Meanwhile, the former deputy chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center has admitted that a trio of Afghani "warlords," formerly supported and supplied by the Reagan administration in the 1980s proxy war against the Soviet Union, today—again—control much of Afghanistan, and that we here in the US "have assumed the place of the Soviets."

As set forth in this earlier piece, the French people are increasingly resisting Sarkozy's Napoleonic compulsion to spill French blood on Afghan soil.

As referenced in that piece, the French have a history of overturning obdurate governments in the streets. It is equally true that the French have a history of rocking governments with rowdy broadsides committed to print. Thus, the leak to a feisty French weekly that reflects:

[t]he pessimistic view in the cable [] common among French diplomats and military officers who are concerned by President Sarkozy’s strong support for the NATO operation in Afghanistan and his recent reinforcement of the French contingent.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a British Foreign Office potentate identified by the Times of London as a "heavyweight with a reputation for blunt speaking," unloaded his assessment of the seven-year Western commitment to Operation Enduring Fiefdom in a briefing with French Ambassador Franc Fitou.

Fitou subsequently cabled Paris—in a communique boldly printed in full by Le Canard Enchaine—that Cowper-Coles had concluded:

“The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them . . . They are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis, which will probably be dramatic . . . . 

"[T]he current situation is bad; the security situation is getting worse; so is corruption and the Government has lost all trust . . . .

“In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan . . . The American strategy is doomed to fail.”

Cowper-Coles was dispatched to Kabul last year "to beef up Britain's role in the campaign to secure the Government of President Karzai and combat the resurgent Taliban." Last year, he stated that Britain could expect to remain in Afghanistan for "decades." He apparently repeated this Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade madness to Fitou, opining that "Britain had no alternative to supporting the United States in Afghanistan, 'but we should tell them that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one.'"

Good luck with that. The last "winning strategy" effected in Afghanistan came courtesy Genghis Khan. And even he lost far more often than he won.

The Los Angeles Times reports that American intelligence officials have concluded that three mujahedin leaders supported and supplied by Wild Bill Casey's CIA under Ronald Reagan are today directing the increasingly successful Afghan resistance to Operation Enduring Fiefdom.

All three men are Pashtun. The Times piece neglects to note that the white man's colonial boundary between the countries "Pakistan" and "Afghanistan" bisects Pashtun tribal territory. That the Pashtun do not recognize this boundary, or any other would-be restriction that does not flow from fellow Pashtun. That it is the Pashtun who offered protection to, and for more than seven years have successfully concealed, Osama bin Laden. That there is no record of Pashtun ever succumbing in war to either Europeans or their American progeny.

The three warlords are Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former leader of the Taliban government in Afghanistan; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamic hard-liner who briefly served as prime minister in the 1990s before ordering his forces to bomb the Taliban-run capital; and Jalaluddin Haqqani, a onetime Taliban Cabinet minister whose tribal group has accounted for some of the most brazen attacks this year . . . .

The three warlords' organizations are arrayed in an arc along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Haqqani and Hekmatyar have directed attacks in and around the Afghan capital, Kabul, and helped revitalize the insurgency in eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. forces are concentrated. Omar's influence is mainly in the Taliban heartland to the south, radiating outward from Kandahar.

The Times piece correctly notes that the three Pashtun have close and long-standing ties to ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. It neglects to note that these ties were originally forged by Wild Bill Casey and his people during the US proxy jihad against the USSR; Afghanistan designated as charnel house.

Paul Pillar, formerly deputy chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center, is these days experiencing something of an uncomfortable deja vu.

To some who were involved in the CIA campaigns of the 1980s, the U.S. effort to beat back an insurgency led by Hekmatyar, Omar and Haqqani represents something of a role reversal.

"We're trying to fend off security challenges to the government of Afghanistan from a collection of loosely allied groups chiefly of the militant Islamist variety," Pillar said. In that sense, he said, "we have assumed the place of the Soviets."

I emphasize that this is a short list. A comprehensive list would take days to compile.

IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION

-$142 million wasted on reconstruction projects that were either terminated or canceled. [Special Inspector General for Iraq, 7/28/08]

-“Significant” amount of U.S. funds for Iraq funneled to Sunni and Shiite militias. [GAO Comptroller, 3/11/08]

-$180 million payed to construction company Bechtel for projects it never finished. [Federal audit, 7/25/07]

-$5.1 billion in expenses for Iraq reconstruction charged without documentation. [Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction report, 3/19/07]

-$10 billion in spending on Iraq reconstruction was wasteful or poorly tracked. [GAO, 2/15/07]

-Halliburton overcharged the government $100 million for one day’s work in 2004. [Project on Government Oversight, 10/8/04]

-$1 trillion unaccounted for by the Pentagon, including 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. [GAO, 5/18/03]

KATRINA

-Millions wasted on four no-bid contracts, including paying $20 million for an unusable camp for evacuees. [Homeland Security Department Inspector General, 9/10/08]

-$2.4 billion in contracts doled out by FEMA that guaranteed profits for big companies. [Center for Public Integrity investigation, 6/25/07]

-An estimated $2 billion in fraud and waste — nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June. [New York Times tally, 6/27/06]

-“Widespread” waste and mismanagement on millions for Katrina recovery, including at least $3 million for 4,000 beds that were never used. [GAO, 3/16/06]

DEFENSE CONTRACTS

-A $50 million Air Force contract awarded to a company with close ties to senior Air Force officers, in a process “fraught with improper influence, irregular procedures, glaring conflicts of interest.” [Project on Government Oversight, 4/18/08]

-$1.7 billion in excessive fees and waste paid by the Pentagon to the Interior Department to manage federal lands. [Defense Department and Interior Department Inspectors General audit, 12/25/06]

This is of course how we knew it would be, a couple of weeks after the convention, with everyone's attention elsewhere, buried late on a Friday afternoon.

So Mr. Coleman, you got away with it. You should feel proud. You subverted free speech long enough to make sure your cadaver of a candidate (not a reference to McCain's age, it's a reference to the death of his honor, decency, and integrity) got a 2 week bump with nary a blemish or an unfavorable news story.

Hard to write a story from jail. Nice to see even in your statement that you've left some wiggle room to charge those that don't meet your definition of 'Journalist'. Artists, photographers, activists, bloggers, etc. In other words citizens who disagree with you. The slimiest sort of people who got what they deserved and should be considered guilty until proven innocent.

Thanks Mayor Coleman, really really big of you.

One more thing: Kindly go fuck yourself.

It never ceases to amaze me how pissed off the right gets when someone breaks the law in order to expose the fact that they are breaking the law...

Recommend clicking through below for the links in Glenn's post.

What does Sarah Palin have to hide in her Yahoo e-mails? - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com.

Still, it's really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years -- put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans' telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown -- all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin's privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.

And the same Surveillance State Worshipper leading today's screeching -- Michelle Malkin -- spent the last several years deriding those who objected to the President's illegal spying program as "privacy crusaders" and "constitutional absolutists" and "civil liberties absolutists".

Wer mit Wilhelm Reichs Begriff des "mechanistisch denkenden Menschen" Probleme hat, muss sich, so finde ich, einfach nur mit diesem CERN-Projekt beschäftigen. Wir wollen wissen, warum wir hier sind, das ist eine der Begründungen für den Bau dieser Maschine. Wir wollen wissen, warum wir hier sind, daher nehmen wir Milliarden von Euro und bauen die größte Maschine aller Zeiten. Jetzt sehe ich auch die Weisheit, die in "Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis" steckt. Die Anwort wird nämlich "42" sein. Eine Antwort, die für eine Maschine verständlich und eventuell völlig korrekt ist, aber keine Wahrheit über die menschliche Existenz enthält.

Dann hab ichs gelöscht weil es mir doof vorkam. Es gibt schließlich einen Unterschied zwischen dem physikalischen Grund im Sinne von "Machbarkeit" und dem philosophischen Grund, dem "Sinn" unserer Existenz und ich dachte, ich würde diese beiden zu Unrecht gleichsetzen wenn ich das so schreibe.
Dann las ich dies: Die Physiker versuchen nun also, mit dem Teilchenbeschleuniger das "Gottesteilchen" zu finden. Ich nehm alle Selbstkritik zurück.

