The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.
…Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”
By politicizing who is and who is not a “terrorist” – pinning the label on American adversaries and sparing purported American friends – the U.S. government created confusion at FBI headquarters that contributed to the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, reports ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley. (originally posted on Consortium News)
Glenn Greenwald’s critique – regarding the recent U.S. indictment of 38-year-old Iraqi Faruq Khalil Muhammad Isa (currently in Canada) – is spot on about “terrorism” coming to simply mean opposing United States’ interests or resisting U.S. military invasions.
U.S. authorities have now dropped any requirement that the “terrorists” target or kill civilians as part of a political objective, the classic definition of terrorism. Isa stands accused of “providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy” because he allegedly backed a 2008 attack in Mosul, Iraq, killing five U.S. soldiers. Continue reading “The Danger from Politicizing “Terror””
Fox News ran a two-part report on foreign aid this week. Fox’s John Roberts asked me last week about a couple foreign aid “success stories.” I doubted the success claims but I commented that there had been so many programs over the years, that….. Well, here’s the one sentence outtake Fox used:
JIM BOVARD, AUTHOR/FOREIGN AID CRITIC: “Sort of like if you have a drunk throwing darts at a dart board from 50 feet away, every now and then, there’s going to be a dart that hit.”
I’m always happy to come on to a TV program and add a little tone.
The prior night, they popped in a sentence from me counterpointing quotes from foreign aid backers:
JIM BOVARD, AUTHOR/FOREIGN AID CRITIC: “I think it’s a great idea to start the foreign aid budget at zero and then leave it there, because there’s simply not evidence for the vast majority of countries that the foreign aid has helped them.”
I am looking to track down copies of the actual broadcast segments. If anyone has any suggestions or leads, I’d be much obliged.
Remember how the United States has been cozying back up to the dictatorship in Uzbekistan for the sake of alternative supply routes to occupying forces in Afghanistan? And remember how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Uzbekistan in October, largely for the sake of public relations? Upon meeting with the Central Asian dictator Islam Karimov, she said publicly “Countries that make reforms to give their people the opportunities for political and economic participation that they demand and deserve will thrive. Those who do not will fall behind.”
She used that visit and that speech as a way to promise that Uzbekistan had made an earnest pledge to improve its wretched human rights situation, therefore retroactively justifying our bold new donations to the sincere – and barbaric – authoritarian. Those of us with fully operating brain systems knew it was baloney, but the establishment sure believed it. Turns out, the brain people were right: torture is still rampant, freedom of speech and of the press is actively and violently suppressed, the rule of law is continuously dismantled, and U.S. support for this dictatorship has only cemented Karimov’s cruel grip on power.
Uzbekistan has not kept its promises to stop torture in its criminal justice system, including electric shocks and asphyxiation, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Safeguards to halt the practice that were announced with fanfare have not been put into effect. Western governments seeking closer ties with the authoritarian Central Asian government for strategic reasons have all but ignored the abuses.
The 104-page report “‘No One Left to Witness’: Torture, the Failure of Habeas Corpus, and the Silencing of Lawyers in Uzbekistan,” provides rare first-hand evidence of wide-scale human rights abuses in the isolated country, from which United Nations human rights experts have been banned for almost a decade. In Uzbekistan, human rights activists are languishing in prison and independent civil society is ruthlessly suppressed.
“The West has to wake up to the fact that Uzbekistan is a pariah state with one of the worst human rights records,” said Steve Swerdlow, Uzbekistan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Being located next to Afghanistan should not give Uzbekistan a pass on its horrendous record of torture and repression.”
The whole report demands a thorough study. Does anybody in their right mind believe that this lack of reform will prompt a change in policy from the Obama administration? For more on my coverage of U.S. support for Uzbekistan, see:
I don’t know how my arcane little post on Frank Gaffney’s World War I theories launched a discussion of Shariah law, bikinis, “executive gays,” and Ted Nugent, but Eric Dondero dropped in, so…
Dondero is raving about, among other things, a county in Maryland providing twice-weekly women-only swim times at public pools. (You can read a reasonable account of what’s happening here, or you can get frothed on over at Pam Geller’s site.) My failure to wet my swim trunks over this issue ultimately led Dondero to demand that I stop calling myself a libertarian.
Now, this strikes me as a little ironic, since the doctrinaire libertarian position on public pools is that there shouldn’t be any. They hardly seem like an essential function of the night-watchman state, after all (and don’t even get those crazy anarcho-capitalists started). Let individuals and organizations build their own pools and swim however they like, whether in the buff or in burqas.
But public pools aren’t really that central an issue to any libertarians I know, even the misguided, pro-war ones. What a luxury it would be to live in a time and place where abolishing the parks and rec department was even arguably a priority! And note that Dondero doesn’t call for privatizing the pools — he just wants to make sure that a state agency that shouldn’t even exist doesn’t in any way accommodate a certain subset of taxpayers.
And Dondero doesn’t stop there:
Or, maybe we should kick these Islamic “immigrants,” out of our country?
If you do not wish to assimilate into American culture of tolerance, open sexuality, and freedom to live as you please without a nanny-state telling you how to live your life, than why in the bloody hell are you here in the first place?
But as the article I linked to explains, it’s not just Islamofascists who like the women-only swim times. In fact, there’s a worldwide market for women-only gyms, and the biggest provider started right here in the USA. But in their hatred of Muslims, these twisted libertoids end up enemies of the open society they’re supposedly defending. Like the puritans they claim to despise, they feel oppressed by the consensual activities of others. That’s why most libertarians disdain Dondero and company.
Full disclosure: I sometimes swim at a local public pool, so when the revolution comes, I will dutifully drown myself by tying a copy of Man, Economy, and State to my ankle and jumping in the deep end. Now rock out to the Nuge in better days.
