Ermordung durch Dekret

One of the most frustrating policies of the Democratic Party in general and the Obama Administration in particular is the United States’ continued involvement in War Crimes.

War Crimes?!

Well, yes actually. The kind which we executed scores of Germans and Japanese for after the Second World War. You know, the good one where we saved the world from fascism? Surely they mentioned something about it in school, it was in all the books.

Now being 120+ years old I’m cursed with a personal remembrance of nearly everything. It seems mere days ago I was chatting with some brothers outside a Dayton Bicycle Shop saying “There’s no future in heavier than air flight and besides, there’s this guy named Gustav Whitehead in Connecticut who’s already done it.”

I said I remembered it, not that I was (w)right.

Still, even without History books (which are mostly true), anyone born before 1995 or so ought to be able to clearly remember 8 years ago no matter how short your attention span.

You see there was this evil guy named George Bush and his heartless henchman Cheney who decided that it was not only a good idea to bomb the crap out of Staten Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut because Mafia! (and that pesky Whitehead, who knows how he could threaten the Homeland with his motorized kites), but just for good measure take out Minnesota too. Jesse Ventura was so crazy he didn’t even belong to a political party and he was developing a devastating finishing move- The ‘Body’ Breaker.

Democrats loved this.

After Minneapolis was reduced to ashes and sectarian violence had broken out between the Lutheran Church of America and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod some Democrats thought maybe George was not such a good deciderer and most voters agreed.

In fact they agreed so much that in the far off dim dusty distant past of 2008 a majority of the Democratic Party thought that Barack Obama ought to be their Presidential candidate because as a Illinois State Senator he said he thought regime change in Minnesota was a bad idea and Hillary Clinton as a United States Senator voted for it.

Friends, he was as good as his word. When the remaining Norwegian Bachelor Farmers told him they’d start arresting soldiers who were shooting Minnesotans for amusement we left. Not because shooting Minnesotans was bad mind you, but arresting soldiers was.

And they stayed away until those damn Presbyterians and Anabaptists started moving in from Wisconsin. The Lutherans didn’t stand a chance without boots on the ground.

Of course we kept pounding away at the Tri-State area (except Manhattan, because rich people) where enemy combatants including women, children, pregnant women, elderly of both sexes, and basically anything that lived, moved, or breathed kept engaging in Mafia-like activities such as going to weddings, funerals, christenings and other religious services, and eating. I mean, I know it’s too much to expect you to actually read The Godfather but there are 3 damn movies! Get a Netfix account you skinflint!

In fact suspicious signs of Mafia-like behavior were found in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts so we were soon bombing them too. Nevada was a serious threat, there was all this military hardware parked in the desert. We came. We saw. He died. Sodomized with a bayonet because that’s just how we say hello here in the good old US of A.

Why pretty soon you couldn’t find a town or village that was not in need of total surveillance. To keep the ‘bad’ element out you know, nothing to see here, move along as if everything is normal.

Because it is.

All of this happened with Democratic assistance in Congress, with a Democratic White House for half of it, and because they are Democrats, ‘Good’ Democrats, just like ‘Good’ Germans, ignore the stench of the ovens and the trains arriving full and leaving empty.

Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. … I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent — as permanent as the war debts. Robert H. Jackson

I am under no illusions, nor should you be, about the purposes of Political Party organizations. They exist solely and simply to win elections. Loyalty is rewarded. Logic, consistency, ethics, morality- keep walking. We don’t need your kind, we want soldiers who will stand up and salute. Sieg Heil!

You may not realize it about me, but I’m a political pragmatist. On this site I represent the ‘conservative’ point of view in that I’m in favor of using electoral means and peaceful direct action to bend the system to the will of the people instead of hoping for radical rule changes. I’d much rather ‘own’ the Democratic Party that attempt to replace it simply because I’m old and lazy. I’ve done it both ways.

This gets me into trouble with ‘purity’ people who (rightly) point out that Bernie is just as bad as Hillary on foreign policy. Yes, but he’s good on economics and Hillary isn’t good on anything. Trump is a racist buffoon. Yes, but he cuts the throat of the anti-entitlement pro-bankster crowd and unlike Cruz is willing to deal instead of destroying.

It is a sad situation to be in and I sympathize with and probably will join those who vote Jill Stein.

Likewise I understand people who say it would be better if John “Wet Start” McCain had become President in 2008 (despite Caribou Barbie) because at least it would have kept Democrats ‘honest’. You may be right, I have shaken Joe Lieberman’s hand and there isn’t an honest bone in his body- only limp wristed cartilage the better to ooze through the cracks.