Nun hoffe ich, dass aus irgendeinem Grund Antimaterie in dem Labor entsteht und uns dieses Problems entledigt. Abgesehen von der oben beschriebenen Albernheit des Experiments steckt dahinter auch eine unglaubliche Arroganz: In einem Zeitalter von AIDS, Artensterben und angekündigtem Atomkrieg (ich wollte mich auf den Buchstaben A beschränken, sonst wär das hier ausgeufert: Albernheit, Arroganz, Beschränktheit, Borniertheit, Dekadenz...) Milliarden von Euro sowie Unmengen von Energie und "Ressourcen" in ein Experiment zu stecken, das das Leben von 99.9999991% der Menschen nicht im mindesten verbessern wird, ist schwer zu verstehen. Theoretisch. Praktisch verstehe ich es besser, als es mir lieb ist, da es perfekt innerhalb der Logik des Systems ist (Wie oft kann sich eine Handlungsweise eigentlich ad absurdum führen? Ich könnte jeden Tag sowas schreiben und mir würden nie die Themen ausgehen! Morgen: Pestizide - Wir vergiften unser Essen. Übermorgen: Atombomben - Ich bin tot doch du bist toter. Klingt wie StudiVZ-Gruppen.)

Noch ein Wort zu der Befürchtung, dass ein schwarzes Loch die Erde verschlingen könnte: Bevor die erste Atombombe gezündet wurde, waren sich die Erschaffer nicht sicher, dass diese Tat nicht eine Kettenreaktion in Gang setzen würde, die das ganze Universum vernichten würde. In den 90ern startete die NASA Raketen in den Weltraum, die mit genug Plutonium versehen waren, die halbe (menschliche) Erdbevölkerung zu töten, sollte etwas schief gehen. Von den Atomkraftwerken um uns herum gar nicht erst zu reden - in Europa geschieht ja seit ca. 1 1/2 Jahren praktisch jeden Monat irgendwo ein Zwischenfall. Ich bin keine Physikerin und weiß nicht, wie ernst die Gefahr, die von diesem Experiment ausgeht, ist, aber wenn sie da ist, ist es kein Einzelfall, sondern der alltägliche Wahnsinn einer wahnsinnigen Kultur.

In late August, France buried ten paratroopers ambushed and killed in Kabul province. The two-day battle that resulted in their deaths seems to have been something of a fiasco. One soldier told Le Monde that his unit was equipped only with assault weapons and that he and his fellows exhausted their ammunition during the attack. NATO commanders seem to have neglected to send reinforcements or provide air support. Confronted with charges that the slain French troops were too young and inexperienced, the French defense minister responded only that a professional army is "inevitably" composed of young soldiers. The Taliban commander who devised the ambush stated that but for the arrival of night, his men would have "killed every one of the [French] soldiers." Twenty-one French soldiers were wounded; eleven of the most gravely injured have been flown back to France.

The Afghan ambush was the costliest single military loss for France since 1983 . . . which also happens to be the last time the French rashly trotted at the heels of the US into an ill-advised Middle East conflict. On that occasion, 58 French soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber who drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a parking garage beneath the French barracks in West Beirut. Nearly simultaneously, 241 American Marines were killed in a similar suicide bombing at the American barracks at Beirut airport. Over the succeeding days, bodies had to be pulled out under sniper fire. Shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan turned tail and ran, withdrawing all US troops from Lebanon. A complete and total surrender conveniently forgotten whenever American righties commence their mendacious chants about US "retreats" in the face of "terrorism."

During the life of the Fifth Republic, France has prospered most when it has studiously steered a "Europe-first" course, eschewing entanglements with American overseas adventuring and recognizing that, in a post-colonial world, colonial projects, under whatever name, cannot, in the long run, succeed.

Sarkozy—like Napoleon, a foreign-born leader of France—seems intent on repeating the mistakes of England's Tony Blair, a man who snuggled up as lapdog to George II in a doomed, pathetic, loopy attempt to somehow raise from the dead his nation's "glory" days as imperial enforcer. Napoleon intended, eventually, to get around to extending a French presence into Afghanistan; Sarkozy, a Hungarian who spends entirely too much time ruminating upon the life and times of the "little Corsican," presumably figures "better late than never."

