Category: Terrorism

This is Nucking Futs

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I get that the bombing at the Boston Marathon is a big deal.

But the saturation coverage is excessive, and locking down the Boston Metro area, the home to about 4½ million people, is insane.

Seriously, if this happens in a place like London (52 dead, over 700 injured), or Madrid (191 dead and 2050 injured), they kept the cities open.

It seems that every time that something like this happens, we are greeted by our authorities telling us to indulge in underwear befouling terror.

Seriously, our reaction as a society (I’m not talking about the first responders here) has been one of profound cowardice, and government officialdom has encouraged this whole thing.

I wonder if this is the ultimate goal. Is it all about sending the message, “Live in obedient fear, citizen.“

If You Claim the Right to Kill Anyone You Want, You Will Kill Anyone You Want

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It turns out that Obama’s claims that drone strikes are exclusively made against senior terrorist figures are a lie:

Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”

In a response to questions from McClatchy, the White House defended its targeting policies, pointing to previous public statements by senior administration officials that the missile strikes are aimed at al Qaida and associated forces.

Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”

Gee, you think that they are lying to us?

Hoocoodanode?

You remember what they say about absolute power.

Because the So Called Pro-Life Movement is an Oxymoron

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Yes, the folks who want to criminalize abortion have threatened the life of a Nevada state legislator for saying that she had an abortion:

The life of a Latina assemblywoman in Nevada has been threatened after she used a story about her own personal abortion experience at age 16 to make a point about the importance of sex education.

“I’m going to say something I’ve never said publicly before, because — Why not? I’ve been open about everything else?” Democratic Assemblywoman Lucy Flores reportedly told the state Assembly Education Committee on Monday. “I had six other sisters, all of them became pregnant in their teens — all of them. One was 14 years old when she got pregnant with twins. That is what I had to learn from.”

“I had an abortion because I didn’t have access to birth control, or even an understanding of what that meant,” she explained. “I didn’t even understand that my worth did not come from men, or sex with men, trying to fill up a hole in me from so much pain.”


………

After several Nevada news sites published accounts of Flores’ emotional testimony, conservative websites like Life News got the message out to anti-abortion activists with headlines like: “Democratic Legislator: I Don’t Regret Killing My Baby in Abortion.”

“Unlike Flores, most women regret their abortions and tell painful stories of how they are often unable to come to grips with taking the life of their child,” Life News’ Steven Ertelt wrote.

Flores was scheduled to explain her support for Assembly Bill 230 to reporter John Ralston on the Thursday edition of Ralston Reports, but canceled before the show aired.

Assemblywoman Lucy Flores, who testified at sex ed hearing re abortion as a teen, recipient of threatening messages. Cancels Ralston Thur.
— Dana Gentry (@DanaGentryLV) April 3, 2013



“Assemblywoman Lucy Flores, who testified at sex ed hearing re abortion as a teen, recipient of threatening messages,” television producer Dana Gentry wrote on Twitter. “Cancels Ralston Thur.”

On Thursday, feminist blogger and activist Emmily Bristol, who wrote about Flores’ testimony, wondered if she had “indirect culpability in giving greater exposure to the kind of information that has been shown to incite anti-choice news outlets and organizations.”

“Those opposed to reproductive health care — lest I remind you that abortion is a legal form of health care — and those opposed to comprehensive sex education share the same goal: To silence and shame women,” Bristol wrote. “They seek to demonize human sexuality.”

This is what the whole abortion criminalization movement is all about: Punishing women for having sex.

It’s why they threaten lives, and why, over the past few election cycles, they have talked about banning birth control, and keeping birth control coverage out of Obamacare.

They hate the idea of women having power over their bodies.

This is why compromise with those ratf%$#s is a losing proposition.

Obama agrees to release legal memos on Awlaki drone strike – latimes.com

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So, now that Michale Isikoff has released a leaked Department of Justice memo which summarized their legal opinion on drone strikes, it basically said that Obama can kill anyone he wants at any time, the White House has agreed top release the actual legal opinion to Congress:

President Obama, who has championed lethal drone strikes as a major part of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, bowed to pressure Wednesday and agreed to allow the Senate and House intelligence committees to review classified legal memos used to justify a drone strike against a U.S. citizen in Yemen in 2011.

Senators had demanded for months to see the Justice Department opinions that provided the White House legal authority to order the targeted killing of Anwar Awlaki, a New Mexico native who became an Al Qaeda leader.

Complaints by several Democrats over not receiving the documents had cast a shadow on the Senate confirmation hearing Thursday of John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism advisor tapped to be CIA director.

An administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified material, described the decision to release the classified Office of Legal Counsel material as “part of the president’s ongoing commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters.”

“I think this is an encouraging first step,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Intelligence Committee and was among those who had publicly complained about being denied access to the material. He said Americans must “understand the rules under which a president may make these consequential decisions.”

Wyden said Obama had “assured me that all of the documents concerning the legal opinions on the targeted killing of Americans will immediately be made available” to the intelligence committees.

By “made available” I’m sure that they mean that the Congressmen can look at it in a locked room, take no notes, and not discuss it with their staff.

That’s how they roll.

God Bless America

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The US Treasury is now freezing the accounts of cartoonists of mass destruction:

I went to Congo to write a comic book about a terror group — and ended up being labelled a terror supporter myself by the Treasury Department.

The bizarre tale of my graphic novel Army of God, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a window inside a little-known counter-terrorism campaign that captures more than a few innocents in its wide net.

Nearly 12 years since the massive expansion of federal powers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, OFAC’s collateral damage — myself included — is a reminder that defeating terrorists can come at the cost of our freedom.

It began two years ago. In the fall of 2010 I spent a month in the Democratic Republic of Congo reporting on the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal Ugandan rebel group that was chased from its homeland and has spent the last decade hiding out in the forests of eastern Congo. Led by charismatic madman Joseph Kony, the LRA pillages farming villages for supplies, kills or mutilates the adults and enslaves the children.

………

In early December our agent wired [artist Tim] Hamilton his share of the advance, but the money never reached the artist’s account. After a few weeks the agent made some calls. “He was told that the party holding the funds was the federal wire fraud unit which suspected that they were laundering funds for a terrorist organization,” Hamilton says.

On one level, it may seem as if it is not a big deal, but it is.  

Basically, this means that they can take everything you have with out any recourse at any time, and if they are wrong, or if they are malicious, it does not matter, because they are above the law, because if anything goes wrong, all they need to do is go, “Yadda, yadda, terrorism.”

We have deliberately created a lawless national security state.

Do Responsible Gun Activists Even Exist?

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I’m sure there are a few responsible gun owners out there, but the Gun Nuts With Small Penises™ crowd seem determined to show that there is no such thing as a responsible gun owner:

A suburban New York newspaper that ignited a furor by publishing the identities of thousands of residents who hold gun licenses has hired armed security to guard its staff after receiving an intimidating e-mail, a police report said.

Among a “large amount of negative correspondence” that White Plains, New York-based Journal News has received since publishing permit holders’ names was one e-mail in which the sender “wondered what would get in her mail next,” according to a Clarkstown, New York, police report obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.

The editor, Caryn McBride, told police the newspaper hired a private security company whose “employees are armed and will be on site during business hours,” the report said. The guards are protecting the newspaper’s staff and Rockland County offices in West Nyack, New York.

Police told McBride the e-mail did not contain an explicit threat that could compel authorities to take action against the sender. The menacing e-mail was reported to police on December 28.

Let’s see what happens here.

You have an argument over gun control.

The people gun control advocates call gun rights advocates dangerous and crazy.

The gun control advocates respond by threatening the lives of gun control advocates.

QED, gun control advocates are dangerous and crazy.

Thank You CIA, for Preserving Polio

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You see, the Taliban is targeting workers on the UN Polio eradication program, because they claim that they are CIA spies.

The problem here is that the CIA has, and has probably continued, to use vaccination programs as a part of the intelligence gathering process:

Back in 2000 I shared a train cabin from Amsterdam to Munich with an Afghan man who, when he learned I was a journalist, pleaded with me to communicate to the American public that the CIA had to stop destroying his country and rebuild it instead. “They have so much power,” I recall him saying. I reacted with the tolerant and condescending attitude of the Western liberal. The real sources of Afghan misery, obviously, were tribal, political and religious rivalry, and while it was tempting for people with lower levels of political understanding to blame a foreign mastermind for their troubles, such conspiratorial thinking was actually part of the problem in the Mideast, as in Eastern Europe. Right?

Afghanistan and Pakistan are where liberalism goes to die. In the years since, it’s become increasingly clear that my traveling companion was at least partially right: when trying to explain a social or political event in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it’s entirely rational to assume that it stems from a plot by an intelligence agency, quite likely the CIA. The sickest confirmation of this point was the recent revelation that the CIA ran an operation to verify Osama bin Laden’s location by gathering DNA samples through a false-flag hepatitis B vaccination programme. As James Fallows notes, American officials are defending this operation, not denying it.

This is despicable and stupid.

