Listening to Lara Logan

Listening to Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs and 60 Minutes Correspondent on the Colbert Report sell not only her 3-part Special Report on CBS but throwing an impassioned (and obviously well-rehearsed) pitch for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan to the US people.

I am physically revolted by the murderous audacity of her appeal to continued slaughter and ruin in that devastated country.

Ms Logan, a South African, tells us that what “appears to be a wavering of US resolve, smells like victory to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

I must less-than-elegantly observe that her ‘wavering resolve’ line smells a lot like a blend of the verminous horse-shit that reporters and government spokes-people were spoon-feeding us during the war in South-east Asia and the pre-digested bull-twaddle of a time-share salesman trying desperately to close the deal.
This blatant propagandizing of a war increasingly unpopular with the American people (not to mention the Afghani people) by a member of what sadly passes as the Fourth Estate in the US can only be reviled and vilified by civilized, intelligent witnesses.

This despicable display of war-mongering by one who shows no sign of professional journalistic objectivity must be seen as nadir point but for the fact that the New York Times is also riding the pale horse of war.

In a review of Robert Greenwald’s documentary, ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ which opened in New York City last week, Andy Webster complained about there being too many dead and maimed in the film. He further kvetched in his thinly veiled editorial that what Mr Greenwald presents in his documentary “again and again, are terrifying images of children”. Then in a turn that would be the envy of The Exorcist special FX team, he snidely quips “Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.”
One must stand dumb-founded at the callous, calculating disregard for human suffering so brazenly, disdainfully displayed by Mr Webster and his editors.

Now consider this: it is a shop-worn axiom – an article of faith - that the New York Times and CBS News are purveyors of ‘the liberal media bias’. What an evil friggin’ joke. Yes, bleeding hearts one and all. Bleeding from self-inflicted wounds to their professional integrity, whining and blustering as the circumstance dictates while thousands upon thousands of children are murdered by Minuteman missiles and Predator drones.

Thanks, Lara, Andy, for your fair, even-handed objective reporting of world events. Your checks from the Pentagon will be deposited directly to your accounts as agreed.

http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=251054

http://rebelreports.com/post/205318314/ny-times-whines-that-rethink-afghanistan-film-is-not

Scalia's Thumb on the Scales

The best fake news program ever, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, alerted me to Lesley Stahl’s interview of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on 60 Minutes. I watched the first half of the interview and have not the stomach to watch the second half. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/60minutes/main4040290_page3.shtml

What I saw and heard has haunted me; my dreams have been pervaded with rebuttals, retorts and reproaches. I have been stricken with nausea brought on not only by Ms Stahl’s fawning, gushing school-girl act but the pompous arrogance of Justice Scalia and his school-boy debate team games of rhetoric.

I’ll leave the legalistic punditry to others to parse but I will posit that El Nino’s description of himself as a ‘Constitutional originalist’- someone who insists the US Constitution be viewed through the same myopic, racist, theocratic lens as was used by most of the Founding Fathers and the framers of the constitution - is just another word-game (of which Scales is quite fond as was shown in the interview).

Now, I’m all for the Founding Fathers. Please consider, however, that with few exceptions, they were all wealthy, educated, white male Protestants of western European decent. Not exactly what anyone would call a democratic cross-section of society, then or now. They were visionary, progressive, brave men but they were also men of their own times. Times have changed. Not many politicians and statesmen in modern America could own slaves, for instance.

Scalia is a firmly out-spoken opponent of what is called the ‘Living Constitution’ whereby the modern connotations of terms such as liberty, freedom, and cruel and unusual punishment are the accepted norm when reading the document. The term ‘originalist’ serves to obfuscate the fact that Scalia is a ‘literalist’ and a fundamentalist who claims to have the only correct interpretation of the fundamentals much like the Bible-belt preachers that insist the world was created in 7 days, 5 to 10,000 years ago.

