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Wednesday, March 25, 2015

‘War-Crimes-R-US’ (11-9-11)


Muammar Gaddafi’s barbaric murder on October 20, 2011 was a war crime. It violated the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 and it violated the UN Security Council Resolution #1973 of 2011.
Will it be seriously investigated and prosecuted? Probably and tragically not. Or maybe a “short-lived” (pun intended) kabuki investigation. But I am guessing not even that.
So when did American presidents and secretaries of state stop caring entirely about international law?
So when did most of America, in fact, stop caring entirely about international law?
Raw power is what it is about. Unrestrained ruthlessness rewards the ‘winners’, and ‘winners’ have license to do anything. No accountability. (Look at Goldman Sachs. What a bang they got for their million dollar bucks to Obama’s 2008 campaign. They have managed to help destroy not just our economy but that of Greece’s, apparently. Those dandy little credit default swaps are still going strong, and, no, are not even going be taxed a fraction of a cent. IN YOUR FACE, CITIZENS OF AMERICA! IN YOUR FACE, CITIZENS OF THE WORLD!! THE BASTARDS PREVAIL!)
For a good long time now the U.S. has stopped being a democracy. We are run by mobsters and their hierarchy of obsequious, amoral lackeys, whether in the corporate board rooms, the three branches of government or the corporate media.
Obama stands small as the current Mobster-in-Chief, as does Hillary Clinton as Mobster-of-State.
We are coming closer to the day when just calling out these mobsters will bring greater incidences of death, incarceration and/or torture upon us as outraged citizens of conscience. The day when for the sake of pragmatism ANY criticizer of the declared ‘might makes right fascistic status quo’ will be taken care of.
Or maybe not. Maybe there is such a tiny minority of us who actually care about morality, justice and international law, that if we choose to just stay writing about it (unlike the even tinier minority of those citizens of conscience who really put it on the line, commit acts of civil disobedience and already feel the punishing wrath of said faux-representing mobsters) we are no SERIOUS threat to the oh so busily destroying powers that be, the bastards of the universe, especially those at our own helm.
Even alternate media US blogs about Libya and the monstrous amorality of that imperialist deadly and barbaric misadventure get short shrift at best, jingoistic contempt at worst, from readers.
Our CIA and black ops teams have been snuffing people of conscience out for years at home and abroad. The one kind of new U.S. governmental transparency that is actually working, ironically, is how less covert US administrations have come to behave in not hiding their ‘pragmatic’ lawlessness in snuffing out media-declared “bad guys” abroad.
I’d say Obama is our sloppiest, most ‘in your face’ president thus far (and considering W that is saying a lot, I know). How ironic he majored in the U.S. Constitution. The better to disrespect it and destroy it, apparently. Nixon and Bush were no saints but knew what they were doing was wrong in their heart of hearts I would venture. They worked in the shadows. Okay, Cheney et al., granted, have done a lot for the normalization of the horrifyingly and sadistically abnormal. But they, too, worked in the shadows, at least in the beginning.
Not our Obama. Does Obama even have a remotely working conscience? Or our present Congresspeople? The members of his administration? You know what they say about people who are guilt-free (and it ends with “-pathological”)? It seems all about gamesmanship with cutthroat rules. Maybe those shadow monsters like Nixon, Bush, Cheney and even our more “sainted” presidents and their dirty CIA deeds have made amorality totally embraceable now that we are in Obamaworld.
Let me insert here that Obama is sure capable of one feeling at times -- “embarrassment”. He sure as hell responds to that fast enough. “Impression management” is his prime motivator. But my take is that that is not a sensibility from the heart and soul and conscience. That is a sensibility of the ego. That is when the energy goes in to a hasty “cover up” of the unjust status quo rather than repairing the core problem in the system outright. Mendacity for image. Not courage for character and integrity.
Maybe those of us speaking up are protected by the vast numbers of authoritarian-following amoral zombies in the U.S. who don’t give a damn that their tax dollars and passive authorization enables unspeakable crimes to be perpetrated on human lives globally and domestically. And they trust the personality amiability of the likes of Obama and Clinton and other pimped-out tools of the oligarchs especially those reassuring cowards in the corporate media.
How PICKY I am being now and un-Amurrikan to bring up assassinations by our presidents (or their roles as primary accessories to murder) on foreign ‘demonized’ bad guys such as Gaddafi. What a Pollyanna girl scout asserting that “two wrongs don’t make a right” and, oh, let’s see, that maybe enabling and celebrating sodomy with a knife on a long time head of state before his brutal “snuff out” is not the way to go.
“Wow!” nervous laughter upon witnessing the brutalization of Gaddafi. “We came, we saw, HE DIED,” later sayeth a chuckling Hillary Clinton. Speaking of embarrassment, she sure as hell embarrassed and enraged me as a US citizen committed to morality.
PICKY PICKY PICKY?
Who gives a serious sh*t about the Geneva Conventions about POWs not being killed. About the real essence of the UN mandate that got twisted so Libya under cover of the “Arab spring spirit” could be destroyed for the aggrandizement of the US and NATO supported international business cartels. Or are we down to just one very potent cartel at this point?
NO FLY ZONE? That means no fly zone for the country the faux-good guy Western powers are bombing the sh*t out of in the name of humanitarianism. NO FLY ZONE means plenty of elbow room for the no-boots-on-the-ground drones from Nevada to incinerate or attempt to their fish in a barrel, civilians be damned and trust the media will minimize that, and the heavy latest designer weapons of those civilized western nations of NATO (80% American) to decimate a country.
International law never seemed to seriously bother the Republicans and sure as hell doesn’t bother the NEW AND BLOOD THIRSTY, PRAGMATIC Democrats in this NEW, CHILLING, ORWELLIAN WORLD ORDER. Well, except for an oddball, occasionally, like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich in Congress. What are they thinking swimming upstream in the name of international morality?
Most of us in the United States undergo cognitive dissonance on a daily basis from the disinformation overwhelming us from the corporate media and the lying lips of our politicians. We need to stay unsettled within this state of distress, that is, not be seduced to sleep, and to keep calling out lawlessness. Otherwise such barbarism and sadism and divine right of faux-democratic representatives really fascist dictators will be completely normalized especially to our younger generations coming down the infrastructure-be-damned (we have too much international killing to do) pike!
[cross-posted at correntewire and sacramento for democracy]