French troops serve in Afghanistan under the aegis of NATO, which is absurd—NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was intended to "promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area." Afghanistan is nowhere near the North Atlantic. It is landlocked, and located in Central Asia. NATO's functional reason for being was to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has been defunct since 1991, and has not bothered Afghanistan since 1989. In Afghanistan, as in most of the rest of the world that does not consist of NATO member countries, NATO is increasingly seen as what it clearly is: simply the most recent manifestation of "white people telling us what to do."

At least in Afghanistan the French have not behaved as badly as have the Germans—another NATO nation goosed into Operation Enduring Fiefdom by George II. Let loose again on the world stage, German gaulitiers just couldn't resist the impulse to immediately disinter their skulls and their swastikas and their smirking torture.

Still, Sarkozy's ill-considered embrace of Operation Enduring Fiefdom is jeopardizing the lives of French citizens. Under the previous regime, France provided only non-combat assistance in Afghanistan, and resolutely refused to become involved in George II's Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. With Israel's Mossad having self-immolated in a George II-style political putsch, French intelligence now produces (pace China) the most accurate intelligence on the Middle East; the French knew for a fact Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, as a member of Saddam's cabinet was on the French payroll (the French passed this man to the US, who didn't want to hear him). When, as a response to Operation Iraqi Fiefdom, Islamic extremists set out to punish George II enablers, like Spain and England, France was spared; spared too were French citizens captured in Iraq. The Sarkozy ever-cozier snuggle-up to George II in Afghanistan means inevitably that France and French citizens will be removed from the Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-influenced "do not disturb" zone.

The French people, sensibly, want nothing to do with Sarkozy's adventure in Afghanistan. When Paris Match published an eight-page photo spread of Taliban fighters posing before effects stripped from the ten slain French paratroopers, even the mother of one of the dead called on Sarkozy to end the senseless French presence in Afghanistan.

Earlier this week, the mother of another of the French paratroopers killed in the 18 August attack told the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur that she had written a letter to Mr Sarkozy, begging him to get France out of the war.

"Stop following the example of President Bush," she wrote. "Let's stay French. Let's get our soldiers out of the quagmire." 

Contrary to Sarkozy's apparent expectation, that the publication of the photographs—the first real mass exposure of French participation in the Afghan conflict—would excite bloodlust and a desire for revenge among the French, the Match spread seems instead to have sparked a country-wide desire to get the hell out.

Until then there had been little news coverage of the French mission, although some 3,000 of the country's troops are currently serving in Afghanistan.

But being confronted with full-page, glossy photographs of the insurgents who killed their troops is bound to rekindle arguments about what France's role in Afghanistan really is.

The French parliament has called for an urgent debate on the matter[.]

Jean Francois, a financial adviser, [said]: "This kind of report is horrible and unfair for the families. The French population can't accept to see any more soldiers killed. French soldiers have to come back to France as soon as possible."

They can be cruel, there in France. Currently, the speculation, in both the capital and the countryside, is over who shall desert Sarkozy first: his serenely omnisexual wife, or the French electorate.

Scenes from St. Paul -- Democracy Now's Amy Goodman arrested - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com.

This video found above along with other information about the general situation thus far.

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Washington Post has it on a blog, doubt it sees the print edition.

I don't know about you America, but I've just about had enough.

From Democracy Now (click through for full release):

Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were arrested on suspicion of rioting, a felony. While the three have been released, they all still face charges stemming from their unlawful arrest. Kouddous and Salazar face pending charges of suspicion of felony riot, while Goodman has been officially charged with obstruction of a legal process and interference with a “peace officer.”

Democracy Now! forcefully rejects all of these charges as false and an attempt at intimidation of these journalists. We demand that the charges be immediately and completely dropped.

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities’ law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested, law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, including a photographer for the Associated Press.

A trio of journalists who have a track record of documenting police abuse at political conventions were stopped and searched during the early morning hours in Minneapolis. Police took their video equipment, cell phones, hard drive and notes about protests planned for next week's Republican National Convention.

No charges have been filed against the three, according to Mineapolis police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer.

Protestors running from Police in St. Paul:

More at http://www.theuptake.org. Why did the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office raid a quiet musical performance at a rented theater and then search everyone? It's the eve of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, and that has everything to do with it. Noah Kunin takes us inside the building that the police raided Friday night and shows us what they did, or didn't find. This was streamed live from a cell phone camera, hence the video quality.

