To our endless shame, we’ve known all along that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al, rate amongst the most boundless liars and despicable war criminals, responsible for at least hundreds of thousands, and perhaps in excess of a million innocent deaths.   Congress bent over backwards to pass the military commissions act because they knew most of the detainees were innocent, as indicated by William Haynes insistence that none could be found innocent and acquitted:

Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.

[Slavery] amounts to much more than [Haley Barbour’s] “diddly” that so many Americans try hard to avoid coming to terms with the reality of slavery. It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss.

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the last millennium’s greatest horrors. An estimated 17 million Africans, most of them teenagers, were snatched from their families, stuffed into the holds of ships and brought to the New World. As many as 7 million of them died en route, either on the high seas or at “seasoning” camps in the Caribbean where they were “broken” to the will of their masters.

Haley, Haley, Haley.

If he has never done so, Barbour should hold in his hands some of the leg irons, manacles and other restraints that were used to subdue the Africans. He should visit some of the plantations where slave cabins still stand — there are plenty in his state — to get a sense of how the Africans lived. He should spend a long, hot day picking cotton. He should read the accounts of plantation life written by former slaves, and then he should explain why there is any reason to “honor” soldiers who fought to perpetuate a system that could never have functioned without constant, deliberate, unflinching cruelty.

Amen.

Whoops, here’s Robinson’s link.

Some people will surely say that I don’t support the troops.  Hogwash.  I’ll prove I do with sound advice.

After initially claiming that two pregnant women and a teenage girl killed in a US Special Forces raid on an Afghan home in Khataba in February had been discovered bound and slain by the Americans, the US military has admitted that they were actually shot and killed by those US troops–who then tried to cover up their “mistake” by carving the bullets out of the bodies with knives, removing other incriminating bullets from the compound’s walls, and then washing away the bloody evidence with alcohol.

Using alcohol to wash off blood, especially in larger quantities, is incredibly amateurish, ineffective, and time-consuming.  

Use water.

Kthnxbai.

Yours,

Winston Wolf

PS. Is this instant coffee?

Double-PS: don’t kill people if you don’t speak their language.

Triple-PS: I know this will slow down the rate of “progress,” but a job worth doing…

The quadruple: Oh, well then, fuck, it’s okay:

“The force went to the compound based on reliable information in search of a Taleban insurgent, and believed that the two men posed a threat to their personal safety. We now understand that the men killed were only trying to protect their families.”

The Guardian originally ran an interview with former IAEA chief and Nobel prize recipient Mohammed El Baradei, wherein El Baradei suggests that the million-plus innocent dead in Iraq is a war crime based on lies smoke-screening resource wars.  

El Baradei, as originally quoted by The Guardian:

“I would hope that the lessons of Iraq, both in London and in the US, have started to sink in,” he said.

“Sure, there are dictators, but are you ready every time you want to get rid of a dictator to sacrifice a million innocent civilians? All the indications coming out of [the Chilcot inquiry] are that Iraq was not really about weapons of mass destruction but rather about regime change, and I keep asking the same question – where do you find this regime change in international law? And if it is a violation of international law, who is accountable for that?”

“Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view. It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it’s been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping.”

dogshit

New York forensic experts will start a major new search Monday through debris from the World Trade Center for remnants of the US Constitution destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attack, officials said.

About 844 cubic yards (645 cubic meters) of material recovered from the reconstruction site at Ground Zero will be combed for parchment and Enlightenment values thought to be vaporized when hijacked airliners slammed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

“That material is going to be sifted to see if there are any remaining legal values,” said Jason Post, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “We’re taking every step we can to recover our centuries-old way of life.”

Experts, including stationers, hand-writing experts, and constitutional scholars, will hand check the material in the 1.4-million-dollar operation, which could go on as long as three months at a closed location at a landfill on Staten Island.

Previous searches through the mountain of rubble from the World Trade Center, which collapsed as a result of the aircraft strikes, have already turned up 1,772 potential pieces of the obliterated document and one perfectly preserved driver’s license from a Saudi hijacker, according to the mayor’s office.

Update: Hands down, the April fools winner.

The defining feature of our time will be the awful reckoning following years of denial.

Steve Pearlstein describes the false optimism bubbling up from the economy:

In recent weeks, a wave of relief and optimism has washed over the economy. The corporate sector is closing out another quarter of solid profitability. Business and consumer confidence is on the rise. The Dow Jones industrial average is flirting with 11,000. The Treasury secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve have declared that the economy is on a path of sustained recovery. State tax revenue is finally picking up. And on Friday, the Labor Department may even report that the number of jobs actually increased in March, ending two years of nearly uninterrupted declines.

Basically, we have moved Wall Street’s fraudulent assets onto the public spreadsheet, and Wall Street approves, thus perpetuating the fraud at public expense.  Hip-hip, Hooray!    

Obama’s no longer even trying.

On Suharto’s human rights abuses:

We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed.  We can’t go forward without looking backwards . . . .

On Bush’s & Obama’s human rights abuses:

I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there.

Now that he’s got healthcare, he can’t even bother phoning it in.  He’s not even changing the words.  Just their syntax.

I suppose his staunch supporters consider that sham holiness “ambidextrous,” and to his credit.   He’ll be wiping his hands on someone’s shirt before November.

On the other hand, our cruel overlords are smiling at such unconscionable and grotesquely advertised lack of accountability.  So, at least someone’s happy.

Holy shit.  The dude is literally George W. Bush!