People v. State

“It is notable that the loudest cheerleaders of this war do not actually desire anything remotely resembling a revolution.  ‘As much as possible of the current bureaucracy, police and army should be retained,’ says Juan Cole, which unintentionally illustrates the truth: that this was not a revolution, not from the Euro-American perspective; it was a hit.  If Qaddafi were quite the Hitler he’s now supposed to be, or to have been, or whatever, then it would hardly do to keep his party apparatus in place.”

So says IOZ.

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[Title inspired by J. DeVoy at the Legal Satyricon, Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice, and of course Trey Parker and Matt Stone.]

A skeptic might theorize that Osama bin Laden is in fact not dead but alive and well in the CIA witness protection program somewhere. After all, the best evidence of his death has already been buried at sea, and U.S. officials are trying to decide whether a photo they have of his corpse is just too graphic to release. After all, Osama has been great for government business over the last ten years. His “disappearance” now won’t undo or slow down any of that, and the timing couldn’t be better for Obama.

I myself don’t go so far (despite the U.S. government’s habit of telling outrageous lies to “its” people). I merely note that the killing of bin Laden by Team America doesn’t make me feel any safer. Quite the opposite. And the threat of reprisals for his death is already being used by U.S. officials to remind us how much we need them.

You know what would make me feel safer? If the government which purports to act in my name stopped fucking with people all over the world.

“Governments don’t live together, people live together.” (H/T Bryan Brown at the ArchAngel Institute.)

Here it is. The smiling face of Corporal Jeremy Morlock, a disgrace to the human race. Why is the corpse whose head he’s holding up naked? What unspoken and unspeakable atrocities did Morlock and his brothers-in-arms commit against this innocent son of a farmer before they finally killed him for shits and giggles? And Jeff Gamso almost had me convinced that the death penalty is never justified. And here I am in my last post implying that God dwells within each and every human being. Morlock and those like him are the best argument there is against the existence of God.

Or maybe it’s really not Morlock’s fault. Maybe war just does that to people. In which case we should never, ever, go to war, unless it’s actually to defend ourselves. We should bring all of “our” troops home this very minute.

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Is there anything more obscene than Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing of dead soldiers’ funerals? Yes, there is indeed something far more obscene: the U.S. military’s God-damned torture and charging with a capital offense of the only American soldier in recent memory who has actually fought and suffered for the freedom of Americans, PFC Bradley Manning. In this new age of involuntary transparency brought on by Wikileaks, Obama’s Administration apparently has decided to respond with less secrecy and more Terrorism, and presumably views the “bad” publicity associated with Manning’s treatment and comparisons with Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as a feature and not a bug. Obama is a contemptible hypocrite. Manning is a hero. They have their reward.

See:

The Truth Behind Quantico Brig’s Decision to Strip PFC Manning, by his lawyer David E. Coombs

Manning Prosecutors: The Enemy is Us, by Thomas L. Knapp at the Center for a Stateless Society

Sailors take aim at new recruiting slogan, by Philip Ewing at the Navy Times

Glenn Greenwald’s The Egyptian mirror:

Not even American propaganda could whitewash the fact that the U.S. has imposed Hosni Mubarak’s regime on The Egyptian People for decades.  His government is not merely our ally but one of our closest client regimes.  We prop him up, pay for his tools of repression, and have kept him safe for 30 years from exactly this type of popular uprising — all in exchange for his (a) abducting, detaining and torturing whom we want, (b) acting favorably toward Israel, and (c) bringing stability to the Suez Canal.

And yet it’s remarkable how self-righteously our political and media class can proclaim sympathy with the heroic populace, and such scorn for their dictator, without really reconciling our national responsibility for Mubarak’s reign of terror.  Thanks to this Look Over There genre of reporting, we’re so accustomed to seeing ourselves as The Good Guys — even when the facts are right in front our noses that disprove that — that no effort is really required to reconcile this cognitive dissonance.  Even when it’s this flagrant, we can just leave it unexamined because our Core Goodness is the immovable, permanent fixture of our discourse; that’s the overarching premise that can never be challenged.

Read the whole thing.

Greenwald is one of those bloggers who often makes me wonder why I even bother.