Sat. Aug 30, 2008. Saint Paul, MN Police Department raids a home at 591 Iglehart Avenue at gunpoint. The journalists include a contributing photojournalist with "Democracy Now", whose host Amy Goodman appears in this clip jumping a fence to question police officers.

This is part of a series of police actions on the eve of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

After several hours, all those detained were released. No arrests. No property was seized as result of the search warrant. The clip ends with an interview with homeowner Mike Whalen. At the start of the clip, a neighbor shouts to the media and onlookers that we could all come into her backyard to see the detained people held in the adjacent backyard.

Video by Chuck Tomlinson

When The UpTake arrived at the home at 3240 17th Ave. South in Minneapolis, the police and city inspectors were boarding up the house. The city said they had to board up the house because the owner wasn’t available, but the owner was in jail.

Michelle Gross of Communities Against Police Brutality was the victim of a burglary...and she's hinting strongly that she thinks someone from the government did it.

She and her husband were detained by police in St. Paul on Fri. 8/29/08 while attending an organizing meeting of activists protesting the RNC in the Twin Cities. They were not arrested, and eventually released. However, they returned home to find their garage and car had been burglarized. Nothing was taken, but documents and belongings had been searched. Interviewed at a gathering in Powderhorn Park on 8/30/08.

A man reading a list of the "charges" to a group at a park, who laugh at the outlandish accusations:

Wonder when the so-called "liberal media" is going to pick this one up...

(h/t: Crooks and Liars)

Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they've done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

After all, if you don't want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there's a very simple solution: don't protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest -- especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march -- gets what they deserve.

This coupled with the recent undermining of the constitution by the FISA legislation (that Obama, a constitutional scholar voted for), should tell you where we are headed.

Continue to ignore this at your own peril.

This is the cost of your ignorance, and the freedoms you've allowed to be traded away for the illusion of security:

This is clearly the suppression of free speech, and a proactive attempt to chill lawful protest and assembly. Don't kid yourself into thinking that this is a Republican thing either, the same tactics were on display last week in Denver.

You don't give away your power and then expect the government not to use it. You had better start pushing back, before Gitmo comes to a city or town near you.

Local first-grader Connor Bolduc, 6, experienced the first inkling of a coming lifetime of existential dread Monday upon recognizing his cruel destiny to participate in compulsory education for the better part of the next two decades, sources reported.

[...]

Basic math—which the child has blissfully yet to learn—clearly demonstrates that the number of years before he will be released from the horrifying prison of formal schooling, is more than twice the length of time he has yet existed. According to a conservative estimate of six hours of school five days a week for nine months of the year, Bolduc faces an estimated 14,400 hours trapped in an endless succession of nearly identical, suffocating classrooms.

[...]

"When you consider that it doesn't include another four years of secondary education, plus five more years of medical school, if he wants to follow his previously stated goal to grow up to be a doctor like his daddy, this will come as an interminably deep chasm of drudgery and imprisonment to [Connor]," said Wasserbaum. "It's difficult to know the effect on his psychological well-being when he grasps the full truth: that his education will be followed by approximately four decades of work, bills, and taxes, during which he will also rear his own children to face the same fate, all of which will, of course, be followed by a brief, almost inconsequential retirement, and his inevitable death."

Although I usually refuse to contemplate anything involving Lauri Ylönen, I reinterpreted the song "Life burns" when I read this. "we have no sympathy for the lost souls / we've chosen the path of disgrace / we give this life to our children / and teach them to hate this place "

There seems to be a certain duty to be unhappy in our culture. A few centuries ago, this was manifested in a religious way - we are all sinners, the joys of this life are inevitably tainted and we must mourn and pray for forgiveness, our tortured god before our eyes - now it's work. The only excuse to be missing from work or school - except for a few days of holidays a year - is to be ill. The only excuse to retire early is that your job has already crushed you and made you permanently ill and unfit for work. The only excuse not to get a job at all is that you are disabled in one way or another and are thus already fulfilling your unhappiness quota. If you are healthy and don't work, you are also condemned to unhappiness through low social recognition, unhealthy food and most likely living in a block of concrete.

If you live long enough, you will witness the marshaling of the same arguments at different instances of space and time. If the arguments prove ignorant on the first go-round, you can generally expect that they will likewise wobble wrongly in succeeding revolutions. This is part of what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he wrote:

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished. 

