By now, most have heard about the video of U.S. marine throwing puppy off a cliff in Iraq. This sort of behaviour isn't new to war. There was a Vietnam veteran in Cahill 3 with me. He told me a story that seems now eerily similar to this.

The guys in his unit called the orangutans "rock apes", because they would catch rocks you threw at them and then throw the rocks back. They had fun playing catch with the orangutans until one day one of the guys in the unit decided to pull a pin out of a grenade and throw it at an orangutan . Of course the orangutan caught the grenade and was blown to pieces. That ended the fun they had with the orangutans. The difference is that they didn't have camera phones then.

Should we be surprised by this sort of behaviour? These soldiers have been sent to kill people. Most humans view other animals as less than human. If they're killing people left and right, what's the odd puppy or orangutan ? Who is more evil then: the marine that killed the puppy or the politicians sent him over there to kill?

A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court declined to consider his case. The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets. ... Mr. Masri contended in his suit that he was seized by local law enforcement officials while vacationing in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003. At the time, he was 41 years old and an unemployed car salesman. “They asked a lot of questions — if I have relations with Al Qaeda, Al Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood,” Mr. Masri said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times. “I kept saying no, but they did not believe me.” After 23 days, he said, he was turned over to C.I.A. operatives, who flew him to a secret C.I.A. prison in Kabul. There, Mr. Masri said, he was kept in a small, filthy cell and shackled, drugged and beaten while being interrogated about his supposed ties to terrorist organizations. At the end of May 2004, Mr. Masri said, he was released in a remote part of Albania without ever having been charged with a crime. full story

This is outrageous. The blocking of a trial with spurious claims of "state secrets" is, in my opinion, tantamount to an admission of guilt. This crime is even more blatant by the fact that this German citizen was flown to Kabul — an occupied territory of the United States. Does anyone really doubt who's in charge in Afghanistan or Iraq? The crimes of puppet governments are crimes of the puppeteer. It is a further crime that Khaled el-Masri cannot peruse justice in an American court and it is likely that neither those who kidnapped and tortured him nor those that ordered the kidnapping and torture will ever be extradited to stand trial in Germany.

I've been on the side of the police in the recent bomb scare incidents in Boston. The police were unfairly blamed for doing their jobs and doing their jobs well in those instances. That does not mean, however, that I believe the police can do no wrong.

In fact, there are many recent incidents that show there are real and significant problems with the police, including (but far from limited to) the Jena Six, the tasering of the student at John Kerry's speech, campus police breaking a high school student's wrists over crumbs, racial profiling, overuse of heavily armed SWAT teams for what used to be considered relatively minor drug offences, and police outright threatening to make up crimes.

We have secret prisons and the right to habeas corpus has been revoked. The police believe they can behave with impunity, because much like the soldiers responsible for the massacre at Haditha or the Blackwater employees slaughtering civilians in Iraq, the police within the United States are generally allowed to act with impunity when dealing with those outside the power structure &mdash they know they will not be held accountable for their actions.

That is why I get so upset about the whining that occurs in Boston whenever the police do what they are actually supposed to be doing — it draws too much attention away from the real problems.

The information coming out about Blackwater just keeps getting worse and worse.

A few weeks ago, we hear that Blackwater massacred at least 11 Iraqi civilians.

Then we find out that there were 6 other Blackwater shootings this year.

Then we find out that a Blackwater employee drunkenly shot and killed one of Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi's bodyguards last Christmas Eve, only to be silently whisked back to the United States by the State Department — never to be held criminally responsible for the murder.

Then we find out that Blackwater (not Iran) has been arming the Iraqi militias.

Then we find out that there have been 195 Blackwater shootings since 2005, and in 162 of them Blackwater fired first.

Blackwater has been operating above the law, not accountable to anyone — and the State Department has been complicit in their actions. The Iraqi government has asked that Blackwater leave the country, but the U.S. State Department told them that is not possible. As a result, the Iraqi government has accepted the foreign-hired mercenaries will stay and that it is powerless to do anything about them. Is that how a sovereign government behaves? Powerless to prosecute, expel, or even question foreign mercenary groups that prey on it's citizens?

The Iraqi government is in not sovereign, its actions have to be approved by the United States, it is nothing more than a puppet. When Americans complain about the Iraqi government being ineffective, they are really complaining about our government's puppeteering being ineffective.

The addition $42 billion dollars in war funding requested by the Bush Administration is political move designed to allow both the Democrats and the Republicans to appeal to their bases. It smells of backroom dealing. The Democrats in congress will not approve this additional funding, but instead will fund the war at the originally requested levels. The Republicans can then appeal to their base by saying that the Democrats aren't giving the troops the funding they need, and the Democrats can appeal to their base by saying the actually did something by turning down the Bush Administration's additional request.

In the end, nothing changes.

While I definitely agree that something should be done about the race for the earliest primary (or rather second earliest), the Democratic National Committee directly taking on Florida about it's early primary date doesn't seem like a prudent political move and isn't likely to generate good will in the state. I can see that taking bold action despite potential political costs is sometimes a good thing, but I'd rather the Democrats take bold action to end the Iraq War instead.

I'd like to see a system where all primaries fall on the same date (including New Hampshire's). In modern American politics, early primaries hold far too much sway and so states naturally want to have an early primary – and what constitutes early is getting earlier and earlier. There will be no end to the primary creep until a more equatable system is put in place. The problem won't be solved by taking action against individual states.