It must be remembered that ‘Scales’ was appointed by Ronnie the Communicator at the height of the Iran-Contra era, a time when Nicaragua was the devil at our door, when selling drugs to buy arms for a private army was a ‘cool idea’, when Grenada and Panama loomed threateningly and Ronnie, Ollie, Bush the Elder, Schultz and Henry the K were hell-bent on destroying the ‘Evil Empire’ along with our economy. This context must be kept in mind so that the absurdities which ‘Scales’ so charmingly espouses might be clearly seen as balderdash in high resolution. That he is a fundamentalist and a reductionist should place him under the same heading as most other fundamentalists – a nutter to be carefully monitored. (To be quite honest, I have had my fill of fundamentalists. I can only hope that there is a growing number of people who feel the same.) It is a shame and a travesty that he is a senior member if the Supreme Court.

He offers arguments that are both specious and facetious while posturing as a playful wise-guy dismissive of his inferiors. He claims his own position of authority as support for his arguments; i.e. ‘I am Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, therefore, ipso facto, I am right.’ I can’t help but ask how this guy made it onto the Supreme Court or even on a high school debate team. My friends would pick him apart if he tried to pull any of his malarkey without the smoke and mirrors of his lofty position. Too bad Ms Stahl was so ga-ga over meeting him that she left her journalistic cred and her ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ in her other suit.

Here’s in an extended excerpt from Ms Stahl’s interview with Justice Scalia. El Nino’s own words during the interview reveal the flaws in his arguments regarding the 2000 election scandal and the current controversy regarding torture. The interview opens with an appearance by Justice Scalia at the Oxford University Union and a very cleverly worded question from an Oxford student regarding the 2000 US presidential election.

“Of all the cases that have come before him on the court, Bush v. Gore may have been the most controversial. It has been reported that he played a pivotal role in urging the other justices to end the Florida recount, thereby handing the 2000 election to George Bush. The subject came up at the Oxford Union.”

"Supposing yourself as a Supreme Court justice were granted the power to appoint the next president of the United States, who would you pick and why? And would he or she be better than your last choice?" a student asked Scalia.

"You wanna talk about Bush versus Gore. I perceive that," he replied. "I and my court owe no apology whatever for Bush versus Gore. We did the right thing. So there!"

“So there!”

‘I’m right and that’s all that needs to be said.’ A very fitting rebuttal for a Supreme Court Justice to make at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of learning, don’t you think? Then, Ms Stahl’s interview begins.

"People say that that decision was not based on judicial philosophy but on politics," Stahl asks.

"I say nonsense," Scalia says.

Was it political?

"Gee, I really don’t wanna get into - I mean this is - get over it. It's so old by now. The principal issue in the case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn't even close. The vote was seven to two," Scalia says.

Moreover, he says it was not the court that made this a judicial question.

"It was Al Gore who made it a judicial question. It was he who brought it into the Florida courts. We didn't go looking for trouble. It was he who said, 'I want this to be decided by the courts.' What are we supposed to say? 'Oh, not important enough,'" Scalia jokes.

Here, El Nino jokes to cover the simple, obvious truth while blaming the victim. What else is one expected to do when confronted with a matter of legality except to take the matter to court? It is as if Scalia would deride Al Gore’s right and the rights of the American people to a court hearing to insure that is justice done. (In this instance, injustice to our republic was done, IMHO.)

Scalia’s position is preposterous. To determine legal matters, to render judicial decisions, such matters are precisely what our courts are for. The courts were the only proper place for Gore to go to rectify such an important legal matter as the sanctity of votes and an honest, accurate count thereof. Does ‘Scales’ think Al should have just slunk away with so much riding on an accurate count? Whatever his answer, he places the onus of the infamous decision in Gore’s lap.

Now back to the interview:

"It ended up being a political decision" Stahl points out.

"Well you say that. I don't say that," Scalia replies.

"You don’t think it handed the election to George Bush?" Stahl asks.

"Well, how does that make it a political decision?" Scalia asks.

Duh!

"It decided the election," Stahl says.

"If that’s all you mean by it, yes," Scalia says.

"That’s all I mean by it," Stahl says.

"Oh, ok. I suppose it did. Although you should add to that that it would have come out the same way, no matter what," Scalia says.

