& Impasse In Afghan War
Interesting that this story about underage male prostitutes doesn't bother most Americans and especially not the media.
As Cenk Uygur says this should be front page news "but of course not in America".
Meanwhile on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise there's some strange going-ons captured on film and released by a newspaper online revealing what men in the service think of women and what they think of gays. Anyway it just shows how debased American soldiers really are.These are the same sort of American heroes who enter an Iraqis house rape a young girl and then kill her and her entire family and then return to base to brag and laugh about it.
This we are told is just one of those things that happens in war, Besides those in power tell us that afterall the girl wasn't white and she wasn't a Christian or an American and therefore her life had no value. Is this what America and NATO are fighting for the right to treat other peoples as if they were less than human.
Well according to Justice Scalia it appears that Gays, non-whites, non-Christians and women are not quite human since they are all ignored by the US Constitution which also by default supported the institution of slavery which some Americans are hoping to re-instate.
But we shouldn't be surprised since a majority of Americans and the media see nothing wrong with abuse and torture of prisoners or the mass killing of unarmed civilians or reducing whole cities to rubble just for revenge and retaliation.
Americans seem to have forgotten that one of the horrors and crimes committed by the Nazis in WWII was the retaliation against innocent civilians for the activities of the underground or what today is referred to as "Insurgents"-that is people fighting to protect their families , homes, neighborhoods, towns and their country.
Americans have even agreed to allow their paranoid government to force citizens to be stripped searched and groped by strangers at airports.
"Try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."
-- Julian Assange, 2007 blog entry
Afghan Pashtuns like sex with young boys (sort of like some American evangelical leaders and members in American congress)
US Tax $ Funds Pedophilia - WikiLeaks
Outrage over Wikileaks: "Kill Julian Assange!"
And another call for Julian Assange to be incarcerated or executed.
So this anti-Democratic viewpoint has now with the help of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden Eric Holder , Obama et al become a mainstream rationale response to leaked documents which uncover the lies, propaganda the duplicity of American officials the American government and its bias pro-government pro-establishment media.
So am I to be considered an enemy terrorist for criticizing the US government and supporting the work of Wikileaks .
The politicians and media in their attacks on Wikileaks or anyone who dares criticize the current government policies or those of the past administrations sound more like the uncritical government controlled media in some tin pot dictatorship such as Saddam's Iraq or the Ayatollahs and clerics in Iran or the rulers in Saudi Arabia or the Taliban in Afghanistan .
Is it really about protecting American troops -if they wanted to protect their troops they would not have lied to them and to the nation about Saddam & the imaginary WMDs or the non-existent connections with Al Qaeda or other Islamist fanatics. And now we get a revisionist history supplied by the biased US media and the shills in the US government .
A Fascist Call: Kill Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) | First Amendment Terrorism à la U.S. Congresswoman
CNN
WikiLeaks in review
Uploaded by CNN_International. - News videos hot off the press.
WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us Wikileaks has shown that our government and military form a 'vast lying machine' that perpetrates mass murder in our name.by Fred Branfman January 3, 2011
Do you believe that it is in Americans' interest to allow a small group of U.S. leaders to unilaterally murder, maim, imprison and/or torture anyone they choose anywhere in the world, without the knowledge let alone oversight of their citizens or the international community? And, despite their proven record of failure to protect America -- from Indochina to Iran to Iraq -- do you believe they should be permitted to clandestinely expand their war-making without informed public debate? If so, you are betraying the principles upon which America was founded, endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly "unamerican" subservience to unaccountable authority. But if you oppose autocratic power, you are called to support Wikileaks and others trying to limit U.S. Executive Branch mass murder abroad and failure to protect Americans at home.
These two issues became officially linked for the first time when former U.S. Afghan commander General Stanley McChrystal explicitly stated that the murder of civilians increases rather than decreases the numbers of those committed to killing Americans, and actually implemented policies -- since reversed by General Petraeus -- to reduce U.S. murder of civilians. McChrystal said that “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies." By so doing he made it clear that killing civilians is not only a moral and war crimes issue, but -- in today's interdependent world -- also threatens U.S. national security.
As important as is the issue of free speech, it is the question of whether the U.S. Executive is in fact protecting the American people through its mass murder abroad that really lies at the heart of the Wikileaks controversy. Executive Branch officials justify persecuting and threatening to murder Assange on the grounds that he has damaged U.S. "national security." If McChrystal is right, however, it is the past decade of U.S. Executive mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, now revealed beyond any doubt by Wikileaks, that is the real threat to U.S. national security.
Obama Should Read WikiLeaks on Afghanistan
By Ray McGovern January 04, 2010 "Information Clearing House"
-- Perhaps President Barack Obama should give himself a waiver on the ban prohibiting U.S. government employees from downloading classified cables released by WikiLeaks, so he can better understand the futility of his Afghan War strategy.
For instance, if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has hidden from him Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's cables from Kabul, he might wish to search out KABUL 001892 of July 13, 2009, in which Eikenberry reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is "unable to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state building."
