americans, their culture, their ways, their accent, their politics, their arrogance, their stupidity, their ignorance...
I really can't stand Americans. I can't stand their men, their women, their country, everything they represent...

I truly, deeply, sincerly hate them.

I will elevate this hatred to an Art form.

What colors do you think I should use ? I love colors and I find them to be a colorless people...

So what colors should I use ? Gray, Black or Red ?
Or maybe just White ?

I have this idea of taking an old sheet, a dirty sheet...burn the edges, stab it with knifes and make holes in it, over a million holes, then throw in some bright red, like rain drops...

At other times, I fantasize about using the Abu Ghraib excrements and smudging the sheet with it, then collectively wipe your faces with it. Wipe your faces with the shit of the detainees you tortured.

Sometimes, my fantasy takes on a perverted twist, you must be a contagious lot with your perversity.

So I imagine a dirty sheet, covered with semen from forced masturbation, and have a few penises dangle on the corners, the penises you castrated, have them dangle there...and then give it a few brushes and strokes of hemorrhaging blood from the wombs of the women you raped. And this will be your new American flag.

Then you can all gather under that flag and we will take pictures of you. Don't forget to say cheese, will you ?

You know something, all the Americans I come across, the ones who are polluting the Middle East like some bacterial disease, they all know how much we hate you deep down...

They invariably start their sentences with "I'm an American, I hope you don't hate me"...And we give you the same stuff over and over..." No of course not, we have nothing against the American people"..."It's your government."

A lie...

Can you really blame any of us? What is so likeable about you ? After all you are nothing but a bunch of cold, indifferent, murderers...murderers of an innocent people. A people you have totally destroyed, destroyed right down to its fibers...

Your Bush, your Clinton, your senile Congress, your Senate...and you....All to be flushed down the toilet. But then, even the sewages of the world will vomit you out.

Of course if you are eager to hear words of praise, you really should not be visiting this blog. You can go to other Iraqi bloggers who have developed the expertise of kissing your ass for a "symbolic fee". Inside and outside the Green Zone.

But then deep down, you have contempt for these bloggers...They are too slave like. What you really secretly long for, is someone to tell you the Truth about you, about your moral degenerateness. And I shall not spare you. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever...

The most fascinating part of it all, is that I am very comfortable with this feeling I harbour towards you. It does not bother me, does not eat me up, does not cause me any guilt trips...It is so natural, so free flowing...

So what do you think ? What is the most appropriate expression for me to show you how much I really hate you ?

P.S: Brits may apply too. But you may get the leftovers...After all you have become a leftover yourselves. Layla Anwar

God Bless America

March 20, 2008

I am neither going to comment on what is writ below nor am I going to highlight any particular passage. (well just the one) It all makes for an insightful read.

For those that are not familiar with Layla Anwar she is a dispossessed Iraqi woman woman taking refuge in, as far as I know, Syria.

She is not unsurprisingly more than a little angry.

These first few comments, with a little editing to remove the dross, were posted in response to Anwar's post above, entitled "A Brief Hate Statement."

Greg from USA said...

Cheese

I think you just hate men.

How was life for you and your family under Saddam? Well taken care of?

15/3/08 9:43 PM

layla anwar said...

greg,

I was referring to the detainees that were raped and castrated by your brave boys...
Have you never seen the pictures?

15/3/08 11:45 PM

Greg from USA said...

It is an abomination that you make the US military out to be a bunch of Abu Ghraib rapists. Wherever you go, there are criminals - the criminals from Abu Ghraib are traitors, and are rotting in jail - at least some of them. There will never be a justice that can stand up to this crime, but what you are saying in your blog is not only inaccurate, it invites more aggregate suffering. The US Soldier is one of the most disciplined, professional soldiers in the world. In Iraq, the US Soldier is more trusted than the Iraqi government. For every criminal you find, there are ten soldiers that personally take it upon themselves to help a sick Iraqi child, or visit with and comfort a suffering Iraqi family. US Soldiers put their lives on the line every day to protect Iraqis.

My friend asked me once why we don't just nuke Iraq. I tried to explain to him that we are trying to turn the Middle East around. We want to win hearts and minds and switch the ME to democracy, or at least one country, so that some day our children will no longer have to worry about animals who fly planes into buildings. I don't think he really gets the connection. He simply hates the terrorists. You hate everyone. Is that true? The cycle of hate goes on.