‘No matter what?’

Does ‘Scales’ actually believe that there was no other outcome to consider in the 2000 election? Bush won and that was that; foregone conclusion at that point in the game? No bit of lingering uncertainty regarding the thousands of uncounted, mis-counted and ultimately discounted votes by the citizens of Florida who were in effect, dis-enfranchised in a presidential election?

How is it that this man made it through law school? Or even through a basic course in logic?

The interview now enters El Nino’s views on the matter of torture.

"I don't like torture," Scalia says. "Although defining it is going to be a nice trick.”

Well, Nino, one attempt was made in 1948, by the General Assembly of the United Nations following the horrific abuses of World War II in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 5 states: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." This ban on torture and other ill-treatment has subsequently been incorporated into the extensive network of international and regional human rights treaties. It is contained in Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratified by 153 countries, including the United States in 1992, and in the Convention against Torture or Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the Convention against Torture), ratified by 136 countries, including the United States in 1994. It is also codified in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, and the American Convention on Human Rights.

(For information regarding laws defining and prohibiting torture please visit the Human Rights Watch web site. http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/11/TortureQandA.htm#What )

Evidently, these declarations, conventions, covenants, and codes are deficient in the view of Scales Scalia. Perhaps he prefers the views of Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo as expressed in the infamous ‘Torture Memo’. http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4583256&page=1

“But who's in favor of it?” Scalia continues. “Nobody. And we have a law against torture. But if the - everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution," he says.

"If someone's in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression 'cruel and unusual punishment,' doesn't that apply?" Stahl asks.

"No, No," Scalia replies.

"Cruel and unusual punishment?" Stahl asks.

"To the contrary," Scalia says. "Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don't think so."

This beggars the imagination. Scalia tries to equate ‘punishment’ to ‘torture’ in the attempt, as a literalist, to undermine the implied Constitutional ban on torture. A quick look at a decent dictionary will reveal that punishment has the additional meaning of ‘rough handling or mistreatment’ as well as penalty for infraction. Torture is used as punishment and punishment, generally speaking, is a form of torture. (Punishment is never intended to be pleasant, after all.) Once again, Scalia’s attempted resort to tricks of rhetoric is feeble, hollow and even devoid of the lexical grounding necessary for such a cheap trick to pass logically.

Fortunately for the charming El Nino, the formulation of logical discourse is not Ms Stahl’s forte. She continues moony-eyed.

"Well, I think if you are in custody, and you have a policeman who's taken you into custody…," Stahl says.

"And you say he's punishing you?" Scalia asks.

"Sure," Stahl replies.

"What's he punishing you for? You punish somebody…," Scalia says.

"Well because he assumes you, one, either committed a crime…or that you know something that he wants to know," Stahl says.

"It's the latter. And when he's hurting you in order to get information from you…you don’t say he's punishing you. What’s he punishing you for? He's trying to extract…," Scalia says.

"Because he thinks you are a terrorist and he's going to beat the ‘you-know-what’ out of you…," Stahl replies.

"Anyway, that’s my view," Scalia says. "And it happens to be correct."

What view? He only obstructed discourse in this segment of the interview. His bludgeon of choice is to laughingly pooh-pooh the half-hearted challenges offered by Ms Stahl. He gave no credible argument on either topic, the 2000 election debacle or the torture scandal highlighted by Abu Ghraib. Since he was stammering and painting himself into a corner on this one, he sought his last refuge and fell back on his status of authority.

What a major Dick!

If Scales is “one of the most prominent legal thinkers of his generation” , it’s easy to see why the Constitution has been gutted and why the US is in such deep doo-doo.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/60minutes/main4040290.shtml

http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html

The Never-ending War Story - the Prequel

6 months before the US invaded Iraq, Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, were building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion.

The PBS documentary ‘Private Warriors’ presented this fact in June, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/
(Chapter three, ‘Embedded with KBR’; at 5:10)

To repeat:

The decision to invade Iraq had been made and Halliburton had been hired to provide logistical support for an armed assault of Iraq long before the fabricated evidence re: WMDs and Saddam/Al-Qaida connections were presented by the White House to the US people and their greedy, jello-spined representatives.