Just for fun, I decided to look at the edits made from the United States Department of state using wikiscanner. I only looked at a fraction of the over 2,500 edits, but here are the ones I thought were interesting:

Laura Bush thinks Condi would be a great president

We're being invaded by Mexicans!!

"...the World Bank is one of the most highly-regarded financial institutions in the world..."

Tiawan is a pseudostate

"The statements about events in 2007 are clearly written by a Russian."

State Department predicts what issues will be contentious at the next Intergovernmental Conference of the European Union

The Department of State knows a lot about science and technology in China.

Somewhere in the world, humans can marry non-human animals

Delete – Who said the 2003 invasion of Iraq was illegal? No one said that

Delete – You can't say that the U.S. officials should have know that Bin Laden would turn his attention to the west after the Soviets were out of the way

Delete – Text on the United States Interests Section in Havana

Delete – A large chunk of the Missouri United States Senate election, 2006 article

Delete – Part of the discussion on the Agent Orange talk page

The Bush administration has decided it has too much credibility and is planning on listing the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as terrorist organization based on classified "irrefutable evidence" that they've been supplying the Taliban - the first time an organization controlled by a foreign government has been listed as such. The evidence is irrefutable, no one can refute it if they can't see it. Even so, it still seems unlikely that Iran would be supplying weapons to a group they've consistently and openly opposed throughout the 90's up to today. Even the U.S. backed Afghan government of Hamid Karzai rejects the idea that Iran is supplying the Taliban.

There is still the classified evidence that Iran is supplying the Iraqi insurgents. More irrefutable stuff no one can see. At the very least, Iran is interfering in Iraqi affairs and as Paul Wolfowitz stated so eloquently a few months after the fall of Baghdad, "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq". I guess Americans don't count as foreigners in Iraq.

Perusing the headlines on Google News, I notice most media outlets avoiding the word "filibuster". I see phrases such as "procedurally blocked", "flexed senate rules that require a 60 vote supermajority" or "failed to pass a motion to limit debate". The media had no problem calling the democratic filibusters "filibusters" when the Republicans controlled the senate. What's the aversion to the term now? I strongly suspect that years of conservatives yelling "liberal media" has resulted a news media that is so afraid of saying anything seen as critical of the right for fear of being labeled "liberal".

Bush and his cronies like to claim Reagan's legacy. Bush is no Reagan. Bush sent 10,000 troops to Afghanistan (gradually increased to a now 25,000) to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban. A year and a half later, he sent 100,000 troops to Iraq (gradually increased to a now 150,000) to fight a tin-pot dictator who was neither a tangible military threat to the United States nor involved in the September 11^th attacks at all.

If Ronald Reagan were in office, after September 11^th he would have sent those 175,000 troops to Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden's head would have been sitting on a pike in front of the White House by the end 2001. He would have rhetorically asked "Anyone else?" and brought the troops home. The war in Afghanistan would be long over and the war in Iraq would never have started.

Yesterday, in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton proclaimed, "We liberated you. We got rid of Saddam Hussein for you. We are not going to babysit a civil war."

Gotta love that attitude: The Iraqis owe us for invading their country, dismantling their stable government, destroying their infrastructure, raiding their treasury, firebombing their cities, and stealing their oil. If their country is a mess, it's their own damn fault. Why can't they just grow up?

Bush's $2.9 trillion dollar budget proposal seeks to cut FEMA funding by 14%. Does he somehow believe that FEMA has been too well funded to handle disasters? Does he WANT another Katrina-style disaster? Perhaps he simply needs to scrape more money up for his failed wars and hopes that the public view this as punishing FEMA rather than further crippling an agency that was already decimated by his post-9/11 homeland security reforms.

swiped from dan4th:

another year I thought that the version of PhotoShop that came with Orac (the name I have given to the used computer purpleglitter recently bought me) was the scaled down version, unlike the professional version on Clementine. I woke up well this morning and was hoping for a very productive Project Schedule. Skye is egg bound with a soft shell egg. sometimes the only thing that makes death unappealing is that I do not believe it ends existence. dan4th took a couple pictures of me in the sunlight last weekend. Take also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it. I thought that I could not be any more disgusted by the Bush administration, but his response to the Israeli assault on Lebanon has proved me wrong. I've improved some of my old userpics. I had a great time this evening celebrating purpleglitter's birthday with zarthon, recoiling, and of course purpleglitter. The paste of purity has run its course and I have scrubbed it off the wall of corruption. Yesterday, President Bush told Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, "This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all."

Yesterday, President Bush told Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, "This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all."

While I don't generally make a habit of trusting Bush, I'm fully confident that the exit from Iraq will be clumsy and messy.

I don't doubt that Saddam Hussein committed atrocities during his time in power (many with U.S. backing). Saddam Hussein was and isn't a nice guy. However, how anyone could claim that the sham trial just completed was in any way a "fair trial" is beyond me. Defence lawyers picked off one by one, a judge that was seen by the United States (the occupying power) as supportive of Saddam was replaced by one who was blatantly anti-Saddam. Even the date of the verdict seems conveniently timed to Bush's interests.

In a puppet trial like this: even if condemned truly deserved what they get, they come out looking like a martyr not a criminal.

For each of the following, indicate which one you option you like more (or dislike less) by selecting a number on that side of the scale. The closer to -5 or 5 indicates the degree to which you prefer that option.

Poll #854560
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

butterflies (-5) vs. dragonflies (5)