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(15,558 posts)and even more stunned that we're letting helping it happen...
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Something is not right, let alone democratic, when most people vote for peace and they get more war.
WCGreen
(45,558 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Solly Mack
(90,767 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Catherina
(35,568 posts)since President Ford had to issue an executive order outlawing political assassination after the plot to assassinate Castro was revealed.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)As you noted, Catherina, I remember when the Church Committee (the last time Congress really put the secret government to task) announced the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Castro became public, the nation's press became quite concerned. Congress held more hearings. Appointed President and Warren Commission fraud artiste Ford came appointed Vice President Rockefeller to look into it and put Poppy into CIA to put the kobosh on exposing any more family jewels.
Back then, those who gave a damn, generally, went ballistic. The missing outrage demonstrates the alienated, media-warped, drug-sotted, depraved nature of the times we find ourselves in.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)What a field day Nixon, who saw enemies and threats everywhere, would have had with these powers.
There are no checks and balances left.
Thanks for all the links.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)I knew there was something missing.
But, they were ordered off at Love Field.
PS: The agent throwing up his hands in apparent disgust upon being ordered off the bumper at Love Field was Donald J. Lawton, not Henry J. Rybka as originally identified.
DirkGently
(12,151 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Murder, for instance, as national policy.
PS: It's alarming how seldom peace has been the objective of our nation's foreign policy since Dulles and CIA recruited the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro in 1960.
"Money trumps peace" is how "president" George W Bush put it.
DirkGently
(12,151 posts)Fire Walk With Me
(38,893 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)From a former CIA person:
Drone attacks create terrorist safe havens, warns former CIA official
Indiscriminate use of drones in Middle East causes too many civilian casualties, warns former CIA counterterrorism head
Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 June 2012 15.56 EDT
A former top terrorism official at the CIA has warned that President Barack Obama's controversial drone programme is far too indiscriminate in hitting targets and could lead to such political instability that it creates terrorist safe havens.
SNIP...
Now Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA's counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, has told the Guardian that the drone programme is targeted too broadly. "It [the drone program] needs to be targeted much more finely. We have been seduced by them and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences," Grenier said in an interview.
Grenier emphasised that the use of drones was a valuable tool in tackling terrorism but only when used against specific identified targets, who have been tracked and monitored to a place where a strike is feasible. However, recent media revelations about Obama's programme have revealed a more widespread use of the strike capability, including the categorising of all military-age males in a strike zone of a target as militants. That sort of broad definition and the greater use of drones has outraged human rights organisations.
The BIJ has reported that drone strikes in Pakistan over the weekend hit a funeral gathering for a militant slain in a previous strike and also may have accidentally hit a mosque. That sort of action adds credence to the claims that the drone campaign is likely to cause more damage by creating anger at the US than it does in eliminating terrorist threats.
"We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan," he said
CONTINUED...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/05/al-qaida-drone-attacks-too-broad
Wish we'd listen to the intelligence professionals, like Tom Tomorrow or half of DU, instead of the G.I. Joe wannabes.
Fire Walk With Me
(38,893 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)The people who rule now -- FDR's enemies -- were the ones who traded then with Hitler.
[font size="1"]Warmonger by John Carroll[/font size]
After the war, many untold thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the vilest and most evil human beings to ever walk the earth were welcomed with open arms via PaperClip and who knows what else to fight the Godless Communists and make a mint on the Cold War.
kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)That's the only conclusion I can make after watching them perpetuate and widen the conflict and conflict area. It's a gravy train for military + spying contractors and a endless Enabling Act in general for our power elites. The Permanent Emergency dictates budget priorities and allows the political class to obscure the fact that their policies are making nearly everyone's lives worse in order to grant favors the financial and military elites. If they weren't able to perpetuate the Spell of Terror they've cast over us, there'd surely be a lot more angry questions about where the fuck are the jobs and wages, and why aren't these criminal bankers in jail?
It's like the endless War on Drugs. The strategic goal or benefit being pursued in the Drug War is not to secure the blessings of a drug free populace. They know they aren't going to achieve that, and they don't care about it now if they ever did. The benefit being sought is derived from the war itself - perpetually maintaining a state of war, internally, against their own population. Keeping the population routinely terrorized. Keeping the middle class in particular alarmed and huddled under the protective wing of the Police State, and meanwhile terrorizing them into abject compliance with the visible Hell that would await them should they ever fail to meet their employers' expectations or incur their employer's displeasure and so lose their place in the order, falling into the lower classes.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The Cold War ended and the warmongers cried in their martinis, Shirley Temples and near-beers. For a day or two, Corporate McPravda actually covered the obvious. Then, there was this terrorism thing.
