Gonna be an ugly day today…

the whole series is here. This is literally days, possibly weeks, worth of reading.

It’s a crude attempt to send a message. It’s a threat. It is no coincidence that the right wingers chose April 19th to brandish/fetish their weapons: this is the anniversary of Tim McVeigh’s successful domestic terrorist attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Until 9/11, it was the worst terrorist attack on our soil in history. More than a hundred people, including 19 children, died because of the insane fruitcakes on the right, who whipped themselves into a paranoid frenzy, loaded a truck up with high nitrogen fertilizer, and set their homemade truck bomb off in a crowded office.

THAT is why these so-called “patriots” chose to march today. They want you to know that they have killed fellow Americans before, and they are only too happy to kill their countrymen again. So when you hear your local right wing radio station spout off today, or your conservative cousin sends you another chain email about “Obama the socialist nazi”, remember: they want THIS:

…to happen again.

They want THIS:

THAT is what the right wing stands for, nothing more and nothing less.

read Greenwald, now please:

As the video demonstrates, the soldiers in the Apache did not take a single step — including killing those unarmed men who tried to rescue the wounded — without first receiving formal permission from their superiors. Beyond that, the Pentagon yesterday — once the video was released — suddenly embraced the wisdom of transparency by posting online the reports of the so-called “investigations” it undertook into this incident (as a result of pressure from Reuters). Those formal investigations not only found that every action taken by those soldiers was completely justified — including the firing on the unarmed civilian rescuers — but also found that there’s no need for any remedial steps to be taken to prevent future re-occurence.

This is what our taxes pay for, and why I laugh when I hear conservatives pretend to be outraged about the cost of health insurance reform. The costs of our useless wars that never solve anything outstrip the cost of our puny reforms to our miserable health care system by an order of billions if not trillions.

No, the reason conservatives oppose real health care reform is that they prefer to see innocent people die. That is the sole reason for the existence of conservatives, and if you don’t believe that, ask yourself why we’re in Iraq, a country that never attacked the US and had nothing to do with 9/11.

Shameful. That’s the United States, that’s you and me. We’re murderers. What, you don’t think you are? Did you pay your taxes this year? Did you put gas in your car?

well guess what? You’re no better than Charles Manson, who like Uncle Sam also had other people do his dirty work for him.

My kid’s mom was evacuated from the World Trade Center that day. A guy I knew in high school died in the attack. My friend Claiborne’s brother was on his way to work at the WTC, when he saw the planes fly into the buildings, and couldn’t call his family to tell them he was alive. My friend Rupa’s boyfriend worked in the plaza, and walked across the city covered in ash and debris to the school where she worked so she’d know he was alive.

And you, you fat pompous fucking asshole, you want this to happen a second time? Because you’re pissing your pants over immigrants??

OK, I’ll take you up on that one: but only if the bombs are set off in YOUR house, with YOUR FAMILY inside, you fucking piece of shit. That way you can watch your loved ones perish, and then maybe you’ll know how the 9/11 victims’ families feel.

And that’s a highly qualified “maybe”, because quite frankly, I think you’re a sociopath and incapable of feeling anything other than your own persecution complex.

Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to usher in a McCain presidency.

The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, “impetuous” Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier,” the message said. “Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush.”

SITE Intelligence Group, based in Bethesda, Md., monitors the Web site and translated the message.

“If al-Qaida carries out a big operation against American interests,” the message said, “this act will be support of McCain because it will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida then will succeed in exhausting America till its last year in it.”

Ackerman notes McKKKain’s comments regarding Hamas:

mcKKKain: It’s just a fact…Hamas, apparently their North American spokesperson, is endorsing Senator Obama. You can make your own judgement from that. I don’t view that as anything but a statement of fact.

If you want to see more planes crashing into buildings, vote for McKKKain, the friend of international terrorism. And homegrown Nazis. And white supremacists. And nativists. And wingnuts. And secessionists. And creationists. And…

Ray’s laughing too. Great minds and all that…

What a shitty day.

10/26
Former Salvadoran army officer Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos, convicted for the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper and her 14-year-old daughter, was arrested by federal agents on October 18 in Los Angeles, California.

Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos, a sub-lieutenant in the notorious Atlacatl Battalion, took part in the November 16, 1989 massacre at the Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador. Less than a year before the brutal killings, Guevara Cerritos received military training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Murdered Jesuits in El Salvador

11/26
Ex-Chilean military officer Enrique Sandoval has confessed to the murder of the first underage victim of the military dictatorship in Chile, fourteen year old Carlos Faria Oyarce. The confession comes as part of a trial led by Judge Zepeda. Enrique Sandoval and Com. Lopez Almarza have been convicted for kidnapping and murder and could face prison sentences.

Carlos Faria Oyarce was kidnapped from his home in La Pincoya on October 13, 1973 and was killed execution style by three bullets to the head; his body was then burned and buried in an undisclosed location becoming one of Chile?s many disappeared and one of the 79 underage children who fell victim to the brutal regime led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. His body was found during an excavation in the West end of Santiago on July 30th, 2000.

A few months prior to the murder and the military coup of September 11, 1973, Enrique Sandoval had attended the Schools of the Americas, then located in Panama.

American nuns, murdered by death squads in El Salvador

and on it goes…

The vote was 214-203. I sure want to know which Pennsylvania Democrats voted to continue funding this abomination, this shameful school of murder.

Ah, that would be the odious Chris Carney, hometown hero Pat Murphy (polishing up his progressive cred, no doubt), Jack Murtha, and Joe “No Act Blue, I’m really sorry for my vote” Sestak.