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D*mn, LibbyLiberalNYC, aniwar.com had a GREAT article on many of the facets You covered here, today, but I decided to keep my focus on the rogue state and the godfather.


-R-
facism. law and justice back seat to desperation - the need to please...WTF? i agree strongly. it is our duty to stand up for justice .
as I was joking to a friend, khaddafy was taken off the Approved Dictator List.
re orwellianism, Im gonna write on that soon.
the USWarmachine has become the 4th branch of the govt under the fig leaf of the Executive & the passive enabling & supine spinelessness of the congress/judiciary.....
Look at this spinning circle... you will soon be in a deep trance. Actually knowing you, you rabid beautiful freak, you will not be entranced. Okay...

"Muammar Gaddafi’s barbaric murder on October 20, 2011 was a war crime. It violated the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 and it violated the UN Security Council Resolution #1973 of 2011.
Will it be seriously investigated and prosecuted?"

Come on Libby, the Libyans did THAT and we have footage to prove it! I doubt we will prosecute Libyan citizens who have been killed and tortured by other Libyan citizens for killing their dictator.

It is not even our call to enter into that "specific action".

And all right woman, you asked for it. I'm going to send you something via the private sector and it will make you hate America so much but instead you will hate me for sending it to you. Nah... you'll just barf. I apologize in advance. I have a present for you.

