Antiwar.com Blog

The Rumsfeldian streamlining of the military continues. It will now be much, much easier to identify and destroy targets. Yay!

If you ever wanted to hear a bunch of US Senators get told off, here’s your chance.

George Galloway: Your case for war was a pack of lies.

MP3 courtesy of Crooks and Liars (they have a Realplayer video version if you prefer)

Are the documents implicating Galloway forgeries? 

Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement 

Glenn Reynolds writes:

I want to add that I don’t think there’s anything immoral about flushing a Koran (or a Bible) down the toilet, assuming you’ve got a toilet that’s up to that rather daunting task, and I think it’s amusing to hear people who usually worry about excessive concern for religious beliefs suddenly taking a different position. Nor do I think that doing so counts as torture, and I think that it debases the meaning of “torture” to claim otherwise. If this had happened, it might have been — indeed, would have been — impolitic or unwise. But not evil.And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to be willing to apply the same kind of criticism to things like Piss Christ, or to explain why offending the sensibilities of one kind of religious believer is “art” while doing the same in another context is “torture.” If, that is, they want to be taken at all seriously.

We’ve been hearing a lot of this, often from self-described “libertarians” who pander to the Limbaugh crowd (e.g., Reynolds and Neal Boortz), ever since Abu Ghraib came to light: Why, that’s no worse than what a lot of these liberal perverts do in their own bedrooms! What’s the big deal?

They apparently missed that part in Libertarianism 101 about the critical distinction between activities one finds distasteful and activities one is forced to participate in. Since I always like to help lost sheep, I offer the following handy pocket-sized guide to consent and coercion.

Taking a photograph of one’s own justly acquired religious item in bodily fluids: Highly offensive to many, but no coercion involved. OK from a purely libertarian standpoint.
Holding, say, a born-again Baptist against her will and forcing her to watch you excrete bodily fluids on the Bible: Offensiveness to anyone but the non-consenting party is morally irrelevant – after all, rapists don’t find anything icky about rape. Not OK by any decent standard.

Eating pork: OK.
Dousing an Orthodox Jew or Muslim with pig blood: Not OK.

Humiliating oneself as part of a fraternity initiation: OK.
Building nude pyramids at gunpoint: Not OK.

Smoking cigarettes: OK.
Tying a suspect to a chair and putting out cigarettes on his flesh: Not OK.

Physical intimacy with a willing adult of the same sex: OK.
Sodomizing a 17-year-old, then shooting him 11 times: Not OK.

All clear, Glenn?

While debate rages in the blogosphere about the flushability of Korans, the warbots dream of sending a much smaller document to the goldfish graveyard. More links and must-read commentary here.

The Telegraph is reporting that the RAF Hercules which crashed January 30, 2005 – the day of the Iraqi elections – was downed by an AA weapon.

An interim Ministry of Defence report has ruled out almost everything apart from enemy fire and it was suggested that a missile or rocket-propelled grenade could have brought down the aircraft.

But an official told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that the report concluded that the Hercules had been shot down by anti-aircraft artillery, as it flew at a low altitude, possibly 150ft.

“It was shredded by a multi-barrelled 20mm canon,” the official said. “They have worked out that’s what caused the crash.”

The gun is believed to have been a 1960s twin-barrel Zu-23, made in China or the Soviet Union, left over from the Saddam Hussein regime.

It has an effective range of 2,000 yards and can be mounted on a lorry or set on wheels.

It is not known why the Hercules, which was equipped with sophisticated defensive measures, was flying at low altitude for the 40-minute trip.

George Lucas conceived Star Wars in part as a criticism of Nixonian America and the Vietnam War (the Endor battle scenes in Return of the Jedi are intended partly as a Vietnam sequence). Now, at the premier of Revenge of the Sith, he says “When I wrote it, Iraq (the U.S.-led war) didn’t exist… but the parallels of what we did in Vietnam and Iraq are unbelievable.”
Although shrewd businessman Lucas wants to downplay any overt political implications of his new movie, there is an obvious critique of Bush and the War on Terror. Near the end of the picture, after Anakin has embraced the Dark Side and become Darth Vader, he confronts his best friend Obi-Wan Kenobi. Vader says “You are either with me — or you are my enemy.” Bush said something very similar after 9/11: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” In the novelization and I hope, the movie, Kenobi responds “Only Sith deal in absolutes, Anakin. The truth is never black and white.”