The cohorts of George II at present instruct that we must pursue all over the planet a War On Terra because "if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here." If you slip in a disc of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can watch one of the first known invocations of this same mantra, as a band of ur-men brandishing bones crushes the skulls of a rival band at a strategically important watering hole. Fast-forward the planet some several million years, and you may observe hundreds of thousands of Americans and Australians, awash in the same shibboleth, floating over to Europe for WWI, there to ensure Germans do not occupy Topeka, and Turks do not site a mosque on Ayers Rock.

In my youth, the United States transformed Southeast Asia into a charnel house in order to "there" put a stop to Communism, so that "here" we would not be forced to burn all our money and construct refrigerators out of cement. The US lost that war, but there don't now seem to be any more Communists here where I live than there were before the defeat. Just the same one guy, an economics professor at the university, ready soon to retire. The US will lose the War on Terra, too, but I don't expect that as a result my daughter will be immured in a burka, or that I will be impressed into service as a dervish.

Gore Vidal, having despaired of any other method of teaching history to American young people, proposed in Screening History that it be imparted via film. There is merit in this idea. Peter Weir's Gallipoli, it seems to me, could ensure that few young men or women would in future be bamboozled into hamburger by barnums hardblowing the ignorance of "if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here."

In that film, two heedless young Australians, off to enlist for the British crown and be sent to their deaths in Turkey, encounter in the parched Australian outback a grizzled old desert rat who has heard nothing of what would come to be known as WWI. Asked how it started, he is told by the young men: "don't know exactly, but it was the Germans' fault." The old man is surprised: the only German he ever met, he says, was a decent fellow. The point of Australian entry into a European war is lost on the old man: "I can't see what it's got to do with us." To which a doomed youth replies: "if we don't stop them there, they could end up here." The old man takes a long look at the arid desolation around him, and concludes: "and they're welcome to it."  

Paperless brown people emigrating to the United States from Mexico and points south are a great evil, it is being argued—right now—on my radio. They are responsible for any number of moral and medical plagues, and our nation is on the verge of hernia, groaning under the unsupportable burden of providing for them.

Maybe I'd be tempted more to believe this balderdash if I couldn't reach over and open this volume of Orwell, and find that the ignoramuses of England were arguing the very same things in 1947—about Poles.

Recently I was listening to a conversation between two small businessmen in a Scottish hotel . . . We were sitting round a rather inadequate peat fire, and the conversation started off with the coal shortage. There was no coal, it appeared, because the British miners refused to dig it out, but on the other hand it was important not to let Poles work in the pits because this would lead to unemployment . . . They began talking about the housing problem, and almost immediately they were back to the congenial subject of the Poles . . . [I]t seemed that it was impossible to buy houses or flats nowadays. The Poles were buying them up, and "where they get the money from is a mystery." The Poles were also invading the medical profession. They even had their own medical school in Edinburgh or Glasgow (I forget which) and were turning out doctors in great numbers while "our lads" found it impossible to buy practices . . . .

The younger man remarked that he belonged to several business and civic associations, and that on all of them he made a point of putting forward resolutions that the Poles should be sent back to their own country. The older one added that the Poles were "very degraded in their morals." They were responsible for much of the immorality that was prevalent nowadays. "Their ways are not our ways," he concluded piously. It was not mentioned that the Poles pushed their way to the head of queues, wore bright-coloured clothes and displayed cowardice during air raids, but if I had put forward a suggestion to this effect I am sure it would have been accepted.

Have you ever heard of the great post-WWII Polish debasement of Great Britain? Neither have I. That's because it never occurred. Yet there they were, "solid citizens," "serious people," arguing their ignorance, as convinced that the Britain of 1947 was imperiled by Poles as the ignorant of today are convinced that the United States of 2008 is imperiled by Mexicans and their southern brethren.

I live in California, in the foothills overlooking the "great foodbasket" of the Central Valley, from where I can see a state and an industry that would grind to a halt, instantly, if it were not for paperless brown people, here on hejira from points south. The California Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful lobbying group representing industrialized agriculture in this state, explicitly admitted more than 15 years ago that it is dependent on paperless workers: without them, it would collapse. These people are not going anywhere. The only question is whether they are going to be treated decently.

