Yes, FoxNews, If Torture Is How We Fight, I Hope We Lose.

“To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treasonous to virtue.” Edmund Burke.

"Whoever owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but no less than $10,000, and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States." (18 U.S.C. 2381)

In other words, thanks to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, any citizen or resident of the United States – or anyone the George W. Bush Administration can get its hands on anywhere on the planet Earth – is subject to arrest and torture merely on the affirmation of a federal agent.

There is no other way to rationally and coherently read the text of the two laws.

We are, in short, in a fight to restore the nation’s rule of law. We have, by logical extension, lost our democratic republic. George W. Bush - King George the Seventh – is wont to call himself "the Decider," and with his signing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an abomination presented him by the conspiracy of criminals (is there anyone who still doubts what I have been saying in that regard for literally years?) we continue to call the U.S. Congress, he has more power – far, far and way more power - to reinterpret the rule of law including the definition of treason and the Constitution, than any president in American history.

In case there are any who doubt that, hear it from the horse’s (horse’s ass’s?) mouth. The day before his Majesty George signed the “law” (no law in contravention of the U.S. Constitution has any legal effect) there was this exchange between a reporter and presidential press secretary Tony Snow:


Reporter: "(This law) makes him (President Bush) the final arbiter on torture."
Presidential spokesman Snow: "Right."


Bush will now decide not only what torture is under the "coercive interrogations" allowed under the new law, but he will also decide what evidence is permitted before the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – or anywhere else.

Our new dictator can also have "unlawful enemy combatants"—i.e., whomever he designates as such—picked up anywhere, and that includes the streets of the United States, to be held indefinitely. That applies to aliens, including millions of lawful immigrants into the United States – anyone found here, as I stated a minute ago.

As he already has with persons like Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, Führer Bush can also lock up American citizens as "enemy combatants" for "purposely and materially supporting" the enemy. As citizens, according to the new law, they remain entitled to access to our courts – that, however, under procedures totally alien to the Bill of Rights - but all non-citizen "enemy combatants" will be forbidden to have lawyers file habeas corpus petitions in our courts.

There is now no way to question the legality of one’s arrest or imprisonment.

Der Führer is the first U.S. President since Abraham Lincoln to by right of might suspend “the Great Writ," that of habeas corpus. In 1866, when Abraham Lincoln attempted in like manner to suspend the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that he had no constitutional right to do so. We don’t have that kind of court or law any longer. In short, there is no doubt that this administration and the military industrial complex that owns and controls it will use their new powers. Everything since the latter’s coup d’etat points to that. What do you think has brought us to this sorry, completely antithetical where a Jeffersonian democracy is concerned, state?

Unless the Roberts Supreme Court intervenes - and that means that hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands will have been imprisoned and tortured for at very least a year or more - the issue is decided. Before that happens, don’t forget, someone with enough money to hire a lawyer will have to have been arrested. The poor may stay in jail under torture forever without being notices (let's not forget that for years, while IRS violated each and every one of my rights under the U.S. Constitution, and I wrote literally dozens of letters to the likes of U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senators, and the ACLU, nothing happened; nothing EVER happened). Once you have been arrested to be held incognito – and that, obviously, is how it will be – you disappear; you are gone.

A while ago – anybody remember – U.S. Senator John McCain used to say that we can't allow terrorists to change who we are. Well, guess what. Senator McCain voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006, then said a few days later, "I can assure you I would never allow anything I'd consider torture." Well, Senator – how do you propose to stop our Fuhrer? The same way you stopped him from declaring war on Iraq all by himself?

The new law says the President decides, something you knew when you signed this national urination on the graves of our forefathers. You also knew that the Führer will set the rules of evidence for trials, including the use of hearsay evidence and the products of "coerced interrogations." You call that a Constitutional trial?

What IS “aid and comfort?” Ask FoxNews. Al Qa’ida, we are told there, is stepping up their action in Iraq on account of our elections. Sean Hannity and their White House propagandist like are saying that even the upcoming election may encourage the insurrection (or is it “insurgency?) - whatever the hell we’re calling it lately – in Iraq. Everyone, in other words, who votes against the Republican Party is giving “aid and comfort” to the “enemy.” Everyone who speaks out against the Bush League and its almost incredible bungling in Iraq gives “aid and comfort.”

What’s the implication? If you see that as anything but calling for suspension of the elections, I’ll be happy – amused, even – to hear you explain how.

