Posts under ‘war’

I took my 8 y/o daughter recently to visit the grave of my grandmother and grandfather. They’re buried in a little cemetery in Batavia, IL called Resurrection. My daughter said it was too bad that we didn’t bring flowers and I agreed. I’m not much of a cemetery visitor myself, but there is something about flowers.

We agreed to bring flowers next time.

According to this well written piece from David Porter, also carried at HuffPo – US Army General David Petraeus is working to override US President Barack Obama.  

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, tried to convince President Barack Obama that he had to back down from his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months at an Oval Office meeting Jan. 21.

But Obama informed Gates, Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen that he wasn’t convinced and that he wanted Gates and the military leaders to come back quickly with a detailed 16-month plan, according to two sources who have talked with participants in the meeting.

Obama’s decision to override Petraeus’s recommendation has not ended the conflict between the president and senior military officers over troop withdrawal, however. There are indications that Petraeus and his allies in the military and the Pentagon, including Gen. Ray Odierno, now the top commander in Iraq, have already begun to try to pressure Obama to change his withdrawal policy.

(Image courtesy of Wikileaks)

This bulletin just came in from Wikileaks:

Wikileaks has released over 600 United Nations investigative reports, over 70 of which are classified. The reports expose sensitive matters from allegations of hundreds of European peace-keepers sexually abusing–and impregnating–refugee girls, to generals in Peru using Swiss bank accounts to engage in multi-million dollar procurement fraud.

A number of the reports have not only been marked "Strictly Confidential" but as an additional measure have had selected regions redacted before before internal distribution. Often these redacted regions can be "unredacted" by simply "cut and pasting" the blanked area. On the description page for each report, where possible, Wikileaks has provided a simple text version of the report that includes the redacted portions.

Since the number of reports is subtantial we ask that journalists, bloggers and other investigators take responsibility for those those reports closest to the month and day of their date of birth before considering the material at large.

They are looking for help from journalists and the blogosphere to help pore through this info, to further expose what the UN already knows and is hiding concerning the crimes of its own forces.  Here is a partial list of the items investigated:

• rape
• forced impregnation
• embezzlement
• extortion
• illegal weapons and ammunition dealing
• racketeering
• kickbacks
• fraud
• theft of food rations

Lest we forget that Bush & Cheney are not the only violators of human rights and public trust; there is a whole world of liars, thieves, rapists and murderers operating from the organizations that we ask to protect us from these crimes.  Someone stuck their neck out and did the right thing by exposing this information.  Let’s not waste that good effort.

If you have time and the will to help, you can start here.  The list of information is overwhelming.  Please help.

- gadfly

Is the United States of America is the world’s largest dealer of illegal drugs?  What about the world’s largest gun runner?  For years our government has used the CIA, NSA & other super-secret ‘intelligence’ agencies to cultivate drug harvest and distribution in SE Asia and Afghanistan.  We offer ‘aid’ and ‘trade’ to countries in the forms of weapons and ammunition.  The drugs come home to the US to poison and kill our own population.  The weapons we sell are used either against us directly by people to kill others, who then seek to kill Americans.  Did the founding fathers envision a country that would become the world’s largest debtor and blood merchant?

(Image courtesy of indiesocial.com)

I walked onto the train platform in downtown Chicago today.  A woman had just finished shopping at Macy’s and had several red shopping bags.  She was trying to put everything into one bag.  The wind picked up and blew some of the empty bags down the platform.  I took off running and stopped them from blowing out onto the street. 

Then, she yells to me that: "It’s OK!  They’re empty."  Then she sits down and waits for the train with her two bags full of stuff.  The 5 empty big red bags are just out there on the platform and she makes no effort to pick them up.  I told her that I didn’t want litter for a Christmas present, picked them all up and threw them in the trash (no recycling on CTA platforms…dammit!).

Image courtesy of cesr.org

This post begins a series to recognize people that speak about the world in terms of what they observe and what they can prove.  Their voices stand out in the crowd.  In their words, they speak not of fantasy, delusion and rationalization.  Instead, they utilize the gifts of human cognition, awareness to observe what is here in the world around us.  They are not dogmatic, but analytic and take in the world ‘warts & all’ for what it is and what it is not.  They do not separate humankind from nature in any form of grandeur.  In short, they look at things the way they really are and not what we would have them be.

I condemn murder in all of its forms. This is a conversation about terrorists and attacks on civilian populations.

Last week’s brutal attacks of unarmed civilians in Mumbai got me to thinking about the nature of attacks on civilians. For many years, I accepted the given definition of ‘terrorists’ as people that are so filled with evil that they want to frighten and kill us all. There are always sociopaths out there to fit into this mold. I think that for the sheer numbers of civilians killed in targeted violence, sociopaths are not the only explanation. The large role of religious / dogmatic programming in targeted violence against civilians eliminates sociopathology as a cause because the sociopath has no conscience or care for his/her impact on society. For the most part, the religious killer is convinced that his/her morality is calling for the murder of civilians.

“The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession,” and its days are numbered.” (H. G. Wells, as quoted in the Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers.)

The enemies of democracy are the enemies of the rule of law.

“enemies both foreign & domestic…”

Our Presidents and our armed forces swear to protect the Constitution from this threat – with good reason. The Constitution is the rule of law and it is the one thing that can prevent tyrants, thieves and murderers from the ruinous world of their unchecked greed and brutality.

Yesterday, I wrote about my grandfathers and their contribution during WW2. As I finished it, I realized that it was incomplete – only half of the story. It is all too common that I think of only the soldiers from WW2 first and the families that stayed behind second. Sadly, the legacy of the children and wives of the soldiers consists of far greater numbers than all of the troops that left to fight. The people who stayed behind. They were mothers, fathers, younger brothers and sisters, children and wives.

My two grandmothers stayed behind with their children. The war was not kind or easy for them. For some, their sacrifices continue to this day.