The current system is the one most conducive to the interests of capital, which is why it persists. Paperless people may not organize or complain, either on the job or in the community. Anyone who causes any sort of trouble, in the workplace or in the outer world, can simply be picked up and dumped back across the border. The systemic failures of the industrialized health and education systems may be conveniently blamed on the few paperless people who use them. Just as crime statistics may be manipulated, by including those detained on immigration violations, to deliver the false impression that the foreign-born are largely responsible for the national villainy.

Unfortunately for the lords of capital, who would prefer to continue the current system (chaos controlled by them), overzealous politicians who slipped the leash have in recent years so worried "race hatred and mass delusions"—Orwell again—that a less palatable alternative may now be necessary. This would be the disinterment of the disgraceful "guest worker" program, in which paperless brown people would be pressganged into service in the United States for some set number of years, and then booted back across the border. This is what will occur if Bomb McCain becomes president. If Barack Obama is instead allowed into the Oval Office, it is the present system that will persist—subject to race-based attacks from the right, and human-decency-based complaints from the left.

In the meantime, per Vidal's Screening History, people could do worse, in trying to understand, on a human level, the messy truths of paperless brown people in the US, than view The Three Burials of Meliquiades Estrada.

And if you want to be torn to pieces, experiencing vicariously the sort of grief and humiliation suffered by those who must leave home to elsewhere secure their daily bread, view—here in context of Romanians in France—Code Unknown.

Once you have committed to "enforcement" of those artificial constructs known as "borders," you will require bureaucrats, who will inevitably bring forth injustice.

In the same Orwell tome referenced above, he reviews Henry Miller's The Cosmological Eye, which contains a piece recounting Miller's unsuccessful attempt to enter England in 1935.

The immigration officials nosed out the fact that he had very little money in his pockets, and he was promptly clapped into a police-court cell and sent back across the Channel on the following day, the whole thing being done with the maximum of stupidity and offensiveness. The only person who showed a spark of decency in the whole affair was the simple police constable who had to guard Miller through the night. The book in which this sketch occurs was published in 1938, and I remember reading it just after Munich and reflecting that, though the Munich settlement was not a thing to be proud of, this little episode made me feel more ashamed of my country. Not that the British officials at Newhaven behaved much worse than that kind of person behaves everywhere. But somehow the whole thing was saddening. A couple of bureaucrats had got an artist at their mercy, and the mixture of spite, cunning and stupidity with which they handled him made one wonder what is the use of all this talk about democracy, freedom of the press, and whatnot.

This sort of thing reruns in our day. Also with artists (who, it must be stressed, are these days generally treated by border officials with greater courtesy and respect than those whose skill-set does not afford them the means to strike back). It will be recalled that Gabriel Garcia-Marquez has, several times, been denied entry to the United States. Even though, when the histories are written, Marquez will be credited with more advancing human liberty and decency, than all the presidents, and all the presidents' men, who worked so spitefully, so ignorantly, to keep him out.

America now safe from Bin Laden’s chauffeur!

Well, the verdict is in from the trial of Salim Hamdan, the man alleged to have been Osama bin Laden’s former driver, who has just been convicted by the military commission established by the Bush administration on five lesser counts of “supporting a terror organization.”

Phew! Golly, that’s certainly a relief, isn’t it? Although to be honest, it really wouldn’t have mattered a whit one way or the other considering that the US government planned on “detaining” Hamdan indefinitely regardless of the verdict — or at least until the “War on Terra” had been won, which could take, you know, a hundred years or “whatever” according to John McCain...

Unsurprisingly, the left-leaning National Security Network think-tank is less than impressed:

The Bush administration’s policies have not only violated our basic values and traditions; almost seven years after the 9/11 attacks, they have failed to bring terrorists to justice while damaging the credibility of our justice system and our democracy in the eyes of the world. In fact, we learned during this trial that the Bush administration failed to follow up on Hamdan’s offer of assistance in helping track Osama Bin Laden — a revelation that further brings into question the administration’s strategy in the “Global War on Terror.”