There is, we used to hear over and over in high school (not any more – when I went to high school), a great deal of difference between dissent and treason. Not any more. Listen to the media. Listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Listen to FoxNews and Sean Hannity. How long ago was it that Bill O’Reilly called Colorado Professor Ward Churchill “a traitor?” How about the Dixie Chicks?

Over the last several weeks, the froth-at-the-mouth contingent of the far right has been challenging their supposed opposition with the question, “Do you want the U.S. to lose the war (Iraq, I presume – but that will change as dictated by their position in any argument, won’t it?)?”

Here’s my answer: Yes – if torture is required for you to win, I hope you lose. So do all decent human beings. Anybody remember Henry David Thoreau? Walden Pond? “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” he said, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” The same can be said of a government that practices torture. Yes, I hope you lose.

There is, therefore, little left for people like me, anyone who has chosen to exercise any of his constitutional rights, or has had the temerity to demand that government obey the nation’s law, but to arm themselves and sell their lives as dearly as possible. I will do that, I promise you.

Sad, isn’t it, that it should have come to this?

Another Modest - If Irreverent - Proposal.

I think I've got it. Since high school, I've been perusing history, searching in hopes of understanding the vicissitudes there - and the human critter responsible for them. Why in hell - what in hell, who in hell - keeps the human race slaughtering one another as if it were a damned sport?

It is that, you know. Military strategy and tactics aren't rocket science; they're not even high school football science - in fact, they're about as mentally demanding as golf (is that a sport, or just a game?). The chimpanzee version of a whiz-kid can be a general (and I'll bet a dollar you can teach a chimp to play golf - if they haven't already). Twelve-year old kids often do better at military computer games than generals - especially the U.S. version. The difference is that people get killed when the sport is war; lots of people. When you run a play that gets stuffed at the line of scrimmage, the runner dies. When you throw a block the guy is maimed or dead. Protecting the quarterback means killing everybody who tries to get to him. Trying to "sack" the quarterback means trying to kill him. You get the point, maybe?

It is, all of it, nevertheless, a game. Sports are played in order to aggrandize oneself, in order to become a "winner." War is like that, too. Winning, or doing something well, contributing to the team, gets you a trophy or a medal. Human beings will kill, or die, in order to win the award of a ribbon and medal hung around their necks. There is fame and high advancement, too. Win and the capitalist world will throw position, power, and money at you. And, of course, the wannabe world loves war in all its forms, from football to world war. They love - football game and the like or intercontinental war - to watch, participate - vicariously, of course - and criticize. "Monday Morning Quarterbacking, you know."

All of which is probably beside the point. I've known since building muscle and learning to play judo and fight that a fundamental reason for war is the incontrovertible fact that the human being is in his heart and essence a hypocrite. He says he hates war. What horseshit! He LOVES war. He LOVES killing. That's as long as it's someone else who gets killed or does the killing, of course. In the book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," I wrote concerning my own struggle to rid myself to the bullies who were making life miserable - to say nothing of altering my features:

"When my growing strength and my study of fighting became known, townspeople, teachers, and relatives all had the same reaction.’Fighting isn’t good,' they said. 'Turn the other cheek.' 'Live by the sword, die by the sword.' A teacher, Mother Superior of the parochial school I went to, put it even stronger. 'They’ll hang you some day,' she said. Now, taught by my relentless opponent life, I saw it all for what it was. Society is at its heart a hypocrite."
Writer and historian H.G. Wells said it another way: “The Social Contract,” he said, “is nothing more than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the ‘General Good.’ Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.”
"The first casualty of war," a gentleman named Hiram Johnson observed many years ago, "is truth." Man makes war because he is a fucking hypocrite. A list of the lies attendant any war and the effort entailed would fill libraries. Pure and simple, it's all about lying.

(As I write this, FoxNews' Sean Hannity appears on television - lying, of course. Three statements, three lies; and if you recognize the lies, you're a traitor. Does that sound like his hero in the White House? Yeah. Wannabes tend to worship wannabes like themselves.)

So what to do? Well, you may have noticed that no one goes to war because war is evil. Oh, no. Especially where the "Land of the Free," the "Nation of Laws," and all the rest - how much can you stomach? - is concerned, it's always a crusade. We're on god's side. And the number of people, who die, people who - absent our crusading - would otherwise be alive, is staggering. In order to save the village, the captain in South Vietnam said, we had to destroy it" - what's the problem?