BTW I am going to [R] even though you know I am on a different bar stool regarding this discussion. Why the [R]? Because no matter how much we disagree on somethings, your rage is what makes volcanoes so beautiful and the lava flow so forcefully.
from James Petras, a good article on the depressing failures of the shallow and bloody Obama doctrine. The following on Libya:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29667.htm

"The Libyan war marks the key imperial formula for retaining Obama’s imperial pretensions. The pretext for the war was just as phony as the cause bellicose in Iraq: in place of weapons of mass destruction, in Libya charges of genocide and rape were fabricated. A UN resolution claiming the right to militarily intervene to “protect civilians” was cooked up, and NATO launched an 8 month war based on nearly 30,000 air attacks, to overthrow the established government and destroy the economy. Obama’s Libyan policy was based on air and naval bombardment and Special Forces advisers; the use of a mercenary army and client ex-pats as the ‘new leaders’; a multi-lateral coalition of European empire builders (NATO) and Gulf state petrol-oligarchs. In contrast to Iraq and Afghanistan sustained massive air attacks took the place of a large invasion army. Already Obama’s military strategists have embraced and promulgated the Libyan experience as a new “Obama doctrine” for successfully rolling back independent Arab regimes and movements. Despite massive propaganda efforts to puff up the role of the mercenary ‘rebels’, the fact is that Gadhafi loyalists were only defeated by the combined air power of the NATO military command.

"Obama-Clinton’s celebration of the Libyan victory is premature: the means to victory involved the thorough destruction of the economy ,from ports to irrigation systems to roads and hospitals; the disarticulation of the labor force, with the forced flight of hundreds of thousands of sub-Sahara African workers and North African professionals. In other words it was a “pyrrhic victory”: Washington defeated an adversary it has not won a viable state.

"Even more serious, Washington’s client mercenary ground forces include an amalgam of fundamentalist, tribal, gangster, opportunist clan and neo-liberal operators who have few interests in common .And all are armed and ready to carve up competing fiefdoms. The parallel is with Afghanistan where the US armed and financed drug traffickers, clan chiefs, war lords and fundamentalists to fight the secular pro-Soviet regime. Subsequent to destroying the regime, the same forces turned against the US and proceeded to spread a kind of pan-Islamic mobilization against pro-US client states and the US military presence throughout South-Central Asia, the Gulf states, the Middle East and North Africa.

"Obama’s Libyan formula of using disparate mercenaries to achieve short term military success has boomeranged. Islamic fundamentalist militias and contrabandists are sending tons of ground to air missiles, machine guns and automatic rifles seized from Gadhafi’s arms depots to Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and all points east, west, south and north."

SO WE DESTROYED A COUNTRY AND LEFT A BLOODY CIVIL WAR MESS.
Thanks for the comments, guys.

antiwar.com -- thanks for reminder of that, mark. chris floyd of empire burlesque is a really good site, also.

snowden, "the need to please" ... you mean Obama? if that is the case with him, it is really tragic for both him and us. Whether he is an authoritarian or an authoritarian follower, he is destroying human lives.

vzn, EXACTLY, gaddafi was "our bastard" until he wasn't and then he was dead meat. no loyalty in pragmatic D.C. or the Pentagon or the CIA clearly.

Dear Charlie, WE ARE CULPABLE RE GADDAFI! WE ARE ACCESSORIES TO HIS MURDER. We and NATO were even involved with the stoppage of the Gaddafi convoy! Prisoners no matter who they are once they become prisoners are not to be subject to summary execution! We got to see exactly who US and NATO were enabling.

This powerful statement from glen ford of BAR:

http://blackagendareport.com/content/butchering-gaddafi-america’s-crime

"Last week the whole world saw, and every decent soul recoiled, at the true face of NATO’s answer to the Arab Spring. An elderly, helpless prisoner [GADDAFI] struggled to maintain his dignity in a screaming swirl of savages, one of whom thrusts a knife up his rectum. These are Europe and America’s jihadis in the flesh. In a few minutes of joyously recorded bestiality, the rabid pack undid every carefully packaged image of NATO’s “humanitarian” project in North Africa – a horror and revelation indelibly imprinted on the global consciousness by the brutes’ own cell phones."

Bill Van Auken, wsws asserted Gaddafi was captured while fleeing his hometown of Sirte. Sirte had been brutally bombarded for a month by the so-called rebels that destroyed the city and killed and wounded scores and scores of civilians.

"Indeed, barely 48 hours before the lynching of Gaddafi, the US secretary of state had flown into Tripoli, where she declared that the Libyan leader should be “captured or killed” as soon as possible."

Gaddafi’s convoy was attacked first by a Predator drone, operated from an airbase in Nevada. Then French fighter jets dropped 2 500 pound bombs on the vehicles.