Way to go guys, way to go! You voted to continue this

and this, and this

Warning: graphic, nsfw. The worst thing I have ever seen.

And as so many have said before me what digby says.
And the Democrats are sending the motherfucker a blank check? For this?
WTF?

As I’ve said before, comments are great, and this is a good one. I’d like to build on my response.

My anger toward Pinochet is an anger should be shared by everyone from right to left: the Pinochet government was installed by a CIA coup that toppled the duly elected Allende government. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of people, waging a dirty war against his own citizens. Pregnant women politically opposed to the regime were disappeared, but not before giving birth in government hospitals, their children distributed to party loyalists. Pinochet’s government would fly their victims out over the Paacific Ocean and throw the bodies out like so much trash. That my government bought and paid for Mr. Pinochet is unacceptable to me: it is a stain on our nation’s history. It is as unacceptable as our funding the Contras, who killed nuns and children in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All of this was done on my dime (or rather, my parents’ dime). Terrorism, in other words.

So I have to question the assumption that I’m not angry about terrorists, Islamist or otherwise, because it’s a false assumption. I hold all fundamentalists in contempt: I believe they are a threat to everyone’s freedom, whether those fundamentalists are Islamists or Christians. And the same goes for Communists too, those suckers who claim that everything would have worked out fine except for that damned Joe Stalin.
But it’s not all black and white in my mind: after all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (what to make of the Minutemen, who fought off the British by hiding in ambush; or the scuttling of the Gaspee?).

I do not believe that all of fighters in Iraq, for example, can be described as “terrorists”. Many of them are probably better called “resistance fighters.” The fact that they are Muslim is actually secondary to the fact that they are Iraqis fighting to end occupation. This is not to deny that many are Islamists as well, such as al Qaeda in Iraq, who are fighting for an Islamic state. But what of the puppet Shi’a government of Maliki? Not only is Maliki’s government forging ever closer ties to Iran, Maliki himself is a member of the Dawa Party, known for blowing up the American Embassy in Kuwait. Terrorist? Ally? It’s not so clear…

I recently saw a bumper sticker that read “Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease”. While I try not to base my political philosophy on catchphrases, this one strikes me as broadly correct. Happy, healthy, well-fed people with a stake in society and a voice in their government don’t simply wake up and randomly say “Today I will blow up myself and a building.” You really have to get the people’s back against the wall before they go to that extreme. So in the case of the Islamic terrorists, why do they want to do that? It’s not simply a case of “they’re jealous of our freedoms”: paraphrasing from Doug Stanhope, global geopolitics isn’t an episode of Jerry Springer, with two lowest common denominators arguing back and forth about who stole whose baby daddy. If anything, they WANT our freedoms for themselves.

I’m not going to launch into a “Blame America first” diatribe, but I certainly harbor no feelings of American Exceptionalism. People forget that “my country, right or wrong” is only the first half of the quote, ending with “if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Then there’s the fact that I’m simply not scared of the Islamic terrorists: no one can make me be scared of some guys who are so behind the times they release videotapes of their messages to the Great Satan. We defeated the Nazis AND the Japanese at the same time. We managed to bring down the Soviet Union, through the power of ideas and material wealth. I’m just not scared of guys in caves.

[By the way, it's worth noting that Saddam Hussein hated the Islamists as much as we do: that's why we backed him in the 1980s. he was a brutal dictator, but a strong bulwark against SCIRI and Khomeini's revolution in Iran. That's why it was so funny to hear Bush employ "liberating the Shi'ites" as rationale number 5,000 for the Iraq War: we backed Saddam specifically to keept he Shi'ites down! For that matter, who was it that funded and armed the mujahedin that are now fighting us in Afghanistan? But I digress...]

One thing that does concern me is how we’re dealing with the terrorists, and those we suspect of terrorism. If reports are to be believed, and bush has confirmed them himself, we are operating a series of secret prisons scattered around the world. It’s estimated that as many as 35,000 may be imprisoned indefinitely on suspicions of terrorist activities, with thousands of innocent people imprisoned with substantially fewer truly bad actors.

If these people are undergoing the interrogation procedures Okayed by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (aka “torture”), is there any doubt that upon release to their countries of origin (should that ever occur), in which the culture of revenge is a powerful motiviating force, these people are going to take up arms to get revenge on their tormenters?

And these policies, which are without doubt not only creating more people who wanted to kill us but inspiring those who bore us no ill will to take up arms, are happening on our dime.

I happen to know a few Muslims (it’s hard not to when you live in a place like Philadelphia), and none of them bears any ill will to me or their neighbors. Most of the immigrant Muslims I know are happy to live here, not only because they can worship as they please, but because they can make a decent living here for themselves and their families. None of the Muslims I know care that I am an atheist (that’s more than I can say for a number of Christians).

So yes, I despise terrorists and others that kill innocent people. However, I do not believe that the way we are addressing the problem is constructive, by suspending habeas corpus, illegally wiretapping people’s phones without a warrant, invading and occupying countries that never attacked us. Not only are these policies not constructive, in the case of the war, they are actually weakening us politically AND militarily (and by the way, Steve Gilliard’s recent posts on the possibility of a fighting retreat are well worth reading).

In the end, we will have to talk. That’s how it always ends up.

Here’s just one example of what’s in the bill that few people are aware of. Yale professor Bruce Ackerman writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed: “Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

“This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops ‘during an armed conflict,’ it also allows him to seize anybody who has ‘purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.’ This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.”

We are all in grave danger, right now. Try to get out if you can. if you can’t, quickly avail yourself of a firearm while it’s still legal, and learn to use it.