If that doesn't sound like Iraq today, it sure as hell is turning out that way.

And who can argue? Check the holy books - ANY holy book. God, it seems - we are always told - always wants his chosen people to wipe those infidel bastards out. I often wonder if any of the fundamentalist adherents to just about any religion you choose ever reads the scripture with which he pounds head of the infidel. Islam, for instance is a religion of peace. Excuse me? The Bible? Now I KNOW you haven't read much of the founding document for your religion. Genocide, rape, murder, pillage, arson - what ISN'T there in the Bible?

But one thing is very clear where all the religions and religious teachings are concerned. It's all god's fault. God made them do it. That's right down to the present. First, we have a guy who purports to be favored of god - don't they always? - who demands of his equally devout followers that they kill unbelievers. All of them. God will love Osama bin Laden's minions for blowing to bits women, children, and old people who have never done them any evil other than believing differently than they do. Then, we have a Christian - that's the follower of a man whose basic premise, the Kingdom of God, demands that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us - who has unleashed a slaughter rivaling the worst ever. That's on the premise that another guy who had nothing to do with bin Laden was an evil man. And where did he get that idea? From god. Because he - G.W. Bush - listens to god.

How many times have we heard all this before? More damned times than I have the time to count.

So, I have another of my modest proposals. Let's - for crying out loud - stop listening to god! No, I mean it. Make it a felony offense with a penalty of ten years, no time off for good behavior, no matter what, for anyone who so much as reads what god has to say. Even the most cursory examination of history makes it thunderously clear that listening to god results in hundreds of thousands of innocent people being maimed or killed. Talk about "hate speech!"

The next time some cuckoo bird says he heard from god, throw his butt in the slammer. DO NOT ELECT HIM COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE BIGGEST MILITARY IN HUMAN HISTORY! Call the guys in white jackets, slip him into the rubber room, lock the door, and lose the key. If a voter belongs to a church that listens to god (from what I gather, not all of them do), disenfranchise him. If god wants to vote, let him register like everyone else.

I'm reminded as I write - and, in so doing, consider it all - of Mark Twain. He may have reflected concerning all this before. His work, "Letters From the Earth" would certainly give one that impression. In "Letters" - Twain's, not mine - Satan is writing to his erstwhile buddies Michael and Gabriel, Archangel and Trumpeter Angel, back in heaven. Listen:


"This is a strange place, and extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at is worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.
"Moreover -- if I may put another strain upon you -- he thinks he is the Creator's pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance. I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven!
"He has salaried teachers who tell him that. They also tell him there is a hell, of everlasting fire, and that he will go to it if he doesn't keep the Commandments. What are Commandments? They are a curiosity. I will tell you about them by and by."
The commandments old Mark speaks of, of course, forbid killing - invariably the sine qua non and end result of war - to say nothing or the rape, murder, pillage, and the covetousness that is always the real reason for starting war in the first place. So why is it that the god who wrote those commandments is contradicting himself - and telling these people he talks to something else?

Now, I have a confession to make. I confess that I don't believe god talks to anybody. I think, frankly, that all the people who say he talks to them are liars. I mean, doesn't it seem odd to you that he goes to all the trouble to create a human being, then has him destroyed? A little kid (what, he knows the kid is going to be a pacifist, or something?)? God? God, who knows everything, presumably - therefore - before it happens? Like he didn't know this guy or that guy was going to be an infidel? He didn't know there were going to be seven hundred and fifty religions?

It's like sex, people. He invented it, then equipped people to do it, in order that people should do his job for him. Then he tells those people he talks to that it's a bad thing, and people should only do it when he tells the people he talks to that they should do it? Seems like kind of a roundabout way to accomplish what otherwise would be pretty straightforward thing (like it always was with yours truly, matter of fact), doesn't it? For god? Come on, now - doesn't that sound a lot more like the way a human being does things? FEMA, for instance?
So there's my proposal. And I think you'd better get right on it. The way things are going, god is about to tell the people he talks to something pretty stupid.

I Don't Believe You Believe the White House - Or Its Media; NOBODY Is That Stupid.

“One flew east, and one flew west, and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”

“Victory is the only option.” Over and over and over. Is that the call of a particular species of bird? It must be – nothing with a bigger brain would say something as totally devoid of reasoning thought. It’s like punching your answering machine. You hit the button and out comes the message that’s been put there. The machine doesn’t think, either.