You never answered my question - I suppose you were better off under Saddam. Wife of a military man? Did he die in a fight with the Americans?

BTW, (this is a serious question) why don't they show the pictures of the thousands of Iraqis tortured by Al Qaeda?

16/3/08 12:11 AM

Greg from USA said...

I read your other blogs. I guess I wasted my time. You are just another typical ME conspiracy theorist. Is that right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

If 100,000 tons of gold were discovered in a tunnel in Baghdad, and every Iraqi was suddenly rich, you would find a way to squander it or give it up and then blame it on "the Man" - the Americans in this case. Oh, wait - that already happened. You are sitting on top of enough oil to make everyone rich, you have a new, free constitution, and all sides have suffered immeasurably. The last time anything like this happened was the birth of the USA.

Bush is not a vampire, Americans deserve peace as much as you do, let go of your hate - stop being a stooge for the America haters. Put your brilliant mind to some good use.

16/3/08 1:27 AM

Perla said...

Greg you are for lack of a better suited word at the moment, a complete
moron. First, because you actually believe that Bush and Co. don't have some ulterior motive for US OCCUPATION of Iraq. HA. If you knew anything about the role that US has played throughout the world as a democracy-restoring nation, you would think twice about the things you say. I was born in Chile, under the dictatorship of Agusto Pinochet,put in place by the lovely American CIA. They savagely ripped out the heart of my country by stripping it of its former president Allende and posting yet another puppet. My mother lost many family members under Pinochet's regime, and this is all because of America's filthy "benevolent" intentions. I live in the US, and even with all the media bullshit coverup of Iraq and ME, I am still aware of what is happening, and the shit US is causing over there. One day you will remove your head out of your ass (or the President's) and understand what we are fucking up. Layla is fully entitled to think and feel in the matter she bests sees fit, because she has lived through this torture. You have not. So go back to your la-Z-boy and drink your red bull.

Secondly, you suggesting that under occupation, the
population of Iraq could magically rise above their oppression and take charge of the most valuable resource on earth. I hope you are alive in 20 years when China takes over this whole damned country and strips us of our rights to create a livable existence out of the natural resources we have. Oh wait, that's right, everything we need we can find at our friendly neighborhood wal-mart.

16/3/08 2:25 AM

Greg from USA said...

Acknowledged, the US looks out for its own interests first. I look out for my family first. The fact that Germany and Japan were completely rebuilt and successful democracies, while the CIA ruined your country was due to the chance. Sorry about that. Ill bet your hero Hugo will foul things up before it is all over - central planning is iffy at best. Our military never occupied your country...

Other than Taiwan, China isn't going to take over anything. For better or worse, it is in Japans interest to check Chinas power.

BTW, its not a la-Z-boy, it is a glider-rocker and diet Pepsi. After all, I need my exercise.

16/3/08 2:48 AM

bluegum said...

response to Greg from US
Go do some reading. Even your own US countryman, William Blum, former US State Department, in his excellently referenced and detailed book “Killing Hope “ has listed the US military's covert and overt operations in 56 countries of the world, since the end of world war 2. (1945-2003)

Blum thoroughly details and references the US military's/CIA dirty rotten heinous crimes carried out against people of these countries; of which the US bombed 25 of them, and caused the end of life for several million people.

So just for starters you have at least the majority of people from 56 Countries around the world that hate the US's guts. That excludes the US's puppet well-fed elite in these countries of course. In 2008 you can now add a few million more onto this number.

One can honour soldiers defending their own sovereign country. But one does not honour the US's barbaric marauding invaders of bullies cum pillagers, destroyers, ransackers, torturers, rapists, assassins, chemical poisoners, and murderers. This is what the majority of the worlds' people see the US and its military as. Bearing in mind not one of these 56 countries were a threat to the US.

And while your US airmen/women brag about the precision of their bombs of death. You disgusting cowards have the audacity, when you fire on civilian targets to tell us it was a mistake.