And, while he's at it, he should dig out the September 2009 cable from the U.S. Ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson, in which she warns: "There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance ... as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these [Taliban and similar] groups in Pakistan."
The same conclusion is contained in the recent National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan. My advice to Obama would be: Don't let anyone gist them for you; read at least the Key Judgments.
Yet, in his recent defense of his Afghanistan-Pakistan policy, Obama acted as if he didn't know or understand the full import of these disclosures. Instead, he simply reiterated the "three areas of our strategy" in Afghanistan:
"To break the Taliban's momentum and train Afghan forces so they can take the lead; to promote effective governance and development; and regional cooperation, especially with Pakistan, because our strategy has to succeed on both sides of the border."
But the Taliban's momentum has not been broken nor is it likely to be, Mr. President. And good luck with President Karzai on that "effective governance" thing, not to mention the part about getting cooperation from Pakistan.
Indeed, the real Achilles heel of Obama's strategy, the true showstopper, is the forlorn hope of stronger cooperation with Pakistan.
...Americans have been generally inclined to give the government and its official explanation for war the benefit of the doubt - but only for so long. Many are now coming around to the realization they've been had.
According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey of Americans conducted from Dec. 17 to 19 (immediately after Obama's public reassurances), 63 percent of the respondents expressed opposition to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan - an all-time high.
For those who think Afghan opinion also matters, recent polling conducted by the BBC, ABC, and other news organizations shows that, in provinces where there is the most fighting, the proportion of people approving of attacks on U.S. troops has risen from 12 to 40 percent in the last year.
...and concludes:
Congressional Hearings?
It may take a couple of run-throughs of this background, but Americans are inclined to "dis" (to use inner-city vernacular) artifices like "disrupt, dismantle, defeat" as empty slogans hiding a lamentable lack of cogent thinking.
I find myself asking, a la John Kerry before he let the imperial Establishment do a lobotomy cutting the connection to the Vietnam file in his brain, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
Maybe it is too much to expect today's John Kerry to do better than his timorous predecessor as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Vice President Joe Biden.
In the run-up to President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, Biden caved in to strong White House pressure and staged faux hearings featuring the kind of "experts" who predicted that an invasion of WMD-laden Iraq would be a "cakewalk," and shunning those of us predicting catastrophe.
Et tu, John? One can always pray for miracles, but the current Foreign Relations Committee chairman appears to be the same empty shirt who let himself be persuaded by his handlers in the 1990s that his dreams for political advancement required making peace with the Establishment.
Sadly, it's almost impossible to envision Kerry converting back to the more courageous politician of his early days in the U.S. Senate when he challenged the Reagan administration's foreign policy, let alone to the gutsy young Navy officer who in 1971 confronted the same committee he now chairs.
With the new far right/ Tea party increase in Republican representatives in the U.S. federal legislature the Tea Party loons are well placed to get their extremist agenda viewed as reasonable and mainstream which it is not.
As the far right presents itself as the mainstream this makes moderate Republicans appear to be "too liberal" and the progressive Democrats appear to be be on the "far left".
The odds have increased that the next administration will be forced to the right in order to be elected whether they are Republican or Democrat.
So we get Justice Scalia commenting that gender equality is not in the US Constitution or Bill of Rights or part of the amendments to the Constitution.
According to his learned opinion gender, racial, ethnic and sexual orientation are not protected by the US Constitution. So discrimination against women, non-whites, Gays is not in his view prohibited .
Justice Scalia seems to have attended Glenn Beck's / Fox News law school and so reads the US Constitution in literalist fashion as if it were carved in stone without any regard to changes that have taken place over the last two centuries since it was written. IE Gays are not mentioned in the Constitution nor are the rights of women, blacks, latinos, native Americans,or other non-white Americans or non-Christians therefore they do not have the same rights as white heterosexual Christian males.
Slippery Justice Scalia Says Women's Rights Are Not Guaranteed by the Constitution Alternet.org Jan. 4, 20111
The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice doesn't believe women's rights are necessarily protected by the Constitution.
In a recent interview with California Lawyer (via the Huffington Post), Justice Scalia was asked for his stance on the landmark 14th Amendment, which overruled Dred Scott in 1868 and allowed blacks to become citizens of the United States. In a typically slippery response, his interpretation defers to the legislature, but leans way right -- so right that he doesn't appear to advocate equal rights for both genders. The interview:
In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?
Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don't like the death penalty anymore, that's fine. You want a right to abortion? There's nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn't mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.
It's a convenient time for Scalia to get loose on the 14th Amendment, as the new, super-right-wing, “constitutionalist” Congress floods into Washington with the intent of revising the document our country was founded upon in their own image. In particular, right-wingers have a particular disdain for the landmark amendment, which did away with many racist and guarantees birthright citizenship -- last summer, Senators John Kyl and Lindsay Graham proposed we do away with it altogether, and the passion for repeal is already bleeding into super-conservative states like Arizona, Texas and Utah. In his passive, wishy-washy stance, Scalia is essentially deflecting interpreting the Constitution -- erm, his job -- back to Congress.
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