All the nation’s great minds can think of nothing better to say than THAT? All of the genius that split the atom, put men on the moon, does open heart surgery, can create life in a test tube, and a hundred things even more difficult, can’t think of something better in Iraq than “victory?”

First off, what the hell are we talking about? What IS victory? Do pundits like those telecast on CNN, Fox, and the rest mean the people of Iraq come out cheering and throwing roses? They throw their weapons in the Tigris and start raising flowers? They repudiate their centuries old religion by establishing a U.S. style corporate democracy (i.e., an oligarchy of the fabulously rich)? They open their country to our absolute control, let us wield our IRS, for instance, and tax the hell out of them? Give us control of their oil?

WHAT? What’s this “victory” all the hoo-rah birds are nattering about?

Now, I’ve always been brighter than most (sorry – matter of record), but it doesn’t take the proverbial rocket scientist to see the utter folly of what these supposed wisemen are stumping for. NOBODY capable of reading the script these guys seem to have been handed and are reading is that stupid.

I’ll tell you something else. I don’t believe the “victory is the only option” people are THAT warped by their ideology, their religion, or what have you. I don’t think even Ann Coulter really believes anything that obviously nonsensical (go back and read the questions again; dream up your own – what do you mean “victory?!)

This must be what it’s like to be in an asylum for the insane (or is it Oceania?). The inmates – male and female; it’s that kind of country, too, you know - are skirmishing every day about who gets to compromise the chastity of the Queen of France. There IS no Queen of France, of course. Not to anyone outside the asylum, that is. There’s no KING of France, either. Of course.

Play with it. What does “compromise” mean? “Victory?” Which is imaginary, the Queen, the King, or the skirmishing – verbal or worse – over who gets - or who has already gotten - to “compromise” - the “Queen?”

Let’s see how a rational being – one like the Queen of France, for instance, would work this out. First, all of the “Victory is the only option” birds are agreed that we are the most powerful nation on earth. They natter that almost as often – and they’ve been so nattering for most of my life – as they recite that “victory option” thing.

Okay, given. Next, the same “Victory Birds” say that “defeat,” “cut and run” is – well, there’s nothing worse. It’s unthinkable. Hmmmmm.

“Defeat” is the opposite of victory – or isn’t it?! Maybe we’d do better to ask what “defeat” is.

Anyway, defeat means terrible consequences for the United States. We are told. Thinking for oneself of course . . . well that’s “unthinkable,” too. Traitorous.

And terrible consequences for the world, of course. What’s good for the Unites States is good for the world (doesn’t General Motors hold the copyright on that one?). That’s our main purpose, after all, to save the world for democracy (and just a little “American” business? Maybe?). Defeat means terrible things for our national security?

Excuse me. Excuse me? The most powerful nation in the world’s security would be “compromised” (that’s the word we always hear, isn’t it?), were we to leave Iraq?
Okay – how?

I mean, having spent $15,000,000,000,000 (that’s fifteen trillion dollars) on our military since World War Two, with fourteen nuclear aircraft carriers – two in every ocean - sixty-eight (how many is THAT per ocean?) nuclear submarines armed with enough ICBMs to obliterated civilization several hundred times, and so on and so on and so on, we are in danger from a nation basically living in the fourteenth century and offering what resistance it can to our occupation with only small arms and “improvised explosive devices?”

HUH?

Spending upwards of $100,000,000,000 yearly on police and security forces, with scores of spying satellites, video cameras and listening devices everywhere in a manner that can only be described as Orwellian, with all right to privacy - even in one's own bedroom and bathroom - held hostage by the government, we're not safe? We'd better get another watchdog.

Return with me, if you will, to another of these missions to protect the security of our country – and, of course, save mankind – that of South Vietnam. Victory was the only option there, too – remember? After a while, though, “victory” came to have certain . . . definitions. The definitions . . . well, let’s just say they weren’t easy to equate with anything in the real world - anyone’s day-to-day life, that is. Finally, we just declared victory – AND WE CAME HOME.

Look around. Do you see any sign of the devastation resulted from out “victory?” Or was it “defeat?” If everything were to happen just as it did after our “defeat” – or was it “victory? – in Vietnam, would that be so bad?
If “defeat” – well, we didn’t win, did we (or DID we – was there an agreed definition then; or were we then as we are now, just not mentioning trivial things like that) – in Iraq were to wreak the kind of havoc that defeat in Vietnam did, would that be so bad, really?