I was at the launch of The Assassination Complex in Brooklyn. Yep, that was me in one of the 3 chairs next to the ‘Green Room’. Got a good view of everyone important’s backs as they waited to go on stage.

I’ll have some more dish about Greenwald’s Planet of the Apes and Dogs later, but I wanted to get to this-

Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald blast U.S. drone war and “assassination complex,” say liberals would never let a Republican get away with Obama’s crimes
by Ben Norton, Salon
Thursday, May 5, 2016 11:23 AM EST

Award-winning journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald warn the Obama administration’s “deadly legacy” has paved a dangerous path for a future of egregious abuse of executive power.

The Democratic president, they say, has gotten away with crimes and repressive policies that liberals never would have let a Republican carry out.

“The most significant aspect of what President Obama has done, regarding drones and regarding the so-called targeted killing program around the world, is that Obama has codified assassination as a central official component of American foreign policy,” Scahill said in an interview on Democracy Now
this week.

Obama “has implemented policies that a Republican probably would not have been able to implement, certainly not with the support that Obama has received from so many self-identified liberals,” he added.

In 2015 alone, the U.S. dropped at least 23,144 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries, many in which it has not officially declared war.

Scahill expressed doubts that, if a Republican wins the presidential election, MSNBC pundits and other liberals will maintain the same position on these very same policies.

Greenwald argued the same. Obama campaigned in 2007 on the destructive policies and undemocratic mindset of the Bush administration, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist recalled. Yet, once Obama became president, “he ended up not only embracing, but strengthening and increasing” these very same policies, continuing indefinite detention in Guantánamo and elsewhere and greatly expanding the drone program.

President Obama “has institutionalized a program where now we don’t only just imprison people without any charges or due process, we don’t just eavesdrop on them, which was one of his big critiques of the Bush administration, without first giving them due process or a trial, we now just target them for execution, for death, for a death penalty,” Greenwald added in the Democracy Now interview.

He pointed out the irony that, while Democrats have long opposed the death penalty in all cases, even when criminal defendants are given a full trial and assured all constitutional rights, the Democratic president “has embraced a policy that says that he can literally go around the world, target people for death anywhere in the world that he wants, including places where we’re not at war, including even American citizens, and simply eradicate their lives based on his order.”
…
“The Assassination Complex” is based on leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower that expose how destructive the secretive U.S. drone war has been. Some of the findings in this leak were released in October as The Drone Papers.

Among the many revelations in the book is that during a five-month period in a U.S. program in northeastern Afghanistan called Operation Haymaker, almost 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets.

Investigative journalists and researchers say hundreds of civilians have been killed in U.S. drone strikes, at the very least.

The Obama administration has released very little information about its drone program. As Scahill put it, “the covert drone program, for the majority of its lifespan, has been shrouded in secrecy.” It was only recently that the government pledged for the first time to release figures on the number of people it has killed.

In April, the president defended the drone program, insisting that, while there is “no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone strikes,” the program is justified, because “the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.”

Experts at the Council on Foreign Relations say the exact opposite is true.
…
Even the former director of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, the U.S. military unit that oversees the drone program, has acknowledged that it often does more damage than it does good. “The more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict,” admitted retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn.

Scahill emphasized this in his interview. “The U.S. is creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Rather than stopping terrorism, the U.S., through its drone program, is encouraging terrorism and providing terrorist organization with recruitment material, just as the Guantánamo prison serves as recruitment material for the people that the Obama administration claims it’s trying stop from conducting acts of terrorism,” he said.

“The most extraordinary aspect about” all of this, Greenwald added, “is that Democratic partisans, who were cheering [Obama’s] critiques in 2006 and 2007 and pretending to oppose this approach because it was a Republican who did it, switched completely on a dime.”

“The minute that President Obama embraced these policies, they, as public opinion polls show, completely switched how they think about all of these policies and started supporting them,” he explained.

Americans — and people throughout the world — will only continue to suffer the consequences of this in the future, Greenwald warned.

“What this has meant is that these policies have shifted from being just a right-wing, extremist, Republican framework into one that is fully bipartisan, and therefore will be institutionalized and has been strengthened for years, if not decades, to come, in a way that George Bush and Dick Cheney could only have dreamed of.“

Democracy Now

“The Assassination Complex”: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Probe Secret US Drone Wars in New Book

Jeremy Scahill: Clinton is Legendary Hawk, But Sanders Shouldn’t Get Pass on Role in Regime Change

“This Isn’t a War on Leaks, It’s a War on Whistleblowers”: Snowden Pens Foreword to New Scahill Book