Tag: Osama bin Laden

I like Alex Jones but I don’t trust him. He’s sly but he’s also courageous and he’s unique as a commentator but, above all, he is a salesman. He is one of the only people who predicted 9/11 a few months before it happened–mind you he predicts a lot of things that don’t happen but his prediction of 9/11, nonetheless was uncanny–did he just hit a lucky number? Did he get some inside information–he claims to be privy to insider gossip and certainly the people that populate his shows are interesting. Mind you, I don’t like a lot of the crazy right-wingers he seems to agree with on his show (he tries to agree with everyone) but I think these ideas need airing and I don’t have to agree with people to consider what they are saying.

He has people I like on his show guys I would like hanging out with or who remind me of guys I liked hanging out with–Gerald Celente with his highly articulate ability to insult everyone in the best Italo-American tradition (I’ve hung out a lot with people like him), the Yale-educated intellectual and lover of Liebnitz (how endearing to listen to someone like that) Webster Tarpley, the grand southern gentleman Paul Craig Roberts and one of the most unique people in this country (who now lives in Mexico) Jesse Ventura. Because he keeps company with these highly interesting (btw, I don’t necessarily go along with everything these guys say but they base what they say on something real which is more than I can say about the MSM which is, in my view, consists entirely of edicts from the Central Committee. I have almost stopped listening to NPR unless it is a non- “news” show.

After the alleged assassination of OBL I got on the Alex Jones channel. I can’t listen to him for too long since he is, shall we say, somewhat erratic in his articulateness and “truthiness.” One of the figures who came out of the woodwork exclusively on the Alex Jones Show is Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, a collaborator on several Tom Clancy books as well as long-time government operative and Assistant Secretary of State–the guy seems to be a real person but since he’s basically a spook and the model Clancy used to create the character of Jack Ryan there’s little real info on him. Having heard the guy on Alex’s show what he said not only about the OBL hoax (I think that is pretty obvious–the governments is so pathetic you have to be stupid not to think something is funny about it) but about the general situation. To me these interview are so explosive, particularly, when he explicitly warned Obama and his people that there would be a revolution if he attempted another false-flag operation which sounded a lot like a threat yet there’s virtually nothing on this interview in the MSM. You would think that they’d try to debunk Dr. Pieczenik or note his very real threat to Obama. If the guy is real they should note it if the guy is a fraud they should debunk it. All I’ve seen is that his Wikipedia entry which suddenly got a note that it is a candidate for deletion.

So what is going on? Is Jones really on to something? Has he become a focal point for dissenters? How much of what he says can be believed? He’s constantly drumming up fear that some terrible things are about to happen most of which, eventually, turn out to be false. Can we support someone who’s on the right as far as immigration policy, about “socialism” and about climate-change, yet is with us (those of us who are highly skeptical of the the official 9/11 story and the weird OBL execution and burial at sea) as well as being an anti-imperialist, anti-globalist and anti-police-state activist. The guy does stand up relentlessly for these things. So what do you think?  

MIGHTY WARRIORS!

“Around 20 to 25 Navy SEALs, wearing night vision goggles, slid down ropes from the helicopters into the compound.”

From Fox News…

A senior U.S. official also told Fox News that only one of the five people killed in the raid was carrying a weapon and firing. The detail seemed at first to diverge from White House accounts claiming the Navy SEALs encountered resistance throughout the raid and were engaged in a firefight during much of the 40-minute operation. However, the scene was described as chaotic, with U.S. forces encountering barricades and women in the compound screaming and attacking the men.

And the AP…

WASHINGTON (AP) – Only one of the five people killed in the raid that got Osama bin Laden was armed and fired a shot, a senior defense official said Thursday, acknowledging the new account differs greatly from original administration portrayals of a chaotic, intense and prolonged firefight.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Dahlia Lithwick, a lawyer and senior editor at Slate, spoke with Cenk Uygur about returning the rule of law to thus country now that Osama bin Laden is dead. She calls for President Obama to fulfill his campaign promises to close Guantanamo, end military tribunal in lieu of Article III trials. In her article at Slate she discusses “Closing Pandora’s Box” ending the euphemistic “was on terror”:

The killing of Osama bin Laden has, for a brief instant, united an America that seemed permanently torn in two over birth certificates, the deficit, and the Donald. We can debate whether there should have been a trial, whether Americans ought to be dancing in the streets, whether it was legal to kill him, or even whether it matters whether it was legal to kill him. But we all appear to basically agree that the world is a far better place because the man responsible for one of the most vicious attacks in U.S. history is no longer in it.

