Stop Me Before I Vote Again

bishop chomsky speaks:

"It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination,multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appearsto have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumablycould have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually noopposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them.In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehendedand brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the headof the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the mostintensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than thatit “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, thoughimplemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washingtondismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know,because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if theywere presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washingtondidn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his WhiteHouse statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks werecarried out by al Qaeda.” Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of binLaden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I wonthe Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement. There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistandidn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military andsecurity forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is saidabout Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry outa political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high inPakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision todump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger andskepticism in much of the Muslim world. We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandoslanded at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped hisbody in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed binLaden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider”who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differingonly from other war crimes in that it contains within itself theaccumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) forwhich Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths,millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bittersectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who justdied peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine”that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terroriststhemselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to noticethat Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. andmurder of its criminal president. Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is soprofound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that theyare glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistanceagainst genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons aftervictims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe wereto call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.” There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementaryfacts should provide us with a good deal to think about. "

Wow --

Go Noam go. More withering than he has been in quite some time.

i drank to his death. maybe the machinery will keep finding ways to build new fake hitlers, and maybe it won't, but it's sure easier to do when the candidate has old-school proxy war blood stains.