I would use the term evil, a term that I have increasingly applied to various actors in the United States state security apparatus, though one could also use the quote from (probably) Tallyrand, “It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”

If You Are Going to Watch Zero Dark Thirty, For F%$#’s Sake, Torrent It

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Because no one involved with the enterprise deserves a penny of money.

Glenn Greenwald rightly calls it a, “CIA hagiography, [and] pernicious propaganda.”

Spencer Ackerman, of Danger Room, admires the torture scenes and how they show moral ambiguity, but this is completely wrong.

You see, in a private letter to members of Congress Leon Panetta stated that torture had no role in locating bin Laden, though in public, he continued to defend the CIA’s torture directorate in public.

There is no ambiguity here. Our torture served no purpose but to satisfy the sadism of certain elements of the state security apparatus, along with people above them in the chain of command. **cough** Dick Cheney **cough**

There is no ambiguity. We did not derive actionable intelligence from torture. All we did was give Dick Cheney an erection.

FWIW,it should that the the European Court of Human Rights has officially declared that the CIA engaged in systematic torture. (See also here)

The fact that Obama and Holder have been complicit in indemnifying, and covering this up makes them more than reprehensible human beings, it makes them war criminals as well.

(on edit)

I am not suggesting that you torrent Bigelow’s other works, though I wouldn’t object to it.  I’m not gonna watch any of it.

Whiney Beotch of the Day: John McCain

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Just in case you don’t know, the entire Republican Jihad over Susan Rice and Benghazi is about two things: They desparetely want a real Obama scandal, and they realize that if they kill her nomination to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, then the likely alternative is John Kerry, which would open up the other Massachusetts Senate seat, to a run by Scott Brown.

Leading the charge are Lindsay “Mincing Fool” Graham, and John “McCrankypants” McCain, and now we find out that McCain skipped a classified briefing on Benghazi in order posture in front of the press:

I have to tell you something that just happened on Capitol Hill, and that is our senate producer Ted Barrett just ran into John McCain and asked about something that we’re hearing from Democrats, which is John McCain is calling for more information to Congress, but he had a press conference yesterday instead of going to a closed briefing where administration officials were giving more information. Well, Ted Barrett asked John McCain about that, and it was apparently an intense very angry exchange and McCain simply would not comment on it at all.

(Emphasis original)

John McCain seems to have spent most of his entire political career in a fit of pique directed at people who he thinks unfairly kept him from becoming president.

Wanker.

Because They are Our Terrorists, Dammit

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The State Department has dropped the MEK from its terrorist organization list:

The US has removed the dissident Iranian group Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) from its terror blacklist.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally removed the group after sending a classified opinion to Congress earlier in September.

The organisation had been designated a terror group by the US since 1997.

The MEK led a guerrilla campaign against the US-backed Shah of Iran in the 1970s and also opposed Iran’s clerical leaders who replaced the Shah.

Also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, the group insists it has renounced violence.

The state department said its decision had been taken in view of the MEK’s public renunciation of violence, the absence of any confirmed acts of terrorism by the organisation for more than a decade and its co-operation in the closure of their paramilitary base in Iraq.

I guess that all that lobbying money that they spread around Washington’s elite lobbyists, money which was technically a felony to take, paid off.

While We Are Talking About How 911 F%$#ed Us All

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Scott Horton’s article on how the Obama administration has continued to embrace and extend the bush administration’s extreme views on executive power is worth a read:

A clear-cut example recently emerged when lawyers serving as defense counsel at Guantánamo discovered that they were arbitrarily being denied access to their clients on the orders of a military commandant, despite a series of court orders dating back to 2004 that had guaranteed them access. The Obama Administration had put in place new rules under which only those prisoners who are actively challenging their detention are guaranteed the right to talk to counsel; otherwise the commandant has the right to deny access. Moreover, to have any access to clients at all, the lawyers were being pressed to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Department of Defense under which they consented to these new rules.

 But the Guantánamo bar took the Obama Administration to court, and yesterday they won a resounding victory. Chief Judge Royce Lamberth’s decision (.pdf) was not only an uncompromising vindication of the posture of lawyers who have provided pro bono counsel to Gitmo inmates for years, it was also caustic in its dismissal of the arrogant and meritless arguments of the Justice Department:

 ………

 Barack Obama seemed at one point to appreciate this focal lesson. On the other hand, his Justice Department is so obsessed with the vindication of arbitrary and capricious exercises of power that it seems to have concluded that upholding the laws and the Constitution—to the extent that they impose obligations on, rather than grant rights to, the government—is a secondary consideration. And that, in a nutshell, explains the public’s current lack of confidence in the Justice Department.