SAS British forces “advisors” helped the rebels track Gaddafi down.

The Obama/Clinton doctrine is a BLOODY disaster!!!

Charlie, thanks for whatever you are sending me and the [r]. Very accepting and embracing of you!!! Looking forward to more exchanges! best, libby
“Wow!” nervous laughter upon witnessing the brutalization of Gaddafi. “We came, we saw, HE DIED,” later sayeth a chuckling Hillary Clinton. Speaking of embarrassment, she sure as hell embarrassed and enraged me as a US citizen committed to morality.


Embarrassing, embarrassed... yes, for decades

for instance........ (almost two decades now)
to have to
spend hours explaining to a young man
in Dominica...

(he wanted to know
where all this violence was going
and where from...)

he asked, staring at the white face
very close, and
serious, dead earnest too

I think he just came down to bring
some "julie" mangos
or something, into town, and then he was to head back up
again

do you know how poor Dominica is, everyone?
....and I had to try... to try
((("I!"))) you understand,
because it was me just went in to buy some matches or something,
something to light the stove with,
to cook some rice get on with living get out of the rain a minute like everyone else normal, like him

but no, instead
I guess as some sort of unwilling unwitting unpaid service to the US
government
...spending yet again, time,
another hour, with some hapless foreign soul

trying to explain that particular brand of sickness ,
sadism, cynicism,
of the country I was still a sad sack citizen of
then

I felt so very lonely in those times
imagine
to have to explain or
apologize
for your country!!!????

to have to hope to convey
to the stranger with trusting but sad world weary eyes

"but, I'm not them..."
believing in... I hope
as I walked out into the dark whisper

watched him walking away with his razor sharp cutlass
on his shoulder
inverted, poignantly expressed. thank you.

"(he wanted to know
where all this violence was going
and where from...)"

... you know when I was little hearing about Hitler and the exterminations and the Ann Frank story I figured there was only one very very very evil leader named Hitler and this leader scared everyone, EVERYONE in the whole country, and they didn't want to do what he said but everyone did it out of fear, HE made them do stuff, somehow he had all this power, but what happened when he went to sleep? Couldn't they overcome him if he were that evil but released his vigilance for that? How did he do it? How did this one man make everyone else whom I naively thought were decent people (back when I thought 99.9% of the world was decent) do cruel things to people. It was all about him and his cruelty alone. And of course, I denied that this could ever happen in my own country, of course. The older I got, I realized it wasn't just Hitler, it was other people, too, in that country, joining in to the evil. But I trusted that in my own country the Hitler horror would and could somehow never happen. Then I heard more and more of the "good Germans" and the power of DENIAL and propaganda.

Exceptionalism and denial and naivete about the heart of darkness, the lower selves of people, lurking in us all admittedly, that can at first stifle our own sense of morality, awareness and/or courage, and we co-exist amidst the growing spiritual crimes, endure the horrifying cognitive dissonance, the alarms going off of evil and horror within ourselves but we numb out more and more to them, sacrifice our own souls and betray our characters for the numbness, and we don't collectively rise to rally to call evil out and fight it.

"Thou shalt not kill" ... especially so basic and so obvious. And the gamesmen and gameswomen who treat lives so monstrously cheaply call on "team loyalty" and "national cronyism" to induce an entire majority of a country to ignore the profoundly unignorable, to rationalize the horrors, and not to speak of the profoundly unspeakable, or accept the lying words that blanket the reality and demonize the targets of our governmental evil. To induce all of us collectively to join in as accessories to murder. To join the ranks of what Scott Peck calls them, the "people of the lie." I think of Bradley Manning, caged, who had a front row seat to the military evil and the front row "people of the lie" crucify him and many of those in the cheap seats, so very many, simply ignore him or vilify him obtusely, with no attention to the evidence of evil he produced for them at such great personal risk.

