Jeremy Scahill on GritTV

Beginning almost immediately after September 11th, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld essential segregated JSOC (about JSOC) from the rest of the military. And the idea there was that they were going to create a sort of stand-alone military force that would reply directly to the administration rather than the military chain of command. So essentially JSOC has an open classified mandate where they can take people — snatch then, they can carry out targeted assassination, and they also run their own bombing campaign inside of Pakistan, I’m told, that runs parallel to the CIA’s. And one of the reasons why this is significant is that all of the actions of the CIA have to be briefed to the so-called “Gang of Eight” — in the intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein and others — and these operations, I’m told, are not being briefed to the Congress.

In other words, while the United States States trumpets the rule of law, it is by and large a country that routinely circumvents any pesky law that stands in the way of profit, subjugation, or imperialism. (The scary thing is that, where Blackwater are concerned, the US military may actually agree with my sentiments.)

Jeremy Scahill has his own blog, and is an active twitterer.

(via YouTube)

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But it doesn’t require much of an imagination to realize that anyone seeking to bear arms in these times has a charred little hate cinder somewhere beneath their flag tattoo.

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Guess we learned a lesson from our stunning victory over Cuba. Meantime–and here’s the really interesting part–Khaled Meshal, head of the political bureau of Hamas, delivers a lucid address on his party’s stance on world affairs:

Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us – our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.
(via Electronic Intifada)

I never thought it would come to pass, but even Hamas makes the State Department sound like a band of petulant thugs.

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“The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists,” said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified.

Unfortunately, the military’s PR machine had suffered from what Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, spokesman for the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, classified as an “administrative error.” Namely, the quote was virtually identical to a quote released my the U.S. military on July 13:

“The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the children and all of Iraq,” said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified. “They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists.”

It’s easy enough to claim that the jingoese vomited from the U.S. war machine’s jabbering maw would surprise no one. To the contrary, Americans not only buy (in both senses of the word) into the government’s homespun fiction, but actively defend conquest thinly-veiled as a pursuit of freedom. Having to choose between righteous ignorance and so-called terrorism is no choice at all.

Actually, Donald Rumsfeld said it best:

…We’re dealing with people that are perfectly willing to, to lie to the world to attempt to further their case and to the extent people lie of, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility and one would think it wouldn’t take very for that to happen dealing with people like this.

Testify! From your clicking skull jaw to the war crimes tribunal’s ears, my brother.

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BeNow Inc., a Wakefield, Massachusetts marketing company will be managing the database, which contains such personal data on high school students as grade-point averages to ethnicity. Only now being disclosed in a notice under the Privacy Act, the database was actually created in 2003. Pentagon officials have stated that they did not initially realize such disclosure was required.

In its statements, the Pentagon added that anyone may opt out of the system “by providing detailed personal information that will be kept in a separate suppression file.” Can armbands be far behind?

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