Why I am glad to live in Maryland.  I can exercise my conscience and not vote for the purveyors of this crap, even if the other side is worse, because is Maryland is in play, the election is over anyway.

An Update from Obama’s Gulag

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Looks like those military tribunals are not going as well as expected, so now they are trying to ensure that effective and vigorous representation by counsel is impossible:

In a federal court hearing that fully disclosed the deepening level of distrust between the military officers who run the Navy’s prison at Guantanamo Bay, and the volunteer lawyers who represent the detainees there, the presiding judge reacted with obvious skepticism to the military’s new move to curb those lawyers’ activities there.

………

As the hearing unfolded, a government lawyer suggested darkly that detainees’ lawyers have brought unspecified “contraband” into their meetings with clients at the Naval prison, and argued that intensifying activities in prosecuting war crimes cases there are raising new security fears among military officers, with many more lawyers in their midst. Answering those expressions of distrust, lawyers for detainees countered that the government cannot be trusted to keep its word even if it promises not to interfere with legal representation; they cited shifting details of lawyer curbs as well as the government’s more fully expressed doubts that some of the detainees have any remaining right to a lawyer.

“‘Counsel visits [to Guantanamo] are a burden on the resources and manpower of Guantanamo Bay to provide accommodations for counsel and on security personnel to ensure the safety of counsel and their good behavior as well,” Justice Department attorney James J. Gilligan said at the hearing. In turn, one of the lawyers for the detainees, New York attorney Rebecca Briggs, contended that “these limitations [on counsel’s access] that are being added in footnotes [in government access rules] just highlight the fact that their assurances to yield their discretion responsibly cannot be taken at face value, unfortunately.”

When the rabid right wing rants that Barack Obama wants to create some sort of Soviet style totalitarian state, they miss the fact that Obama has already done so, but he hasn’t expanded it beyond Muslims ……… yet.

What Might Be the Most Important Story You Have Not Heard About the Oak Creek Massacre

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Yes, the events in Oak Creek are a tragedy, but this was not the only act of right wing bigoted domestic terrorism in recent months, it wasn’t even the only act of right wing bigoted domestic terrorism this weekend.

Some Klan wannabee firebombed a Mosque in Joplin Missouri.

These are not isolated incidents. Rather this is a part of a deliberate effort to create an environment that encourages people with a few screws loose to engage in acts of terrorism.

The assassination of George Tiller is another part of this trend.

What Needs to be Said

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A democracy and anti al Queda activist from Yemen has published an OP/ED in the New York Times saying that our drone war in Yemen is bolstering the terrorist organization:

“DEAR OBAMA, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda,” a Yemeni lawyer warned on Twitter last month. President Obama should keep this message in mind before ordering more drone strikes like Wednesday’s, which local officials say killed 27 people, or the May 15 strike that killed at least eight Yemeni civilians.

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair. Robert Grenier, the former head of the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center, has warned that the American drone program in Yemen risks turning the country into a safe haven for Al Qaeda like the tribal areas of Pakistan — “the Arabian equivalent of Waziristan.”

Anti-Americanism is far less prevalent in Yemen than in Pakistan. But rather than winning the hearts and minds of Yemeni civilians, America is alienating them by killing their relatives and friends. Indeed, the drone program is leading to the Talibanization of vast tribal areas and the radicalization of people who could otherwise be America’s allies in the fight against terrorism in Yemen.

The first known drone strike in Yemen to be authorized by Mr. Obama, in late 2009, left 14 women and 21 children dead in the southern town of al-Majala, according to a parliamentary report. Only one of the dozens killed was identified as having strong Qaeda connections.

…………

This is why A.Q.A.P. is much stronger in Yemen today than it was a few years ago. In 2009, A.Q.A.P. had only a few hundred members and controlled no territory; today it has, along with Ansar al-Sharia, at least 1,000 members and controls substantial amounts of territory.

His entreaties will likely fall on deaf ears, because Obama has been thoroughly captured by the high-tech remote violence crowd in the state security security apparatus.

So How Are We Not Terrorists?

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In the New York Times, they have an article on how the Obama administration selects people for their kill list, and according to sources, among those flagged, “Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.”

We are sending drones with missiles after 17 year old children.

And what is whispered in the article is that a political electoral calculus is motivating much of this, which does not make this better.

We Look Like Scared, Fearful, Losers Because We Are Scared, Fearful, Losers.

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I cannot believe that I am quoting Iraq War booster Fareed Zakaria, but his take on the new invasive US state security apparatus:

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.

………

We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.

(emphasis mine)

Osama bin Laden did not win, he’s dead, but we lost, and we did it to ourselves.