Bullying of children is a problem in America. Well, hell, why not? It sure is a problem among the adult population, too. Now it knows more chillingly less personal widespread dimensions, like mass economic terrorism to our own and military terrorism of those outside our national neighborhood.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29666.htm

from press tv:

"A report released by the United Nations in June 2010 called the drone attacks part of a "strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability" and warned that they were contributing to an erosion of longstanding international rules governing warfare. It urged states to identify publicly the rules of international law believed to provide a basis for any attempted targeted killings as well as the rationale for deciding to kill instead of capture individuals. CNN

"The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on March 16, 2010 demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas. The ACLU made an initial FOIA request for information on the drone program in January. ACLU

"In a June 2010 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions, said that the growing use of armed drones by the United States was undermining global constraints on the use of military force. NY Times

"According to a report by the New York Times (May 2010), the Obama administration changed a new manual on military commissions rules to accommodate its illegal drone program. Under the old rules, "murder in violation of the laws of war" was defined as killings by people who did not meet "the requirements for lawful combatancy," which would have suggested that CIA drone operators - who are not members of the military and do not wear a military uniform - could be charged with war crimes for killing individuals using drones. ACLU

"The American Civil Liberties Union maintains that the U.S. program of targeting and killing people, sometimes far from any battlefield, with little oversight or transparency is illegal regardless of the military commissions rules. ACLU"
WHAT IS OBAMA THINKING???? Lesser of 2 evils? Sending tax dollars to strengthen torturers and murderers of dissidents?

From Steve Zunes:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/09-2

"The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, in a move initiated by the Obama administration, has voted to waive Bush-era human rights restrictions on military aid to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan, one of the most brutal and repressive regimes on the planet. The lifting of the restrictions, now part of the Foreign Operations bill, is before the full Senate and appears to have bipartisan support. The Obama administration has indicated that it intends to provide taxpayer-funded military assistance to Uzbekistan once the legislation passes both houses of Congress.

"Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov

"Torture is endemic in Karimov’s Uzbekistan, where his regime has banned all opposition political parties, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human rights and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually taken as many as two million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literally boiled alive.

"In reaction to the Obama administration’s efforts, 20 human rights, labor, consumer, and other groups signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying “We strongly urge you to oppose passage of the law and not to invoke this waiver.” The signers encouraged the administration “to stand behind your strong past statements regarding human rights abuses in Uzbekistan” and not move toward “business as usual” with that regime.

"Signatories included the AFL-CIO, Amnesty International USA, and Human Rights Watch, as well as organizations with close ties to the foreign policy establishment like Freedom House and the International Crisis Group."
I am waiting for more of our conversation at the dive bar... get on it girl. Order me a vodka drink with vodka and a shot of vodka in it… or whatever is on tap. We need to take a closer look at this potential Comedic Genius Herman Cain. We need to investigate Maddow's claims.

At least just for a moment... cuz' you need a break from fighting for all 99% of us (although, glad to have you fighting!)... but let's fool around and get REALLY stoopid for a little while.

WEEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAA
Something Cain inspired? Something clownish.
Oh I don't know. But I'm feeling so giddy…
Gotta run now…
So-called liberal media are taking care of the Republican clowns, Charlie! And very witty people such as yourself on os, et al. And they sure need to be taken to task, they so deserve it and it awes they are taken so seriously by some right voters.

That is why I am going after the SINS of those in power now who get a pass under the "lesser of two evils" propaganda racket! Because we get seduced into trusting THEM since the OTHERS are so disgustingly outrageous and incompetent it seems the Dems are saner and more empathetic and MORAL, but that is not true. Relatively speaking. THEY ARE BETRAYING US. THEY ARE NOT EMPATHETIC, JUST SPIN CLEVER. GOOD U.S. GOVERNMENT JUST DOES NOT EXIST RIGHT NOW!!!! Hell, I am close to promoting Ron Paul! Domestically he worries me, of course, but he talks sanity about the war!!! I haven't watched Maddow in ages. She was minimizing the war sins and apologizing for Obama. GE paycheck pragmatic influence.

Gingrich goes after the liberal media and the faux-liberal media refers to itself as a liberal media and gets defensive. HAH. I WISH WE HAD LIBERAL MEDIA! WE HAVE POSERS!

Sorry, Charlie. I am just not a fun person any more. Not when it comes to politics!

Rick Perry doing top 10 list on Letterman. Maybe that will be enuf to get to be prez instead of doing his president homework.

libby :)

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