WHY?

The “greatest county on earth” is so vulnerable, so pitifully puerile, that to simply admit it made a mistake - bit off more than we could chew – would cause its “defeat?” To simply leave Iraq, as more than seventy percent of the public there want us to do (so much for democratic ideals), would be to “cut and run?” We couldn’t bear to have people say that?

REALLY?

Tell me something – would “defeat” be all that bad? Really? What, somebody would rampage through our streets, like the Vikings of old, raping pillaging, burning? The economy would collapse? Our children would starve? The government would fall? Our way of life would vanish from the earth?

You’re kidding!

You’re kidding and I don’t believe you believe that. Uh-uh. I’m not stupid. The last time anybody checked, my IQ was in the 160s. I put myself through high school, while living in a sod hut by the Little Cedar River back home. At one time, I had UN interpreter certification for seven languages besides English. I do complicated math like calculus in my head. For seventeen years after my military career, I was among the most successful private detectives in the nation. That’s applied epistemology and forensics and fact situation determination, not the half-baked, jump-to-conclusion-on-the-basis-of-the-first-two-pieces-of-evidence-that-come-together, pseudo-forensics and FBI science.

Of six disappeared children whose parents came to me rather than turn the fate of their children over to people the caliber of those who constitute our Pink Panther constabulary these, I recovered four. Had it not been for massive interference by the stumbling incompetent of the federal government – with a head as big as that of the typical federal official it’s hard to keep one’s balance – I recovered four of six young women and children lost to the white slavery rings of the Iran-Peru-Central American axis (you don’t really think it’s mere co-incidence that we have 144,000 missing women and children in the U.S., right across all but wide open borders from a nation where kidnapping for ransom and sexual slavery is a major industry – do you?).

I first conceived, and wrote the original tactical doctrine T.O.& E. for what is no called the S.W.A.T. teams. S.E.A.L. Team Six and the like were MY idea – in 1958.

I fought to a standstill the federal government – i.e., most powerful Sicherheitdienst in human history, that of the Internal Revenue Service. It was they, don't forget, who were forced to hide behind the legal fiction of national security exemption - sound familiar? - when I sued for the records that would have, to quote none other than the judge, "irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States." The "Nation of Laws," in other words, lied. Sound familiar?

I’m far from stupid, in other words, and I don’t believe any of this puerile, pundit-purveyed pap. I don’t believe a nation of people reared and educated to think rationally and for themselves – competent in their own best interests – would choose knowingly to believe – to “buy” – the nonsensical, absurd twaddle being disseminated by people like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and their pontificating, bloviating ilk (how in the hell do people of that caliber get a national soap box?).

I don’t believe that anyone familiar with the most basic axioms of formal logic is so addled by CIA MKULTRA-like behavioral conditioning that he doesn’t recognize for what it is balderdash like “aid and comfort to the enemy” charges levied against anyone who recognizes, for instance, the war in Iraq and the mendacious propaganda that justified it. That’s ad hominem on its face, and it is circular, begging the question fallacy at its heart. It’s ridiculous.

Who MADE the people shooting at us our enemy?

When my house is burglarized and I catch a man running in the street, throw him down and begin beating him, I should continue the pounding even after I realize that I have the wrong man – because otherwise, I’m giving aid and comfort to criminals? Otherwise, I’m “cutting and running?” That’s ridiculous.

When my son’s mother arrives as I’m punishing him for stealing the cookies she now says she took to the neighbors as a gift, I should continue the punishment, rather than admit that I’ve jumped to conclusions, made an error.

That’s ridiculous!

That I mention here no one from the political left is because I have little idea who the leading lights of that form of nonsense are. They are only, after all, the opposition in the debate over who will seduce the Queen of France. (Will she “surrender?” Will her suitors “cut and run,” disgraced for their limp-dickedness. Does it make a difference that there IS no . . . oh, never mind!).

NOBODY WHO HAS A NORMAL MENTALITY IS THIS STUPID! Nobody with experience and education sufficient to get along in daily life is so “challenged” mentally as to accept the relentlessly illogical and patently false “news” being spewed daily, hour by hour, at the public by the government and its media propagandists. Think about it. If you think this is all real, I’ve got some ocean-front property in Arizona . . . And there’s this bridge across the East River. The money I owe you is in the mail, and I won’t . . . well I might.

Anybody whom you’ve been screwing the way you have all these years might.