From Christopher Simpson, info on how Poppy started the big ball of wax when he pried control out of the bed-ridden Pruneface aa strategy they would use to later develop their new existential enemy:
George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
CONTINUED...
http://books.google.com/books?id=YZqRyj_QXf8C&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=christopher+simpson+The+Uses+of+%E2%80%98Counter-Terrorism%E2%80%99&source=bl&ots=8klB0PzATX&sig=hi9DpE3qF43Oefh7iGn79W4jXQs&hl=en&ei=zAFQTeriBsr2gAfu1Mgc&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=christopher%20simpson%20The%20Uses%20of%20%E2%80%98Counter-Terrorism%E2%80%99&f=false
Gangster times would be a picnic compared to what these days represent.
Thank you infinitely for putting it into words, kenny blankenship. Every word you wrote, the Truth.
Agony
(2,605 posts)fracking unbelievable...
Octafish
(55,745 posts)No way. No how. Not gonna support unconstitutional unitary executive warmonger can't find weapons of mass destruction anywhere horsefeathers.
Of course, Bush had called off the drones to track bin Laden BEFORE 9/11.
Nothing about that, anywhere, anymore, almost.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)for "enemies".
Octafish
(55,745 posts)http://www.bradleymanning.org/
"They also don't ask questions."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9580652
stupidicus
(2,570 posts)and kept all males between (as I recall) like 15-55 from leaving before he bombed the bejesus outta it.
I'd guess the droners, assuming they were aware of that, whined to high heaven.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)... preventive or preemptive self-defense was not a legitimate rationale for invading Iraq, which posed no imminent threat to the United States. The facts that no "weapons of mass destruction" were found, and that their absence was suspected all along within the U.S. government, only serve to demonstrate the sound rationale behind these principles.
The Crime Of War: From Nuremberg To Fallujah
A review of current international law regarding wars of aggression
by Nicolas J. S. Davies
Z magazine, February 2005
In September, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told the BBC that the U.S./British invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law <1>. The following week, he dedicated his entire annual address to the U.N. General Assembly to the subject of international law, saying, "We must start from the principle that no one is above the law, and no one should be denied its protection." So, how was the invasion of Iraq illegal? How does that affect the situation there today? And what are the practical implications of this for U.S. policy going forward, in Iraq and elsewhere?
The Secretary General presumed what the world generally accepts, that international law is legally binding upon all countries. In the United States however, international law is spoken of differently, as a tool that our government can use selectively to enforce its will on other nations, or else circumvent when it conflicts with sufficiently important U.S. interests. For the benefit of readers in the U.S., I therefore feel obliged to preface a review of war crime in Iraq with a look at the actual legal status of international law, both in international terms and in terms of our own national framework of constitutional law.
When the president of the United States signs a treaty and it is ratified by the U.S. Senate, our country is making a solemn undertaking. The seriousness of such commitments is exemplified by the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and subsequent international trials, in which individual national leaders have been held criminally responsible for treaty violations and, when convicted, have been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment or even death by hanging. In our own constitutional system, Article VI Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, known as the "Supremacy Clause," grants international treaties the same "supreme" status as federal law and the Constitution itself. It reads:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
You can visit the State Department website to find a complete list of the international treaties to which our country is a signatory, under "Treaties in Force" <2>. These treaties are enforceable by national court systems in each country, but, without an international court system to ensure universal enforcement, the real consequences of violating international law are often political, economic and diplomatic rather than judicial. As we are finding in Iraq, these consequences can nevertheless be substantial.
It is important to understand that war crimes fall into two classes: 1) war crimes relevant to battlefield conduct; and 2) waging a war of aggression. To explain what was at that time an unprecedented focus on the second kind of war crime, war of aggression, the Nuremberg Judgment included the following statement: "The charges in the indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/Nuremberg_Fallujah.html
Tip o' the pin to DUer NNN0LHI.
stupidicus
(2,570 posts)and that "imminence" thing, or should I say the fuzzy nature of it as defined in the BHO memo, is just one of the flies in that particular ointment.
underpants
(182,803 posts)Last edited Fri Feb 8, 2013, 08:25 PM - Edit history (1)
of course the voices from the dashboards were saying this AS it was revealed. And claiming that "I haven't heard anything from the left about this" which is impossible unless they stopped talking and found liberal voices (good luck finding those in our media) but none the less they are co-opting and issue that we were SCREAMING FROM THE HILLLS ABOUT when wireless wiretapping started.
I personally got on the local RW station and drown out the host with "YOU HAVE TO HAVE A WARRANT!!!"
We knew where this would lead.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)A different windshield. A different dashboard...
And they weren't. And this isn't. And you and I and all who give a damn don't want the NAZIs, er, merchants of death to win.
PS: Not calling Obama a NAZI. He may be a captive. Who knows, with all this secret government kill lists and what not?
dreamnightwind
(4,775 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)As for who won World Wat II, Bush NAZI documents for download connect some Aryan cash and carry dots.
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/14504840