war crimes

The Myth of Anti-War Democrats

by on February 8, 2012 @ 10:08 pm · 3 comments

in Anti-Statism, War

Of all the policies of the Barack Obama administration – one of many which began under the Bush regime and has been continued, even expanded, by his successor – I think the use of predator drones sickens and angers me the most.  Especially with the revelation that the drones also target first responders, and even people attending funerals.  Imagine if a suicide bomber had attacked police and firefighters as they arrived at the World Trade Center on 9/11, or the funerals of the victims.  That is essentially what the CIA’s predator drones are doing.

But what’s really infuriating, though not surprising, is how quiet liberals are about this, given how loudly they spoke out against war during the Bush years.  Yet this is arguably worse  in terms of its sheer violence and callousness: worse than Abu Ghraib, worse than the Haditha massacre.  If any other country’s military engaged in such acts, they would be denounced by the U. S. government (and others) as war crimes, and rightly so.  And as the repPredator droneort cited by Glenn Greenwald makes clear, government officials have been lying about the civilian casualties from the attacks.  But from most Democrats, the response amounts to at best a shuffling of feet and an uncomfortable silence.  In fact, most of them support the use of drones, and even keeping the Guantanamo Bay prison camp open, according to a Washington Post poll.  This despite Obama’s campaign promise to close Gitmo.  I guess Democrats suffer from memory loss as much as Republicans do.

How anyone can vote for a man who gives orders to commit mass murder is simply incomprehensible to me.  And please spare me the counterpoint that the Republicans are just as bad.  Of course they are.  That just further proves the point that the major parties are virtually indistinguishable in their lust for mass murder, bigger government, and more control over people’s lives.  Voting Republican or Democrat is voting for the imperial warfare/welfare state, and all of the blood and treasure it demands.

{ 3 comments }

Sigh. Catholic Priest Whoops It Up For Unconstitutional Military Assassinations

by on May 3, 2011 @ 12:54 am · 4 comments

in Imperialism, Police Statism, The Left, The Right, Vulgar Politics, War

One thing about Catholics is that, when it comes to partisan politics, they’re split pretty evenly. Only deeply ignorant people lump Catholics in with the “Religious Right” since about half of them are on the religious left. Many are admirably antiwar, and of course, there is even a nice anarchist pacifist tradition, in which one finds Dorothy Day or Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.

Some Catholics, however, are absolutely terrible on issues of nationalism and war. This article below, written by a priest with whom I broadly agree on almost all theological and liturgical issues, was particularly tasteless. Fr. Zuhlsdorf, who is generally sound when writing about things that he actually knows something about, always ends up toeing the neoconservative line every time he ventures into foreign policy. Most clergy can be safely ignored when opining on political matters, and this case is no different. The text of his irreligious column is below with my comments in brackets.

Usama Bin Laden … Rest in… well… whatever… [How classy. Zuhlsdorf must have forgotten about Matt 5:44.]
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Pres. Obama announced tonight, fairly late on a Sunday night, that Usama Bin Laden was killed a week ago, as it seems.

I am guessing that he made this announcement tonight, USA, time, so that people rising in other parts of the world would get the fresh news during the morning at the beginning of a week, as markets open, etc. Had it come at the end of the week, it would have been fodder for Friday evening Muslim sermons. [Because all Muslims liked Osama bin Laden, you see. This assumption that all Muslims support violence is at the heart of the neocon ideology. Always ignored is the fact that a majority of "Christian" Americans support the dropping of American bombs on Muslim women and children.] It still will be, but after several days.

Nevertheless I find the timing of both the event of his killing by a small team of US operatives in a fire fight and the release of the news interesting. One friend called me to opine that they actually found him at a Taco Bell in North Carolina and flew him back to Pakistan before… you know. [ho ho] Moreover, the President seems now to be ready to quote a standard of American patriotism, the Pledge of Allegiance, with its strong invocation of God, when for sometime he couldn’t bring himself to quote the Declaration of Independence [written by an anti-Christian Deist] correctly with its reference to a Creator who gives us our rights. [Yeah! Why can't Obama be more like Bush who once said that the Constitution "is just a goddamn piece of paper."] Color me cynical.

[Keep reading…]

{ 4 comments }

Another U.S.-Inflicted “Ground Zero” in Pakistan

by on August 23, 2010 @ 10:49 pm · 14 comments

in Anti-Statism, Imperialism, Racism, The Right, War

If opinion polls are reliable at all, most Americans are too enthralled by the manufactured outrage over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque to notice that the government claiming to represent them just massacred, via remote-controlled drone, at least twenty innocent people in Pakistan.

Several of those killed in the attack were children whose lives were violently ended by a missile fired at the hideout of “suspected militants.” It was their fatal misfortune to be living next to an address chosen for a “targeted execution” — that is, an assassination conducted pursuant to presidential order.

This is just one of literally hundreds of “ground zeros” the U.S. government has inflicted on Pakistan since Barack the Blessed escalated the drone war early in his presidency. That fact is lost on the  spittle-flecked militarists who profess to be inconsolably offended by the presence of Muslims within a few blocks Ground Zero’s incomparably sacred soil in Lower Manhattan.

People intoxicated with a sense of vicarious victimhood aren’t likely to understand, or care about, the anger and frustration of Muslims whose homes and families have been destroyed, on a whim, by the rulers of a distant and unassailably powerful regime.

The more deranged among the neo-Know Nothings (the “No Mosques in America!” crowd) insist it is a species of sedition even to suggest that there is a connection between the criminal violence committed by Washington abroad, and the retaliatory terrorism we occasionally experience here at home.

This dogmatic indifference to the value of non-American lives was displayed by Hillary Clinton during an October 2009 foreign excursion in which she inflicted herself on the inhabitants of Pakistan.  During a meeting with Clinton, several well-spoken but forceful Pakistanis condemned the strikes as “executions without trial” and acts of state terrorism. Clinton breezily dismissed the complaints: “There is a war going on.”

That statement is a distant echo of Madeleine Albright’s notorious comments in a 1996 60 Minutes interview, in which she blithely said that it was “worth it” for the U.S. to suffocate Iraq with sanctions that were killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.

Albright’s words, which were re-played incessantly in the Muslim world, resulted in a huge windfall for terrorist recruiters (who really should have given her a commission for each suicide bomber who enlisted in their ranks).

Clinton’s arrogant, dismissive comments weren’t as widely reported, but the policy she defended is cultivating the seeds from which future terrorist attacks will spring. And the bovine residue being spread about the “Ground Zero Mosque” by the War Party’s cynical hate peddlers is helping fertilize that threat.

{ 14 comments }

The Ghost Writer

by June 12, 2010

Libertarians may especially enjoy Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, which is now playing in second-run theaters and coming to DVD in August. I wish I could tell you more about why, but it’s the sort of movie that’s best entered with minimal knowledge. The plot involves a man (Ewan McGregor) assigned to write the memoirs [...]

Read the full article →