So now what? Legally speaking, there are two broad lessons to derive from the Obama administration’s latest salvo in the war on terror. One is that it shows the need to continue operating outside legal norms indefinitely. The other is that it allows us to declare a symbolic victory over terrorism and return once more to the pre-9/11 regime in which the rule of law is inviolate.

snip

About all we can say with certainty is this: We tortured. We live in a world in which we must contend with information obtained by torture. We now need to decide whether we want to continue to live that way. Writers from ideological backgrounds as diverse as Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat argue that it is time to return to the paradigm abandoned after 9/11. Let’s put the 9/11 attacks and the existential threat it created behind us. With Bin Laden’s death, let’s simply agree that the objectives of the Bush administration’s massive anti-terror campaign have finally been achieved, and that the time for extra-legal, extra-judicial government programs-from torture, to illegal surveillance, to indefinite detention, to secret trials, to nontrials, to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay-has now passed. There will be no better marker for the end of this era. There will be no better time to inform the world that our flirtation with a system of shadow-laws was merely situational and that the situation now is over.

Although, I agree with Ms. Lithwick that President Obama has a grand opportunity to fulfill some of his campaign promises ending many of the extra-legal abuses of the Bush administration and his own, I disagree on others. Without prosecuting US war criminals — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, all the lawyers and military commanders — the United States will never regain the stature it once had in the world in Human Rights. Pretending it never happened not going to make all the violations of International and US law go away. It is unrealistic to think it will.

here:

I grew up watching action movies starring the big guys.  Stallone, Arnold and Bruce.  It was always the sign of a serious bad ass when they could kill the bad guy while cracking some witty remark.  But that’s the movies, right.  Nobody is that much of an actual bad ass in real life.  Right?

Wrong.  President Barack Obama is that much of a bad ass that he can kill the world’s most wanted villian and put a cocky trust fund billionaire in his place at the same time.  

Socialization in America, take a bow!  You made the top of the wreck list with the little shaver’s pre-adolescent hero worship.  Can’t you sense the curly ones sprouting?  That’s some milk-fed T talking some Hollywood trash and letting Gawd sort it out, baby.

Keep up the excellent work, liberals.  It’s been fun watching you out-flank the wingnuts on targeted assassination.  You’re really living up to the dream.

Cross posted from The Stars hollow Gazette

The new face of the Arab World is now the young people in Egypt and Tunisia and all the Middle Eastern countries where freedom rises up. Now, let’s bring our troops home.

Americans outside the White House celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden, May 2, 2011

The most important single fact about the CIA and the only fact that anybody knows for sure is that the CIA is stupid, and way back when I was occasionally invited to parties on Embassy Row in Washington (because of the Harvard Cyclotron) I proved this over and over with a little game.

“The stupidest person at every party in Washington always works for the CIA,” I would say, and inevitably some guy in white socks would get red in the face and blurt out…

“That’s not true!”

But it was all too true, and the CIA has demonstrated this self-evident proposition once again by jumping the shark with their already ridiculous story about the death of Osama bin Laden.

It wasn’t enough just to kill one sick old Arab chained to a dialysis machine in a house with no telephones. It wasn’t enough to kill one sick old Arab that it cost us more than $1 trillion to kill.

They had to jump the fucking shark!

They also had to prove that all that torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was a very good thing!

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who was repeatedly subjected to methods including “waterboarding” and stress positions, provided the CIA with the name of bin Laden’s personal courier, according to US officials. The killing of the world’s most wanted man as a direct result of information obtained from Guantanamo detainees such as KSM will reignite the debate over whether torture is a legitimate interrogation technique in the “war on terror”.

Torture paid off!

HURRAH!!!

Now we can forget all those pesky accusations about crimes against humanity and the Geneva Conventions! Torture saved us from UBL! Case closed!

And this is exactly the same kind of overkill that couldn’t stop piling new and ever more incredible weapons into the arsenal of Saddam Hussein until the CIA had inflated him from a tin-pot dictator with a rusted-out army all the way to the status of SUPERHUMAN MONSTER, who supposedly possessed not only the kind of armament that he might have actually possessed, like chemical and biological weapons, but also a whole fleet of totally imaginary drone-bombers which could fly all the way from Baghdad to Manhattan, along with 500 tons of yellow-cake for non-existent nuclear weapons.

This was exactly the same kind of overkill that couldn’t stop piling new and ever more HORRIBLE CONSEQUENCES upon the very idea of losing the War in Vietnam! It wasn’t enough that Vietnam would be re-united under a communist ally of the Russians! The CIA also had to “prove” that dominoes would fall all the way from Saigon to London unless we sent yet another hundred thousand soldiers to fight and die in those god-forsaken rice-paddies! Western Civilization will die! Defeat is not an option! Be very afraid! And don’t just feel fear…

Piss your pants and give us all your money!

So of course anybody with minimal intelligence immediately sees right through these ridiculously exaggerated stories…

But that still leaves 85% of the American electorate to piss their pants and give away all their money.