Military commission finds Guantanamo detainee Hamdan guilty on lesser of two charges against him. The military commission established by the Bush administration reached a verdict in the case against Osama Bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan on Wednesday. The jury, made up of active US service members, found Hamdan guilty of material support for terrorism but acquitted him of the more serious charge of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. That means even under these extremely favorable trial procedures the government could not persuade a simple majority of the six jurors that Hamdan was guilty of conspiracy. Sentencing will follow, although the case is almost certain to be appealed to the Court of Military Commission Review as established by the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The Bush administration’s military commissions system violates American values and constitutional traditions. The military commission in Guantanamo Bay was neither fair nor up to the standards of American values. Hamdan’s trial allowed the use of hearsay testimony. Conviction only required four out of six jurors to agree. Evidence procured from torture and other coercive interrogation methods – methods so troubling that Hamdan’s original prosecutor quit before the case began. Americans can be proud that individual military lawyers and judges tried hard to make this trial fair and it is they who deserve better from the U.S. government. Even had he been acquitted of the charges, Hamdan would not have been released until after the “war on terror” had ended. This would amount to incarcerating an innocent person with no certain date for release, after already having been imprisoned for 7 years. Such practices are far beneath American values.

And this, unfortunately, is the “legal process” that our current prime minister has inexplicably placed his confidence in to deal fairly with the case of Omar Khardr. Go figure.

Despite the air of paranoid nationalism,  from the FAIL Bush Administration's declaration of war on abstract ideas were two online comics. The War on Terror Trading Cards were hewn from that classic American spirit of free expression, reminding us that some of our "allies" in hegemony were actually former enemies. The once-unknown Vladimir Putin went from "EVIL" to "GOOD," and former Hated Enemy Saddam Hussein was actually quite the friend of the United States just back in the 1980s. Granted, he did make that royally stupid move of invading Kuwait, but in many ways that invasion (and the Cold War) brought us to where we are today. A kinder way to put it is that these cards illustrate the shifting sands of contemporary foreign relations. (If the president was a Democrat, such changes would likely be labelled hypocritical flip-flopping that endangered national security.)

[BTW: The web site goddoubleplusblessamerica.org apparently was recently the target of malicous hackers, as Firefox has identified it as potentially bearing malware. Either that or it's a clever conspiracy by The Man to repress the righteous expression of free speech, maaaaaan.....]

Perhaps better known than the war on terror trading cards is the online comic strip Get Your War On. Constructed from old clip art, GYWO suffused righteous anger at what was committed by outside forces with rightful anger at what was committed by domestic forces, namely the federal government.

Some seven years later, not much has changed. We're still in two wars with no end in sight. But we can look on the bright side with one of the few non-depressing things to come of all this: an animated Get Your War On! Based on the comic by David Rees, the new series from 23/6 will be coming at us once a week with true-to-form animation that bring the simple GYWO line drawings to life. The premiere episode is called "The Watch List." Enjoy.

[Link.]

And other things we knew — four years ago!

Being thoroughly vindicated by history is probably small consolation for Sen. John Kerry, but perhaps he can take some degree of solace from the release earlier this week of a new report by the Rand Corporation, a think-tank that often works with the Pentagon, entitled How Terrorist Groups End – Lessons for Countering al Qaida.

The report’s analysis of 648 groups that existed between 1968 and 2006 concludes that “military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups, and few groups within this time frame have achieved victory.” Indeed, Rand found that military operations against such groups are among the least effective means of success, achieving the desired effect in only 7% of the cases. Against most terrorist groups the study states that “military force is usually too blunt an instrument” also warning that “use of substantial U.S. military power against terror groups also runs a significant risk of turning the local population against the government by killing civilians.”

Well duh. Calling for a rethink of US strategy, the Rand report argues that policing and intelligence, rather than military force, should form the backbone of U.S. efforts against al Qaeda.”

Of course, some of us who were on the planet four years ago will recall that Kerry was mercilessly ridiculed by Dick Cheney along with legions of right-wing pundits and bloggers, when he suggested that the “war on terror” was a flawed construct and argued that a multinational law-enforcement-like approach would be more effective in fighting terrorists. Cheney scoffed at this notion, saying that there was a danger, should Kerry be elected, that “we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war.”

Here again though, Kerry, Holbrooke and others have been vindicated. In the report, the Rand Corporation suggests the US drop the misleading term “war on terror” and simply call the effort what it is: counterterrorism. “Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” said Seth Jones, political scientist and lead author of the study.