It might seem beyond credibility, given what we know now, that neither the director, Tim Mangini, nor producers, Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith thought to pursue a line of questioning pertaining to this fact in this ‘hard look at private contractors’. Too off-topic perhaps. (IMHO, the documentary quickly descends into a ‘human interest piece’. Perhaps the tragic story of ex-Navy Seal, Scotty ‘the Bod’ Helvenston and others was too alluring. Helvenston was one of the Blackwater mercenaries killed, burned and strung up from the bridge in Falluja.)

Call me naïve, but I would have thought that drilling to the core of the investigation to fathom the grand reason why we were truly at war in Iraq and in need of all these private contractors would have been the preferred tact to take. (Call it 20/20 hindsight, if you wish.)

If the reporter was correct, sometime in September, 2002, 6 months before the Bush Administration bullied the US into violating international law by invading the sovereign nation of Iraq on March 20, 2003, contracts had been signed and contractors were on the ground building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion. This presumably included the ‘permanent bases’, and quite likely improvements on what is to be the largest embassy compound in the World. A ‘Vatican City’ to serve as the base of future operations in the Middle-east. Most certainly, they were busy building some of the more than 60 sites that KBR operated in Iraq at the time of this documentary.

In his January 28, 2003, state of the Union address, Bush denounced Saddam as “the dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons” and listed vast quantities of biological and chemical weapons. What Dubya didn’t tell us is that his cabal of war-criminals had already bargained away any peaceful, diplomatic solutions in a no-bid contract to Halliburton/KBR, three months earlier.

Lest we forget, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, a 26-year veteran of the agency, revealed to CBS’ Ed Bradley on ‘60-minutes’ which aired on April 23, 2006, that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director, George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States and was reportedly paid more than $100,000 by the CIA — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/60minutes/main1527749.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0321-09.htm

Mr Drumheller went on to say that the administration didn’t care about this revelation, no matter the source. Of course not, by that time, in September, 2002, the real decisions had been made by the people who truly matter, the high mucky-mucks of corporate America, and the ink was drying on the dotted line. The gravy-train was leaving the station with a full head of steam and no red flag was going to stop it.

You can almost hear an echo from the addled, collective brain-pan of Bush’s Inner Circle, ‘We can’t renege on the deals we’ve made with our friends at Halliburton. That wouldn’t be kosher. A deal is a deal.’ One must suppose that the ‘finder’s fee’ on the estimated umpteen billion dollars in no-bid, cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton/KBR would be a handsome one. And if one had similar connections with other corporations that supplied materiel and services to Halliburton and KBR at inflated cost, one could wolf down the slop at both ends of the trough. Hog heaven, as they say.

That’s a mighty temptation. Mountains of cash up front and on the back end, lots of powerful friends who’d be happy to give you a corner office, a princely salary and a diamond parachute when you conclude your ‘service’ in the US government.

Beyond the dreams of avarice.

And all you have to do is undermine the Constitution, betray your solemn oath to uphold and defend the precepts of that document, lie to the US citizens you swore to serve, deceive the world with bald-faced falsehoods and steel yourself to live with the fact that the blood of thousands or even tens of thousands of human beings are on your greedy hands.

Such a deal.

So, General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, when can we expect to bring home our troops and our contractors? When will this war end?

The answer is simple.

The war will end when Dubya, Dicky-boy, Donnie the Rum, Condi, Wolfie, and all those of their sickening ilk can force themselves from the slop of the trough.

Then again, I’m an optimist.

Post Script:
I am very sympathetic to Mr Helveston's friends and family members. I also can understand the reasoning revealed by Mrs Katy Helveston, Scotty’s mom when she told PBS,”When you’ve been in Special Forces for 13, 14 years, you’re trained to do one thing. And there’s not a whole lot of jobs out there for people trained to kill.” Being a private contractor seemed to be a solution to the deteriorating US economy for many of the 10,000 who were in Iraq in 2005.