The issue that stands out here, is the glaring fact that the US never takes on anybody their own size. Like most bully boys it picks on those who have little defense to no defense. And then its excuse-for-soldiers kid themselves they are heroes.

In view of all this, of course you are a hateful country, which millions of people around the world healthily, and quite justifiably hate.

16/3/08 12:34 PM

Greg from USA said...

bluegum,
Whatever - I don't care if the rest of the world hates us - they read or listen to what they want to hear - William Blum, Saddam Hussein, whoever gives them an easy answer for their problems. If you think blind hatred gets you somewhere, you are sooo sadly wrong. If bigots in Al Qaeda attack the US again - worse than 911 - it will turn all of our la-Z-boy cowboys into a raging bunch of killers - not the guys that are treating our enemies with "kid gloves" now.

Iraqis are much better off working with us to clear out Al Qaeda, then we will go home and you can run your own affairs, less Saddam, with the only democratic system in the ME other than Israel. The US should/will only meddle when it feels it is threatened. (By the way, any threat to the oil supply is definitely a life threat to millions here - we have these wild lefties over here that have blocked us from building enough nuclear plants to cut our oil dependence. They would rather we meddle in your affairs than take any risk of an accident) Finally, America and the rest of the world are joined. If the USA falls into chaos, your satisfaction will be tempered by the knowledge that we will probably drag everyone down with us.

As for the atrocities, I didn't commit them so I can't apologize for them. WHY DONT YOU WALK DOWN TO YOUR NEIGHBORS HOUSE, the one who scared off, tortured or murdered half the sunnis or shia in town and ask him to apologize first?

We are the good guys, no matter what William Blum or Kim Jong Ill or anyone else says. I would show your people a lot more mercy than you would show mine. And that goes for my family, my town, my state, etc., so I can confidently project that thinking onto the majority of US soldiers. I can be angry with this blog or posts without lusting to see your skin peeled off - can you say the same?

"You disgusting cowards have the audacity, when you fire on civilian targets to tell us it was a mistake." Yep, it was a mistake. We don't target civilians.

"the US never takes on anybody their own size" The last time we did that, 50 million people died in WWII. Is that what you lust for?

If YOU killed my family, I would hunt YOU. I would hunt YOU down and kill YOU. That is the only way I would be a slave to my hate. But then if I captured my enemy I would have the discipline not to torture them. Unless you have information that can save lives, there is no reason to do it. I know when the devil speaks to me. Is there a devil in Islam? Or is it G-d telling you to blowtorch holes in people's feet?

16/3/08 5:53 PM

I intended to finish at this point but before parting I thought I should offer this last nugget.

American Woman said...

Awwwww you hate me Layla? That really breaks me up!!! Good God, how pathetic can you get? Let that hate consume you...go ahead, let that hate flow...do it for me.

You know, this blog entry should be the automatic response sent to every American who agrees with anything you have to say. You know, the ones who kiss your ass, begging for forgiveness of their sins. I am talking about the Americans who don't think they are included in your hate-speak - when, in fact, you have more contempt for them than anyone else. You make my skin crawl.

Hate me - I still have electricity
Hate me - I have running water
Hate me - I have a job & money
Hate me - I have law & order
Hate me - I don't spend my life stand in line
Hate me - I have Medicine & insurance
Hate me - I own a house
Hate me - I have a big family who love me & I love them
Hate me - I live in my own country
Hate me - I am a Christian
Hate me - I can walk down the street without fear
Hate me - I am laughing at you
Hate me - IT'S AN HONOR!!!

Face it, Americans are far more innocent than Iraqies. Iraqies relate perfectly to their so called fearless leader, Saddam - a cold, indifferent murderer himself. What is so lovable about you? You are purple fingered traders, liars, cry-babies, backward shits, cowards, sectarian & tribal assholes, fundimentalist nuts, pedophile worshipers, crooks & criminals, rapists, pimps, whores & torturers.

I need to take a bath just thinking about you people....while you enjoy wrapping yourself up in that new American flag you invented....you sick fuck...

17/3/08 3:06 PM

Further reading can be found in the comments section of the article preceding this.

Behold: The U.S. God Of War

The holy fire of patriotism

O Lord our God, ... help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, - Mark Twain ICH

The War Prayer

By Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Least We Forget: Fuck America